On a bicycle, the possibilities and permutations are endless; in a car, they are few.
In 1979, the French film director Bertrand Tavernier was asked by Glasgow’s then Lord Provost why he had decided to film his sci-fi thriller, Mort en Direct (Deathwatch), not in the elegant capital Edinburgh, as one might expect, but in the industrially choked, and high-rise pocked Glasgow.
‘Edinburgh is just so very beautiful’, he answered.
Before the Glaswegian retorted, Tavernier added, ‘Glasgow is so much more than just beautiful. It is dramatic, so very dramatic, later enthusing to the Evening Times newspaper, ‘Glasgow is a city of infinite possibilities. I’m amazed that film companies haven’t flocked here over the years’.
I always remember this when I see a humble bicycle being ridden next to fancy cars. That in the society of the spectacle, in the society of the superficial, where surface is king and appearance everything, what lies beneath is what is important.
The real internal combustible engine is, as the word ‘internal’ suggests, inside. Inside, that is, not some fancy car you have to continually break your back in order to pay off and pay for, but inside your own body. Beware of things that promise to make your life easy, for in a spiral universe of profound circularity, sooner or later that ease will lead to dis-ease, and that comfort to discomfort.
On a bicycle, the possibilities and permutations are endless; in a car, they are few.
The top-heavy dualism of Glasgow's new logo (People Make Glasgow) has
troubled me since its inception a couple of years back...
Indeed, it's this sort of anthropocentredness and one-sidedness that has a subtle impact on the child's outlook, until, cognitively crowbarred enough with it, dualism is all he or she knows, and this idea (if not the practice) of all things engendering each other to various degrees (ultimate reciprocity) becomes something quite kooky and mystical. Of course, as long as we live in a people-heavy environment, and beneath the dualistic-scientistic cloud, we will forever struggle to get our little crowbarred brains around what the Jains call Inter-dependent Co-arising, or what our own native peoples, the Celts, referred to as enmeshment, depicted in the inter-weavings of their Celtic knotwork.
One could argue quite easily that in terms of Glasgow, the glas-chu, the green-grey hollow, the strath-clyde, was initiated not by people, but by geology, by the movement of glaciers, by the flow and course of rivers, in short by the elements and the climate. Glasgow long existed before any people came to it. And the reason it became a Glasgow of people is because of the river, then a small stream, and the Molendinar Burn, where Fergus' bulls stopped to take a drink.
This is the source of Glasgow. And we must respect the source at all times. Because if we don't, we will become lost and confused, and logos will start appearing that contradict the original logos.
and so.... in
the spirit of all things collaborating together: people, rivers, hills,
geology... a little Celtic knot-work... and a lord in the background with a traffic cone on his head.
The title here - 53 seconds - refers to the time it took yesterday to cross the river in the wee raft that plies the sound between Yoker and Renfrew. It's a minute of bliss, though the face of the ferryman may tell you otherwise... on my way from Govan into the hills.
The title for this blog came from the hills and their 'slow flow', so it seems only fitting that I should honor those hills by attending to them more intimately, more considerately. The result is a set of sketches which I became involved in this summer (2015) [I have been sketching and painting them for the past 3 years but these ones this year seemed more alive].
It seemed every time I went into the hills I had to sketch them. It wasn't good enough me finding my own way into their bodies, physically, but metaphysically, I had to express that body. The first half of the day would be spent getting into (impressing myself into) the hill; the second half would be spent expressing it. In this way, there would always be an autobiographical element involved in the painting or drawing. The hill always contained part of my self for my having reached it (and considered 'it') under my own steam.
Initially called The 12 Apostles, I soon realized that 12 wasn't enough. So, instead I put an emblem book together and called it Hills of Attitude Not Altitude:
It often alarms me when it comes to nature the ignorance not just of the general public but of those who are in power and hold authority, a sort of general political authority that appears to give them another authority over nature. Speaking recently of the alleged aggressiveness of seagulls in Cornwall, David Cameron at least had the good sense to realize his limits when it comes to ecology, and dare I say it, compassion.
Cameron told BBC Radio Cornwall: “It is a dangerous one for the prime
minister to dive in and come up with an instant answer with the issues
of the protection of seagulls, whether there is a need for a cull, what
should be done about eggs and nests. I think a big conversation needs to happen about this and frankly
the people we need to listen to are people who really understand this
issue in Cornwall, and the potential effects it is having. Reading the
papers this morning about how aggressive the seagulls are now in St
Ives, for instance, we do have a problem.”
A couple of years ago when cycling around Cowcaddens I saw a city council guy with a large bird of prey strapped to his arm. This was just outside Dundasvale high flats. I asked him what was up. He told me the gulls here were a pest and that the hen harrier he had was going to disturb them enough to make them move on. He seemed to take great pleasure in the fact that his bird had already maimed a few gulls and that he and his human cronies had removed eggs from rooftops.
Just watching these gulls, the mother gull and the father gull, raising their two young on the rooftop opposite me for the past couple of months has made a huge impression on my already open mind regarding these incredible birds. I recall Wittgenstein once saying in one of his more lucid moments that to see the behaviour of a living thing was to see its soul. I could not disagree. And here, watching these birds, this family of sentient intelligent creatures, for these past several weeks has allowed me an insight into their lives that I would otherwise not have got from a book or eslewhere. I can see their communicating, their languaging, their learning; i can see the parent's exhaustion after working all week, day and night, to take care of their young, to find food and feed them 30 times a day if not more. I can see, furthermore, the young furball gulls, who appear more like furry little gremlins, clambering over that slippery slated rooftop balancing with a flap of their still tiny wings, preventing them presumably from slipping all the way down and off and onto the concrete floor 6 metres below. I can see the mother's trepidation in her movements, in the fluctuation of her calls. I can see all this and more, and I wonder why it has taken me 45 years to understand the soul of the seagull, why this hadn't been afforded to me when I was young, when I was at school. Surely, this is real education (teaching us about our living breathing earth, our wider and wiser Family), and not some phony education that sets us up for some future financial payoff, inevitably, at the cost of the earth and Family. Family with a capital F.
I pity the city council man who thinks these birds 'rats with wings'. Rats are actually, if you got to know them, very intelligent and capable creatures. But of course, it's blinding ignorance, and it's embarrassing when I hear it from my fellow man. When he actually had the gall to call them an invasive species, I suggested that he look in the mirror. Man, after all, is the most invasive of them all.
Our schooling system needs to take into account the other life-forms we share our city with, our life with. The gulls of Govan as I remarked in a poem once are as much Glaswegian as we humans are. Surely, then, we should accord them similar rights? At the very least, allow them to live here, and be aware that it is us and our casual attitude to waste and litter who cause them to home in on our cities. To destroy them for something that is essentially our doing is just plain wrong when it isn't just plain diabolical.
I often think that when talking of culling: badgers, foxes, gannets et al. that man should perhaps begin with his own species. But of course, just mentioning this will raise a few eyebrows. But then, to not do so is to somehow presume that we are superior (one step beneath the angels), and that seagulls are simply expendable, and some kind of cartesian machine that doesn't have feelings. The reality, however, is quite different.
All in all, it seems a little rich for man to start berating the seagull for simply shitting on his car, or being tempted by overloaded wheelie bins. My advice is to watch these birds, and learn to understand them, learn to see the similarlities between you and them. And by watching I don't mean on your sofa in front of David Attenborough, I mean in the open, in the fresh wild air. For all that Attenborough has done for wildlife awareness, he has also managed, albeit inadvertently, to prevent this type of watching. Armchair ecologists abound, but you will never know a seagull by simply watching a programme (no matter how informed) about it. You can only know a seagull, as these events and others have shown me, by being with it in the open, and, as the cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock once wrote, by having a 'feeling for the organism'.
You cannot feel the seagull through a TV screen, or any other screen for that matter.
