Fuck you I won't do what you tell me.
Rage Against the Machine
As the ultimate refusal to do what they want me to, art is all about the not doing more than it is about the doing. It is this 'not doing' that de-fuses and re-fuses the Self back into its original matrix of Being. And that allows Being itself to art.
The dawn of the dead is the beginning of that period where people 'forget' ab origine as in allow their selves to be violated by an inorganic technology and a mechanical view of the cosmos that weakens and eventually kills their response-ability and their connection to the origin. As a species, homo sapiens is the only forgetful one, the only one that does not re-member its Self through a natural aboriginal conviviality and a deep root system. This is because we have been upturned and uprooted from who and what (and how) we actually are, and our own Technology. The individual (as opposed to its true undividedness) has, through the dividing methodologies of science and progress, become split. In so doing, we have been hijacked by a technology that is not Nature acting spontaneously but which is a 'split being' acting unspontaneously. This false technology has now created a dead zone where human beings now mete out their lives. The dead in other words have dawned, and though we may stumble about gazing into our hands giving off the appearance of aliveness, we are, in our post-human posthmuous unresponsive states, as good as dead.
The economy is fucked. It's official. At next week's budget, whatsisface will probably use a different choice of words, something more gentle perhaps, but he really should fess up in plain old English. After a year of Covid, which in financial terms has been the biggest drain on the economy since WWII, Britain's gross national debt is in the trillions. Which kind of begs the question: what on Earth are people working for? What have they been working for this past century? So they can live in poverty, so they can be locked down physically and financially, so they can be treated like plague-carriers? Apparently so, which is why the economy is a disease.
As i looked around I could see the whole strath, an area of maybe some 100 square miles in one fell swoop. And I was only a couple of hundred metres above sea level. At any rate, i could see where I was going to go this morning, over there on the other side of the Clyde, near Bridge of Weir and Kilbarchan. It was pishing down, but where I was some five miles to the north it was bone dry. As I scanned the valley I could see that I had chosen wisely this morning in trying to avoid the incessant rain we have been having this early February. My internal barometer was working perfectly. I had found the lull and the eye of the storm again. It's a shamanic skill I have developed over the years of wild cycling, the ability to feel the weather coming. And this morning was a great example. As I have always maintained to those who complain that Scotland is a rainy country, it never rains in Glasgow, or at least as I try to explain after their jaw drops, it never rains everywhere at the same time.
It doesn't take long to get up into the beyond. About half an hour from where I live in Cessnock with bike and train (to Kilpatrick). And that train is simply wonderful for its emptiness, its comfort, and its rapidity. This morning it was the 11.19 Helensburgh Express which deposited me at Dalmuir some ten minutes later having bulleted through the suburbs without me even noticing them. Ten minutes on a train is just enough to get the flask out and enjoy some of that hot lava java. Passing Clydebank I see a couple of rooftop pigeons flying and fluttering, and I realise (as I do every time I see wild animals) that ecstasy is your natural aboriginal condition. Man, having closetted his consciousness, has relieved his self of that natural ecstasy and has to go in search for it instead. The pigeons by contrast have never sold their selves out therefore they inhabit ecstasy. Man no longer moves but is carried (by machines and ideologies) and is thus de-ecstasized. His consciouness becomes removed from its natural condition, that of ecstasy, because he himself (his body and mind) has been re-moved. The pigeons on the other hand have not been removed from anything least of all their own aboriginal operating system. And so they inhabit ecstasy. And it was this fleeting ecstasy that I saw when I saw these two pigeons at Clydebank. Moreover, about half an hour later, having braved the 'hard to kill hill', I myself became a pigeon.
It just occurred to me stood up here inhaling the strath that this is my sort of Glasgow, not Glasgow With Style, since all style is an aberration of the One and ultimate perfection, but Glasgow With Stile as in 'up above the streets and houses and all that noise'. In other words, Glasgow from the hills. This is the only (onely) way to see Glasgow in all her beautiful entirety, from her edges and braes... and stiles. Otherwise, all you're going to see is anthropo-centric 'noise' that purports to be Glasgow. But the real Glasgow - the real anything - is that which has had its thick film of noise removed from it. That means Nature unmediated, and that means glas chu and the grey-green hollow without people present (since people now, with all their add-ons and accessories, have given up their presence). It also means, if like me you live in the city, getting out of the city, galvanizing the bodymind in doing so, and revelling in the revelations that Glasgow's peripheral hills provide.
It's one of my favourite moments in cinema, Dustin Hoffman's wiry little Ratso Rizzo slamming the hood of an oncoming car and giving a car driver what for for almost knocking him down as he crosses the road at a busy New York crosswalk. I like it so much that I almost considered Rizzo's retort as the title for this book. After all, I am walking here, and I do not prioritize pollutants over natural aboriginal self-cleansing technology. At any rate, I actually used the phrase today, not at some errant cab driver in the busy city, but at two middle-aged mountain bikers in the empty hills who were piling down a narrow path that I was walking in the Kilpatrick Hills. I heard them behind me and turned around to acknowledge them but did not give way to them. This didn't stop both of them piling down the steep and dangerous rocky slip that I was currently negotiating. As I dodged to one side almost straight into a gorse bush, I shouted Rizzo's refrain. I also added that they, along with their mountain biking brethren who enjoy tearing up hills with their overpriced tricycles and flashy clownsuits, should show some respect not just to walkers but to the hills themselves. They both looked perplexed as if I had just spoken to them in Greek. 'But we're allowed to cycle here', the fat bearded one replied. And that meant they got the standard riposte: 'Just because some moron says you can rape the Earth with impunity doesn't mean you should'. Before shooing them away like the sleepwalking (sleepcycling) violators that they are.
