3.

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) 

   The bus is going around a circuit-road through the undemonstrative modern buildings of Warwick University. The campus has a lot of areas of grass, and a few trees, including some cherry trees.

   The outside is circumambient – spheroambient – and what is more it suffuses all of the inside.

    1993, like every year, is a world of the planet (and the sun and the cosmos), and the human world is just a zone of elements spread out finely within the planet. The place through which the bus travels is pre-eminently the World of the planet, and then there is also the human world - an aspect of the planet. 

    The immediate point of saying this is to fend off, in advance, any confusion that could occur in pointing out that in 1993 the "western" zones of the human world are in a relative low-phase – relative to a long phase of higher intensity that lasted roughly from 1962 to 1982. It is valuable to see this differential, but it is necessary to hold in mind that the zones of the human world are always going up and down, and that at any time it is straightforwardly possible for individuals and groups to set out toward the higher-intensity – toward the Future – whether or not the overall human world is in a more high-intensity phase.

     In fact in 1993 there is a line of continuation - of sustained development - from an emergence in the earlier phase. This emergence was of a new, very highly-focused form of metamorphics, which can be defined as the pragmatics and metaphysics of metamorphosis, where metamorphosis concerns the process - consisting of becomings - of travelling into wider realities. 

The cherry trees are now one tree amongst hundreds of other kinds of tree, there are mountains in the distance, there are deserts with trees encroaching on them, the plains are covered in forests, there is an eerie sunlit dereliction threaded almost everywhere through the plains and coastlands, and here and there are clusters of houses where humans are living, often on the edge of the mountains. 

There is a distant sound of talking and of bright laughter, in which womens' voices predominate. There has been a walking-away, that began around twenty years earlier, and there is communication across the gap of that journey, in the form of something that is akin to occasional radio transmissions which are recorded and distributed: one transmission, then another, with the intensity increasing as the journey continues, and with the degree of immediate impact declining as the communication comes from further away from ordinary, deadened reality. Metamorphics is a focused transcendental awareness which expresses itself as much through pragmatics as through transcendental-empirical accounts of the world, and which, in mapping terrains of intent and energy (and in providing diagrams for heightened forms of existence) uses - always in different ways - concepts and oneiric (virtual-real) worlds which consist of transcendental-empirical outsights. The perspectives of metamorphics form the horizon of Shakespeare's works, so that a primary aspect of his plays and poems is an attempt to draw attention toward this horizon. Shakespeare's work relates to a place which is just beyond the edge of ordinary reality. In 1993 the walking-away has reached a point which is substantially more distant, but the occasional broadcasts continue, emplacing themselves as enigmatic beacons within the ongoing disaster. Beyond ordinary reality's Overlook Hotel there is a sunlit-and-starlit Planetary World from which these broadcasts arrive.

     I only have have a minimal ability to bring this Futural direction into focus. But although I can feel the difference in intensity from the earlier phase, it is also true that there is a kind of thin zone of higher intensity at this time, in the form of radical, alternative-culture perspectives, and I am starting to be aware that in some sense I am on kind of a raised terrain. In 1993 the local (western-society) human world is predominantly continuing a slow slide of capitulation to conventional values, but a liminal zone has appeared, a kind of platform from which it easier to see the Future. But even this raised terrain (which consists to a great extent of rave or "dance" milieus, but which also involves a philosophical element, and a thread of fiction, as with Noon's Vurt) is minimal in comparison to the heights of the long - twenty-year - plateau left behind in the early 80s. The key varying element here is the extent to which people feel that there is another, fundamentally better way of living, in comparison with ordinary capitalist reality. It is the feeling that, in a crucial direction of the unknown, there is a whole other form of existence that- however hard it might be to reach it - is at a higher level of lucidity, poise, and love-for-the-world than the world of conventional values. It is true that high-intensity phases are horribly suffused with forms of reactivity, suffering, and dogmatic mis-use of the heightened energy (they are the ongoing disaster, just like low-intensity phases, only with the difference that the Future is a little closer). But specifically what was left behind ten years before (something that is still deeply but quietly in effect, despite the collapse) was a conjunction-event, or a kind of multi-stranded incursion-event -  a incursion in which maps and diagrams were lodged within the overall human world, and were even lodged, to different degrees, within the central zones of the interiority. 

    It is necessary to delineate this conjunction-and-incursion in order to provide the context for 1993.

    It takes place during and around the years from 1980 to 1982, and at it has the four following primary elements, spread across several different areas of oneiro-abstract production: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), Florinda Donner’s Shabono (1982), Carlos Castaneda’s The Eagle’s Gift (1981). 

   What these four works share is that they are all either works of metamorphics, or are works which have a very close degree of affinity with metamorphics. 1980 to 82 is like an energy-flare where diverse traditions are involved. It is an incursion of the transcendental-empirical.

    Many other works are part of the event, with varying degrees of affinity to metamorphics. Ursula Le Guin wrote Always Coming Home across five years, starting in 1980, and in particular her story, The Visionary, in this book, is part of the conjunction. The same is true of Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, from 1980. The conjunction-event is a point where anthropology becomes philosophical, and where the effective, required name for this form of philosophy is metamorphics.

   Everything here concerns the unknown and the depth-level knowable in a transcendental-empirical sense. It is the unknown of the spatium of forces that is the world, and in a way where the abstract as energy and affect, and, most  specifically the abstract as intent, is fundamental in relation to the encounter with the unknown. This is not the empirical unknown of time (as in, we don't know what will happen a year from now) or the empirical unknown of absence of data about an object (we don't know the chemical composition of X), but is the unknown of the spatium of energy and intent - the unknown of worlds of abstract dynamics. But this unknown is not the unknowable - it is the unknown which is knowable.  

     A work is a work of metamorphics if it constitutively assists in bringing zones or domains of the unknown in this sense to the point of being known: if in part it consists of accounts which can be  immediately validated, and of an effective pragmatics. There is no end to the unknown which is knowable, and the horizon is the unknown which is not knowable, in relation to which there is a point - just before this horizon, where expressing what has been perceived places the production of concepts under maximal pressure. Whatever else the work consists of is not an issue: the accounts which remain enigmatic can be placed to one side as either relating to the next levels on the unknown which is unknowable, or to the border before the limit point of the unknown which cannot be known.

   Metamorphics, defined in this way as a pragmatics and metaphysics of the intensification of existence, is not to be understood as something new - it is a fundamental human option. But this emergence of works of metamorphics goes back to the mid 1960s, and there are five figures who are central to the overall emergence - Florinda Donner, Carlos Castaneda, Taisha Abelar, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. And it is also important to see that the emergence is primarily the work of the first three writers, but also that at a crucial point it is profoundly supported by works from two other traditions - western philosophy, and the world of tales - of literature.

     In A Thousand Plateaus the support is explicit, in that Deleuze and Guattari point out in detail that in fundamental ways their metaphysical account of the world is the same as the one found in the works of Castaneda (and it is valuable to point out that in this book the idea of “abstract machines” is central, and that Donner, Abelar and Castaneda will later take up the term "abstract", and use it in the same way, as a term for the wider and deeper aspects of the world). A Thousand Plateaus is liminal: in part it is metamorphics, and it is very definitely the point where western philosophy leads to this other world of knowledge and exploration. And Fanny and Alexander is a re-effectuation of the Shakespeare abstract machine which consists to a great extent of transcendental-empirical perspectives, and which opens up the wider view of the transcendental-empirical unknown in part through the re-creation of Prospero as Uncle Isak.   

    It can be seen that the conjunction is more than a random alignment, because of the references to Castaneda in A Thousand Plateaus. But it is not possible to say much in relation to the idea of a crucial point in relation to the conjunction. The main point that can be made is that it is in The Eagle's Gift that women, as explorers of the unknown - as practitioners of the anomalous - come into the foreground (after this point they will always be in the foreground) and that this is the point where a female writer of works of metamorphics publishes her first book. There is a sense of a current here: in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari say that for both men and women a process of 'entering into becoming' with women (where becoming is depth-level learning) is the key to all the becomings. And in Fanny and Alexander the entire film shifts its focus steadily toward women. 

* 

    We have to escape from the cave of the interiority. Inside the cave the shadows on the walls we have been taking for reality are perceptions filtered and radically distorted by a constrictive mental functioning. When we manage, in moments of lucidity, to reach the outside, we perceive that we are surrounded by intent, feeling, energy and awareness – we are surrounded by the abstract. It is also clear that there is a momentously positive direction or current within the outside that can be called the south-outside, Love-and-Freedom, or impersonal intent (intent-toward-intensification).     

    Plato’s version of this story is to a great extent the opposite of what it appears to be. The issue is his valorising of mathematics, with its "forms" that provide the model for knowledge, and his associated failure to see the fundamental role of the senses in reaching and perceiving the abstract. Plato has taken what could be called a liberatory tale and has twisted it so that it becomes something disastrous: a primary aspect of the cave in which we are trapped is the way of thinking which Plato embodies.

   The questions become "what is a social-formation or individual at the level of intent?' What are the abstract dynamics or intent-dynamics of this form of dreaming, or this modality of thought?' 'In what way does this zone or formation hearten, inspire and energise?' 'Of what outsights and affects does the encounter with it consist, at the level of thought, dreams and feelings?'

    *. 

   

     The bus is at a bus stop where the student union is on the left and and the arts centre is on the right.

     It was at the arts centre, four months before, that Derrida gave a lecture about philosophy being in a state of mourning for Marxism. But while it is true that the inspirational problem of “there is a better way of living, and what exactly is it?” had been given an energising milieu by Marx’s best ideas, these ideas had not been at the centre of what had created the 20 year phase of higher intensity (it is true that a main current form of the trap of ordinary reality is being a wage slave; and, in a way that is not really connected to Marx's thought, that we are alienated from the means of waking our faculties, and of becoming-active). The primary shift of the early 60s was the appearance of a non-dogmatic brightness that suggested and indicated that there was a whole other way of living beyond reactionary, traditionalist values, and which primarily, in looking toward love and freedom, looked toward intent. This way of being became a deepening encounter with the transcendental-empirical unknown, and its constitutive open-minded brightness was something very different from the dialectical delusions and oppressive gravity of Marxist activism. 

   At depth any mourning of this kind was an inchoate sense of loss in relation to a time when it had been easier to get glimpses of the Future, through the idea of there being another way of living, beyond ordinary reality.

*

   At this time I have not read any of the books from the Donner/Castaneda/Abelar milieu. But the radical currents of the Warwick philosophy milieu within which I have lodged myself, together, and inseparably, with the currents of the charged counterculture of the mid 90s, are ensuring that melancholy of this kind is not something I am experiencing, despite my awareness of an overall drop in intensity since the 60s and 70s.

*

   On and around the bus it is the compelling, eerie Now of the planet, and of the World in which the planet exists. The bus has left the stop and is heading toward the exit from the campus.   

    I am relieved that no-one has got on who knows me (I have already been at Warwick for four years, doing a BA and an MA, and I know a lot of people). It is Friday evening, and I do not want to be caught up in having to turn down an invitation to go to a pub. 

    I have found a path, and I have found a direction (my current situation pertains in fact to movement along a dangerous and circuitous alternative route that leads in the end in the direction involved, if you "survive" it). Part of what  is central to me having found the path is that I am now studying A Thousand Plateaus for a Ph.D. The other main element is any tendency I have (and at this point the ability is only in effect to a minimal degree) to direct myself toward the process of becoming-active, a process that eventually necessarily leads to the becoming active of perception, and to the fostering of the silence in which abstract perception – lucidity – can at last begin to focus itself.

    I am not at all sufficiently aware that pre-eminently I need sobriety, and an implacable process of stripping-away indulgent behaviours. Most fundamentally the mountains across which the path leads are the barrier of self-importance, and of control-fixated behaviour (the embedded machineries of not letting go toward perception and action – toward Love-and-Freedom), a barrier that prevents the upward spiral of an accessing of energy. Having found a path does not mean at all that you will get far along it. Many years later, as I write this, I have still not got across the barrier. But my sobriety has increased a little, and I have reached the point where I can perceive that the primary domains or aspects for understanding the path in question are brightness, the planet and the abstract. 

                                                                        ***

2.

 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) 

   



     A flat in a city, in early autumn.The flat is near the top of a long, gentle slope, a mile from the city’s centre, and two or three miles from the city’s edge. The place is Coventry. It is October of 1993.

    Out in the surrounding – Warwickshire - countryside the leaves of the trees are still mostly green, and on the road-verges the annual micro-jungles of wild plants have not completely subsided. This countryside is to a great extent a denuded midlands terrain of industrial arable farming, with very few areas of woodland, although – as I will discover  - in areas of hills to the south and west there are some exceptionally beautiful places (some of which are terrains where an industrial-revolution development of some kind has become derelict, creating an island on which huge numbers of wild species congregate).

     It is early evening, though still daylight. I am on a bus travelling through countryside from Leamington Spa to Coventry. The bus has just crossed the river Avon, and is now going around a roundabout above a dual carriageway, before going into Kenilworth (Leamington  is fifteen miles south from Coventry, and Kenilworth is roughly half way between).

     In relation to the oneirosphere, where is this terrain?

     An effective initial answer is that it consists of a fault-line region between Shakespeare on the one side, and on the other side, George Eliot and Philip Larkin. George Eliot came from Nuneaton, ten miles north of Coventry, Larkin came from Coventry, and Shakespeare’s place of origin is fifteen miles southwest from Leamington. To the northeast of this divide – two different modes of extremely intelligent, visionary bleakness. To the southwest – eerie expanses of brightness.

    To understand this difference properly it is necessary to explicate two different kinds of “awareness” or abstract perception: empirical awareness and transcendental awareness. For Shakespeare, George Eliot and Philip Larkin the real difference across the divide involves a different distribution (such that a different form of awareness is central) but for now it is the two instances that must be brought into focus (a process that will lead to a proper understanding of the oneirosphere as a dimension of the abstract).

     The empirical is a "line-world" of dead time - of chronic time: the time in which transformations of matter occur, predictably or not, and in which the human world pulls knowledge into existence, so that the unknown is thought in terms of a human actor and in terms of the future as locus of discoveries on the part of the method-applying actor. For empirical attention the only fundamental actors are human beings and the overall human world, and the unknown is pre-eminently a question of the future (the “space” in which progress will – or will not – happen, in which predicted and unpredicted events will occur, and in which new discoveries and social developments will take place).

     The transcendental – by initial emphasis - is the world of space, but space as a terrain of co-emplaced intents, co-emplaced forces and co-emplaced zones of the unknown: here the unknown is all around you, perhaps in some cases looking toward you. This forest of intents and forces is well-modelled, as Shakespeare discovered, if you start from the ancient Greek zone of the oneirosphere, with its many different anomalous forces existing alongside the forces of the ordinary-reality side of human existence, all involved in subtle struggles and alliances with each other (Shakespeare’s achievement is to take this eerie arcadia, but not be governed by its elements, with their religious piety, so that he fills it up with Puck and the other inorganic entities, beings from his local zone of  the oneirosphere).

      The background issue here is that you can take anything as a lens or “model” for seeing the world: even a straight line. In its crippled form reason takes a straight line, and sets out from there, on a very constricted and damaging path. In contrast lucidity takes a forest of forces and formations of intent, and initiates a process of a deepening abstract perception of the world. And time here is no longer dead, geometry time. Our failure to be Spinozists must be overcome in relation to the vastnesses of intent and energy (substance) that surround us: the only effective models for time are thought and dreaming.

    Shakespeare includes what is necessary, using a subtle minimum of elements. There are forests and hinterlands beyond the human world, and these places are populated with anomalous beings (Puck, Ariel etc) whose actions have an impact upon humans (the human is not the only actor). The unknown is all around us, and it is not unknown in a sense that is less profound than the unknown of the human world - on the contrary, the suggestion is that it is more profound, through it having more brightness, more freedom from the the grim, judgemental  world of “gravity”. And for Shakespeare everything revolves around questions of love, freedom from constraint, and dominatory power - which is to say that everything is about spaces of intent (but spaces of intent in the horizon of the cosmos, not in the horizon of the human).

     For George Eliot and Larkin there are no hinterlands. In their very different ways they have both been swept away into the post-Hegelian world of psychology and sociology, in which the only real objects of (a denuded) transcendental awareness are human love and creativity.Their immense pseudo-integrity (for most of its span a genuine integrity, but which fails at the fundamental point) does not direct itself toward the planet, and its other non-human beings; it does not direct itself sufficiently toward the brightness of femininity and a depth-understanding of the libidinal (with all due respect for figures such as Dorothea Brooke), and it also does not direct itself sufficiently toward the abstract, in that it does not engage with space as a circumambient and eerie world of the unknown (unknown overall, but always with elements that can become the known) - a world of forces, and of formations of intent.

     The bus has just passed the ruins of Kenilworth castle, and is now in countryside again. It will soon be going round the campus of Warwick University, on the outskirts of Coventry. I am a postgraduate philosophy student at the university, but today I am not going to get off the bus at the campus.

     I am looking out at the fields and the cloudy, early-evening sky. Something is about to happen. Something is very definitely about to happen.

                                                                               * * *

1.

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) 

   

Explorations

Zone Horizon

   There is an escape-path, leading away from the ordinary, collapsed reality of the ongoing disaster (in its current form - capitalism). The following of this path consists of outsights - of immanence metaphysics - and of a pragmatics of becoming-active and of waking the faculties. This escape-path is micrological, and is about the audacity of taking up the adventure of being alive, and inseparably is about kindness and friendship. It can be described as exteriority extent, or liberatory intent, and this intent has a joyful, soberly courageous brightness that as an affect is best describable as love-and-freedom.

   The escape-path is most effectively and precisely delineated by the breaking open of outsights through concepts, and through the setting out of the pragmatics - but it can also be very powerfully indicated by narratives and tales within which the outsights are embedded, and sometimes also the pragmatics. The first option - delineation through concepts - can take the form either of an account, or of an account of a method - the method of transcendental empiricism (where this can also be described as tremeral philosophy, or as an aspect of metamorphics, which is the overall modality-of-being that consists of following the escape-path).

    The first principle of transcendental empiricism is this: focus on the abstract, and, in particular, on intent.

The second principle is: focus on bodies.

    *

    There are four main aspects of concentrating attention on bodies.


1.   The planet.     Here, firstly, the encounter with the planet concerns questions of where to go, where to visit, where to explore, where to pause, where to live etc. Secondly it concerns deepening an understanding of the zones, terrains, layers and phases of the planet. Thirdly it concerns questions of the ways in which the planet inspires, heartens and energises us, and questions of which terrains have these effects to a greater or lesser extent.

2.     The human body.   Firstly, this involves increasing the degrees of freedom and heightening the forms of action and expressiveness of the body, and, overall, energising it in relation to its parts and in relation to its totality. Secondly, it involves waking the faculties of perception, dreaming, lucidity, reason, feeling and intent; and, in particular in this context, waking the faculty of perception so that it can take place in an unbroken flow, without a reflex of accompanying or superimposed verbalisation. Thirdly, attention being given to the body involves increasing the understanding of all of the body's organs and systems in their relation to forms of action, and in their relation to consumption of types of food and drink - where this involves both female and male bodies, and where it involves a high degree of emphasis on specific key functions, such as breathing. Fourthly it involves all questions that arise from a necessity, that is discovered in the process of focusing on the body, to adopt a physical discipline, or more than one of these, where existing disciplines of this kind include yoga, tai chi, aikido, ju jitsu, chi gung etc.


3. The human world as disparate sphere of physical assemblages and formations. This, firstly, involves all issues concerning what is needed and what can be incorporated in relation to devices and structures. Secondly it involves taking an interest in all socially embedded physical forms, assemblages and aggregate formations: cities, towns, paths, container ships, communication technology, books, houses, temples, villages, power stations, yurts, shabonos, foodstuffs, medicinal herbs, tools, machines, clothing, musical instruments, vehicles, metals, mines etc. Thirdly it involves all physically delineatory issues in relation to kinds - and potential kinds - of large-scale and small-scale social formation, in a way where emphasis is placed on micrological formations consisting of only a very small number of individuals, in the approximate range between ten and a hundred people.


4.  The sun, the other stars, the solar system, and all non-terrestrial and 'cosmological' bodies and formations of bodies. This firstly involves all questions concerning positioning, navigation and energy-encounter in relation to the sun. Secondly, given that cosmological relates here to both small-scale and large-scale formations, it involves selectively giving close attention to formations across a range from the elements studied by quantum physics to large-scale formations such as globular clusters of stars.


*


      In relation to the first principle, the abstract is an aspect of bodies, as opposed to it being an element within - or the whole of - a putative supplimentary dimension of the 'mental.' But, taken as a whole, although this concerns bodies in the customary sense, the abstract is another attribute of those bodies which are involved - this other attribute being the 'body without organs.'

    With individual human beings some of the main forms of what exists within their body without organs are these: intent, energy, thought, dreaming, insights, feelings, processes of planning, anticipations, memories. 


   There are three main aspects of the process of concentrating attention on the abstract.


1.   The human world as a disparate domain of formations of intent.

     Note: a formation of intent is a body without organs, where the body without organs consists of far more than intent, but intent is sufficiently encompassing for it to provide an effective term for the whole.


     This, firstly, involves all questions involving dreams or 'dreamings,' in particular the question, "what at depth is being dreamed?" or "in what way are those involved being moved forward by this dream? - and "what are the outsights about the nature of the world that are expressed within this dreaming?" (these questions relate to the oneirosphere of tales, narratives, myths, dreams in sleep, religions,  and historical / scientific historical accounts of the world). Secondly, it involves questions concerning fundamentally different modalities of intent that are found in the human world. Thirdly, it involves all questions concerning the overall intent of formations, where the question concerns the depth-level of what is constitutively produced by them. 


2.    Individuals. This involves all questions concerning waking the faculties, and all questions of alliances and of forms of tutelary or intensificatory contact. Secondly, it involves questions of the dreams, affects and overarching forms of attention of the individual. Thirdly it involves all questions concerning intent (it is an important point that 'individual' here has reference to animals as well as human beings).


3.    The planet, and non-terrestrial formations.    Concentrating on the planet, as the primary instance, everything here consists of questions that come from a Spinozistic openness to the idea that the planet not only has a body without organs at the level of it being a sphere of energy, but that it is also, in some way, a world of intent, feeling and awareness (perhaps - as an example of these questions -  in a way where we do not know it consists of a further dimension of existence, because we for it are merely one zone of the cells which make this existence possible; and perhaps also in a way where it is caught within a struggle, of which we generally only see a tiny part). 



Note 1:      For transcendental empiricism the relationship between the human world and the planet is both one of a pragmatic inclusion in contrast with an unproven claim to being ontologically distinct, and of an interaction that is directly perceptible as a deleterious functioning on the part of the human world. 

     The principle of concentrating attention on bodies maintains the perspective of the planet in some sense including not only, for instance, the atmosphere, but also the oneirosphere of the human world, and, in fact, the entire sphere of the formations of intent of this world. And the principle of concentrating attention on the abstract starts from the view that the minimum-position is that the planet includes within itself a sphere of intent, dreaming, thought, awareness and feeling (in the form of the human world), but that the true situation is probably Spinozistic, with no division at all in the substance of the planet.

    Concentrating on bodies has a second impact in this context, in that the more you look at the composite of the planet and the human world the more it becomes clear that both internally and externally the predominant aspect of the human world is that of an ongoing disaster. Intrinsically an ongoing disaster, because of the suffering of wars, persecutions and institutionalised - and continually re-disguised - suppressions; because of the depradations and oppressions of captalism (regarding the latest form of the disaster); and because of the continual destruction of species and of environments. 


     Note 2.    In focusing on the world of formations of intent, it also becomes clear that running through the human world there is a current of what can be called Exteriority - a force that involves the waking the faculties, and a becoming-active that consists of a continual increase in freedom. This current can also be accurately described as a movement toward lucidity, and toward an awareness of wider realities. 


    Note 3.    In looking closely at what is produced by formations of intent within the human world certain patterns become evident. Firstly, science is a pattern of forms of engagement which unwittingly blocks an awareness of the transcendental. Secondly, religions suppress the will to heighten existence within this life by claiming, without foundation, that there is a life after this one, and/or by trapping adherents within interiority (whether this is constructed as Buddha-consciousness or the soul this modality is definitively blocked in relation to the world of the 'outside' that is exemplified in this context by the planet which surrounds us). Thirdly, blocking modalities within individuals are likely, unless other, liberatory forces intervene, to concatenate in couple-relationships so that eventually they become a blocking of other forms of alliance, entailing that what was initially an escape-path in time becomes a kind of subtle, shared collapse.  Fourthly, state politics involves a fixation that blocks an awareness of micropolitical escapes, in that these belong to a deterritorialized form of existence which has no depth-level connection to any specific country; and, as well as producing, in itself, more disguised forms of suppression, state politics in each case is ultimately under the sway of capitalism - which at the deepest and widest levels is deleterious in its functioning.


     Note 4 .  In concentrating on the body, it is the faculty of perception which comes to the forefront. In concentrating on the transcendental it is dreaming which comes to the forefront. All that can be said, initially, about perception is that it is a question of learning how to sustain unbroken percepton, without interference from language. And the two fundamental points about dreaming are that dreams should be understood as forces which give birth to the future, and should be understood as recurrently containing outsights about the nature of the world.

    Note 5.  For the last three millennia writers have used four modalities of writing to attempt to express the perspectives of transcendental empiricism. Cryptic, recurrently highly 'figural' conciseness; sustained use of charged abstractions; narrative consisting preeminently of outsights; a combination of these modalitiies. In relation to the third and fourth of these, it is important to be aware of dreaming/narrative not only as an alternative method of abstract exploration, but as another way of expressing outsights.


     

 Breaking Open the View  


The third principle of transcendental empiricism is: focus on space, as the overall domain of bodies, and therefore of formations of energy and formations of intent - as opposed to focusing on time.

However, this principle will come to seem as if it is primarily a route to an effective application of the fourth principle: focus on breaking open the view seen by lucidity -

there is an escape-path in front of you

around you there is a forest

behind you there is an interestablishment consisting of the suppressive functionings of the human world 


Explorations uses a relatively wide range of methods to break open this view. As well as consisting of philosophy in a customary sense, together with accounts of experiences, it includes a novel, and eleven stories. The novel is a world where the complexity is across an axis of simultaneity (and is set in the present), but when the stories are in the past or the future the aim is yet again to break open the view in question.

   In fact, a main aspect of the problem with time is not just that it is normally a supplementary dimension which in itself feeds self-importance ("we, who unlike, the rocks, are aware of the line of time") but is that it is a place in which delusions of species-importance are concocted, from Plato's anamnesis to monotheistic stories of human centrality, and to Hegelian unfolding of the spirit. Explorations concentrates on breaking open the view, with all aspects of time as dimensions of the Now of energy-and-the-abstract, and when it goes back in time it sets out to show that it was the same view seven thousand years ago, and to indicate that, if anything, people are now further from this view, rather than nearer to it. The three books all conjoin three different kinds of narrative - personal, historical and fictional - but they do this in order to reach a new perspective on the spatium of forces which surrounds us, a way of thinking which makes time immanent and gives reasons for thinking that 'progress' is substantially worse than an illusion.

*

    Modernism was a profoundly philosophical movement, but it has barely taken place in philosophy - with rare exceptions such as Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Most crucially modernism is a conjunction of anthropology, philosophy and narrative (but it would be wrong to regard it as fateful or destined to change everything, and equally wrong to regard it as something fundamentally new). In this sense Explorations is in a modernist tradition which is anthropological, philosophical and literary, but to give too much emphasis to modernism is likely to lead to the idea of innovation in form, for the sake of innovation (an idea which is damagingly attached to the concept of modernism). The use of different modes of writing, and of 'cuts' from one subject to another, is not a drift of experimentation, but instead is form being put under pressure by the process of describing the view of the escape-path, the forest, the inter-establishment.



   

    
    *. 

   There are certain aspects of this work which can be delineated. 

    An initial aspect is that it starts out more from questions of space rather than from questions of time.

      Firstly, Explorations is about processes of discovering zones, using this term in a new sense. A zone is a scurfland or wilderness place where it is possible to go and stop for a while. To stop means to stay, to live temporarily within, and there is a way in which, on a first level, to stop is here in opposition to the goal-orientated and travelling-across orientated world of outdoor and wilderness-travel presuppositions ('you see as much as you can', 'you reach the top of', 'you travel the length of' etc.). But at the most crucial level to stop means to stop the flow of ordinary-life concerns and thought-processes, and to perceive the terrain around you - the place, its animals and plants, the sky. For a place to be a zone in this sense certain features are needed. Primarily, it needs to be out of the way - away from paths, or at least removed a little from any regularly used path. Secondarily, it needs in some way to be an inspiring, striking place (each individual must make  their decision about this), and, if it is in a wilderness, and the aim is stay for more than a day or two, it must have a supply of water.

     The term 'zone' is used to get away from the idea of places which are untouched-by-humans. Drawing a little upon the Strugatsky brothers and Tarkovsky, the term very much includes, for instance, derelict post-industrial spaces that have been reclaimed by plants and animals as 'wild' terrains, and, not only this, it refuses the thought of needing to find remote wilderness places with no imprint at all of human beings. For instance if you find a striking forest terrain in a wilderness it is quite unlikely that there will no human imprint of any kind: because there are so many human beings; because the need to use land as a herding and 'harvesting/hunting' resource is so pressing; and because adventurous human beings are drawn to striking places.

    Secondly this work gives close attention to the planet on which we live as a co-emplacement of domains, places and terrains. The domains are primarily the atmosphere, the land, and the sea, and places and terrains are not finally distinguishable from each other: to use the term place picks out the aspect of something being a relatively demarcatable focal point, as with a clearing in a forest, or a town surrounded by countryside. Involved in this re-thinking of the planet are certain lines of thought and emphasis. The emphasis is on the sky (the atmosphere), and on certain kinds of terrain: forests, mountains, overlooked, scurfland areas of dereliction, and towns, as opposed to cities. And one primary line of thought is that the ways in which we are heartened, brightened, and inspired by terrains (or oppressed by them - in short the feelings that we experience in relation to them) should be seen as potentially instructive affects, states that relate to an inter-relation of a profound kind (though it is an inter-relation which on its human side can be hijacked by, or deflected towards, all kinds of subjectified states, such as fear in relation to the sublime). What this involves is a departure from the assumption that feelings are not forms or modalities of perception, and the taking up of the idea that the ways in which we are heartened by terrains and places should be given more attention, as potentially extremely valuable insights (or outsights), for the purposes of our navigation in the world.

   Thirdly, this work explores the idea that there are kinds of place where it is better to live (where the thought involved is primarily of a composition of alliances - some kind of group, or multiplicity - as that which lives in a place). These kinds of place/terrain are:

    Somewhere in or on the edge of a semi-wilderness area where a town is relatively near.

     Somewhere in a countryside area that is not far from a town (where town means a place with a market at the centre; a high degree of connection to the surrounding countryside; and a place you can walk out of in around half an hour).

      Somewhere within a town of the kind that has been described.

It can be seen that this is in opposition to living in cities. So that a kind of proposed gradient is in effect. One that starts with cities, and in some sense continues to towns, and to non-urban spaces. In Explorations travelling along this gradient leads to new perspectives on the human, but it also leads eventually to questions of the transcendental, which in crucial ways supercede questions of place. The basis for this transition can be summed up by saying that to depart from ordinary reality it is not in any way enough, for instance, to walk into - or live within - a wilderness: such a departure involves both a becoming-active - which as such is a waking of the faculties - , and an overcoming of constrictive patterns of thought and feeling, and this is to say that the escape-path is an aspect of world at the level of the transcendental-empirical, as opposed to the empirical. The maps of singular places eventually are superimposed across each other and become abstract, relating to a deeper level of reality that pertains to all human existence, and, specifically, to an occluded, Futural modality of transformation.

     Fourthly, space is also taken as a crucial starting point for exploring 'dreamings', philosophical bodies of work and historical events. Taking a terrain, and looking at the striking developments that have occured in it, is used as a method of discovery: a way of breaking free of the pre-configured lines of concepts, documented events, and of composites consisting of a body of work and its socio-cultural context. It also serves as a vital reminder concerning the directions and spatiality of the oneirosphere of dreamings (the world of tales, fictions in the form of novels, plays, narratives, historical accounts). The oneirosphere has its own contiguities which are not contiguities of space (the most intense zones within the oneirosphere of Mexico are much closer to the oneirosphere of France than to that of the USA), but at the same time it is profoundly connected to singular zones and terrains at the level of the actual as opposed to the virtual-real. Shakespeare goes primarily to the Greek and Adriatic/Italian coasts of the western Mediterranean, and he does this within the oneirosphere, but the places correspond to actual terrains. The human world brandishes the thought of these actual terrains in ways which are either reactive, religious closures of the escape-routes (there is only One story, and this is its central sacred place), or are so recondite and non-dogmatic in their liberatory power as to be misunderstood as 'art' (Shakespeare is a key example of the second kind).

     This terrain-orientated historical approach is here focused more on specific bodies of work in the form of dreamings, as opposed to philosophical works or historical events (although these are also very much involved). George Eliot stares curiously toward Shakespeare, and in the collapse of modernism after the second world war Larkin stares toward both George Eliot and Shakespeare with deadened, urbane-concupiscent eyes. But in the end such oneiric-development maps also here become primarily abstract: the border is of course not between northeast and southwest Warwickshire, but is between the transcendental as it appears within dreamings (these are dreamings which embody a principle of exteriority) and a grim interfused world of, on the one hand, dreamings locked too closely to the empirical, and, on the other, suppressive, reactive dreamings in the form of religious narratives and their literary paratexts, together with philosophical religious paratexts such as the work of Hegel.

*

    A further aspect of Explorations is the centrality of issues in relation both to women and to 'becoming-woman' (becomings are trans-faculty inter-relationships that can initially be defined as processes of 'envisaging/imagining from the point of view of,' although it should also be pointed out that to be in love with a woman is - definitively - a very intense form of becoming).

    A first issue is that the 'codification of lives' in terms of roles centred on reproductive organs seems a particularly pressing concern in relation to women. After millennia of enslavement by men the final form of entrapment is a state where the possibility of being an explorer/traveller (at the level of the transcendentally unknown, but knowable) is blocked off, and freedom is constructed - and libidinally made into a point of fixation - through a process that makes the fundamental, charged question the issue of who it is with whom you are having sex (the additional questions are career, and 'interests,' and family, and religion, but this cluster of roles only functions to produce a false sense of all the options being visible). The freedom which has been won is momentous, and is, to say the very least, a letting in of a huge world of fresh air, and yet the dominance of the question of who you sleep with functions nonetheless to hide the primary aspects of a long-suppressed and fundamental option - having the audacity to travel into the unknown in the direction of love-for-the-world, freedom, and wider realities.

   A further issue involves that of the impact of women, in relation to each other, and in relation to men. Philosophy has immense difficulty talking about women (and this is evidently an indictment of philosophy in its customary forms). There is no phrase more ripe for dismantling than 'heterosexual male' (the idea of becoming-woman in the end completely reconstructs it) so I will put this characterisation to one side and simply go to the main issue, which is that there is no doubt that in developing as a philosopher my life has revolved around women, and has continually been transformed by women, both in terms of relationships and in terms of writers. To talk about these awakenings - and processes of breaking open new perspectives - is not easy, but it is possible. And more than this, it seems that for both men and women it has a fundamental importance. To displace into the perspectives of women is a 'becoming' (especially when any substantial degree of love is involved) and all of the indications are that, as Deleuze and Guattari say, 'becoming woman is the key to all the becomings.'

*

 A third set of issues concern dreamings. The two fundamental aspects of dreamings are, firstly, that in rare, crucial instances they can provide views toward the outside of ordinary reality (here they function as lenses, and the term for describing such narrative worlds is 'validity'), and, secondly, that dreamings in the form of effectuatable dreams about the future (seed-crystals for a form of existence that are a plan and a pragmatics, and that are experienced as a form of joy) are not just important, but are the most important things that are created within the human world (an overview of the question of dreams in sleep is provided in the introduction to Book Two). It can be seen that, rather than dreamings being elements within 'art' or instances of subjective states, they are aspects of human existence whose fundamental nature is epistemological and political. At depth they are not be understood through aesthetics or psychology - or through a condescending account of 'tales', as what exists 'before there is science' - but are to be understood most crucially through micropolitics and through an immanence metaphysics that is centred on the abstract as that which subtends appearances.

    *

    Finally, Explorations sets out to break open a view of certain aspects of the world at the level of the abstract (which primarily means at the level of intent). It does this through a wide-level philosophical delineation of features of the world, and also through drawing upon personal experiences. Furthermore, it also draws upon philosophical and fictional works, and includes tales constructed as lenses for seeing beyond appearances. In short it does draws upon all available resources to make visible an escape-path (from the ongoing and deepening disaster of ordinary reality) in the form of an overall becoming active, a waking of the faculties, and an embodiment of a principle of exteriority. 

     In relation to my own experience, I have not travelled far. But I have travelled far enough to know that the escape-route exists. In Explorations I have detailed the small distance I have covered: a distance that makes it possible to give some exemplifications of the principle of exteriority, and to write about a process of a shifting-over-the-initial-threshold of a faculty of dreaming. Both sides of this delineation are taken furthest in the last section of the third book, where the process of showing the movement-forward takes place through the concepts of persistences, and gaps (gaps in the flows of customary, ordinary-existence activities in the capitalist world). It is wrong to imagine that anything can in any way be proved by such accounts of personal experiences, and yet it is still the case that they can have the property of validity. However, even if the reader feels an overwhelming scepticism about the value of these accounts in relation to the idea of an escape-path, it may still be the case that they will find them interesting. The concepts of gaps and persistences will probably prove thought-provoking, and, more relevantly to Zone Horizon, from this sceptical perspective the account of the 90s radical philosophy milieu at Warwick University may nonetheless be interesting. 

     It is possible to make a final point at this stage. In relation to Warwick University in the 1990s those with knowledge of this milieu might say "Ah, Mark Fisher", and maybe also "Ah, Nick Land..." And they will in a sense be right in both instances. However, I only really got to know Mark Fisher in the last three years of the ten years I spent at Warwick (I arrived at the university five years before he did), and, although this was not clear to me at the time, I spent most of these ten years doing other things which were off to the side of a shifting central group which had Nick Land as a key figure, because - without me fully realising this at the time - I had no affinity for the direction within the outside of ordinary reality which he had taken. Insofar as it gives accounts of the Warwick University milieu in question Explorations is about these 'other things,' and is about the horizon that, partly through doing them, came into view, a horizon which inspired me and heartened me, and which eventually drew me forward into new circumstances.

  Everything here concerns journeys in the tremendum, where tremendum is another name for the world or the cosmos. With the idea of the tremendum in mind, and taking the first two letters of each term, it can now be stated that another name for transcendental empiricism is tremeral philosophy.  The tremendum is a world of jolts, and some of these impact on human individuals and milieus at the level of the abstract, of intent; and in doing so these jolts can wake the faculties.
    



                                                                            *





Zone Horizon 



1.




You are working on a project while staying in a house in a large range of mountains. You are looking after the house for some friends, who will return at the end of the summer.

   The house is near the top of a valley, and has an impressive view to the west. There is a small waterfall, steep forested slopes, an area of cliffs and crags, and in the far distance it is possible to see areas of cultivation. 

    One morning you walk up a mountain slope by the house, and discover that at the top there is a tangled area of tree-covered ridges. By midday you have crossed this terrain, and you are looking toward a new, and very striking horizon. This view is in the direction of the zenith of the sun's trajectory across the sky - in the direction of the equator.

   There are five miles of mountain upland consisting of flat areas and what seem to be ravines. Beyond this there is a ridge of forested mountains, running east-west, which has a lower area that is directly ahead of you, and through this gap much higher mountains are visible.

    In the middle distance, on the edge of the lower mountains, there is an area of what seem to be derelict buildings from disused mines. You are reminded of the stories you have heard that in these mountains there are 'hidden communities' living in remote places.

    There is something sublime about this view: it fills you with a sense of adventure, and with a feeling of it being more than it appears to be, as if to travel in this direction would be the beginning of your life. You want to walk to the distant mountains, and you would like to walk with other people, and you feel that the culmination of the walk would turn out to be only the start of a longer and more extraordinary journey. 



*



    It is a question of travelling in a direction which can be called the south of the outside. This is to travel into a bright darkness of the unknown, an eerie brightness that keeps resolving itself into new, clearly perceived expanses, and which has an intrinsic feeling of brightness even when it is a dark and deeply unresolved manifold. Navigation is in this sense as much through feeling as through a continually awakening lucidity. A thread that guides forward is a feeling of love and of freedom – a feeling of fresh air, and of lightness – but this use of the faculty of feeling has alongside it the faculty of lucidity, or of abstract-perception.

   The eerie aspect of the guiding feeling is here almost overwhelmingly positive. As if what is being sensed is a party taking place outdoors in the countryside, where dimensional barriers are quietly being crossed, and where in midday sunlight the world is being perceived as a forest of energy formations, transected by anomalous movements and incursions, and in which energy is a bliss fully graspable only through the thought of being in love. The eerie aspect in its negative sense comes from the fact that the unknown is always disconcerting, even when it is the south-unknown, and equally from the fact that there is always a danger of a failure of navigation.

    What is being left behind in this journey is a complex of systems that can be called the interestablishment (it can also be called the "interiority"). This system of systems has to do with all forms of “standing” and “kudos,” and simultaneously it consists both of a de-intensificatory and profoundly blocked metaphysics and of an attenuated, constricted use of the human faculties (it can also be characterised as a system of control-behaviours and of modalities of fixation-of-attention). It has three main component systems: one that involves both reason and revelation; one that suppressively constructs the potentials of human lives and human ventures; and one that has the form of a system of reactive or subjectified moods.

    Furthermore. the main areas of the macrological expression of the interestablishment within the overall human world can be divided into three “blocs” - firstly the domains of the state-territorial and of the institutions and prefabrication forms of the familial and the conjugal, secondly the religious and the scientific/rational-discursive domains, and thirdly the domain of all trade, business and industrial modalities: the functionings of the system in these areas are part of the system, in that they function as models and as re-enforcings/exacerbations, but they do not constitute anything like a top-down guidance or steerage function. There is the population of human beings where the effects are pervasive, and in many way heterogeneous (although they are the result of the same system), and then there is the acting-upon-the-population expression at a macrological level, in the form of a household of different, internally fractured formations, which when viewed collectively are always divided by conflicts. The combination of capitalism and the nation states is the latest form of an ongoing disaster, and together these modalities of the macrological produce devastation and destruction of species, but the top-level formations simultaneously consist of populations whose beings to a great extent are constitutively affected by the interestablishment, and this corporeal and facultative domain is all along the fundamental level. It is this level that must be brought into focus if there is to be any chance of an escape.

    The south-outside is not just one direction amongst others. It is a current, a deeply impersonal, fundamentally positive force, that is best conceived as something like a river. To focus attention on the planet on which we live is one of the aspects of the process of perceiving this force. Another 'coordinate' for understanding it is that it consists of the abstract.

   The abstract is the world of everything which in a depth-level sense is non-concrete: it is the world of energy, intent, awareness and lucidity. The world of love, dreams, anticipations, feelings, thoughts, ideas, memories, sexuality, envisagings and perceptions. On one level a crucial case for the first of these is our experience of having energy, but the term is being used to refer to all energy, because it is possible to work pragmatically in this way, even if we don't know exactly what it is, and because energy in the fullest sense is non-concrete.

    A third aspect of this current is a form of existence or intent-modality within the world of human beings which can be called brightness. This form of existence consists, firstly, of a profound tendency to concentrate attention on immediacy, and the over-the-horizon of immediacy, in processes which intrinsically involve seeing intent, affects and other modalities of the abstract, and, secondly, of a courageous delight which on a fundamental level has the form of an adventurousness, an active openness to possibilities and ideas.

    Staying for now in the region of the human world, the interfused and inseparable worlds of the “oneirosphere” and the “anosphere” are both dimensions of the abstract. The oneirosphere is the domain of human dreamings of all kinds (dreams, fictions, myths, religious stories, dreams about the future), and the anosphere is the domain of all forms of accounts - or non-narrative depictions - of the world. The two spheres are straightforwardly interfused because dreamings recurrently provide lucid accounts of the world, and because scientific accounts of issues such as the history of the earth and the human species are also narratives, but at depth the key point is that an aspect of an account is that it is a dreaming. If a study is written about a form of chemical interaction, or about a migratory bird, or black holes, or the moons of the solar system, the fact that there is not a governing narrative of the study itself is irrelevant, in that for the reader the account is then an oneiric-real domain for them: which is to say at the wide level that the account is part of the oneirosphere.

    Human beings spend a lot of time doing deliberate work within the sphere of accounts of aspects of the world, assessing them, furthering them, falsifying them, re-creating them. But they tend to do deliberate work to a much smaller extent within the oneirosphere, because they are swept up by its formations, but in a way where they think no assessment is relevant (variously because they understand them as 'art,' or as a question of religion, or as attractive but ultimately irrelevant supplements to an anosphere account); or because the formation involved is too close and and all-encompassing to be noticed as a dreaming. In an early but very influential phase of ancient Greek philosophy there was a production of narrative-dreamings within philosophical texts (using the term narrative in a sense that relates to what could now be called tales of the anomalous, or visionary stories), but these were written in the name of reason, and were deleterious, reactive formations. It is necessary for philosophy to produce narrative-dreamings which are assisted by lucidity. And it is also necessary both to perceive that dreamings in their most developed form are worlds of outsights toward deeper and wider aspects of the world, and to provide an account of the faculties of dreaming and lucidity.

     All of this is a transcendental-empirical metaphysics, but it is also a pragmatics. In relation to dreamings, in their outer-edge form where they are informed by lucidity, dreamings are not just worlds of outsights, they are also the creation of the Future, in a process where the oneiric-real becomes actualised. At the level of human journeys of development it is correct to say that dreams are a fundamental generative element within our lives.

   It is a question of a search for - a movement toward - a Futural world, the Zone that has been there all along (to make contact with it is to have an embodied focus on the planet, energy, bodies, faculties, and the abstract, where the abstract is preeminently intent and the oneiric-real).

   There are ways in which another title for Explorations could have been The Abandoned Base. However, although this name is in many ways effective, its emphasis on the past and on the negative render it unusable. Furthermore, for this domain it is for each individual to reach a liminal point of abstract perception that has left the speculative or hypothetical behind. This is a challenge, but it is far from being the main challenge: given that a primary concentration on the past is in every way to be avoided, the title ultimately would be worse than inadequate in relation to its emphasis.

     In this context there are two main issues for Explorations, which ultimately are not separable. The Primary issue concerns the existence of an other arrangement of faculties, most crucially definable in terms of the central role of lucidity for this arrangement. The second problem concerns what has been taking place in the Holocene since the early warm-period (early Holocene maximum) around 7000 years ago, and involves a displacement of the importance of writing, mathematics and the modalities that can straightforwardly be assigned the term 'art.'.

   The key difference is between a modality dominated by a constricted modality of reason, and a modality which has lucidity as central, and with a liberated reason intrinsically involved, assisting lucidity. 

   The further difference involves the second of these alongside a modality with the 'seeing' of lucidity, but without the intrinsic assistance of reason.

   There are two one-way routes: if you go to the very centre of lucidity you won't come back, but the remaining and fundamental issue is the incorporation of a liberated functioning of reason, as a component of the arrangement. If you go to the very centre of the constricted form of reason you also won't come back (however, mostly people are caught between the two attractors - though in the more recent centuries of the Holocene when people have tried to understand the world in depth they have pervasively been impelled toward facing the constricted-reason attractor).

   One feature of both of the forms of the lucidity attractor is a concentration on the singularities encountered in immediacy, and a concentration on the planet beyond the human world, with a sense of animals being in a fundamental way on the same level as humans functioning as a key indicator of this modality, or of its continuing influence within a social field. The focus on immediacy and on animals appears as part of what was involved in the lucidity arrangement having been the modality toward which human beings were pervasively turned during the majority of the Holocene. And there is a continuum which runs from nomad and tribal 'shamanic' societies to the early megastates, whose pantheons involved animal deities, theriantropic deities, and deities which could manifest themselves in the form of an animal. And a key difference is that what is central in relation to development/education are intense, jolting, or 'ruptural' experiences of learning centred on perception, abstract-oneiric perception and the body, as opposed to development being centred on books and accounts of the world.

   There is a feeling of an extraordinary joy, and separately, but in association, of an extraordinary sadness. When those who had arrived at the centre of lucidity - who were those to whom peoples' attention was turned at this time - discovered that they needed to incorporate the fully-developed form of reason, they had discovered the route toward the Future.

   If you tell people under these circumstances that they need to go toward lucidity, and that then they need to incorporate reason, people are likely to concentrate on the novel element, and leave the task of effectuating lucidity behind (and beyond this it needs to be seen that reason in this form is the modality that gives the easier, clearer returns in relation to initial effort). What is more, there can be no doubt that in relation to states and mega-states the Holocene was the evolutionary fostering ground for an unfeeling and dominatory tendency, where individuals involved in this development had a vested interest in taking people away from the Futural path and in the direction of cowering obedience. The middle phases of the Holocene were about societal establishments learning to treat people like sheep - far from shamanism as pervasive societal element what was required by the ruling castes was sheep-like behaviour (and, given that most people couldnt read, claiming that reading - controlled by a priest-caste - was the key to wisdom was ideal for rendering people subordinate in their own view of themselves). Lucidity in conjunction with a liberated form of reason was therefore torn apart in two separate ways. Mega-states in turn were under threat from marauding deterritorialised armies ('sea peoples' etc) who were a militarily more supple aspect of the same malaise, and eventually the attractor of reason would smash its way deep into the establishments, and, instead of any residual capacity for lucidity's seeing, the basic form would simply be the dark skills of domination together with diffferent forms of delusory control-metaphysics (your life is under control because you will live again again after you die, we are divinely mandated to control/dominate/defeat the barbarian outsiders, you will be controlled in the form of punishment if you disobey the divine laws, etc.). Writing and mathematics both initially appear as functions of state record-keeping, and one domain of writing which then appears is 'sacralised' or 'fetishised' texts, and over a slightly longer time-span mathematics as a whole will become a quietly but powerfully fetishised element of the constricted-form-of-reason attractor.

  In the northeast and centre of Afro-Eurasia the bronze-age collapse takes place, followed by a shift away from a focus on the planet as tremendum from which we are born, and on animals as extraordinary fellow-entities on the planet. In the far east of Afro-Eurasia a filament of lucidity appears, an emergence of metamorphics, tremeral philosophy. In the central zones of the Americas an ability starts to be formed - a capacity to resist against mega-states, with their fetished writing and fetished practises and constructions.

    It is Ancient Greece around 2800 years ago. Those who had reached or were closer to the other modality are predominantly outside of the urban control-zones, becoming a rumour with its source in the forested and mountainous hinterlands, and in the steppe-lands to the east. There is also a feeling of a kind of semi-blissful but dark entrapment which involves a blocked direction to one side of the Futural path: but nothing is in focus in that direction, and the Futural path is barely visible.

   The bronze age collapse has happened, leaving tales with a disturbing, deleterious aspect: Odysseus came back, but what the account describes as having detained him and lured him away will only create confusion. The tales are militarised and extremely male-focused, with gods that are modelled straightforwardly on human ruling elites, and a female world that is either very far in the background (but at the same time close, as object of desire, waiting on Ithaca), or is both alienated, so that momentous abilities are constructed as belonging to goddesses and other non-human or sub-human entities, and rendered largely as on a spectrum between amorously distracting-from-purpose (Calypso), amorous while being chillingly controlling/dominatory (Circe), and malign (the sirens) - the other cases are the part -female figure of Tiresias who in the story possesses knowledge but is beneath the human through being a ghost, and the case of Athena where the female warrior aspect is alienated, and is rendered exceptionally thin and uninteresting in her anomalous aspect, through her having the qualities of a carefully calibrated deus ex machina plot device, and of a mirror for the Odysseus hero figure, in that she is helping him because she is impressed with his abilities. If the two works attributed to Homer are taken as land and archipelago, then there is a lone figure on the land who breaks this pattern, in the form of Cassandra (as if what she sees is something fundamentally more than the fall of her city), but overall both land and archipelago have a quality, on the one hand, of being immensely intricate and well-realised, while being curiously dull and reminiscent of glory-dreams, and, on the other, of being faintly threaded with eerie aspects that are on the edge of being gothic. 

   And now there is Thales and Socrates and Aristotle on the one hand, and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides on the other.

   And this is the Abandoned Base. Understood in relation to the modality of Lucidity-with-reason the edifices here are ruinous, and the fact that they have been elaborated and extended does not make them less ruinous (though it remains true that this can be a valuable place to be - in particular there are outsights to be arrived at through the works of authors such as Sophocles). They have high kudos but all along appear as remnants of a struggle in which human beings were defeated. And this has nothing specifically to do with Ancient Greece. It is the same with the combination of Confucius and of the Chinese proto-scientists of Confucius's time, on the one hand, and the majority of the myths/stories of China two and a half millennia ago, on the other. And it is the same with combinations in the 21st century of science /high kudos philosophy, and fictions/tales/art. All of these are the eerie, elaborated expanses of the Abandoned Base (Religion has been abstracted from this account because it is something worse - a hypertrophic development of control-generated, delusional dogma-systems and dream-systems, although as such it remains the case that it is only one component within ordinary reality).

  In laying aside the historical aspect, it remains the case that there is the Lucidity-with-reason arrangement of the faculties, and then there are the institutions and societal forms which are pre-eminently expressions of the constricted form of reason (functioning in combination with old products of a blocked, delusory faculty of dreaming), where these together are the aspects of an ongoing disaster. There is the disfunctional domain of this ongoing disaster in the human world, and stretching away from it there is the Futural path.

Lastly, although this book starts in 1993, if any date is pivotal it is 2005, where pivotal relates to seeing the Zone that is the planet - to seeing the Future.

She is seeing the house with the summer breeze ruffling the curtains,

Eight or nine people, in this house and others nearby, the feeling of joy,

Of adventure, of camaraderie, above the house the mountain-forest, the condor, 

The bees in the fuschia by the stream. It is 2005, the festival around her,

Cirrostratus clouds, chalk downland sunlight, she sets off up the slope, everyone says 

They are coming with her, ahead there is sky brightness, she reaches the top

And sees the tangled, luminous heathland and scurfland,

No-one has come with her, though she feels that in the distance to left and right,

There are others, and then this feeling is gone.

There is no-one around her. There is the planet, there is the Future. 

She keeps walking.

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