There is Always Glasgow

THERE IS ALWAYS GLASGOW


For its cloudscapes

it’s shades of grey

its movement

its shades of white

its outflow and inflow

this endless dance of light

its strange liquid symphony

its alien landscape of the skies

there is always Glasgow -

Going All City - A Gallery of Glasgow Graffiti

As an 'art of 5 kopeks' an art which is 'out in the open' and available to everyone, which is free from price-tag and frame, and which embodies a natural solidarity with the ephemeral nature of all things, graffiti embraces freedom like no other form of art. Indeed, one might say that this form of 'open painting' devoid of compromise, from the dawn of man to the modern day, is the only art that has ever really existed: not so much the marking of the territory as the marking of the self.

These 'pieces' (gathered in Glasgow between 2004-12 and combined in this montage) are manifestations of a certain carnival sense of life, and an 'aliveness' that transcends mere (institutionalised) living. Together they represent a natural curiosity and creativity of the denizen of the city, inspired by the various permutations of the labyrinthine metropolis.

'The Gallery'

The Kelvin Heron

Nothing could epitomise the acuity of sloth better than the heron. It lives and breathes in a whole different world. Wisdom, certain Taoists proclaimed, could be acquired simply by watching the heron stand on one leg.

[The Kelvin Heron in the duck pond at Kelvingrove Park]

Glascaux

Marx in Maryhill

This piece, on the Kelvin Walkway on the way up to Maryhill, was put up way back in 2003. Since then it has suffered the ignominy of being capped and weathered to the point of annihilation. But the spirit of the piece lives on...

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Karl Marx 


And down on the Millennium Bridge...straddling north and south, east and west... Marx's companion piece....

 

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

Karl Marx 

The Growth in Clarity

It's the hole in the middle that makes the wheel turn. Lao Tzu

Simplify your life: Die! Nietzsche

Death for Nietzsche was the great oriental metaphor: death as change of consciousness, transfiguring of mind, transformation -

The path to death was star-shaped, with five radials...

abandon the old ways
release the self from convention
throw off the swaddling that has clouded your thinking
retreat from the barbarians that have bruised your senses
contemplation...

with all radials ultimately culminating in the centre... and in seeing.

Let death occur, death as a continuation of ontogenesis... let them die, the barbarians, the senses, and resurrect the essence out of which they were born.

Clarity is the motion of insight and of seeing. Philosophy is the wheel of learning. Growth is the hole in the middle that allows the wheel to turn.

'The whole life lies in the verb seeing,' wrote Teilhard de Chardin.

'Working in philosophy is really more a working on oneself', wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein.

As for Patrick Grant in A Dazzling Darkness,

The growth in clarity is accompanied by a developing appreciation of particulars... The experience of 'intense ordinariness' is less a flash than a steady attitude of attentive wonder in which even the most banal occurrences are experienced as eternally precious. The mystics insist that small things, far from being inconsequential, are of special significance. It is as if love's energy is released more powerfully by attention to the atomic; that is to the tiniest particles that unleash the most dynamic force... We may discover [an intense] joy in a sense of the infinite richness of particular things - in the detection of a timeless energy in the play of boys and girls in the street... in the beauty of a hazel nut or a leaf; or in knowing ourselves immersed with all things in a sea of created glory.

And let's not forget that this 'attention to the atomic' as Grant so eloquently puts it, and the 'atom' ( from Greek atomos "uncut, unhewn; indivisible,") is not actually a particle, but the whole universe itself.

[The Universe, Kelvin Arboretum]

One Man's Pothole is Another's Paradise

My personal view of potholes no doubt derives from the fact that I do not have a car, yet even if I did...

After you've seen a flock of pigeons gathering round as if it were an open-air swimming pool, you can never look at a pothole in quite the same light, car or no car. Elizabeth Street (pictured here) in Cessnock is particularly fortunate in being a cul de sac, since it means that only local traffic uses it, which itself means that it is, mostly, as those signs say on the corner, a 'Play Street', and devoid of cars for the most-part of the day. The pigeons seem to be aware of this, and regularly come down here to bathe, and get rid of all those pesky little dust-mites, and generally just freshen up.

Thus, the 'pothole' becomes a matter of perspective - for some it is a wretched inconvenience to be avoided at all costs; for others however, it is an opportunity for a lazy mid-morning bath...

The Fall

'It so happens that I'm tired of being  a man...', Pablo Neruda

'The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?' Gilles Deleuze


December 22nd, 2012.

The rain outside continues to fall. Man continues to fall. Flood warnings are out in force. Somerset is 'scooping' ... Stonehaven lies under 6 feet of water. The island of man's self-imposed apartheid leaves him stranded. Stonehaven lies under 6 feet of water. Man... lies under an ocean.

In order for man to return to the surface, paradoxically to the deepest part of his self where there is no self, to return to harmony, to 'life in balance' and fulfillment, he has to finalise (not necessarily 'cease') his becoming, and doing. Industry is the great affliction. The Fall is man's own doing.

The Fall, as a distrust and a lack of Faith in things as they are, is depicted in Christian literature with Adam eating from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. This is a parable, if not a cautionary tale, of the 'desire to know' (the carelessness of consciousness) which dispels the opennes of the Edenic Adam to the Mystery that is beyond our knowing and thus cordons Man off from the cosmos, and, by extension, his greater immense Self.

'Deep in his heart,' writes E.M. Cioran, 'man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there'.

'It could be that the next great step-function in 'human' evolution,' writes Jim Norwine in A Post-Modern Tao, 'will be in some measure post-human (where human = Homo sapiens).'

That next step is the annihilation of Man. 'Man is the freak of the universe', Erich Fromm reminds us. Ambrose Bierce adding a little satire but no less serious writes of man:

Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

'The disappearance of Man at the end of History,' writes Alexandre Koyeve in his lectures on Hegel 1938-9, 'is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been for all eternity. And it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so called - that is, Action negating the given, and Error, or, in general, the Subject opposed to the Object. In point of fact, the end of human Time or History - that is, the definitive annihilation of Man properly so called or of the free and historical Individual - means quite simply the cessation of Action in the strong sense of the term. Practically, this means: the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man no longer changes himself essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his knowledge of the World and of himself...'

In returning to 'animal', Man reconciles his self with anima and 'that which has soul in it'. Man is the Fall -  the Fall of Man is himself, his usurping of the great spririt of the universe and, accordingly, in his turning away from the light, his turning towards the darkness. The Fall of Man is himself, his false 'I' which predicates itself on doing, on industry, on action, collecting along the way so much karmic debt ('karma' itself means action) as to render him effectively soulless. To re-turn, he must destroy the self, de-structure it, empty it. 'Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man', writes E.M Cioran

Annihilation pure and simple. The end of History.

'THE CITY HAD FALLEN...'

The city had fallen. We came to the window of a house drawn by a madman. The setting sun shone on a few abandoned machines of futility. 'I remember, ' someone said, 'how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content.'

Dušan "Charles" Simić

A Study of Light

The sun never knew how wonderful it was until it fell on the wall of a building. Louis I. Kahn

Bath Street

Parnie Street 

 Finnieston Square

 

Clyde Port Authority Building, Robertson Street 

Wilson Street

New Wynd

Robertson Lane

The Shadowed Self

Man casts a shadow not because he is solid and material, but because he refuses to acknowledge that he is light itself.

Ibn Arabi

The Dissolution of Mind on the Platform at Scotstounhill

In Defence of the Word (and a lack of talent)

In Mandelstam's eyes 'philology' was a profound concept of moral importance - the word, after all, is Logos, the embodiment of all meaning... His whole life was devoted to the defence of 'philology' in his sense - it was connected in his mind with inner freedom...

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, (translated by Max Hayward, 1974)


The Bible is a compendium of esoteric manuscripts. It has a deep metaphysical core, I mean how could it not when it clearly revolves around the great unifying force of the cosmos that is referred to as 'God'?

What or who is 'God' is the ultimate reality of the bible... but not just of the bible, but of life itself. This is why the bible has endured, and why we nominally Christian societies set our calendars by the day Jesus, a man who attained Christhood (awakening), was born. Epistemologically, Jesus is little different from Siddartha Gautama. Where Jesus became 'Christ' (awake), so too did Siddartha Gautama become 'Buddha' (awake). It is this awakening that the bible cherishes. And that all Christians seek. Awakening as peace, as love, as truth, as light. 

The Pure Land Buddhists speak of the Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Life. The Taoists speak (or rather, do not speak of) the Tao - (the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao).

This is no different to Jesus' utterance of 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.' Indeed, the Tao is the Way.

When the clutter is cleared, when the weight is removed, the light is revealed.

In the Greek language, 'I am' is a very intense way of referring to oneself. It would be comparable to saying, 'I myself, and only I, am'. Clearly, this intensity conveys what the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani calls 'the self itself', that is, the greater originary Self (God, if you will) that is the source of all life, and not the narrow small 'I' which is fabricated after the fact.

The Bible was written by people with a clear understanding of metaphor, analogy and symbolism. To be sure, there are stories that no doubt happened more or less as described with a few tall tales thrown in for good measure, but the deeper stuff, the sayings of Jesus, the names of people and places, the more miraculous undertakings here and there, are inscribed with a profound metaphoric-metaphysic foundation.  Understood thus, the Bible is probably one the greatest books ever written. For it encourages that which it seeks to extol, namely the spirit and the ultimate ground of all being, the self itself which it calls 'God'.

Part of our problem is that not only have we forgotten where the self comes from (in being waylaid  by a society based on distraction and work) but we have forgotten where words come from. Our language has been whittled down to conform to the limited objectives of a narrow-self society, in other words a society that is largely without soul (or when it is, that soul is itself packaged and relegated to a few days of the year in the spiritual calendar). Our command of language is absolutely pitiful which only adds to our confusion when confronting a great text like the Bible which is fundamentally a book of Words. The Word, after all, is Logos, the embodiment of all meaning.

Get to the root of words and you'll get to the root of the self. In a way, this is the poet's remit, (as a fundamental philologist), clearing away the topsoil, the layers and layers of conceptual deposits, in order to get to the bedrock, the Logos, consciousness not of any thing but consciousness pure and simple..

We, today, are apparently multi-talented when it comes to languages, being able to speak and converse in two, three, four and more languages.... But this really is of little import when it comes to actually understanding. You may speak 33 languages fluently but can you speak the language of clarity? Can you understand... ? Can you get beneath and behind the word into that space that precedes it? Can you see where it came from, out of which spirit it was born? Can you see the Logos?

Talent, really, is a hindrance. But we are obsessed with it.

If you examine the word 'talent', you will see that it has wandered a fair distance from its classical Latin definition of 'weight', and is originally related to the proto-Indo-European root tel- meaning to bear or to carry. 'The more gifted a man is', wrote the Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, 'the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.'

The Self Itself on West Campbell Street

To put it very simply, everyone has 2 selves: the great wider more expansive self, and a smaller, manufactured, narrow self that is largely fuelled by others. The former 'contains' and encompasses the latter. It is this former originary self that can be equated with the notion of 'daemon' or inner oracle, Brahman or God, or indeed light itself. The latter, though it may come in many disguises can be equated with the small self, or Atman, or darkness and shadow.

This weblog, using the city not only as metaphor but as physical map, is an attempt to reach the former, that is, the wider, more expansive Self.

The so-called 'I', what we normally take as the self, is merely a frame of interpretation added to this life process after the fact. The true self is the source of the life process itself, the true body of the will to power. It is what I have called 'the self itself' or 'the self as such' and not what is ordinarily called 'the self'. The so-called 'I' is a tool of this greater self.

[Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness]

The Tao on Custom House Quay

['Better to die on your feet than live forever on your knees'. La Pasionaria, Custom House Quay]




The Tao never does anything
yet through it all things are done.
If powerful men and women
could centre themselves in it
the whole world would be transformed
by itself, in its natural rhythms.
People would be content
with their simple, everyday lives,
in harmony, and free of desire.
When there is no desire,
all things are at peace.


[Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu]

Meditation on Pointhouse Quay

Can urban waterfront abuse be rolled back or eliminated? ... riversides and tributary open space strengthen common public domain, preserve natural environment, and decentralize the city into easily identifiable, livable entities[...] The river of the urban region - the most intensively used and  most often abused resource on earth. Roy Mann, Rivers in the City


This afternoon I headed out into the rain and darkness and walked along to the new transport museum, The Riverside Museum, at Pointhouse Quay, a sort of misshapen lighthouse jutting out into the confluence of Clyde and Kelvin rivers. At around 4pm on a Thursday afternoon (mid-December) it was empty. In fact, the poor staff (probably bored out of their wits) outnumbered the 6 visitors (yes, I counted them) by about five to one. A sense of tragedy loomed large over the yellow-lit interior, 4 years in the making and just recently opened at a conservative cost of some 60 million pounds. I overheard one of the staff saying to another sympathetically, 'Aye, you can go if you want... we can manage'.

Zaha Hadid's iconic design has obviously not been well received. Glaswegians have an uncanny knack of seeing through the fake and the phony, and the simply nonsensical (when it isn't entirely hi-falutin). Removed, for some unknowable reason, from its former central and easily reachable location in the Kelvin Hall, the museum's new location on the Pointhouse promontory is as far from anything as you could possibly imagine. It literally sits at the confluence of the two rivers, with unsightly waste ground on both sides, perched as if on the edge of chaos. It is a lighthouse surrounded emphatically by darkness. As the journalist Steve Parnell noted:

Despite all the PR guff about the Riverside Museum being “derived from its context”, and “flow[ing] from the city to the river”, the building could be situated anywhere and, as a self-proclaimed “soft shed”, could be used for almost anything. Like any good global brand, it is as diametrically opposed to a critical regionalism as could possibly be envisaged and is entirely bereft of any Glasgow character or reference...This is unfortunate for local architect Gareth Hoskins, who came second to Hadid in the competition.

But then, no-one's heard of Gareth Hoskins... especially the tourists. The city's main concern is obvious: build icons and, as Parnell writes, 'collect the work of signature architects', in order to attract visitors, money and outside investment. The new Hydro Arena next to the Clyde Auditorium will open next year (2013) designed by Foster and partners who also designed the auditorium. Cities are no longer cities, I have heard, but businesses.

Up on the top floor of the museum I came across a painting of Pointhouse Quay c.1831 by Thomas Fairbairn. It showed a pastoral if not entirely idyllic setting by the rivers with the Pointhouse Inn where the museum is located now. The surrounds too could be seen, the then narrow Clyde, the green verges rising naturally from the water's edge, the few cows, a couple of small sail-boats, a courting couple in the summer twilight. Now, some 180 years later, and especially if viewed from an aerial perspective (with the remnants of the shipyards, the detritus of industry, the new clammy constructions of 'luxury' apartment complexes and the spare grounds primed for construction, the scene is redolent, comparatively speaking, of some hellish nightmare. A vast improvement one might argue on the fume-filled scenes between the late 1800s and much of the 20th century when most of Glasgow was just an over-polluted workyard. Seen from these angles, how anyone can paint progress in a forgiving light is beyond understanding. And yet they do. The museum and Pointhouse Quay has been the subject of countless paintings thus far, all severely cropped to exclude the greater context in which it belongs. Individual existence itself has thus been cropped to exclude its greater context. The result is a fury of industry, of making money through the ultimately self-defeating act of external progress, without any sense of far-sightedness or where it's all going to end up. The new museum itself stands as some monumental (and costly) monolith to the machine age, to the futurist ethos of speed, violence, and a rejection of the past. It seems oddly appropriate that the museum is cut off, not by the rivers as one might think (since a flurry of ferries now serve the promontory) but by the expressway and its slip-roads a couple of hundred metres or so to the north. 

'We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries!' declares the Futurist Manifesto. 'What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.'

It is this speed, this rush and roar, that will ultimately, if it hasn't already, bring man to his knees. How much credence can you give to a 'philosophy' whose aim is to destroy libraries and museums?

I am all for museums (and a learning from the past not an indulgence in it), and it is not the museum that I criticize here, but the badly thought out process which led to this particular predicament of which you might say the museum is an innocent caught up in the action. No doubt they will quote their long-term view for the re-development of the area. But why develop it at all? What's wrong with just leaving it, and allowing it to return (with a little help) to the natural idyll it once was, its original nature?

What I am criticizing is the unthinking acquiescence to progress, to speed, and to violence masquerading as 'civilization'. Take a look at Thomas Fairbairn's watercolours, then take a look at what they've done in the name of progress to our land, to our blood, to our heart...If people do not wake up to this reality, in time, the idyllic nature of all places will be transformed (has it not already happened to the Self?) into something akin to this - a great steel machine, with a token tree as an epitaph marking the sad death of the soul.

'Pointhouse Quay' Thomas Fairbairn, c.1831.

Pointhouse Quay on the left, mid-picture, with the Govan Ferry near the Govan side, 1950.

Sitting on the edge of waste ground, miles from anywhere The Riverside Museum aka. The Sixty Million Pound Barn during construction, 2009.

Inaccessible and outlandish, the new Riverside Museum on Pointhouse Quay, 2011. Note The Science Tower aka. The Syringe, in the top centre of the picture which has been almost permanently closed since its opening in 2001 due to 'technical problems'. This was built at a cost (to the public) of 10 million pounds. 

And finally, back to 1828 and the painter John Knox's The Clyde at Govan, with Figures and a Boat in the Foreground -

Tuesday - Truthday

Every day is a truth day - omne ens est bonum - every day is a good day, a beautiful day!

As I walked across and along the river, over the expressway (what a word!), up the hill that is Sandyford Street, by the fire-station and the wonderful (now empty) school building (built 1897), I pass west through the small copse of tangled trees between the hospital and the railway line towards Yorkhill Park. As I do, the last of the sun's light glinting through the trees is being gradually enveloped by a great shelf-cloud which occupies the whole of the visible horizon. The golden light fizzles through the trees before the cloud eventually swallows it up. Further down at the base of Yorkhill Park the spare ground here has already itself been swallowed up by the property developers. Slowly, perhaps too slowly for people to see, all these nooks and crannies, these little invaluable spaces, are being devoured by the constructivist ones, until one day, we might look back and ask, where has all the space gone? 

Up at the university library, Level 10, Philosophy and Theology ('philosophy without theology is irrelevant, and a theology without philosophy is more or less superstitious credulity' writes Raimon Panikkar somewhere in there), I fall upon Kitaro Nishida's An Enquiry into the Good. 

Goodness is a gathering together (a necessary tautology) of (the spirit of) all things (of their actuality). If we look at the etymology (the truth of the origin of the word) of 'good' we can trace it as far back (in time and space) as the pre-Indo-European root ghedh- meaning to unite and to associate. This corresponds with the proto-Germanic gothaz and the Old Norse goor to the Old English gaedrian meaning to gather, to put together ('together' deriving from the same source). The result of this 'gathering together' is the gradual arising of 'God' which according to Kitaro is 'the unity of the universe' ('infinite love, infinite joy, and peace'), and the awakening of the great Self (what the Hindus refer to as Brahman). Goodness and Godness are as similar as their orthography would imply. With this awakening of the Self (the dissolution of the small self into the immeasurable Self) comes pure being (actuality) and what Aristotle called 'perfect action'. Goodness spills forth - one does not 'try' to be good, rather good is being, or simply, good is. It irradiates forth like the sun's rays. Thus, Aristotle can say that the good is happiness (eudaimonia) [but a happiness that is not pleasure, see "State of Grace - From Kinning Park to Glasgow Green", but liberation from it into the realm of well-being and 'infinite joy'].

'The satisfaction of... the realization of ideals always constitutes happiness,' writes Nishida. Which is why the Teutonic theosopher Jakob Boehme wrote, 'The infinite freedom of the human heart proves God directly'. 'The highest good, in other words,' Nishida continues, 'is for our spirit to develop its various abilities and to achieve a perfect development. In this way Aristotle's entelechie is the good (the completed reality of an entity and the power of the entity to reach completion). For a human to display his or her innate nature - just as a bamboo plant or a pine tree fully displays its nature - is our good. Spinoza said that virtue is to function in accordance with the self's own nature'.

'[...] In this regard the good is beauty... Beauty is felt when things are realized'. 

"And God said, 'Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good".

One could also say that this is the true, that the light was true, or indeed beautiful. Thus, I can say, Tuesday - truth day.... omne ens est bonum (all reality is good)... every day is a good day, a beautiful day.

The sun's rays leap across the horizon of being and understanding.

A Walk Along the Broomielaw

 'You think you've seen the sun, but you ain't seen it shine'. Frank Sinatra, The Best is Yet to Come.

A walk along the Broomielaw reveals the river to be swollen like never before. Debris floats slowly and inexorably towards the sea. The ice of the hills has, evidently, melted in these past few days as the temperature, country-wide, has risen slightly. It can't be the rain here in Glasgow, because it hasn't been raining. It is thus, seeing this extended play at work, of the country, if you will, entering the city, that one becomes connected to a wider (and greater) Glasgow. The Clyde after all is simply a natural artery for the conveyance of the 'blood' of the land, sea and sky. It is thus that the mountain comes to Mohammed, or at least the blood that fed it. One travels, now, without moving. Maybe this is what Proust meant when he wrote, 'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes'. When one attains clarity of vision (seeing is a cognitive phenomenon not retinal), there is no need any longer to journey. 

The slow flow of Glasgow, in effect, is, at a deeper level of reality and of seeing, the slow flow of the world. The slow flow of the world, in effect, is, at a deeper level of reality and of seeing, the slow flow of the solar field. The slow flow of the solar field... you get the idea.

For release from the bonds of empirical existence, the wise and learned person completely gives up all desire-motivated actions and commences an unceasing contemplation of the Self. So writes Sankara (c. 650-700 AD), one of India's most venerated philosophers and exponents of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, in the Vivekacudamani (The Crown Jewel of Discrimination). In other words, stillness is your destination. Stillness as an absence of seeking (agitation). Or, to put it another way, any seeking is a denial of the presence of the sought. As Kitaro Nishida remarks in his Enquiry into the Good, 'Because the self and things are one, there is no truth to be sought and no desire to be satisfied'. 

Curiously, building upon our remarks on doing (as activity/acting) and here, Nishida's 'Enquiry', Sankara writes:

Reality is attained through enquiry and never in the slightest degree by even a hundred million actions.

'Enquiry' as deriving from the Latin in + quaerere meaning to ask, or seek, in(wardly). As John Grimes elucidates in his commentary: When a person makes an effort or employs a method to achieve something, it implies that thing is not present now and will come into being at some future time. But the reality, according to Sankara, is ever-present. To obtain that which is already obtained, no effort is necessary... Actions can never get one to that which one already is... What one is does not involve what one does, doing something'.

The rope of seeking has got to be burnt to ashes, so goes the Indian proverb. 

Later, listening to Jazz FM, there's an interview with the 'Godfather of Swing' Ray Gelato. They play a few of his songs. In one I catch the rather cheesy lyrics:

No more will I go half-way round the world

For I have found my world in you...

('you' being 'that which is ever-present', 'what one is').

The Light Lighthouse

I can think of no other edifice constrcuted by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve. They were not built for any other purpose...

George Bernard Shaw


'A beacon of hope to those in peril on the sea, the lonely lighthouse stands impervious to the fury of the ocean as it steadfastly projects its life-saving beam to storm-tossed sailors'. So opens the book Anatomy of a Lighthouse. Here, in Glasgow's city centre, perhaps we can read 'the sea' as the chaos of shopping, and the 'storm-tossed sailors' as shoppers, and the 'life-saving beam' as a clarion call to the imagination and the heart.

I came across The Lighthouse (Glasgow's Centre for Architecture & Design) many years ago hidden away in a tight-fitting lane between Mitchell Street and Buchanan Street (the latter a sea awash with shoppers, few of whom ever see the light of the lighthouse shining). At that time, under different management, The Lighthouse charged for admission. Now, however, it is free, and even more light and beautiful for it.

The Lighthouse is a wonderful edifice full of history, but the interior is also full of metaphysical high-lights. The designs are exquisite, ranging from glass-panels with clouds for heads to mosaics of gingko leaves and star-shaped lighting. They have the only single-track escalators I know of which add to the 'lightness' of everything. The building is a sensual delight, a real haptic experience. The shapes, the spaces, the forms, the materials, the lighting, all combine to re-ignite the senses and the imagination, encouraging us once more to inhabit them. The great irony is perhaps the location of the The Lighthouse itself where just around the corner (in the second city of the retail empire) we have the dark house of a city centre dedicated almost entirely to shopping where our senses are constantly under attack from unscrupulous manipulators who seek to appropriate our imagination, fill us full of unconscionable rubbish, and lead our selves astray.

The real gems of The Lighthouse are the viewing platforms of which there are two. They offer astounding views over the city's largely Victorian rooftop of which the largest glass roof in Europe (that of Central Station) stands out. It is a great place to go to spend an hour or two, a few times a year. The exhibitions are always interesting and intriguing. Staff are friendly and helpful. And the building's interior layout is, not unlike some of the inner spaces of the mind, a fascinating place to explore. It is without a doubt one of the most thought-provoking places in Glasgow (and not just in terms of design and architecture). That can only ever be a good thing, and a force for lightness... for altruism and the greater more imaginative Self.

'The Light Lighthouse' 9th October, 2012

Between the Bridges

Between the bridges
Along the river
The Earth bows
Before the solar godhead...


As I walk between the Arc Bridge and the Squinty Bridge, a mile (barely a mile!) of bliss, I pass beneath the Kingston Bridge, opened in the week of my birth (in June 1970), and as I do and the Earth (at least this small part of her) catches the last of the sun's rays, I think to myself (it's only later upon reflection that I think, really) that my birth has finished - I have become. Samsara (the eternal becoming) is over. 'Being' irradiates as a searing whiteness, like the incandescent spans of the Squinty Bridge.

I head into the city, empty and whole...

The Clyde Arc Bridge, 20th December 2009

Looking South to the Angel Building from Lancefield Quay, 7th December, 2012

'Dissolution of Mind on Atlantic Quay'

'Kensho'

How To Do Nothing (or Just Don't Do It)

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room. Blaise Pascal 

Practise not-doing and everything will fall into place. Lao Tzu 

It always perplexed me as a youth the possibility of the act of doing nothing (of 'sitting still'). Was it in fact possible to do nothing? Or was I dealing with a contradiction in terms, possibly a paradox, that negated itself as soon as it was mentioned? The intuition was there however, as I imagine it was in Pascal and many others, that it was in fact possible 'to do nothing' and simultaneously 'be good', but not within the boundaries of logic that had been set forth by the conventional usage of language.

The verb 'do' is not the most appropriate term to explain the process of, if we are to invert Pascal's claim, following the path of goodness. The last time I was asked what I 'did' for a living, (I just couldn't take it, the cliche, anymore), I answered (quite politely it has to be said): Isn't being enough?

Goodness does not require that one 'does' or for that matter 'makes' a living; rather, one is, simply... primally... fundamentally. Whatever emerges from that state of  'is-ness' cannot be said to be anything other than a product of being.  In order to do, one must first be. (This is Pascal's 'sitting still'). It follows from this that if one is not 'being' then what you have emerging is not technically 'doing', but rather a case of forced-ness and contrivance where the verb is impure and tainted with ulterior motive. The motive and motion of being 'in and for itself' has thus been corrupted. Everything that emerges then, will also be corrupt, to a degree.

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'. [The Greek word logos is usually attributed here to signify 'Word', but the Latin equivalent is verbum].

The original verb is 'be'... in other words, 'In the beginning was the word....'

At the library this afternoon, I read a little Ratzinger (is it not time I acquaint myself with the writings - and there are many! - of the appointed spiritual leader of the Christian world of which I, nominally at least, am a member?)  I was impressed (not too much as to be distracted) by his take on rest (on doing nothing), here, referring to the seventh day:

'...the people had rejected God's rest, its leisure, its worship, its peace, and its freedom, and so they fell into the slavery of activity. They brought the earth into the slavery of their activity and thereby enslaved themselves. Therefore God had to give them the sabbath that they denied themselves. In their 'no' to the God-given rhythm of freedom and leisure they departed from their likeness to God and so did damage to the earth. Therefore they had to be snatched from their obstinate attachment to their own work. God had to begin afresh to make them his very own, and he had to free them from the domination of activity. Operi Dei Nihil Praeponatur: The worship of God, his freedom, and his rest come first. Thus and only thus can the human being truly live.'

In other words, busyness is a neurosis, contrived activity, unnatural, counterproductive and Self-defeating. It is only through being still (or equally, stilling being) that one will come to know 'God'. Again, I hesitate with the term: I would much prefer Heidegger's rather more poetic 'whole draught of the Open' or Tillich's 'ultimate ground of being' (where [take a deep breath] the incandescence of being wells up from the depths within the widest orbit of the sphere of beings).

It is worth noting that 'doing' as a function of activity is perhaps closer to 'acting' than actually doing. This 'acting' can certainly convey more clearly and less ambiguously the idea that one is, at least temporarily, not being one's self. Further, as a matter of etymological curiosity, and to continue to propound the 'game' that life has become for most ('All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players...') the word 'act' derives from the same root as the word 'agony', from the Greek agonia meaning 'a (mental) struggle for victory,' originally denoting 'a struggle for victory in the games' ultimately from agon 'assembly for a contest'. In today's cut and thrust world of shallow economics, are we not all being assembled for the games?

On the subject of 'not acting', then, and 'doing nothing' (uncontrived activity which emerges through simply being), and to move across to the East, here is Lao Tzu in The Tao Te Ching:

Less and less do you need to force things
Until finally you arrive at non-action
When nothing is done
Nothing is left undone.

Here, Lao Tzu is saying that through 'being', the doer has vanished into the deed: there is no duality, no separateness, no observer no observed, no supercilious subject and object, only the 'Zone', only all-ecompassing (and equally all-emptying) Subject... The dancer has become the music. Now, it is the Music that dances...

Ratzinger writes:

'It becomes clear that we human beings are not bonded by the limits of our own little 'I' but we are part of the rhythm of the universe, that we too, so to speak, assimilate the heavenly rhythm and movement in our own bodies and thus, thanks to this interlinking, are fitted into the logic of the universe. [...] The rhythm of the heavenly bodies is, more profoundly, a way of expressing the rhythm of the heart and the rhythm of God's love, which manifests itself there.'

This coincides with Raimon Panikkar's 'being a unique divine icon of reality, constitutively united with the Source of everything, a microcosm that mirrors the entire macrocosm...'  The difference between 'having' (doing) and 'being' becomes clear. As Francis D'Sa, in the foreword to Panikkar's seminal Christophany - The Fullness of Man, states: 'Yes, I do have a 'me' but I am not identical with that me. 'My' 'I' seems to be found beyond that 'me'. Our 'I' (Panikkar calls it 'the small I') is neither relevant nor ultimate. The real I of our lives, or the I of my 'me' is not my I. Rather God is the I and I am his you. I and you are neither separate nor one; they stand in an advaitic relationship.'

To be sure, it requires more than one reading; our written language has not yet reached the clarity that we might hope for in such deep metaphysical analyses. But it is worth reading again.

Our selves only become relevant (and thus ultimate) when we begin to be, when we see that 'advaitic' relationship of the 'me' being with and within the whole draught of the Open, and the greater I (which D'Sa refers to as 'God'). This is what Whitman means when he writes, 'I give nothing as duties, what others give as duties, I give as living impulses'.

It is Zarathustra's 'freedom for itself and a sacred No even to duty'.

Doing and the 'slavery of activity' has dissipated into pure being, not contrived, not forced, but simply free. The I has dissolved beyond the confines of its corporeal limits into the music of the spheres, and beyond...

One is 'doing' nothing. Yet with the meaningful investment of being. Through this nothingness (which could equally be called an emptiness) comes fulfillment.

As an amusing paraph to these thoughts, some comedic relief perhaps from all that brain-work, it is interesting to note Woody Allen's comment at the end of the documentary Woody Allen (2012). As the film ends, and he tells us his niggling deep-rooted concerns (his 'hintergedanke') he is not without that wry inimitable laugh and the frantic waving of hands:

When I look back on my life, I've been very lucky that I've lived out all these childhood dreams: I wanted to be a movie actor and I became one; I wanted to be a movie director and a comedian and I became one; I wanted to play jazz in New Orleans and I played in street parades and joints in New Orleans and played in opera houses and concerts all over the world. There was nothing in my life that I aspired to  that hasn't come through for me. But despite all these lucky breaks, why do I still feel that I got screwed somehow?

A profound insight, perhaps, into 'doing' and the 'slavery of activity'.

[Photo by Sharad Haskar, India, 2005]

Glasgow, Morocco

OK, so this wasn't Glasgow; it was Rabat in Morocco, and the decadent sea-side district called Ocean. I just happened to look up at the exact moment as this little guy was looking down, and I had the camera in my hand. The seagull was pure serendipity. In a way, glasgow is not confined to Glasgow - Glasgow, like perhaps New York, Naples and Paris is a state of mind more than anything. Not all cities can do that to you, but there are a few out there that can transcend their own geography so to speak. In effect then, wherever 'I' go, Glasgow goes too. Emphatically, slowly...

Cats, well cats are particularly languid creatures, slow, patient, zen-like... very independent spirits, not needy and law-abiding like dogs. They are light of heart as well as of foot, and it is perhaps because of this that the writer Jules Verne, who had a certain affinity with Glasgow's outer edges (most notably Lochs Lomond and Katrine which he visited in 1859), wrote: 

'I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through'.

[Le Chat Noir (and Seagull), Ocean, Rabat, 17.11.2005]

Elixir & Epiphany - On 'Growing Old' & The Cloud Within

Indiana Jones: Do you believe Marcus.... do you believe the grail actually exists?

Marcus Brody: The search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us. But if you want facts Indy I have none to give you. At my age I am prepared to take a few things on faith.

Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade

Heaven is lasting and the earth enduring.
The reason why they are lasting and enduring is that
they do not live for themselves...

Lao Tzu



There are so many people I know who are still exactly the same as they were 25 years ago, only a little heavier, a little balder, a little more wrinkled and neurotic. In other words, any changes that have occurred have been emphatically for the worse. There has been no transformation.... and thus no chance of transfiguration. Any changes that have occurred have been, as a result of our being duped by a system of conventions that outsources the spirit to some grand fantasia, cosmeticisation at the cost of the less expensive (and more expansive) cosmic-isation. In other words, we have forsaken the capacity to embrace the universal within, for the desire to cosmeticise the self from without. Identity, as the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart was apt to say, is not what you put on, it's what you take off.

'Growing old' is another of those delusional terms (like 'birthday')  that is bandied about like candy, until finally the brain eats so much of it that the self becomes clotted to its authentic and actual reality. It is then taken for granted as a self-evident truth. The reality, however, could not be any different. The term comes about from a single-tracked view of life that sees living as some kind of stand off against dying. This view is forced upon us by our 'outsourcing' economic system which requires the divestment of the inner in order to sell it back as an outer. In short, and to take a rather facile example, if we were aware of our intrinsic nature as universal beings (and as divine icons of reality) who are constituted through being and not having, then the cosmetics industry (which is just about everything) would not last very long, and the economy would soon implode in a thunderous roar. There is, then, a vested interest on behalf of the industry in keeping the individual cosmeticised and 'covered-up' in the great tacit conspiracy that we call capitalism. Consequently, life and death confront each other as separate entities as if it were the Gunfight at the O.K Corral. Death, however, is an immanant condition; it exists within us as we live. Breathing in can only come about through the act of breathing out. 

What we have done to death is one of the great crimes of humanity, for in exiling her we have, albeit inadvertently, betrayed the very essence of being. The result is an unhealthy attachment to life and a desire for longevity (on a purely quantative basis) without acknowledging the ramifications of such a duration. Without death however (without the living process of dying, which is what Plato, Paul the Apostle and Eckhart meant, as well as the eastern mystics, when they talked of daily meditation upon death) we are unable not only to live fully but to live infinitely and universally. In this sense, dying whilst alive ('fractioned sartori' as it was sometimes known by Buddhists) may be regarded as the resurrection of the soul, and the clearing away of the clutter in order to do so. It follows that the meditatio mortis of the true philosopher is in reality a means of spiritual resurrection during life - a beginning of that complete deliverance from the bodily tomb which the soul hopes to attain at death. 

But, in our neurotic rush for life and more living, we have allowed this 'resurrection' to be consigned to its furthest point away from life, to the moment of physical death itself. We have thus unwittingly introduced the concepts of 'growing old' and 'senility', whilst simultaneously searching in a manner fit for a maniac for the mysterious elixir that might banish them forever. But the elixir is here, hidden, so to speak, in plain sight. It is death itself, 'death' not as the complete cessation of bodily funtions and the physical end of living, but as the reappropriation of the senses, of our mind, of clarity and vision. Of transformation and metamorphosis.

Seen in this light, 'growing old' thus becomes symptomatic of one's lack of transformation, of natural inner change, and of emergence into the light, what Heidegger referred to as 'physis'. What is required, then, is, a series of epiphanies, where the quality of awareness (as a transformation of consciousness) allows one's being to be brought into the light (phanos, from the Greek meaning 'shining', itself from phainoos, to bring to light). These epiphanies furthermore allow the self to be dissolved in this light and to be transfigured, until such a point where the self cannot be said to exist. 'Growing old' simply becomes absurd.

The modalities of thinking that currently dominate our conventions are anti-thetical to this experience. The scientific system, at best, feels uncomfortable with uncertainty and the nebulous. Clouds must be classified. The strict codes of scientific conduct are rigid to the point of neurosis. The lack of inherent flexibility (and morphing) leads to a stoppage of the cyclical and the eco-intuitive-self that is necessarily in balance and harmony with nature at large. Man thus becomes 'broken'. He cannot for the life of him figure out how to fix himself, since, necessarily, he is using reason and logic to guide him to the sought-after solution. As an analogy, this is like trying to look for darkness with a torch. It will never happen. It cannot ever happen.

How, then, does one remedy the soporific mind that has been waylaid by the sleep of reason? In brief, one must have faith in the inner cloud (the divine in all of us), that nebulous, ineffable being within.... inscrutable, unfathomable, indefinable. The very same cloud which the painter Caspar David Friedrich had called an 'emblem of a limitless freedom'. [Curiously, Friedrich had opposed the classification of clouds by Luke Howard (and his own countryman Goethe) in the early 1800s, maintaining that the deep obscurity and imprecision of clouds were their greatest attributes. Forcing the 'free and airy clouds into a rigid order and classification' he said, would only undermine them].

Only then, free and airy, obscure but not in the dark, and when the mind is allowed to move naturally with the wind of the spirit, will one's being be brought into the light, will one dissolve into the immense and into that which cannot be measured, whilst coming to the slow realization that, whilst a-live in the infinite (and equally the eternal), the possibility of growing 'old' is just not there.

[Cumulonimbus over Hardgate, 1.10.2006]

I am the daughter of Earth and Water, 
And the nursling of the Sky; 
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores; 
I change, but I cannot die...

[P.B. Shelley, The Cloud]