Two Hares - a midden of ripped-out texts located near a threshold of the Tribal Zone of the Mind (introduction to a series)

To say that the story is true is by now a convention of every fantastic tale; mine, nevertheless, is true.  

The Book of Sand

This is how I make things up: first with axioms, then in the elaboration of detail. Then, so it must be that the tribal zone is nothing but the inscription of patterns upon random and otherwise vacant patches of an indifferent universe. The patterns appear in relation to the presence of expelled fragments of diverse populations which are converged there. 


The patterns are more or less arbitrary marks inscribed from the place onto the members of the tribe, and inscribed from the members of the tribe onto the place. The marks are suggested by, and representative of, both the physical features of the surrounding environment, and the tribe's unprocessed history of trauma at its severance from civilisation's interior. 

The tribal zone's patterns are the absolute laws of life by which the culture of the inhabitant tribe is, almost coincidentally, almost haphazardly, reproduced alongside the activity by which it secures its material existence.  

Tribal zone of the mind may well sound like a song by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and that is enough to dissuade most readers. However, to make distinct that peculiar manner of thinking which lurks in the undergrowth beyond the border of state consciousness, it is necessary to assign it a frame of reference. And 'tribal zone' has some resonance here.

What is it that jolts thinking out of its mapped form and induces it into transgression? It is not logic, nor suffering, although both of these lurk somewhere in the background. 

The tribal zone seems to be encountered in the thinking process in the convergence of three necessary factors: the accidental crossing of a boundary whilst pursuing the white hart of some other end; a compulsive, and obscure, drive which is immanent to the particular line of thinking itself; the fascinated repeated return to the disclosure of an irreducible contradiction.

The tribal zone, as a manner of consciousness, is induced within those lines of thinking that have wandered across the border of ordinary procedures and observances... it is an event of awareness, where thinking is caught up in the pursuance of two proverbial hares, neither of which will be caught, where each hare both provokes and suspends the hunt for the other.   

The doubled character of thinking in the tribal zone, where it cannot alight to roost, but flocks at dusk in a great murmuration, is characterised by a distraction of focus which jumps tracks from its initial object to the movement of internal process. There is an endless rumination, a cycling or oscillation between states, which draws on those diverted by its contrary imperatives - leaving them very far from home.

The series, Two Hares will present fragments of text which may be read independently of context and which may, with practice, induce the condition of tribal zone consciousness. Such fragments may be printed out, or torn off, and kept in a pocket to be returned to over and over, as if they were hidden paths through the mountains. Such miscellaneous fragments may be returned to at those breaks, openings, intervals where state-thought otherwise encourages checking updates on social media. 

None of this is to claim that there is any purpose in tribal thinking other than to temporarily access  the modes of the tribal zone - it is an exercise, a sort of simulation, of the modes of consciousness which have moved into the spaces beyond the borders of the state. It is not a political project.