45.

This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).

Explorations: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Explorations: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 

   

   

(5)

 I had just boarded the plane for Abakan, at Moscow's Domodedovo airport. It was mid July in 2011, and I was travelling to Tuva. Abakan, the capital of the republic to the north - Khakassia - was as close as it was possible to get to Tuva by plane. After the plane journey there was a bus service that would take me the remaining 240 miles to Kyzyl, across a pass in the Sayan mountains. (It would turn out that the buses were very infrequent mini-buses, and that many people instead would queue up to be part of a 'taxi' group in one of the large, 6-seater four wheel drive vehicles that are one of the main forms of long-distance transport in this area (this meant that the transport options for the journey were much the same as they would have been likely to be for travelling from Ulaanbataar to a small town in Mongolia, despite Kyzyl being the capital city of the republic)).

    However, part of the fascination of Tannu Tuva was that it was not easy to reach. I felt concern for the people of Tuva that there was an airport in Kyzyl which had not been upgraded so as to be available for flights (this now seems to have changed), and concern about the border with Mongolia apparently not being straightforwardly open, but from my own point of view the necessity of travelling by road across the Sayan mountains was an attractive aspect of the journey.

     However, a separate way in which Tuva was difficult to reach had already indirectly been involved in me being three days behind schedule, because a thunderstorm had meant the plane from Heathrow had had to land at a different airport, so I had missed my connection - and the next flight was three days later. But I had allowed 3 weeks for the trip, and so I felt I had enough time. And it had been good to get an unplanned opportunity to see Moscow (the airline had paid for free accommodation at a hotel near the airport).

    I had done a short Russian course, aware that this was very inadequate preparation. Before going to Mongolia I had had about 8 weeks of one-to-one Mongolian lessons with a Mongolian woman called Nyaama, who was living in London and who answered an advertisement I put up at S.O.A.S. (at that time Mongolian was apparently not being taught anywhere in London). With the trip to Tuva I would have liked to have learned some Tuvan, but because Russian is spoken by most Tuvans (and because it had been very hard to find tuition in Mongolian) I had not made any attempt to go in this direction, though I was looking forward to seeing if any of the Mongolian words I remembered were also words in Tuvan.

    I had three main aims in travelling to Tuva. Firstly, I wanted to meet, and receive some tuition from, a Tuvan overtone singer. Secondly (and inseparably), I wanted to encounter Tuva as a whole social world (as a Russian republic), but also, and most specifically, I wanted to encounter the social world of ethnic Tuva. Thirdly, I wanted to travel into a forested area of the Sayan mountains (I wanted to encounter a Tuvan forest wilderness), and to use this journey to heighten my ability to become sustained perception. 

    It would be right to say that my feelings about the trip were neither those of a tourist nor those of an ethnographer or ethnomusicologist. And nor was it the case that I saw the trip in terms of it being the journey of an artist. It was more that I saw it as a way of travelling into the unknown in the direction of "love and lucidity and wider realities," to use the phrase from the conclusion of On Vanishing Land. A few days earlier (at the start of the trip) I had re-read Donner's The Witch's Dream, a book that gives an account of a journey she made to Venezuela (her country of origin) to study curing practices, in the course of which her ethnographer's attitude is slowly shifted toward that of someone moving, with others, toward the transcendental-empirical, as opposed to the empirical. I feel that to a large extent it was this other attitude - a deliberate focus on the transcendental-empirical - that was involved in my feelings and thoughts in connection with the journey.

   However, at that specific moment - of having sat down in my seat on the plane for Abakan - the trip had developed an aspect which seemed far from what ideally was needed. In the course of the previous twelve hours I had developed a cold. I still felt the exhilaration of what was happening, but I would have preferred to not be coping with a cold on arrival in Abakan, and I felt distressed for my fellow passengers. Fortunately the symptoms were mild - the faintly lowered physical tone of a cold, together with a slightly but persistently runny nose. I sat with my head resting back, but a little away from the passenger who was alongside me on my right: there was nothing else I could do.

    It was going to be a journey through the night (it was around 9 in the evening), and we would arrive at Abakan airport at dawn. What seemed to be in front of me was a night of uncomfortable semi-sleep. 

     But what happened was something completely different from this. Looking back now I feel that the combination of circumstances made what took place into an inevitability. But I had no way of foreseeing it at the time.

  

    The plane took off, and it was not long before most of the passengers had settled down to attempt to sleep their way through the flight. With my eyes closed I attempted to clear my head of thoughts, attuning myself to the sound of the plane's engines.

   I have indicated earlier (Section 44) that I have always been likely to hear music when listening to the sound from plane or coach engines. But I feel that on this occasion the way in which my ears had been affected by the cold meant that the sonic/vibratory field which is the substrate of this 'hyper-pareidolia' was amped up, and no doubt subject to subtle distortion/intetensification, in a way which made the 'halucinating up' - or dreaming up - of freestanding, fully sonically envisaged melodies far more likely than it would have been otherwise.

    The first music that arrived was an existing melody, though in a new arrangement, and with a story that came with it. The whole world of story and tune was suffused with both joy and sadness. The story was from the point of view of a man and a woman who had raised a child - a girl - who was still relatively young, but who had in some way crossed a threshold of existence, and who was departing to another dimension of the world, intending emphatically to return, but in a way where the parents felt no absolute certainty that this would happen. It was like a tale: it was as if the child they had raised is more like Ariel in The Tempest, than a human being. After she has left they hear her voice singing a farewell - there is a delighted playfulness in her voice (in some obscure way the whole thing feels like a story for children) but at the same time there is note of sadness:

Born free

(two notes, the second higher than the first)

Wherever the wind blows

(two notes, lower than the first pair, the second higher than the first)

Where we go no-one knows

(again two notes, the second note higher than the first, but lower than the second note of the second pair)

'Cause we're born free.

I had never given any thought to John Barry's melody. I had liked it as a child (I had seen the film at the cinema, probably when I was around six), but since then it had not come into my mind, other than on rare occasions when I happened to hear it, as with John Barry retrospectives on TV etc. But now something very beautiful about the melody was impacting on me, and the tune, in its different arrangement was playing itself - as a fully 'heard' sonic world - in new variations in my mind.

   I thought this was all that was going to happen. But then there was a point where I had an experience of hearing the voice of my Turkish friend Yildiz, speaking very brightly and with emphasis. When saying the words for colours Yildiz was always likely to add the word 'colour' as a suffix, as part of the name for the colour. What I heard her say was:

"Blue colour, Justin, blue colour"

And then not long after this I had an experience of hearing a song in Turkish (a language I do not speak, apart from a very small number of words). The song was like a high-tempo folk song or dance-song, and the verses were always about immense journeys across plains, and rivers and mountains (I understood that this was what they were about, even though I was not hearing English words), where these groups of verses always culminated in a chorus, which is the only part of the song that I remember. The words were:

Zigid, zigid, zigid

Bi doonyaar

Zigid, zigid, zigid

Bi yaar

In the experience I did not think that this had anything to do with Turkish, but the key thing about it was the meaning of the word 'zigid.' Zigid was the name for an intense lightning-like energy that runs through everything: within the world of the song it was the name for an energy with which human beings needed to make contact, in order to wake themselves.

Both of the other phrases seemed to mean 'in the world' in some way (I knew at the time that dunya was the Arabic word for world, and it seems in fact that it is also the word for world in Turkish). I heard three verse phases of this song, followed by the chorus, and eventually I was only hearing the chorus (I have remembered the melody of the chorus, as well as the words). The joyful staccato energy of 'zigid, zigid, zigid' was breathtaking, and it came with a 'seeing' of the lightning-like energy which it invoked.

   Other melodies appeared after this, but the music shifted toward a role where it seemed to be holding in place a process of visual envisaging - a process where I was seeing a house which was constructed amongst house-sized, sunlit rocks, and had a partly overgrown garden around it, where the house and the garden were in the middle of a flattish, grass-and-rocks terrain a few miles across, and where this terrain in turn was at the top of a sheer-sided plateau that was many thousands of feet up in the sky. There was a sublime, joyful affect about this place; it was a serene, sunlit world of horses grazing, bumblebees, and redcurrant bushes in the garden with fruit on them. On the walls inside the house there were abstract paintings with exceptionally beautiful combinations of colours. I knew the house had belonged to a small group of travellers-into-the-unknown who had moved on - who had left it behind - and it seemed that I belonged to another, younger group of friends to whom the house had been 'passed on' as a continuation of a process of escape.

    Eventually this phase of the experience ended, and everything was again entirely focused on sound. I found I was hearing a melody that had come to me - without any words - earlier in the summer. It was now more developed as a melodic sequence, and it was in the form of guitar-sound. Having heard it like this two or three times I started, without thinking about it, to sing against the sound of the guitar, astonished by what I was doing (insofar as it was me who was doing it), and worried after the first phrase had been completed that I would not get to to the end. I succeeded in letting go, and not thinking about it, and I got to the end. These were the words of the song:

Be as ghostly as the silence that is blowing through the mountain

Be as eerie as the forest that is dreaming through the river

Be as empty as the lovers who you'll find all through the cosmos

Be as silent as the dreamers in the wind.

This song then continued to play itself in my mind. Around ten minutes after it had 'arrived' the announcement was made that we were about to land in Abakan.

   It took me around two days to 're-set' myself so that I was more-or-less recovered from the cold, and had caught up on my sleep. In the first half of this phase I did the public-transport journey which - for reasons that are simultaneously geographical and cultural - is the most  extraordinary of any I have done. And this journey was then succeeded by a process of finding somewhere to stay, and of getting to know my new surroundings. There was recurrently a real joy involved in this journey, and in the still-exhausted stage which followed it (and I managed to avoid things getting worse, through not leaving possessions behind etc), but I was often bleary as a result of lack-of-sleep and the effects of the cold. 

     It was a sunny, warm morning at Abakan airport. I liked the airport: it had a lot of fittings that were made of wood, and had a very pleasant atmosphere. I picked up my backpack from the baggage reclaim, and found out that the centre of town was about 6 miles away. I took a taxi to the bus station: the taxi driver was very friendly, and I was grateful that he spoke some English, while being aware at the same time that we did not have much in terms of shared language, despite the driver's English being a long way better than my Russian). 

    The bus station was a wide expanse of ground outside the train station. Other parts of Abakan had seemed completely European (and later, on my return journey, the boulevards and wrought iron railings of the town centre would heighten this impression) but the minimalism of the bus station reminded me of Mongolia, in that it was little more than a place of departure for vehicles, most of which were unscheduled. This is not a criticism - the system recurrently works well, and unscheduled vehicles don't leave until they are full, which is a good use of resources.

    However, very few people seemed to be taking the unscheduled taxi vehicles that morning, and in any case I wanted to take the bus, because it would cost less. There would be a bus leaving for Tuva in around three hours. I went for a walk along the street that led toward the centre, with the song from the end of the plane journey still playing in my head. I loved the song, despite - or because of - its quality of being too impersonal and anomalous to have any success in the world of commerciaI music. I felt elated, but extremely tired all at once. I bought some bread, and some nuts and dried fruit from a small shop, and returned to the bus station. By the time the bus was due there were a few people waiting who seemed to be locals, in that they did not have luggage, and a Russian couple in their twenties on a camping holiday, who, as I would find out later, came from Krasnoyarsk, a city further up the Yenisei river to the north. The impression was that the overall lack of tourist infrastructure (no flights to Kyzyl etc.) was decisive in blocking the flow of tourists: with me at the bus stop there were no people from outside Russia waiting to get to Tuva - whether lovers of recondite, singular traditions within music, or Richard Feynman enthusiasts wanting to achieve the journey Feynman had dreamed of, but had never been able to make, or people wanting to see the forests of the Sayan mountains.

    The mini-bus was extremely packed, with more people on it than there were seats, in the way that was familiar from other journeys in the same approximate region (the degree to which it was packed was less, in fact, than the most extraordinary cases I had experienced in Mongolia). The atmosphere on the bus was friendly - and it felt good that I was not being moved along a slick conveyor belt of a tourist industry. The terrain around the bus consisted of open country with quite large areas of trees that in many cases were deciduous rather than coniferous - in one way or another it was farmland rather than expansive grazing terrains: it was not taiga, or anything similar, but nor was it steppe. Some of the faces of the people in the bus gave me the impression that I was in an area of Siberian Asia that was not far from Mongolia, but as with Abakan, the places through which we were travelling seemed more reminiscent of 'Europe' (many of the trees had probably been introduced from the opposite, western side of Eurasia to which we give this name, with its bizarre association of being the name for a continent).

   The journey took around twelve hours. During the first phase I tried to get a little sleep with my head against the bus window, but the jolting of the bus on the often heavily rutted road got in the way of this plan. After two or three hours we stopped in a village, and the mini-bus would not re-start. The village had a stall selling fruit and vegetables, and it was a pleasant sunny afternoon. I spoke a little with the couple from Krasnoyarsk: this gave me a first close-up impression of what it is like to live in a country with hinterland worlds as vast and beautiful as those of Siberia. It was clear that they didn't want to be seen as 'romantics' in relation to what they were doing (in that part of what was involved for them was learning survival skills), but it was also clear - inseparably in fact - that they had discovered the joy of travelling in wildernesses. 

   The situation with the bus-breakdown was, again, a very familiar one from Mongolia, but there the drivers always seemed to be skilled mechanics (and if they needed help vehicles would always stop to assist, and the driver of the vehicle was of course also a skilled mechanic: all of which seemed to mean that a breakdown on a road without facilities, or a road-surface - a road was a set of earth tracks a hundred and fifty feet wide - would in fact take, on average, about forty five minutes).  We waited for about three hours until a coach arrived as a replacement: the coach was old, and was more of a bus, in fact, than a coach, but it felt exceptionally luxurious.

    Soon we were in the foothills of the Sayan mountains, an area of what is called 'southern taiga' (different from the primary, northern form because of the lower latitude, and higher altitude). The road near the top of the pass was a long traverse with a striking view of a jagged rock pinnacle rising out of a wall of trees that reached almost to the top of the ridge on either side of the peak. 

     The transition to Tuva was taking place, and about two hours later (having crossed to Tuva at the top of the pass) I saw the big, largely grass-covered hill-mountains of the other terrain that came with the transition - steppe. 

    I was extremely exhausted (I had not slept very much) but the earlier absence of major infrastructure for tourists was now wonderfully counterbalanced by micro-infrastructure being in place instead. We arrived at the bus station in Kyzyl at around midnight, and I was told, to my immense relief, that if I wanted I could sleep in a room that was on one side of the ticket hall (the public toilets were nextdoor). The room had a bed in it, and nothing else, but it felt like paradise. I was able to refill my water bottle, the cost of the room was around £4, and I was at last in a situation where it would be possible to get a good amount of sleep. There was nothing grand about the bus station building, but it had given me what I needed in a way that completely outshone its equivalents in my own area of Eurasia.

   In the morning (it was probably around 9am) I came out of my room into a crowded ticket hall. It would of course have been good to be able to have a shower, but at least I had slept (and I washed my face in the public toilet wash-basin). I managed to find someone to whom I could return my key, and then I set off into the streets of Kyzyl.

    I feel that everything I did over the next sixteen hours was a process of maintaining an element of a vital background attitude, in the form of the inchoate perception that the world is a serene tumult of the unknown - and I feel that this process was occurring in a way that was inseparable from a series of adjustments that were taking me to a place from which the fundamental journey could begin.

  I needed to find a guest house or hotel with an available room, and I needed to get well from the cold, and I needed to avoid cancelling out my gains in terms of not knowing where I was (so long as the dogmatic image of the world is predominantly in control of our awareness we must always avoid the conviction that we know where we are). The events on the plane had helped (they had made me feel that the interiority of the customary idea of the unconscious might well be a control-delusion), and Tuva has its own power to shake the feeling of knowing where we are, one which is only superficially connected to the indeterminacy of Tuva in relation to the ideas of Asia, Russia, relatedness to Mongolia, Siberia etc. (at depth this perturbatory power is connected to a pragmatic, deliberate openness to the unknown that can be found within aspects and sub-domains of what is called "shamanism").

    Kyzyl was a sunlit, inconspicuously beautiful expanse of light-coloured buildings and of trees in the streets. It had the clear air and dust and sun-bleached, straggly grass of a city in a low-precipitation area. It made me think of Ulaanbaatar (it did not look at all like Europe), although it had gone in a different direction, so that one of its main features looked, in fact more Asian than its equivalent in Mongolia, and so that (as I would see later) at the level of the architecture of the 'suburbs' there were for the most part only small wooden houses, as opposed to gers within a wood-fence enclosure. The feature that looked more Asian was the strikingly attractive, stand-alone theatre, standing up very tall in a square in front of the parliament building, whose crowning motifs - constructed against and on top of a white background - were emphatically Tuvan: a tour de force that both worked well in itself, and was clearly in part a statement that had nothing to do with fashion (like the statement indirectly being made by men who had long hair at the time of the mid-60s phase of the Vietnam war). (the comparison is between the complexes of buildings in the main parliament-square areas of the two cities).

    As with Ulaanbaatar there were occasional views of the big, largely grass-covered hills of the steppe terrains, and Kyzyl was also built to a great extent on a grid-pattern. However there were two major topographical differences between the cities. The first was that Kyzyl was far smaller: alongside Ulaan Bataar it felt in many ways like a town - as well as being around a tenth of the size of the other city, Kyzyl had smaller buildings and very few high-rises. The second was that the main river in Kyzyl - the Yenisei - was several times larger than the river Tuul in Ulaan Bataar, and it was very close to the centre (only about four blocks away, as opposed to the two miles to the Tuul in Mongolia's capital). 

    The street I was on was initially a non-commercial avenue, with trees growing alongside it, and largish houses. Using a map, but continuing in roughly the same direction, I went into the centre of the city, and after about an hour-and-a-half of searching (including a visit to house which had ceased to be a guest house, though it was still listed in my guidebook) I found my way to a hotel which had a room.

    The hotel was a very pleasant place: both quietly beautiful and un-luxurious by the standards of the high-wealth zones of the planet (which was fortunate for me - because I could never have afforded to stay there otherwise). Its position in Kyzyl was exceptionally good, in that it was by the river, and in the best part of the 'line' of places by the Yenisei, in that it was near to what in Tuva (and indeed, beyond Tuva) is a very famous riverside monument. 

    Of the three people who were working in the reception area there was only one who spoke English, a woman who seemed to be the manager. She was friendly in an undemonstrative way which I liked very much. Initially it was uncertain that a room was available, and I waited for about an hour and a half while a cancellation was being confirmed, and while the room was being made ready. But during this time the woman (who, as a manager, was having to do the work of a receptionist for me, because of the language barrier) made me feel welcome, and kept me informed about the situation.

     While I was waiting in a lobby area I spoke with a man who was a businessman (a salesman I think), and who was waiting for someone to arrive. He came from Novosibirsk. We had a half hour conversation which included a point where he asked me about my journey. When I mentioned my three days in Moscow he told me he felt distant from the world of Moscow. He said he very much loved his area of Russia (which I think primarily meant the 95% of Russia that is beyond the Urals) but did not feel the same affinity with the world of Moscow. There seemed to a critique of the Russian establishment involved in this statement (though such a critique could have been coming from any perspective, very much including a socialist one), but overall what he was saying reminded me most of the distance from the 'capital'/the big cities that is found in countries all across the world (once when I was in Stockholm I spoke with a man who came from the far north of Sweden, and he told me he felt like a foreigner in Stockholm).

    The man to whom I was speaking and the staff at reception seemed to be ethnic Russians. But to say this is to describe a micro-element within the milieu of Kyzyl, and is not to start a critique in terms of 'westernisation' in relation to the dissolution/potential of indigenous worlds. Despite the very specific situation in Tuva (with its relatively substantial and pervasive cultural separateness making it in many ways a close relative of Mongolia), to start to be critical, at this micro-level, of the presence of slavic people in Siberia would be as senseless as to be critical of the presence of anglo-saxon people in Arizona.

    The person for whom the man had been waiting arrived. It had been a friendly conversation, and I liked that the man had expressed something about his feelings toward his whole social world. It needs to be pointed out that I felt comfortable in Russia: in a certain way I felt very much at home. At depth this was to do with the fact that Russia is a zone of the planet (from a planetary perspective territories are very superficial constructs), but it was also the result of my having spent a vast amount of time in Russia, at the level of the virtual-real, firstly, through reading Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Turgenev (etc.); secondly, through having read quite widely in relation to 19th and 20th century Russian history, in particular the history of the revolution; and thirdly, through Tarkovsky's films. However, in relation to territories, the specificity of my situation was that I was in Russia, but I was also - and in a depth-level sense primarily - in Tuva.

    It was a sunny late-afternoon when I went back into the centre of town, looking for an internet place. I found one, two hundred yards from the start of the market area, and wrote an email to Maysa. (later in the summer we would go to Croatia for two weeks, this double holiday having been made possible by me having a small amount of extra money that year, on top of my City Lit pay, and by my auxilliary-worker contract at the college still being term-time only, so that each year I had at least six weeks of leave in summer).

     After writing the email, I looked in detail at the news. At the level of the global economic situation something was happening, although it was a 'something' which not long afterwards would seem like nothing at all. The U.S.A. had had its credit rating cut, and there had been a large-scale fall in the value of stocks around the world, partly in connection with Standard and Poor's cut in the U.S.A.s rating. Stock market falls were still taking place, and the news was full of speculation about the crash, especially in connection with the credit rating change.

    In relation to news of wars the world at this time was very disturbingly in turmoil, though I did not spend long reading about these conflicts. This was not the time, but it was also the case that with many of the wars it was quite hard to become clear about the nature and likely ramifications of the situation. Since Vietnam there had been a major transition in relation to increased western acceptance of wars, beginning with the first Iraq war, and crossing a delusory validation threshold with the second Iraq war: the overall feeling was that this acceptance combined itself with selective releases of information to produce views of wars which left you ignorant about the depth-level aspects of the conflicts. The main news at the time was the war in Libya, which would seem like a textbook case of justified intervention from the point of view of the new, example-assisted pro-war attitude, prevalent in the western media systems. But there was also the Afghanistan war, which in fact was raging at very high intensity (after having initially been constructed as victory to be followed by a short-term process of consolidation in the non-urban terrains of the country...), and on top of this there was the onset of civil war in Syria, which would very rapidly send sparks into the ultra-explosive materials that were the enraged, defeated forces of Iraq, meaning that the west would have to defeat these forces a second time. In fact, it should be pointed out that, at time of writing, three out of the four wars in question are in effect still ongoing, and that the third - the war in Iraq - has led to a very complex installation of U.S.A. forces just over the border from Iraq, in two zones of Syria, so that the war in Iraq has a kind of continuing epilogue that is emphatically related in terms of the consequences of the conflict.

 My feeling and impression at the time was that these were monstrous events (I had no predictive grasp on the situation, and a lack of knowledge of what was happening meant that in fact I wasn't favouring any anticipation about what would happen next). This feeling-and-impression can be described in relation to the events in Libya in February: what I had felt was that an exceptionally dark noose of destruction was closing on Benghazi, and that then an even more powerful, and equally disturbing noose had appeared around the first one, where the affect of this impression was that these dominatory-destructive encirclings had, at depth, a very dark, extremely disturbing libido.

   As I have said, I did not spend long reading the new stories that day, But the two 'areas' in question should be thought about for a moment. At the level of the overall, large-scale organisation of capitalism and the state societies these two areas are the fundamental aspects of the ongoing disaster. The economic issues are in fact the tectonic tensions between 'developed' and 'less developed' groups of countries (which end up with developed countries getting into extreme debt, and with industrial heartlands being turned into 'rustbelt' zones), and, whatever else is involved, the wars and massacres are to a great extent the results of territorial, religious/ethno-metaphysical and economic forces. This, it should be added, is not a prediction about capitalism digging its own grave: everything continually morphs and shifts, so that new areas of production are opened up, and labour forces are grimly disassembled and then shaken back down toward lower pay, and worse conditions (while this is taking place there is the accompanying process of people in power embodying the view that in some way the overall process 'makes sense,' doing this with a high degree of success, despite the extreme violence of the wars, and the radically deteriorated post-industrial areas).

   This is the wide-level aspect of the transendental-empirical in relation to the ongoing disaster in the human world (Sections 19, 29, 30). That is, the transcendental-empirical in relation to the disaster within the widest level of the human world's plane of organisation. A kind of grey roiling on the part of capitalism/the state societies/the corporations, where this roiling is recurrently transected by lightning flashes, or magma flashes in the form of battles, massacres, and economic collapses.

  I looked in this direction that day (because of the stock market crash, and to some extent because of the wars) but I didn't look with any intensity of focus, and I only looked for a short while. However the details of the view I have just described were virtual in the experience, even if they were only in effect at a very low level of intensity. Having looked, I turned my attention away, putting it largely out of my mind. I was in Kyzyl, a sunlit, extraordinary place by the banks of the fifth largest river in the world, and the direction in which I primarily needed to be looking - as ever - was transcendental south.

    When I arrived at the hotel I went though it, and into its garden, instead of going to my room. From the garden, I found my way onto the path running alongside the river, and I turned right alongside this path, in the upstream direction, walking toward a small monument about a quarter of a mile away.

    There is a sense in which the national-story of Tuva has a clear account of where Tuva is. It is in the centre of Asia - or, more specifically, it has the centre of Asia within it. For about a hundred years there has been a view in existence that Tuva in some way contains the middle-point of Asia, or that the country/republic is the best candidate for containing such a point. Evidently this view is mytho-geographic as much as it is geographical, and it is no doubt as an element of the Tuvan mythos that it has had an impact, rather than as a simple, more-or-less uncontested measurement, like the height of a mountain.

    And of course, from the point of view of ethnic Tuvans, the intensity of the idea to a great extent comes from what might initially appear to be secondary - the idea of being deep within Asia that goes with the idea of the the republic containing Asia's central point. And this can be taken up as meaning that Tuva at a fundamental level is culturally Asian, in a sense that would be exemplified by a countries such as Mongolia and China, as opposed to it being European - or Russian. However, the main idea (ie. 'the central point of Asia is in Tuva') can simultaneously be taken up as an idea involving a neutral - non-cultural - geographical location, and can be seen as positive through it being, in effect, the idea of Tuva as a place at the heart of its region, facing simultaneously toward Siberia, India, Mongolia, China, Japan etc.

    The monument was very low-key: a plinth with a globe-sphere on it (maybe seven feet in diameter), showing the land-masses in pale rust-orange (flat in relation to their surfaces, but in slight base-relief in connection with what was around them) against a steel blue indicating the oceans. Behind this was a three-sided obelisk about thirty feet high, which felt as if it had the symbolism of a 'pointer' of some kind. At the front of the sphere there was the representation of Asia (or, the Asian zone of Eurasia), and in the middle of Asia (which was also the middle of Tuva) there was a dot indicating the central point. Underneath, in the centre of the front part of the plinth, there was an engraved plaque with the phrase "The Centre of Asia," written in three languages.

     There was no-one much around. Beyond the monument was the Yenisei, a big river flowing quite fast. On its far bank there was nothing but small trees and undergrowth. Beyond this there were low, arid mountains, their main slopes probably starting ten miles in the distance. Looking to the right was a relatively close hill-spur with a few trees on it, the point where a range of the Sayan mountains came down to the confluence between the Big Yenisei and the Small Yenisei, which was about five miles from the centre of the city. To the northwest was a bank of cloud with the sun, close to the horizon, coming through beneath the cloud. 

    The monument I was looking at has now been replaced by a transformed 'centre of Asia' monument - in some ways similar in shape - with a small, running reindeer at the top of the pointer, a reindeer with the stylised large antlers of designs from the shamanic cultural worlds of Tuva (designs which are very ancient and are found inscribed on megaliths - called deer-stones - in both Tuva and Mongolia). It would be going too far to say that the reindeer was virtual for me that evening in Kyzyl, but the monument I saw impacted so little at a 'descriptive' level in relation to its terrain (it didn't say the name Tuva, and didn't give the boundaries of the country within the continent) that I feel it functioned to point mutely to the enigma: it just pointed toward the river, the mountains, the city, the sky - toward its spheroambient world. And I had an awareness of the non-western aspects of Tuva - so in some sense the equivalent of the deer was there in that experience.

    I was still slightly unwell as a result of the cold, and I set off to return to the hotel, knowing I needed to sleep. The sun had set, and the bank of clouds was lit up orange-and-pink. The sunset cloud-bank and the broad, twilight river produced a feeling of the sublime, but this experience of the sublime-within-the-world was also faintly suffused with a background sadness. Standing on the footpath I spent a few minutes looking at this very intense view, and then I went into the hotel.

     

    That night I slept deeply for many hours. Toward the end of the night I woke and heard a thunderstorm taking place, with very heavy rain falling. I rapidly went back to sleep.

    I dreamed I was walking south toward a bridge over the Derwent river, in Malton, in North Yorkshire. It was early in the morning, and it was sunny: it felt as if it was midsummer. I wasn't looking around me, I was simply moving forward, but all the detail was there in some sense: the agricultural suppliers, Yates's, was on my left, and up ahead, beyond the river, there was the bus station, and, further away, there was the train station. I crossed the bridge - a plain, modern bridge across a quite narrow river, and then the view opened up, and two hundred yards away, not far from the railway line, but to the left of the train station building, there was a woman standing, looking approximately in my direction.

    She was wearing a darkish green dress, a deep green that seemed to have a little dark grey in it, and within the dream I knew, in a direct sense of knowing, that the woman was a 'rain goddess' (not an attribution I remember making, awake or asleep, in the rest of my experience). Seeing the woman was  a jolt. It wasn't that I saw her as having a terrifying nature, or as aggressive. The woman was a very bright presence (and I should add that there was no sense that she was definitely looking at me, even though she was facing in my direction), but she was in some sense exceptionally intense as a being, and in terms of looking at her she was just too much - too anomalous. It was like scenes in stories where someone sees a ghost, only the affect was neither that she was dead, nor that was malevolent (though her intent was too impersonal for it to be possible to say that she could not be dangerous in some way, despite the bright, very positive quality of her affect). The seeing-a-ghost feeling was of course too much for the experience to be more than momentary. I woke up from the dream.

     Outside torrential rain was falling, and there was still occasional thunder and lightning. As I say in Hidden Valleys, I have never once given any thought to the idea of 'rain goddess' as a good way of understanding this dream. Instead, I have had the feeling that this is the kind of experience which can occur when looking toward transcendental south, a direction which has a great deal to do with the planet - and of that part of the planet which is called the atmosphere. 

    When I woke again, later, it was sunny. In the street at the front of the hotel there was floodwater from the rain. 

    At breakfast I spoke to a Russian couple who were travelling through Siberia by motorbike. They came from one of the big cities at the "European" end of the country (I can't remember if it was Moscow or St Petersburg), and I felt the exhilaration of what they were doing. It was a big-sky journey through very varied terrains (the Sayan mountains, the steppe, Lake Baikal, the taiga forests of the far east), and across a genuinely immense distance. It is worth remembering that if Siberia was a separate country it would be the largest country in the world. This couple were probably in their late 30s. As with the younger couple from Krasnoyarsk, who I had met on the bus, they gave me a feeling of the joy of travelling, only with this epic motorbike journey I felt I was in contact with a love of a hinterland immensity that made me think of across-continent journeys of people in the U.S.A. - only the distance was greater, and the variation in terms of sub-cultures being encountered was more extraordinary. Talking to this couple for half an hour was like breathing good air - there was an aspect of freedom about what they were doing which made it a heartening encounter.

    After breakfast I left the hotel to walk to the centre. I was very aware, as I walked in the sunlight, that I had now recovered from the cold. Not far from the hotel there was a series of big puddles that were alongside some trees. To look into the puddles was to look at fragments of tree-fringed sky in a way that was very striking: in the bright Tuvan sunlight, and with the clear-water of the rain-washed street, the mirror effect seemed more impressive than any effect of this kind that I had seen before - as if the street was scattered with gaps that showed a downward view toward the sky. I paused for a moment, enjoying the mirror-spaces of the water, but aware as well that the day before I might have not have enjoyed it in the same way: I was experiencing the surge of elation that comes with a return to health.

   I set off again, to walk the four blocks to the big square by the theatre and the parliament building. I had been told that, to get the information I needed, I should go to the 'tourist yurt' that I would find there. 

    The yurt stood out on its own, but not in the centre: it was on the north side of what was quite a large square. It was good to see a 'ger' again, to use the Mongolian term, even if it was part of a tourist industry. And it wasn't easy to see the tourism systems of Kyzyl as a rampaging threat to the Tuvan eco-systems, given that this piece of infrastructure was a temporary construction twenty feet across. 

    The woman who was working there was perhaps in her mid twenties. Her face seemed more Tuvan than Russian: she was wearing western clothes, and had dark curly hair that came down to her shoulders. When I arrived she was helping an American family - a man and a woman and two children - who were going to be travelling around Tuva by car. It was clear that she was very intelligent, and very good at her job. There was a reserved but impressive sparkle about her way of being, and she spoke very fluent English.

     When it was my turn to talk to her I asked her if she knew of a khoomii singer who would be prepared to give me some lessons. 

    The response I received was interesting: there was a definite quality of this being a good question from her point of view. She gave me the address of the workshop of man called Aldar Tamdin, who she said was a very good khoomii singer and khoomii teacher, and who was a maker of Tuvan musical instruments. The address was a place that was about a mile away to to the east. She said I could just go there in person, without getting in contact in advance, and that Aldar was likely to be there, because he would be making instruments in the workshop. 

    It wasn't that I picked up any impression of a personal connection with the person she was recommending to me as a teacher, or any feeling of wanting to provide a customer. It was more that she seemed pleased that I wanted to do something - learn something - rather than witness a spectacle. In talking to her over the next twenty minutes I arrived at the feeling that she was an intellectual, and that in the background she had intense views about Tuva.

   Around forty five minutes later I found my way to a courtyard off a sidestreet. On my right there was a house, and extending from it, in the direction away from the street, there was a single story outhouse with an open door leading into it. The outhouse turned out to be the workshop, and inside it I found Aldar Tamdin who was making a Tuvan horse-head fiddle. (with him was an apprentice, who I would find out afterwards was from Belarus)

     Aldar was very welcoming. He told me he would be happy to give me some lessons. I said it would only be a small number of lessons, because I was not in Tuva for very long, and he said this was not a problem. Aldar was a friendly, confident man who was perhaps in his late thirties: however he was unassuming at the same time as being confident. Despite clearly being a talented and successful musician and craftsman he never attempted to set out his credentials. The next day, when he told me briefly about performing with his band in the U.S.A., everything was about the pleasure he had taken in the enjoyment on the part of the audiences of Tuvan music, and about him having liked the U.S.A. What went along with his evident skill as musician and instrument-maker was a friendliness and generosity, and an occasional slight note of sadness.

   We arranged a price for the lessons, which was very reasonable. And Aldar said that I should come back at about 5pm, for a first lesson. He said there could then be another one the next day. Because I didn't have much time in Tuva, this pace was exactly what I had been hoping for. 

    I went back out into the streets of Kyzyl feeling somewhat surprised by how quickly I had found a khoomii teacher. and by a sense of a genuineness in relation to the encounters which had been involved, as opposed to a feeling of having been a customer. 

    

     Everything now felt like a fast movement forward. The current I was in was very calm, like the river flowing alongside the hotel, but at the same time it moved quickly.

      The khoomii lessons were valuable in a direct sense, in relation to the skill, but they were also valuable in relation to learning about Tuvan culture, and simultaneously were thought-provoking in terms of the dormant potentials of the human voice (like Tserendavaa in Mongolia, Aldar was both a brilliant khoomii singer, and a very good teacher). The scale of the deterritorialisation of the human voice that is involved in khoomii was now clearer than it had ever been - and staying simply at the level of the action, deterritorialising the voice to the point where it produces overtones is a joy in itself, whatever might be the aesthetic value of any music that is created in the process.

     I got to know the market area of Tuva, and I found a market cafe where they served food with which I was familiar from Mongolia. But I was also getting ready for going walking in the mountains, and two days after meeting Aldar I found my way to a hardware shop to the south of the town centre. I needed a camping stove and gas bottles, and having found these, and purchased them, I left the shop and walked a bit further from the centre to where the road went up a slight incline, raising the vantage by about twenty feet. From here there was a view of the mountains to the northeast. They were mostly flat-topped, but it was clear they were very high. And, as far as I could see, the upper half of the slopes was entirely covered in forest. The longing to go toward these mountains was intense - I knew that I would set out the next day.

    I had already told Aldar about my overall plan for the trip. But that day I told him I was leaving the next morning. He expressed concern about my safety in the mountains, but when I said that I was definitely going and would be gone for between a week and ten days, he said that after a lesson the next morning he would drive me to the mountains. I did not want to impose upon him, and said no, expressing my gratitude. But Aldar was insistent, and said his children would enjoy the journey in the car. Once I'd got him to agree to an amount of money that would cover his petrol and his time, I accepted the offer. I only agreed because he seemed genuinely happy about the idea of making the journey. It seemed as if it was a good plan for both of us - but I had an impression that a reason why he wanted to go ahead with it was because he felt he had acquired a degree of responsibility for me (this would have been a real concern if I had thought that I had become a burden, but we got on well, so the offer felt more like an act of friendship). 

    It was around midday. I waved goodbye to Aldar and his children as the car set off down the gently sloping dirt track that led back to the main road. I had enjoyed the company on the journey: there had been very little language in common between myself and Aldar's children (a boy of around ten, and a girl of around seven) but they had taught me words in both Tuvan and Russian, and the conversations with Aldar had been interesting while never getting in the way of an atmosphere of a holiday road-trip.

    I had managed to stop Aldar from taking me the remaining mile that might have been possible, dissuading him because of the deterioration of the track and its increasing gradient. Looking back, everything was visible in the clear air: a huge sweep of the Bii-Khem river valley, running from west to east, and beyond this a line of big, steppe-land hills to the south. I watched until the car was arriving back at the road. 

    Turning round I started walking. There was sun-bleached grass on either side of the track and up ahead to the right there were was a large area of blue-violet flowers whose colour was striking in the intense sunlight. Ahead of me the ground rose up steadily to become a vast wall of the range of mountains that towered in a continuous chain to the north 

of the Bii-Khem valley. This mountain-escarpment was facing the sunlight, and slowly changed from steep grassland with occasional trees to a final third that consisted of cliffs and of very steep slopes with larger numbers of trees. The summit of the mountain - so far as it could be seen - was entirely covered in forest. This was in fact a kind of foothill 'limb' of the main massif to the northeast, but from the point-of-view of the base of the river valley it was a big, impressive mountain.

     As I walked I had an intense feeling that I had got away. This was a feeling of joy - I had managed to do the thing that I had done before but which was always better than it was possible to remember (it was only when you were there again that you could remember). But the feeling was also in connection with singular circumstances: the place where I was felt very extraordinary - I felt that it was at a level of intensity that was higher than anywhere comparable that I had been in the past. 

     I stopped and made sure that everything was the way it should be. I carefully tied my bootlaces, checked the lids of my water bottles, and tightened the straps of my backback. I was aware that in some sense I had crossed a threshold (the feeling of having 'got away' was this awareness) but I needed to hold everything together, so I could stay on the far side of it, and move forward.

    I started to walk again, passing a large patch of flowering scabious, growing on the path, its lilac-coloured flowers very vivid in the midday sunlight. Up ahead was a steeper slope with a few outlier pine-trees starting about half way up. At the top of this slope - less than half-way up the mountain, there were cliffs, but there appeared to be a way up to the left, although no path was visible. 

    What happened took place almost immediately, seeming to emerge as a straightforward expression of the joy I was feeling. I started to do something I had done on a walk in London a few months before - I began to envisage that there was a wall of white light to the south, stretched from east to west, and reaching to the height of the top of the atmosphere, and that, as I breathed out, it smoothly swung all the way around the planet, passing through everything on the surface, including myself, and then returned to its initial position, where it was an ultra-bright, unmoving expanse during the inbreath and the pause at the end, only to sweep around the planet again on the outbreath. 

    I saw this as a technique for focusing attention on space, and space extended fully from left to right and from bottom to top, but I also saw it as a way of focusing on where I was at a fundamental level - that is, for instance, not in a particular country, but on the planet. Lastly, I was aware that it grounded everything not only in relation to the planet, but in relation to energy. More than anything else the white wall was reminiscent of lightning: it would be right to say that in general it was like plasma, but while it had the calm of the aurora borealis/australis, it had the intense brightness of lightning. It was white-bright, with a slightly enigmatic quality of seeing into a gap in the world, and the intensity of the white gave the impression that at a deep level it was electrically sparking with energy, even if wasn't quite possible to see the details of these micro-events.

    I was therefore experiencing what I was doing as a simple technique for focusing on space, for smooth breathing, and for grounding myself affirmatively on the planet, and in a world of energy. There was no 'grand' or 'fanciful' impression that came with it, despite its scale as a process of envisaging - I felt it as a strategy for placing me on 'mi eje,' (my line of balance), to quote the song by Femina. I was surprised by the way in which it induced a serene state, with calm, smooth breathing, given its outlandish planet-wide vastness and dynamism at the level of the envisaging: but it worked, and that was what mattered.

   It was not a new development, in that it had arrived as an idea at some point in February or March, and I had briefly explored it as a possibility during the course of a three mile walk in a slightly run-down, post-industrial area of southeast London. And in a further sense it was not new, in that the wall of white light had in fact come from the virtual-real world of The Corridor. 

       However, I had been tired on the walk, and although I had found it to be a striking technique, it was as if it did not quite take off (like a sail that was not fully opened), and I remembered it as interesting, but did not make any sustained attempt to develop it.

     But now, on this mountain-slope in Tuva - with an immense horizon coming increasingly into view behind me - it seemed that I found the place for opening the sail. I had found the circumstances that would focus the technique. The envisaging had lacked depth of focus before, but now I felt the wall of white light as extended in an arc around half of the planet, and I felt it as extending to the top of the atmosphere. Everything became exceptionally clear in its indeterminacy. What was fully clear was what you would see and feel if the event was taking place, but the rest was precise at the same time as being more faint. The location of the pause of the wall of light was substantially over the southward horizon, in the sense that it was somewhere halfway across Mongolia, but any slight indeterminacy in this location of the east-west line at this point somehow felt like part of the technique, and what was vital, in any case, in relation to this aspect, was that this was the point where everything settled into the inbreath-and-pause view of the wall of light reaching sublimely and enigmatically to the height of the auroras, while extending across the whole east-to-west horizon. 

     This form of breathing then became a pervasive aspect of the whole journey through the mountains and their forests. A kind of machine for serenity and focus - a technique that had blown in from my process of writing The Corridor (Sections 16, 27, 28 and 43, but in particular see Section 26). And given that it had gone into effect from out of a fiction into a pragmatics of actuality, it was a technique that suggested something that might be at a more fundamental level than art in relation to dreaming up virtual-real worlds - it suggested that beyond art was the process of waking faculties and potentials, a very joyful process of waking forms of existence out of a perturbing state of cognitive and physical torpor.

  However, although this breathing technique was a very recurrent and recurrently very sustained aspect of the journey, it would remain the case that it was very much a background aspect (which it seems is the way breathing techniques need to be, because if you focus on them too much your breathing has a tendency to become awkward, and non-immanent in relation to exertion). From the outset it was there, and yet it was primarily in the background, to a great extent because of the pre-possessingly powerful landscape into which I was walking.

   The steep slope was tilted into the sun. I was passing occasional pine-tree saplings and young trees, that were vibrantly healthy. The top of the mountain escarpment was almost entirely a forest horizon, and gave me an impression I was going up into a mountain wilderness of a very extraordinary kind. I knew nothing at all about these mountains, apart from the fact that I had seen forests covering the much higher summits beyond the horizon to the northeast: this was a walk without a map or a compass, and without accounts, place-names or stories relating to the places I was seeing. The exceptional beauty of the place, together with it being profoundly unknown, was in the fullest sense pre-possessing: it claimed my foreground attention effortlessly, as a source of inspiration of the most heartening and recondite kind. 

    And at that initial point in the journey there were additional reasons for my attention to be fixed by what was in front of me. I was on a path which led to what I could now see were caves in the cliffs up ahead of me. And I could see two people coming down from these caves along the path: they were small figures that were moving relatively slowly on a path  that I felt sure was the one up which I was walking. There was no impression that they had seen me: they did not seem to be looking at me.

    The path was one which had been chosen for me by Aldar, and I felt that it was a gift of some kind - that it was a path to a place which was visited, a place that in an anthropological sense was in some way 'sacred' (Aldar had mentioned that his father had been a practising buddhist, in a way that transmitted approval, but caves in the mountains in Tuva could easily have a complex significance and history that was Buddhist but also shamanic). 

    I was therefore walking towards an enigma in the near-distance, and with two people coming down from it toward me. But beyond this there was another issue which in some ways was far more pressing. There was no sign of a continuation of the path beyond the caves, and although there was a slope to the left that looked as if I could get up it, with difficulty, I knew that such impressions could often be highly misleading, and given the weight of my pack (with the water for the first phase of the journey, and food for eight or nine days) this was a concern that left me scanning the slope with a degree of trepidation. I felt that Ardal had given me a gift, but a path that only goes up the first two thirds of a mountain slope is a gift that also gifts you a challenge. Afterwards I would wonder whether Ardal had hoped that I would reach the caves and then think better of the whole plan and come back, but I don't believe this - I feel the gift in every sense was a good one (there was in fact a hidden way into the mountains through a very narrow ravine two miles to the west, but I would not have wanted to take this route).

    The two people walking down the path were a man who was perhaps in his sixties, and a younger man, in his thirties or forties. They both looked Tuvan and they greeted me in an undemonstrative, friendly way. I used the Tuvan word for 'hello' and this seemed to have an impact on the older man - he seemed pleased, and he looked into my eyes as if he was trying to discern what I was doing. On the basis of a hand gesture, I felt sure that what he said next was a question about whether I was walking to the caves. My Russian was not good enough for a conversation in which they would explain the nature of the place which it seemed they had just visited, and neither of the two men spoke English. I indicated what I was doing by pointing out my route to the top of the mountain ridge. And by attempting to communicate friendliness and sincerity with my face, while nodding and pointing, I tried to let them know that my understanding was that they were telling me something important about where they had had just been. There was a warmth about the whole encounter, despite a slight feeling of strain created by failed attempts to communicate, and there was a mutual ease about bringing it to an end. As if it had been a piece of music, we all seemed to know when it was time to bring it it a conclusion, in the form of waving goodbye.

    The slope became very steep for the final hundred yards that led to what seemed to be the largest of the caves, as well as being as the one that was nearest. At the top the ground became nearly level for twenty feet. The cave looked natural and was about about seven feet high by six feet wide: it had a sandy floor, and it went back into darkness so that it wasn't possible to see how deep it was. At the front of the cave, just under the overhang of the rock, but lit up in sunlight, there was a small wooden writing desk, with a wooden chair beyond it, so that if someone had been sitting there they would have been looking out across the valley. Both the desk and the chair looked old, and quite weather-beaten, as if they had been out in the elements for several years.

     In different places near the cave there were pieces of blue cloth, secured with rocks, and in some cases attached to poles or to tree branches - the indicators of a sacred site that I had encountered in Mongolia. A sequence of caves - many of which were just shallow indentations - continued around a rock face that angled its way round from facing south to facing west. (the cave at which I had arrived was at the front of a roughly U-shaped promontory of the mountain that consisted of cliffs for most of its first hundred feet).

    Looking at the desk and the chair I felt that someone had lived there in the cave, and I wondered if they had died. Given that it was perfect weather for someone to be there, this impression was very strong. I felt a feeling of intense respect for the individual who had adopted such a singular form of life, but at the same time I felt distant from a reclusive or 'hermit' mode of existence. But more than anything else, looking at the faded and sunlit writing desk and chair, I had a moving feeling of being in the presence of a life and a death.

     I did not attempt to explore the cave. I looked at the desk and chair, which seemed to be indices rather than possessions, and I looked around me at the whole place, and then I set off again, traversing my way up the slope.

   
  I was no longer on a path, because the one on which I had been walking only went as far as the caves. I liked the fact that I had gone beyond the end of the path, but in the last five hundred feet the escarpment became slightly vertiginous, so with my full pack it would be necessary to go increasingly slowly (the pack contained food for eight days and four bottles of water), and the steepness of the slope meant that I would have to choose my way carefully and become fully focused on where I was placing my feet.

    At the top there was a terrain of pine-forest interspersed with small areas of long grass and wild flowers (there would have been herds here in the spring or early summer but they would have been taken down into the valley, where there was water, and the grass had not been grazed for a long time). The relatively flat ground extended to the east for about a mile before rising up steadily, and then more precipitously, toward the main massif.

    I walked forward a short distance, looking around me at this new terrain. I took off my pack and sat down. I drank some water, aware that as a result of the exertion I was drinking more than I would have liked. 

   Then I went back to the edge of the slope. The sky was vast. A gigantic terrain of hills stretched fifty or sixty miles to a horizon on which occasional mountains looked tiny, and above this horizon there was an immense cloudless sky. This view had been having an intense effect on me all the way up the slope, even though I had not been able to see as far.  

   The impact of the view was an involuntary envisaging of the sky that I could see beyond the horizon and the terrain that was beneath it, where this involved an awareness of the beyond-sight terrain as stretching out sideways in the form of the curve of the planet; and simultaneously its impact was a feeling of the sublime - a feeling of serene joy, a feeling that was like the most beautiful reverie you can imagine. 

   This was what I have called the planetary view. I have only seen it on a very small number of occasions. I saw it when I was standing on a hill to the south of El Bolson, looking across the whole of the valley in which El Bolson is located (this was the first time, in 2008); another time I was on the edge of the North York Moors looking to the horizon across the western part of the vale of Pickering; a third time I was on a hill above Warwick and Leamington looking toward the sky above distant hills on the opposite side of the Avon valley. Every time I have been looking in the direction of the equator: on the hill near El Bolson the view was to the north, and on the other occasions it was to the south.


    I pitched my tent in a clearing which was a few hundred yards from a part of the escarpment that consisted of cliffs and crags, with forest growing in the areas where there was soil. I had already been to a point where it was possible to get a view - a very wide, flat tor of grey, shattered rocks, about twenty feet high, with a few trees on the top - and had seen that I was on a ridge with a mostly flat summit a quarter of a mile wide, and that beyond this there was a steep-sided valley, and then another forested ridge. 

    There were signs of humans on the ridge, and not just the clearings - I found a loose, minimal shelter made of branches, which would have been made by someone who was tending a herd of sheep or cattle. But people did not come there enough to make paths.
In the distance to the east there were some places where there were small areas of grass and rocks on the edge of cliffs, but these tiny bays - extending from the forest - were not connected by a cliff-top path, and there was no sign of any walking route along the watershed of the ridge.

    I was glad there was no path, because I wanted to focus my attention on the terrain, and be guided by where I wanted to go, and because I wanted to be without human indications about what was in front of me, even at this empirical level of the topography of the mountains. 


    A large amount of what was important about this journey was in the affect of the places, and in the cumulative totality of the experience. Starting from being dropped off by Aldar the day before, I had embarked on a process of discovering the features, overall form and singular points of a terrain - and this terrain had a subtlety which meant that it kept revealing important new aspects until the very end. Inseparably the journey was a movement in relation to the transcendental-empirical (which can also simply be called the transcendental), a process which had its own, very extraordinary subtlety, and which would leave me with a deepened impression that the planet, and animals, and human beings are all worlds consisting of the transcendentally unknown.

    In the morning I started early, packing up my tent in bright sunshine. The way onto the massif's summit was to the east, up the ridge onto which I had climbed, and alongside the steep-sided valley I had seen the evening before. 


    I started from the wide outcrop of rocks, walking through pine-forest and across small clearings. Soon I was in one of the grassy cliff-top places: it was slightly higher than the escarpment edge on either side of it. The place was an area of rocks and grass, with a few pine trees, and it had a quietly idyllic quality  - evidently rarely visited, and in a terrain empty of people, it felt like a rock garden suspended in the sky, and gave the impression of an undemonstrative perfection, like a piece of water-sculpted driftwood.

    But I knew that part of what was behind the atmosphere was the severity of the terrain, and that this severity was less about height than it was about shortage of water (and regular - 45 degree centigrade temperatures in winter). And this meant I was not going to pause for more than a moment, in that I was already becoming aware that finding water might be very difficult, and that meeting this challenge was definitive of what I was trying to do. I had a means of water purification with me - two bottles of different kinds of chemical in liquid form, where drops from each of the bottles are put into the water - but apart from having used this system in Mongolia, I had no specialist knowledge (such as an ability to find water by digging for it).

   Ahead the terrain went down, and then steeply upwards, in a slope consisting of forest broken by cliffs and crags. There seemed to be no more clearings on the parts of the ridge I could see: and the lower area, in front of me, gave the impression that it was broken into ridges and shallow ravines, and therefore would not be right for creating grazing land (at this altitude what was needed fpr this was flat summits or south-facing slopes). I decided to traverse to the opposite side of the ridge, and continue along the part of it that was opposite the escarpment.

    The ground was often quite difficult, and the sunlight had a lot of warmth. The latitude of the terrain was not north-of-Norway, but was the same as the north of France, and the difference in relation to the far west of Eurasia was that the extreme low humidity meant that the heat of the sun was more intense - more photons were arriving directly from the sun, so that the evaporation rate was higher. The difficulty of walking was getting through undergrowth, and finding a way across gullies, but there was no boggy ground anywhere. 
    
     By the middle of the day it was clear that I could not continue onto the higher part of the ridge without water. I decided to go down into the steep-sided valley, to see if it had a stream in it. I would be losing height, but the valley-floor would still be a lot higher than my starting-point the previous day.

   The descent became increasingly difficult, but I don't think I had to use my hands very much. The opposite side of the valley was in sunlight, and what I was seeing through the trees around me were steep montane meadows, with only occasional trees (this other side of the valley faced south). All the way down I was listening for the sound of water, a sound which I knew would carry a long way in the silence. In the final hundred yards - when I was struggling with a steep gradient, and thick undergrowth - I was feeling it was very unlikely that I would find a stream, but, for someone unused to arid forests, the size of the valley nonetheless made it seem hard to imagine that it had no stream in it.

   I clambered down a ten foot cliff, using branches and vines to support me, and dropped down onto the dusty stones of a very small stream-bed - perhaps on average five feet across. There was no water in it, and everything was dry - there was no muddy ground where it might have made sense to dig for water.

     Alongside the stream-bed there was a track - one that was used for vehicles, although judging by the plants growing on it the likelihood was that it had only been used very rarely - or not at all - since the spring. I wasn't surprised to see it: I knew that, because of herds being grazed - and because of hunting - a massif like this one would have tracks in its valley systems, and that in the age of farm vehicles it was unlikely to be accessed solely on foot or on horseback.

   I walked on the track for a while, seeing nothing but dry stones in the stream-bed - there was no mud that was not baked dry, and there were no damp areas amongst the rocks. Ahead of me there was a distant view toward the upper part of the massif, and I had no doubt that the highest area I could see (which I knew would be quite a distance below the summit) was more than twice the height of the ridge onto which I had climbed the day before. 

   I decided to walk diagonally onto the top of the second ridge, in order to get a better idea of the terrain. The seasonal grazing-land on the slope was long, dried-out grass, with occasional bushes, that sometimes were were in flower: after a long traverse this terrain gave way to forest.

   I was very much aware of the problem of finding water, but I was detached from it. I was setting out to become perception, and for finding water this seemed to be what I needed, rather than being 'inside my head' worrying about it. It felt like a good challenge, and I would either succeed, or I would not.

   The top of the ridge was a series of crags with trees growing on top of them and around them. There were no signs of the next valley being more likely to have a stream than the one I had crossed (although I couldn't see much of this valley other than a wall of trees) and no sign of a place where there might be a lake. After a quarter of a mile the ridge came to an end, for the most part dropping down without steep gradients, and with the easiest route being to the right.

   I arrived back at the dried-up stream and the track. Now there were trees growing on both sides. Even though the stream-bed was dry, it felt more promising. As I walked I saw areas of damp ground, and patches of verdant vegetation.

   After around a hundred yards I came to a place where there were two very deep ruts in the track, one after another: both of these ruts were full of water. I had seen no signs of the track having been used recently, and the water was not oily. I went ahead to see if I could find anything better, but when I returned, having not succeeded, I was not feeling disappointment. I knew now that I would be able to get further up into the mountains, to the forested summits.

    Looking at the water I remembered the big puddles outside the hotel in Kyzyl, the morning after the thunderstorm. The water could not have lasted much longer - it was very probable that on that night there had also been a thunderstorm in this area of the mountains.  

  
   I filled the water bottles, and purified the water. Above the track, on the right, there was a steep slope leading up toward the highest areas of the massif. It was facing the late-afternoon sunlight (the track was curving round to the north, continuing in the direction of the next valley). I set off up this slope, wanting to gain as much height as possible in the remaining hours of daylight. 

   I went in wide zig-zags, initially through forest and then on a grassland slope that had a forested gully on the left, and had more forest on the right. The slope would have been facing southeast, and above the gully, to the left, there was another open area - part of the southward face of a promontory which was descending steeply to the mid-point at the head of the two valleys. There were crags at the top of this grassland, and above the crags there were was a skyline of trees. 

    Eventually the gully came to an end and I went across to the far slope, looking carefully in the area of the water-course, which was now running through grassland. The grass was a little bit more green, but there was no boggy ground anywhere and the small stream-bed was completely dry.

    For a long time I zigzagged up the south-facing slope, looking up toward sapling pine-trees growing far above. Eventually I arrived at an area that was slightly less steep. There were scattered trees, and there was grassland which had gentians growing on it. I knew from experience that the dark-bright, intense blue of gentians was a reliable indicator of height (they are a flower of high mountains, whether or not there are glaciers on them).

    I pitched my tent, and had something to eat. In the twilight a reverie from the previous evening returned to me. The starting-point had been the thought that it is likely to be harder for women to take the decision to travel on their own in wildernesses, because of the greater danger of them being attacked. I had started to envisage the life of a female alter-ego - a woman who might for instance have been my twin, and who had attributes in common with me, while nonetheless being very different - and now I returned to the reverie, wondering about ways in which she might be inspired toward travelling alone - off the paths - in wilderness areas. It was like a story, but with only two characters - the woman, and places such as forested mountains - and it felt as if I was both enjoying the knowledge that this development could take place in a woman's life, and need not be too dangerous (if she was skilled in self-defence) and as if simultaneously the planetary horizon of the reverie in some way meant that this was a powerful way of causing a female alter-ego to come into focus within the virtual-real.


   It was the middle of the next day. I had got up early, and leaving my tent, I had gone all the way back to the wheel-rut puddles in order to replenish my water. It had been a long way and I had set out to do it quickly, but on the way back I had avoided a pace that would have counterproductively caused me to sweat. I didn't know if I would find water further up the mountain, and returning to the water in the valley, although time-consuming, had seemed to be the only option.

  I had camped by crags which formed part of the 'spine' of a ridge which was both forested and more precipitous on its opposite, northern side. I walked to the end of the gentian-dotted grassland, then through a tangle of rocks and trees, and then through a steep, narrow clearing that extended for around a hundred and fifty yards, with a long wall of crags on the left. At one point I put my pack down and climbed onto the top. To the northeast, across a wide forested ravine there was a tree-covered peak.

    I continued to the end of the clearing, and then I was walking in forest on a path which showed every sign of having been made by animals. Branches recurrently came down very low across it (so you had to stoop down); it wound its way through trees and bushes, and there no bootprints, and nor was there any litter. 

   The path followed the ridge - though the crags had come to an end - on ground that was becoming closer to level. After a short while I started to find blueberries, and very soon they were everywhere. I ate a lot of them, enjoying the flavour, and glad of this augmentation of my diet in the form of fresh fruit.

    The path was running about twenty feet away from a cliff which was a continuation of the one which had been on the far side of the crag I had climbed, I decided to see the view again, and emerged at a kind of viewing window, between bushes and trunks of pine-trees.

     Beyond the steep, thickly forested ravine, the tree-covered peak had an arcadian beauty. It was basking in midday sunlight and seemed to have one or two tiny glades near the summit. It was a wave-shaped summit - a triangular peak which was steeper on the left, and I could see that there were crags amongst the trees. 

   The ridge I was on continued for another two hundred yards, initially descending a little, then joining another ridge which was approximately at right angles. A feature of the new ridge was that it had an overgrown ridge of rock that went in a slight curve toward the peak - it was covered in trees but was somehow reminiscent of a bridge. 

    The idea came into my mind that in crossing this ridge I would in some sense be crossing to a place which was the Future - to a place where my existence would be at a higher level of intensity. This was a light-hearted idea, but there was something quietly sublime about the summit which meant the idea had a force that stopped it from being straightforwardly discarded. It stayed in my mind, with a haunting, lovely affect - the bridge, the Future.



    The forested peak had a small clearing on the summit, consisting of an area of exposed ground-rock, and small boulders; and twenty feet lower than the summit there was a narrow glade facing southwest. Around fifteen feet wide, it was a grass-covered slope which was nearly flat at the top, and then extended for thirty feet. At the top, close to the trees, there were flowers which looked as if they could be related to lilies. There were three or four plants: some of them had finished flowering, and had dried flower-heads on them, but one of them had a two foot stem of whitish-yellow flowers.

    I walked around the summit, struck by the beauty of the place. And it was both a place-in-itself and a beginning of an immensely wider summit terrain. To the east I could see another, slightly higher summit that was flat-topped and seemed to be a mile wide. It was two miles away, beyond what seemed to be a wide shallow valley. The summit-terrain appeared to consist of two very different peaks connected, to the south, by a ridge that was around a hundred feet lower. And what I could see was covered in forest: the peaks, the ridge, and the nearest parts of the area between these three features of the terrain.

   I returned to the rock-strewn clearing, and I looked toward the southward horizon. Very far away there was the anvil shape of a cumulonimbus cloud. To the southwest there was what was probably the top of another storm-cloud, which was further away, and mostly beyond the horizon. Apart from these there were no large clouds in the sky.


    I had pitched my tent at the top of the second of the two clearings. I was sitting near the tent, in twilight, and I saw that there was a bird in the branches of a tree, forty feet away, at the base of the slope. I heard the hoot of an owl. It hooted two or three times. At one point there was a pause. I hooted back, into the silence. After another pause, the owl flew to a branch which was on the near side of the tree, giving the impression it was looking at me, but because it was only visible as a silhouette I couldn't be sure. But it was now only around thirty feet away. Eventually it returned to the initial branch.

   I took my eyes off it, looking over toward the trees on my left. When I looked back the owl had gone - it would have dropped soundlessly into the sky above the forested ravine.


     In the night there was a thunderstorm. It lasted about an hour and a half, and judging by the short gaps between lightning and thunder the centre of the storm probably passed within two or three miles of where my tent was pitched. There was a lot of lightning, and there was heavy rain for a long time, although mostly the rain was not torrential (the intensity of the storm was in the amount of lightning not the rainfall).

    In the morning I left the tent, taking only my backpack, and set off into what appeared to be a shallow valley between the two summits. Because of the view being obstructed I couldn't be sure of the terrain, but there was evidently a valley of some kind, and this was where there would be a stream, if there was one. There were small birds in the pinetrees (a kind of finch which I did not recognise), and the understorey of the forest consisted to a great extent of blueberries, which were covered in ripe fruit. 

    The slope was a wide plain of forest, tilted downward so that it faced northwest. Quite a few of the trees on it were dead, or looked unhealthy, particularly at the top of the incline, so that there was a contrast between the verdant south-facing area of the summit and this terrain on the opposite side. I knew that the height of the summit-area of the mountain would be very close to the tree-line, and it seemed that the combination of less light and exposure to northerly gales was enough to make the slope a much less favourable environment for trees. 

   The walk seemed to last a long time (the distance between the two summits was deceptive). I kept having to find my way over and round fallen trees, and all the time I was listening for water, without hearing it. Eventually I arrived at a point where I had a clear view toward the lowest area of the valley, and at the same time I heard the sound of water.

    The stream was tiny: on average it was about two feet across. It ran in a well-defined stream-bed, that was sometimes surrounded by turf, and sometimes was more rocky, and there were times when it split into two, with the strands converging a little further downstream. There was a greater diversity of plants growing around it, including a kind of plant which had three-foot flower-stems with attractive violet flowers on them. 

    I felt that the stream would have water in it for the next few days, as opposed to it just being run-off from the thunderstorm. (And this turned out to be right - several days later  there was still water in it, and it is possible it was partly fed by springs that were draining melting permafrost on the wide, higher summit to the east).



     I had succeeded in solving a problem that in a sense I had been working on for years. The problem was that of finding an area of off-the-paths wilderness forest growing on relatively flat ground, where there is a source of water - a forested wilderness-terrain where it is possible to stay, rather than having to pass through.


    I walked upstream along the valley, and quite soon the ground began to rise. The stream was now running down a rocky slope that was a tangle of boulders and of fallen trees and branches. Above me to the left there was a line of low cliffs, which were the edge of the second summit. I followed the stream, and when I was beyond the cliffs I doubled back onto this raised terrain.

    The summit was a very large area of forest with crags or tors that stood out from ground that was almost entirely flat. There were occasional small clearings which had many areas that looked as if they would be boggy ground at other times of the year. These clearings had grass that was very green, and flowering meadow plants. It was hard to work out how far this terrain extended to the north - unless there was a ravine it seemed it might extend for many miles in this direction.

   I decided to walk back to the first summit on a direct route, rather than re-tracing my steps. I found a way down the steep westward face, between places where there were cliffs, and fairly soon I was at the stream. After around fifteen minutes in the forest I navigated toward what I thought was the rising ground of the peak, only to discover, some time later, that I was climbing onto a crag that formed part of a wide ridge that was a mile from the summit toward which I was walking, and a lot lower in height. This was my first experience of the difficulty of orientation in level-ground forest with no continuous landscape feature to use as a guide (if you are in a forest on a slope of a mountain, with another mountain opposite, the facing mountain is an orientation-point which remains visible above the trees). 

    Feeling slightly jolted by this mistake I arrived back at the tent. I was glad to see it was still there. It was late afternoon, and the southwest facing glade was a striking, beautiful place. But my plan now, after resting for a moment, was to pack up everything and walk back to the stream, and then, after replenishing my water, I would go up onto the other summit and find a place to pitch my tent. I was looking forward to finding the stream again, and to returning to the other summit-terrain.

    I had the feeling of the whole place being a 'zone,' in an anomalous sense of this term (a sense that was not something I knew about, and that only had a minimal connection to Tarkovsky), as if the two peaks and the terrain between were something more than met the eye.

      And when I thought about the two summits something quite dream-like happened. I experienced an envisaging (an envisaging which was also a feeling, or two feelings) of the ground below the surface of the summits - indeterminately stretching around a hundred feet down - together with the trees growing on top of them. Specifically, I saw and felt these above-and-below-ground terrains as being sisters - as two very different and yet closely related female ways of being. One of them - the one in the form of a peak - was open, bright, optimistic, with a feeling of delight and of expansive intellectual fascination; the other sister was outwardly more sombre, almost to the point of having a brooding quality, but inside she was a world of sublime, momentous perceptions and outsights, and of intense feelings, amongst which joy was predominant. This way of seeing the places kept returning to me - as a kind of construct of envisaging and feelings - during the next few days, and it remained dream-like and evocative, deepening across the instances, as opposed to it being a fading memory of a reverie. And one thing that became clear was that the outwardly more sombre sister was not less beautiful - was in no way less heartening and inspiring.


        The first part of the return journey seemed a longer distance than I had remembered, producing a feeling that I was getting lost for a second time in the day. Partly because of this, the impact of seeing the stream was very similar to the first time. Something else involved in this moment was the fact that the amount of water in it appeared not to have decreased: everything had pivoted on me finding water two days before - but now I had a source which was not about to dry up, and where the water did not need to be sterilised.

      I retraced my steps onto the second summit and pitched my tent in a small clearing that was about a quarter of a mile - on level ground - from the crag that seemed to be the highest point. 


    I stayed in this summit-forest terrain for three days. I didn't have any doubts about staying, even though in advance it had not been a fixed plan to stop in this way. 

     To the north the forest extended toward an even wider area of forested, flat-ground summit, at around the same height (because of the forest blocking the view it was impossible to see if there was a steep sided valley or ravine between the two areas, or if there was a 'saddle' of land between them). The feeling was that of having found a singular place, and was also the feeling of having reached a kind of 'roof-terrain' of Tuva, which from a distance seemed to be just the tops of ridges, but which turned out to be a whole world, one that left me aware that this terrain would in fact cover a large proportion of the surface of the country.

     The specific small-scale place - the two summit-terrains, the forest, the stream - was a last 'fragment' of taiga, which continued as taiga because of its height. By a relatively small distance it was just high enough to not be converted into grazing. However, this does not mean that its existence as forest was secure. If I walked a mile southward from my tent, a walk which involved going slightly downhill most of the way, and then more steeply in the last few hundred yards, I came to the end of the forest in this direction. There was an area of grassland two hundred yards wide, and twice this in width, with more forest beyond it, growing on extremely steep slopes.  Looking at the terrain it seemed likely there were cliffs on this southward face of the massif, as well as very steep slopes, so most of this land would not be available for grazing, but where it was flat enough, even very near the top of the mountain, the trees had been cleared. And in fact the forest on the flat areas of the summit might well have been left because it served a function: if a herder was caught in a blizzard at this height a flat-ground forest adjoining the grazing land would be the best place to go, for both the herd and the herder (it would take too long to get off the mountain, and the steep-ground forest would be too dangerous). The forest would therefore be an adjunct : a terrain left primarily untouched because it was a kind of safety net. However, with global warming taken into account, the situation could easily change: the decision could be taken to create more grazing land.

    It can be seen, therefore, that this terrain was not very different from the forest in Mongolia that was described in the previous section. However, it was just different enough. Together with the slight difference in latitude the additional height and scale of the massif was sufficient, in that here there was a stream, and in that the forest was too remote to be managed woodland or to have footways running across it.

     The solar-trance serenity I experienced in this place was the same affect I had experienced in Mongolia, in 2006, on the forested mountain-top to the south of Murun. And, what is more, it was the same affect as the one in the dream about a forest in Siberia (which took place in 2008), the dream which led to me writing the story that for some reason I felt I should call 'Toward Tuva.' It felt as if a circuit had been closed - as if, without realising what I was doing, I had found a way of reaching a kind of terrain which had become visible as a result of the combination of two experiences (the forested mountain in Mongolia, and the dream from two years later).

     In relation to the dream the place I had found did not just share the affect: firstly, it would be fair to say that it was two days walk from anywhere, which was what I knew was true, in the dream, about the abandoned base; and, secondly, it was somewhere where a group of friends could stay, in the summer. It could be pointed out that in the dream the impression was of the latitude being a lot further to the north (within Siberia  'proper'), but then this difference is negated by the terrain in the dream being a elevated only to a a small extent, in comparison to mountainous areas. It was as if I had navigated toward one of the most southerly 'solutions' to the 'problem,' where solutions substantially further north would involve a lower altitude. In summer the Tuvan mountain-top forest was was anything but inhospitable, but six hundred miles to the north the same altitude would have often been too cold. 

       The forest in Mongolia had been the place where I had initially experienced the specific affect of solar-trance, but this starting-point terrain was less than a day's walk from human habitations in several directions, and there was no stream there. Also, the very healthy trees (trees that gave no impression of being on the edge of what could be survived), and the difference in temperature connected to lower altitude and latitude, meant that the impression was that this area in Mongolia was not on a borderline with areas where there is permafrost, and where for various reasons water is likely to be available in midsummer. In contrast, the summit-terrain in Tuva was a high promontory of taiga, projecting into a world of steppe.

       

    * 
  



         On the second night I had a dream. I remembered almost nothing - which, to be precise, is to say that what I remembered seemed to be the end of a long dream sequence. I was dreaming that I was talking to a being who was an alien - who was from elsewhere in the cosmos - and that this being, who was female, was in the form of a woman who I knew in actuality, a woman who was an actress, and who had a management post at a drama college. The impression was that the alien being was taking this form because it was the best available expression of her nature.

      There was a quality of being in some sense in the sky. When I thought about the dream it was always located to the south, somewhere on the ecliptic.

       The first aspect of the dream was that the being - the female alien - was telling me something about the colour blue, something which had metaphysical depth. It felt as if I was being told an important secret.

          The second aspect was that this being had a quality of brightness and adventurousness which was very attractive.

       The third aspect was the character - or way of being - of the actress and drama school manager: the way of being was not in any way effaced or eclipsed but instead was highlighted, made more visible. This woman very was very resourceful, confident and well-organised, and in equal measure she was kind, with a playful sense of humour: to the maximum she was a strategist and improvising creator of valuable circumstances, but her being a fighter was inseparable from her being kind and playful. It was these attributes which were highlighted within the dream, but with the idea or impression within the dream that they were the best that could be done by the alien to indicate her nature.



   *


    It is possible to ask, at this point, what might be the form of a visit by a group of friends to a place like this one? If this was, in some sense, part of the problem I had been trying to solve, what might even a sketch of an answer be like?

    

     

[section unfinished]















    I had walked the six miles from the centre of Abakan to the airport. It was early evening. The flight would leave at 7am. 

    I knew that something had happened in the course of the trip, starting from the outbound flight to Abakan - and that there was a very clear, bright, heartening quality about what had taken place.

     It had been to a very great extent about the planet - and it had also been about women, about the female as a force within the world. But there had been nothing in the crucial elements of the experience which was conducive to indulgence. And most fundamentally it had all been deeply impersonal, in a sense which can be made clear through the concept of the tutelary (taking this to be an aspect of the impersonal). It was not only that nothing had been conducive toward indulgent sensuality: it was also that there had been an affect of distance that was pervasive - an affect that is found in the tutelary relationship, as if this modality had been coming into focus. 

    The tutelary does not involve protestations of love, or of being permanently 'cared for,' and nor does it involve false reassurances about the dangers of the world. For these reasons it has a quality of being 'cool' or 'distant'. The tutor is someone who can move on, and who in fact is certain or at least overwhelmingly likely to move on. But it is vital to see that everything here is in the act, not in the protestation. And in its fullest sense the act is one which involves the waking of the faculties, as a result of the tutelary encounter.

    The impersonal was also involved, in a different sense, in relation to the mountain forest I had visited. The place had been sublime, and yet its profound beauty did not suggest that everything at depth was alright in the world - in fact there was a fragility about it which suggested the opposite. The impersonal here is a knowledge which is both a focused awareness of the sublime as an aspect of the cosmos, and an awareness that simultaneously the cosmos is pervasively dangerous and predatory (this second element is what people would prefer not to see). Furthermore, out on the edge of what could be perceived there was the impression of the immanence sublime at the level of the planet, where the impersonal relationship with an individual human - or cat, or horse, or owl - would be the same as our impersonal relationship to a cell in our bodies: it would be a miniscule component part, where a personal relationship of these cells with the whole would not in any sense be definitive of the form of connection.

       The impression of planetary immanence I had received had occurred only a few weeks after writing the 'there is a white void of air beneath their feet' section of On Vanishing Land (and this was a deepening of the idea in the story Toward Tuva), but the new experience had greater warmth. And if the white void of air now had a warmth, at the same time as an impersonal, anomalous quality, it was also the case that air had been involved in an extremely multiplicitous way (the blue of the sky, the breathing technique, the wall of light revolving through the atmosphere, the storms, the plane to Abakan  being 30,000 feet in the air, the silence blowing through the mountain) with all of this combining to suggest that at the limit immanence could involve dreams and outsights in some way affecting us from the spheroambient planetary unknown. And yet, in the 18 months after the trip there was also a feeling that the sublime quality was deeply bound up with everything having been very practical: the new way of breathing, the discovery of a remote and inspiring wilderness place with a supply of water, the process of coming to understand Tuva. I had an overwhelming awareness that the trip showed I had found a way forward (this was separate from the issue of planetary immanence, which was off on the 'horizon'). And instead of inspiring dreamings, it produced a feeling that eventually became like an imperative - it produced the feeling that instead of oneirically exploring/studying/hypothesising it was now necessary to tighten the focus through bringing lucidity, as opposed to dreaming, into sustained effect. Everything that had happened was startlingly and inspiringly enigmatic, and had drawn language into effect in very unusual ways, but - with a combination of sharp-edged outsights and exorbitant elements which defied any easy account - it did not spread out into story-worlds, but conducted the faculty of lucidity toward a process of resolving some at least of the enigmas involved.      

                                                                            *

Note 1.   

      It had been necessary to leave. To stay, facing ordinary reality and fighting it, is the last trap of ordinary reality.

   This is in opposition to the critique modalities of substantive philosophy, which is always gothic-inflected, precisely because it is written facing ordinary reality. With the Nick Land modality the tendency is toward breathlessly excited delineation of empirical developments in connection with acceleration, with critique of forms of suppression and paralysis, together with a generalised advocacy of an empirical pragmatics of deregulation (where the minimal aspects of the transcendental-empirical are all in relation to the wrong direction). With the Ray Brassier modality there is only critique, with everything else being empirical fact; the intrinsic aspect of being object-oriented is merely an effect of the critique of the mystifications/delusions of the supplimentary dimension of the subject, and all processes of seeming to look in directions other than that of ordinary reality are explicitly not doing this in that these processes consist of critique of non-standard views.

    The Mark Fisher modality was a critique of main aspects of the current form of ordinary reality, together with an awareness of negative transcendental-empirical modalities, for which he would use terms such as 'grey vampire', 'the caretaker' etc. The precision of the analysis of ordinary reality produces - for those who encounter this modality of philosophy - an accidental illusion of a grand solution, or a grand, for-everyone micro-solution, when in fact there is not much in terms of detail in relation to the escape-path. Mark Fisher lucidly analyses the creative desubjectified state (the opposite of work), but this is only the beginning. A movement toward the transcendental-empirical - in the direction of the Future - needs to take place, and if you are staring toward ordinary reality, the first unfocused half-ideas emergent from this Futural view are likely to be destroyed by the place of reason, so that the place of exteriority is never reached. To stay facing ordinary reality and fighting it is the last trap of ordinary reality, and for those who have nearly broken free it is a trap which can be deadly.

Note 2.

It can be pointed out that with the Nick Land modality the story of the last forty years is that of a process of technological acceleration, whereas for the Mark Fisher modality it is one of a deepening collapse in relation to the production of the new in the worlds of music, film/TV and art in its entirety. But on its own this contrast does not go to the centre of the difference between the two.

At the very end of the 90s Mark Fisher set out on a line of departure from the Nick Land modality, and in the second half of the 00s he published his analysis of capitalist realism, which he tied together, accurately, with the phenomenon of neo-liberalism.

However, this analysis immediately leads to the question of what circumstances would be in effect such that the lines of thought involved could lead to - or assist with - a pervasively radical, beneficial transformation. 

Mark Fisher always very emphatically agreed that a transformation of this kind could not come from a left-wing parliamentary party (whether the UK Labour party or any other left wing party) because the nation states are trapped within capitalism, entailing that nothing along these lines can occur. It can be seen that in a UK context the use of the term communist signals the distance from the left-wing-party project, and the term 'acid communist' signals it even more intensely.

This is the first option. The second is the idea that capitalism being the 'nightmare at the end of history' might lead to a kind of terminal terrain of deintensification, culminating eventually in an imaginably extreme crisis in which, in unforeseeable circumstances, there might be an opportunity for the systems, values and overall attitude-system of capitalism to be left behind. The terminal beach is bad, but we're heading toward something inconceivable which initially will be much worse - a new version of Vernor Vinge's singularity, making the putative increasing decline of the new into a symptom of the upcoming singularity. The Mark Fisher modality does not argue for this position, but it is produced as a possibility within its horizon, and there is a sense in which the modality has a close affinity with it. However, for a pragmatics of transformation this view is fatal, which is why it cannot be adopted so long as pragmatics is kept in focus as a fundamental issue. This is because there is nothing to do which can have any direct purchase on the situation if you are waiting for an unimaginably extreme crisis which might never happen.

    The third option is where a fully effectuated transcendental-empirical philosophy can at last emerge - a philosophy which is an expression of lucidity and not just of reason. This is a question of looking in the direction of the escape-route - of bringing into focus a Futural form of existence. For this third option the transformation is available all the time, and consists of a departure from the subjectified, collapsed forms of being and understanding that are imposed by the current form of ordinary reality - capitalism.

     Having set out the analysis of capitalist realism Mark Fisher was caught in an ultra-intense space of cross-currents, trying to turn toward transcendental-south. However, in trying to focus a transcendental-empirical way of seeing, his instincts were those of critique, and critique does not look toward the transcendental-empirical in the direction of the Future. His analyses of of zombie twins, vampires,  and of the alien parasitic entity (the APE), together with his determination to see post-1982 time as a deepening collapse (rather than seeing it as the latest phase of lower intensity) together form part of a process of trying to get everything into focus, where the scanning patterns involved are barely ever looking in the necessary direction. The concept of the eerie, in particular when it is taken up into the terrain of Picnic at Hanging Rock, draws attention a little bit in the 'solar trance' direction of the Future, but not nearly enough.

      To look toward the escape-path is a question of pointing toward unused potentials, and of invoking a state beyond the sad affects or passions/passivities of subjectification, but, more than this, it is a process of seeing the whole form of existence which can be indicated by the term exteriority, and of seeing the trap of being turned in the direction opposite to transcendental-south. Because even though one possibility is that eventually a rhizome in the Future could emerge which could overcome ordinary reality, to be focused on this possibility is to fail to set out along the escape-path. When you have looked long enough in the direction of the Future you at last become aware of the extent to which looking in the opposite direction is a trap.

    The macrological formations of the world of capitalism and the nation states are pervasive and ultra-powerful in their impact, but this does not mean that they are the fundamental level. There is no chance of getting a pragmatic purchase on this world of formations by using the forms of discourse of ordinary reality; and in expressing the outsights of lucidity, there would need to be a generalised, world-wide process of individuals simultaneously embodying an awareness of the need to escape, in order for capitalism-and-the-nation-states to be left behind. The fundamental level is within each individual (part of the issue of course is that people want to believe it is someone else's malaise, not their own). At this point ordinary reality has only a limited set of places to try to locate what is being said: the delusions of religion, and the resignation-philosophy of 'all is vanity' - but these are delerial constructs, and indulgent melancholy reactivities. These positions in fact have been left behind at the point where social critique is trying to turn round and become a process of focusing outsights in the direction of the Future, a process which also involves seeing the fundamental level. What is beyond politics is the liberatory micropolitics of metamorphics: the corporeal, facultative pragmatics of the alliances of the escape-path.

    

 


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