Death of a Salesman & The Difficulty of Being

'When you bring your body out into this landscape you're bringing it home. Because with all due respect, human bodies were never really made for offices, for streets and corners, and tight places.'

John O Donohue, A Celtic Pilgrimage

For the past few evenings I have been watching Volker Schlondorf's 1985 adaptation of Arthur Miller's great tragedy Death of a Salesman. It illustrates, rather too uncannily, not just my own situation but many sons' situations in the face of ambitious, status-anxious, career-driven fathers. It also illustrates the topsy-turvy nature of western civilization in seeking to validate self-worth and security by external success, status, and approval by the other, whilst holing us up in an office or a car for the best part of our natural born (yet not natural lived) lives.

The performances by Malkovich as the 'prodigal son' returning home after three months on the road, and Dustin Hoffman as the eponymous salesman Willy Loman, are as remarkable as they are heart-breaking. How, in 1984, they could do this 185 times on Broadway (before they committed to a television production the following year) and not have a nervous breakdown, God only knows. It is surely one of the greatest plays of the 20th century to which Hoffman and Malkovich more than do justice.

In one particular scene, in the final act of the play, Biff finally has it out with his father who has hampered him all his life to be something that he isn't, that he doesn't want to become. Biff explains why he stole a fountain pen of the businessman whom his father had convinced him to go see in an effort to get a job.

'I ran down 11 flights of stairs with the pen in my hand, then suddenly I stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building - d'you hear this? - I STOPPED! in the middle of the building and i saw the sky... and I... I... I saw the things that I love in this world, the work and the... the food... and... the time to... to sit and smoke... and I looked at the pen in my hand and said to myself, "What am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't wanna be? What am I doing in an office making a contemptuous begging fool of myself when all that I want is out there waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am" - Now why can't I say that!?'

It takes many years of wandering (mentally-spiritually-physically) to finally realize the easy peace that resides within - the 'I am' that has always been there but which has been covered up in the great tacit conspiracy called 'civilization'. It takes many years to destroy the nonsense of 'failure' and 'success' and 'ambition'. Indeed, if we looked at the etymology of the word 'fail' (to deceive, trick, elude) it might reveal the paradox at its core: that the true failures of this world are the 'successful' manipulators who seek to seduce us into being 'successful'. Whilst looking at my own native tongue, Irish Gaelic, I can see that the word 'success' simply does not exist. Not because we Celts were good for nothing layabouts (not such a bad thing) but because we knew that success was a mutually arising process, that it was not some thing which was conferred upon you. In Irish, there is the colloquial phrase d'eirigh liom literally '[It] arose with me', and a common greeting Go n-eiri an bothar leat meaning 'May your path arise with you' i.e 'Be successful'. The etymology of the word 'ambition' elucidates similarly: from Latin ambitio, a going around (esp. to solicit votes, hence a 'striving for favour, courting, flattery'); a desire for honour, a thirst for popularity. In earlier usage, ambition was always grouped with overreaching desire, pride and vainglory.

'...it is ambition enough', writes John Locke in his epistle to the reader of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 'to be employed as an under-labourer in cleansing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge'.

Like ambition and success, 'security' and 'self-worth' are accursed concepts dreamt up by those who have sold their souls to the highest bidder and would have us do likewise. Security (and its pernicious offshoots) does not exist in nature. Nor for that matter does self-worth (which is increasingly paraded as self-serving narcissism when it isn't an outright pathology). When was the last time you saw a magpie take out life insurance, or a swan spend three hours in front of a mirror? Sure, they take care of themselves, and avoid any dodgy situations, but rely on others to do it for them?

The irony in Willy Loman's father figure reflects the Zen precept of 'the watched pot never boils' (played out amusingly enough by Loman's undemanding neighbour and his super-successful son). 'Being' cannot be forced but has to arise spontaneously 'of its own accord', naturally, because it wants to. Not because someone says so. Least of all because society demands it. Biff finally achieves liberation (through the death of the salesman that his father had concocted inside him) while running down the stairs with the equally liberated fountain pen in his hand, having come more or less to the end of his tether. It is not unusual for one to awake on the edge of the tether, but what is unusual is to stay remaining at the edge, to leap off into the unknown, and not to immediately step back and fall straight back into slumber.

This is the difficulty of being - to persist courageously in remaining awake, to make that leap of faith (as much as to have faith in the leap itself), especially when all the signs around you, all those successes (and seductresses) are begging you to join them. Have faith in your own mysterious centre, that exists without security, without ambition, and without self-worth. Success, then, will arise within you, become you, without your even knowing it.

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen on the horse's mane.

Robert Bly (Watering the Horse)

The Quiet Harmony of Chaos - In Praise of Spare Ground

 Meditate Upon Space as the Highest Reality. The Upanishads

Yesterday, on a wander from Cessnock to the Tramway Theatre in Pollokshields East, I passed the spare ground in Brand Street and saluted its 'spareness'. On the way, (there's not much spareness in the bourgeois Pollokshields proper), there was a little spare ground here and there, which again I saluted. As I got into the Tramway and past the 'art', I exited through the cafe into the gardens at the back. It was freezing and the birds were out in force: blackbirds, mistle thrushes, blue tits, great tits, wood pigeons. The metabolism of the plants themselves was so slow that you couldn't help drifting off with them, and it was only the frostbite that awoke me from my bamboo meditations! That, and the banging and craning of the structure being built next door. It was so close to the garden that the poor birch trees were struggling for light, and the birds now had to take a detour to get here. It was unclear what was being built. I could've asked one of the yellow-helmetted workers standing next to me (!), but I thought I would ask at the front desk of the Tramway instead. 

'Aye, it's a Seikh temple,' he tells me.

'It's a bit close, is it not?' I say.

'Aye, cheek tae jowel', he tells me proudly, before quickly adding. 'Aye, it wiz only spare grun afore that'.

I am tempted. I can here the inner voice saying, 'Isn't spare grun its own temple?'

But I don't. I smile, wave and say thankyou, and leave.

As I head down Pollokshaws Road, I can't help noticing all the new-builds. Sure, the spare grun here was more like parking lots than wilding out meadows, but even so. Do they have to build-up everything, fill in all the space? And in the least aesthetic form imaginable? Do space and land no longer have any intrinsic value other than the market value of the land it 'occupies'? In other words, is their 'being' simply a function of a shrivelled economic that insists on measuring them in terms of monetary value, and not value them merely as themselves? This 'economic ethos' doesn't just stop at space and land. Animals, humans included, have long had a price on their heads. It is a soulless way of living and seeing, which, if continued in this vein, will spell the effective enslavement of the human spirit (for the spirit cannot be killed), and the wholesale automation of mankind.

These new-builds are not so different to humans. Their cheap cladding materials, devoid of any fine handiwork, will be weathered and streaking within a year. Within 5 years, they'll look as if they need to be torn down, and replaced. They are godless structures, lacking what the Japanese call 'kami', the essential godliness that comes from hand-crafted love (or equally a loving handicraft) and attention to detail.  But this prefab world that is coming is all part of the plan I fear, the grand economic plan (that is neither grand nor economic), the mantra of constant growth. 

It is like this that I salute the spare ground and sing their praises. There is a different sort of growth at work here, a growth that may indeed be just as invasive and rapacious but yet different, altogether more alive. When you can connect to that aliveness, and begin to feel that communion within, there then occurs another sort of growth, a sort of 'zero growth' that is not simply based upon the acretion of matter, but of spirit, spirit as the reaching out and connecting with the individual, the true individual, that as its name suggests is indivisible and integrated with all things. 

As the Upanishads state: Meditate upon the spare grun as the deepest reality!

THE QUIET HARMONY OF CHAOS

This morning by the Kelvin

by the old scrapyard

the spare ground

sparing out

the January weeds, like trees,

weeding - the broken glass

scattered, and glassing,

the steel fences fencing

in the emptiness, the entropy

gathering, in this microcosmos

hidden in plain sight, 

a quiet chaos, of light,

of force,

of birds -

Unbearable Lightness of Being, Brand Street, Cessnock.

Work-Play & Spontaneity

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold, and I deem them mad for thinking my days have a price.

Khalil Gibran

I began then in real earnest to simplify my life believing that if the present system is wrong one should live by it as little as possible. That is to say, one should conform little and reform much... It is noble to die for one's principles but it is much nobler to be able to live for them.

Dugald Semple 

'It looks as if the modern addiction to labor is becoming an epidemic for humankind,' writes Raimond Panikkar in Invisible Harmony. 'You have to labor because apparently your naked existence has no value; therefore you must justify your life by its usefulness.'

We’re only just coming around to the idea that sacrificing 40 hours of your week might not be a wholly good thing for one’s health and one’s spiritual well-being. I quickly intuited from a very early age, partly thanks to my father's overwork, that to surrender forty hours of your living, breathing week (forty of your most awake hours) was the equivalent of surrendering 40% of your living breathing soul. I also intuited that to be 'useful' could be a dangerous thing.

As such I embarked on a philosophy of  work (as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language) of 1 year on, 6 months off. I engaged in what could be termed ‘voluntary unemployment’ so that I might re-organise and process all that had gone before via some kind of artistic-aesthetic process. Without this processing (and defragmentation) I had felt in my first years of working that things just built up fragmentarily without necessarily being viewed wholistically, and thus capable of being understood as part of the larger picture. Work had thus become a matter of 'work' and of 'play'; furthermore, work had become a means to an end, and an end in itself.

The 'play' part involved in this work-play process encouraged not just the creative-aesthetic (spontaneous-explorative) but the contemplative also. This slow contempaltive nature, in a fast society which for Raimond Panikkar is thoroughly anti-contemplative, clarified the integral role of work within the grander encompassing role of being:

...the contemplative will have a totally different attitude to work. the primacy will not be given to work but to working, i.e., to the act itself (the finis operationis of the Scholastics) so that every work will have to yield its own justification, or rather its own meaning. If an act is not meaningful in itself, it will simply not be done.

That people have allowed their selves to be coerced into 'selling' their days is the reason why there is no play or spontaneity left (or when they argue there is, that it is so shrivelled and hi-jacked by the larger scheme of things that it really isn't play or spontaneity at all). This absence (ab + esse, [away] from being) of spontaneity (sua sponte, of one's own will) further allows the self and 'being' to be taken hostage by busyness and 'doing'.

At the entrance to the street next to me there is a sign stating:
Play Street 8am to Sunset Except for Access.

It might as well have been called Spontaneous Street - for play and spontaneity are inextricably bound.

'Being has an untapped reservoir', writes Panikkar, 'a dynamism, an inner side not illumined by self-knowledge, reflection, or the like. Spontaneity is located in this corner of each being - its own mystery. It is unthought, unpremeditated, free, even from the structures of thinking. Reality cannot be equated with the nature of consciousness'.

It is this sort of 'thinking' that led the Zen prelate Dogen to state: To know yourself is to forget yourself; to forget yourself is to be awakened by all things.

The danger today in the rush and roar of the modern world that pays little heed to slowness and much to self-gratification, is that there is little opportunity for forgetting oneself, and thus to be awakened. In business, it is your duty 'to be aware of your work ', to be so utterly self-conscious that one is literally asleep to everything else. It also demands your best hours, those when, it could be said, you are most alive. Spontaneity and play are relegated to the back room of the brain until all you know is work; the result is that one becomes over-stressed, pressurized, and so tightly strung that it only becomes a matter of time before the tension dissipates through snapping. Further, when retirement comes, the empty undeveloped man deprived of his raison d'etre, lays down and dies. This arrested development, through an imbalance of work and play, was of great concern to the economist John Maynard Keynes who believed that sometime in the late 20th or early 21st century the 'economic problem' would be solved and thus effectively a lifelong retirement would be a reality for all.

If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades. To use the language of to-day - must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown”?

In other words, man has imprisoned himself, corralled by the 'spur of economic necessity'. Lacking the necessary self-development and the capacity to sing one's song, when man stops working he necessarily stops living.

The act of play however, as Keynes himself extolled, is a spontaneous one, and, by extension, a meditative one. It allows a certain flexibility (of mind, of body), that facilitates a 'tensile integrity' to use an architectural term, which automatically and elastically returns a structure to its original shape after deformation. It is thus an essential feature in any 'work-structure' just as it is fundamental to any building that wishes to withstand high winds, earthquakes and remain at peace midst the storm. Without this 'play' of the structure, there is danger in moments of stress, of irreparable damage, if not of complete collapse.

'We shall endeavor to spread the bread thin on the butter... 3 hour shifts or a 15 hour week... For 3 hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us.' Keynes writes in one of his more lucid moments. In 1928.

In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas (arguably the most intelligent of the disciples) true re-form (are we not all deformed structures?) lies not in outer conventions but in inner transformation, a transformation that relies on work, play, spontaneity and contemplation. The senses, according to the Gospel of Thomas, have been led astray by those wishing to appropriate them for their own ends (ring a bell?). The revival of the senses will revive our ability to bend and to play. This demands, however, that we open ourselves up to the unknown, to that which we have never done before or have simply forgotten; it demands our faith and trust... not in any Lord or God, but in the (imanantly divine) self. For many, it is a leap that is 'just not worth it'. But should we impose these deformed values upon the next generation? Should we not at least make them aware of the Faustian pact involved with an all work - no play ethos? And by 'play' I do not mean forced play - I mean spontaneous play, for the love of it, as an end in itself, and as a possible means.

The image in the Gospel of Thomas of men that have recovered their spontaneity of being (their 'play') is that of little children who 'know the place of life' - we're not talking juvenile ignorance or unruly behaviour, but the child who sees and feels all things afresh, as if for the very first time. Only those who have worked on their selves as 'the elect of the living father' will be 'acquainted with the kingdom'. As James Heisig writes in his scholarly essay The Recovery of the Senses, 'The secret teachings of the Gospel of Thomas are very much an open secret. The elite who understand it are not the hand-picked disciples of elder adepts, but those who have the courage to strip themselves down to their native childlikeness and discover the truth within themselves'. This work-play-spontaneity is essential for revival, for resuscitation... for resurrection of the hitherto expropriated self.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S Eliot, Little Gidding

'For in order to tell it bluntly at last, man plays only when he is a man in the proper sense of the word, and he is every inch a man where he plays' 

[Friederich von Schiller in his 15th letter on the Aesthetic Education of Man to the patron Friedrich Christain, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenberg]

Middleton Street, Cessnock, G51.

On the Trajective

The modern itch after knowledge of foreign places is so prevalent that the generality of mankind bestow little thought or time upon the place of their nativity.

Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland


Eliminating distance kills. Rene Char

Distance (and duration) is a matter of perspective. In the same time it might take me to cycle from Glasgow to Stirling, another (by a different means of transport) could have travelled to the northern rim of Africa. There is something sinister about air travel however, something not quite right about circumnavigating the globe in the time it would take the average person to walk from Glasgow to Edinburgh. Though it may proceed in bursts, nature does not receive such ‘jumps’ so readily.  Eliminating distance kills. The soul, the Arabs believe, can only travel as fast as the pace of a trotting camel.

When we close ourselves off from the landscape and glassily pass through it (as with a plane or a car), sometimes not even seeing it (nevermind feeling it), something is lost in the process. Distance is killed. It’s not just a case of outsourcing our trajective energy to a polluting and profligate machine, but of crossing the world without the essential in-betweenness.

The loss of the interstitial soon leads to a 'neitherwhere' (neither here nor there), and an existential void (the A to B reduced to the simply AB) in which the mechanical process of relocation denies us our own locomotive force. Since the body-mind-world are inseparable, this mechanical denial radically affects our perspective not just of the world but of our own place within it. The ramifications of this depleted worldview, as we are beginning to see, can be horrendous for the body and the mind, and the larger world which embodies them.

In being seduced by speed and the promise of an easy life, [not knowing the kernel paradox that lies at the core of this promise - that the easy life is a vacuous life: that the less we put into it and the more we outsource this life to technology (that is neither techne nor logos) the less we get out of it], we have effectively allowed our selves to have been stripped of their dignity as hyper-organic entities. Obesity (whether of spirit or of body) is the great symptom (or the 'silent epidemic' as the UK government have labelled it) of this easy age.

The (short) answer? Start walking, start cycling (the real flying!), start slowing down… and reconnect to the body, to the soul… to the trotting camel. Start moving across the land under your own steam, and leave the car and the plane behind.

'Beautiful'     [Pacific Quay, January 2010]

The beauty of 'world' reveals itself to those who travel under their own steam....

Eye-Max (or equally, I-Max)

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.  
Marcel Proust

Living as I do in Cessnock, within five minutes walk from the Imax and the Science Centre (and more importantly, the river), I pass the 'science quarter' almost every afternoon as I walk or cycle up to the university or into the Campsie Fells beyond. I have been doing this for three years and never get bored of it, perhaps because each time I do so I find something new, something that surprises me, that I had never seen before. Like this afternoon, the five swans in single file, gracefully gliding east underneath Bell's Bridge. Sure, I know these swans intimately but I had never seen them in single file like this. It was almost as if it was a test-drive, you know, when your parents take you out for your first driving lesson (and you have them in tears by the end of it). The water in the Imax pond seems to irradiate a different view each time I pass it too. Often, it is waterless, but no matter. What's more, the titanium shell of the Imax cinema and Science Centre reflect the light like nothing else. Not far away, there is the wilderness (spare ground) of Plantation (awaiting development, but not yet quite primed for construction). Hovering above it this afternoon, in the quiet fading light, was a young kestrel. Sadly, I had left the binoculars at home but it didn't prevent me from stopping and gawking as it flickered its being for a moment before swooping in on some poor creature in the shrubbery. On the grass fringe beside me, I noticed a blackbird, as dead as a doornail, but strangely peaceful looking and all in one piece. Maybe it had been caught by a truck or bus as it low-flew (as they normally do) across Govan Road. The other day I had seen a struggling magpie as if it too had been hit (but of course it wouldn't let me get anywhere near it). 'Magpie Park' (or Festival Park as it's more commonly known) is opposite, and sees, all year round, more magpies and wood-pigeons than people, hence my name for it. It's a wonderful little space with its birch trees and poplars, and its little wetland pond wilding out with couch grass and all manner of organisms that I dare not name. I keep realizing that within a mere five minutes of my flat, in an area that most people would not give a second glance, there is a whole world of acitivity that one cannot simply see in a single visit. 

A great poem remains to be written of the spare grounds (awaiting 'development') around Govan and Cessnock, of their overgrown spaces (itself a mysterious oxymoron), their weeds and wildness, that add a sense of bio-profundity to our humble localities. I fear that some day these spaces will sprout lifeless machines of glass and steel, and the weeds and wildflowers will all be gone (like the eye and the soul) to be replaced by a sterile, ageless, sheen. As a humble poet, who frequented the hills around Loch Lomond once said:


What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

['Inversnaid', Gerald Manley Hopkins.]

The Imax Cinema and its placid moat, and the silhouetted Govan Town Hall, March 2010.

Rhapsody in Blue

From my living room window, a small spaceship cloud hangs quietly over the Campsie Fells. It doesn’t appear to move yet it does. It doesn’t appear to say anything yet it sings. As it caresses the crown of the Kilsyth Hills, it calls to me, and beckons me into the fells.

This morning, on the radio: Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin. 

Co-incidences no longer surprise me, but they do make me smile :)

There's something special about sunshine in Glasgow, that rarest of creatures. To be sure, I'm a cloud and rain kinda guy at heart (are not all true poets?), but you can't beat a bit of unfettered sunlight, with perhaps a few wispy cirrus, or a couple of spaceships. The view from my window, northwards, takes me over what I like to think of as the five anchors of man:

1. 'Science', in the form of the titanium-clad, hog-backed Science Centre (2001) by the river.

2. 'Knowledge', as the Gothic Gilbert Scott building of Glasgow University (1870) on Gilmorehill.

3. 'Art', in the form of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery (1901) in front of the aforementioned Gilbert Scott building, and of course those French-roofed townhouses of Park Terrace (1855).

4. 'Religion' in the rising Romanesque belfries of Trinity College (formerly The Free Church College) (1856-61), and Park Parish Church (1856-7).

5. 'Medicine', as Ruchill Hospital's 50m tall neo-Jacobean water-tower (1895), (currently undergoing a makeover).

Perhaps I should add 'Media' as a sixth, in the form of the new glassy BBC studios on Pacific Quay, or even 'Music' as a seventh with the Clyde Auditorium and the new Hydro Arena just peaking out above the BBC.

But they are all eclipsed, no matter how numerous they are, and as beautiful and as solid as they may be, by the backbone of the Campsie Fells mesa in the background. Every morning I find myself silently standing in awe, in a sort of prayer, to these hills, this stratovolcanic plateau, as it flows slowly across time and space, and the city. Even when cloud and mist prevent my seeing it I can still feel its magnetism, and its pull. Not so with science, knowledge, art, religion and medicine.

There's something deeply rewarding in waking up to this view. It is a quiet rhapsody, in blue... in grey... in all the colours... an epic poem in stone that draws you in to its core.

It renews my faith (faith as openness, as an act of trust in the unknown) every morning. There is no greater cathedral than this.

'Looking North' (28.11.12)

'Awakening!'

'Are we all just primitive beings whose towers have been destroyed?' Gerard de Nerval

'The Leap of Faith Beyond Science, Art and Knowledge'

No Logo

When you find the place where you are, practice occurs.  Dogen

In terms of logos, Nike is probably 'it'. In terms of slogans, Nike is probably 'it' too. There are few logos and slogans that go so well together. The simplicity of it is deceptive to the point of being almost evil.

But there is another logo(s) out there (and in there), one that is not so much deceptively simple as it is simply deceptive. It doesn't have a logo or even a slogan, but if it did, it would probably be even simpler than the goddess of Victory's. Furthermore, there would be no imperative, no exclamation mark. It is 'simply deceptive' in its brazen openness that you have probably already missed it in the seven times thus far that I have mentioned it.

Instead of according ourselves to the busy-ness of the modern topsy-turvy world in the form of 'Just do it', this logo (perhaps we could even stretch to logos, as 'In the beginning there was the Word') would allow us to simply exist and revel in the light of our suchness in the form (and equally, formlessness) of 'just is'.

'The most profound statement that can be made about something is the statement that 'it is'', writes the Irish poet-philosopher John O Donohue in Divine Beauty. 'The word is is the most magical word. It is a short, inconsequential little word and does not even sound special. Yet the word is is the greatest hymn to the 'thereness' of things.

'Most of us move now in such a thicket of excess that we can no longer make out the real contour of things. Where there is entanglement, there is no perspective or clarity to make out the true identity of anything.

Heidegger, fifty years ago, often lamented that the most thought-provoking thing of our times was that we were not thinking. Like our living, our 'thinking' (and I use the word cautiously) has largely been super-imposed upon us. we operate, mostly, upon super-imposed templates and sub-routines giving us the illusion of individuality but really making us into a living oxymoron, that is 'organic automata'. I can't help laughing when scientists bring up the idea of artificial intelligence and the question of consciousness in robots. 'Do you think robots are capable of consciousness?' they ask each other gravely.  'Look around you', I want to yell. 'Look in the mirror; of course, they're capable of consciousness!'

Heidegger, in his wonderful little book Discourse on Thinking encourages us to persist in 'courageous thinking', a 'thinking' that is by its very nature 'a violent rupture of established categories' (Deleuze) and a persistent confrontation with existing dogma.

The 'courage to be' however as Paul Tillich reminds us is no easy feat. It requires a great faith in one's self, in one's deeper self that is buried beneath all that illusion and busy-ness. 'Courage is the affirmation of one's essential nature,' Tillich writes in Courage to Be, 'but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of 'in spite of'. It includes... sacrifice of elements which also belong to one's being but which, if not sacrificed, would prevent us from reaching our actual fulfillment. This sacrifice may include pleasure, happiness, even one's own existence... [I]n the act of courage the most essential part of our being prevails... It is the beauty and goodness of courage that the good and the beautiful are actualized in it.'

The state of busying about (and the according auctioning off of the most essential part of our being) is a sure-fire way to avoid confronting the good and the beautiful. To be sure, our language confuses us at every turn, and joins in on the illusory process. 'Good', 'true', and 'beautiful' are amongst the most abused of words. 'Love', 'God', 'is', too. If perhaps we had a century long moratorium on these words perhaps the space that it would engender would allow us to return to them with some deeper reality of feeling for their essences.

The excessive use of the word 'is' is what caused Robert Anton to shout:

'Is, is, is — the idiocy of the word haunts me'.

Nevertheless, if we can transcend the often contranymic nature of language and get beyond meaning itself, cut down on our busying about, and learn to still the self and simply learn to be, at its most essential level, we might learn to see things as they really 'is'.

Becoming Butterfly

This cold November evening, in the bath, I read a little of a book I picked up today for a couple of quid in the Oxfam bookshop in Byres Road . It's called Chrysalis, and it's written by the Christchurch pastor (no pun intended) Alan Jamieson. In it he lays out the transformation-journey of life and faith using the metaphor of the Monarch butterfly. At the beginning of chapter 3 entitled 'Golden Crucible - cocooning' he writes:

Why do caterpillars stop eating and start weaving the silk anchor point from which their chrysalises will hang? Why, when there are more leaves to eat, do they simply choose to ignore them? What compels them to start shedding the last layer of skin as they hang upside-down - waiting? How do they know that it is time to cease consuming and start creating? How do they design and build their cocoon? And why is it that some caterpillars keep on eating and crawling along their host plant, when others are well into chrysalis formation?

At the age of 42 (a little like Michel de Montaigne who retired at 39 in order to write his essays) I consider myself retired from conventional work. Not because I have made sack-loads of cash and can 'afford' to easily do so. Quite the contrary. I own nothing, and have in my possession very little, of which my 13 year old Cannondale bicycle is probably the most valuable. My lack of appetite for conventional work, and for travelling (my work as an EFL teacher took me to 10 different countries over 15 years), cannot be explained as Jamieson writes 'by looking at the quantity or quality of green leaves available.' Rather, there is something deeper at work, something deeply instinctual if not primordial at the core of this enigma. I find myself whiling the days away quietly and slowly with a profound satisfaction that cannot be described as 'happiness' but simply as 'contentment'. I have always felt, viscerally, that there is a great natural power at work that is much greater than my self but which, paradoxically, is the self.  This is the subject of 'faith' that Jamieson later explores, and which he does not necessarily associate with a supernatural entity like 'God'. As the American theologian Frederick Buechner has said: 'Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and time.'

The problem that many have today is their lack of faith and confidence, not in any conventional and institutionalised deity per se, but in the self, in their self. Too many of us find ourselves second-guessing these deep visceral intuitions if not ignoring them altogether, soon enough finding ourselves completely out of kilter with nature as a whole and as a part. We are, after all, seduced by the inorganic machine, by the consumerist-capitalist ogre that tells us to keep devouring devouring devouring. Many of us, consequently, find ourselves (without being conscious of it) forever eating and crawling along the host plant, unable it would appear to enter chrysalis formation, and subsequently emerge as a butterfly.

I have been thinking a lot of late at how topsy-turvy the world is, how everything seems back-to-front if not completely upside-down. But then, after reading Jamieson's analogy, I realised that I could be seeing it from a different perspective: that it isn't the world that is upside-down, but myself, hanging as I am from the silk anchor point I have woven.

The natural journey however is not for everyone. It involves a lot of work on the self, work that involves loss (of old ways, and identity and learnings), inertia (through stillness, the antithesis of today's anti-contemplative busy society) and rejection (for daring to contraflow and confront existing schemata). Nakedness is not something that is generally appreciated in our society whether it be physical or metaphysical. It is considered at the very least as 'indecent'. But one must endure it if the self is to be finally exposed. We are all born naked, yet all our lives we distance ourselves from this nakedness in frantic busyness, in adorning and clothing the soul and the body. It is worth remembering that all sentient beings are originally and fundamentally buddha. Many miles have to be covered if we are to reconnect with this original state. As Jamieson states however:

It is a journey that many begin but few pursue throughout life. It is not that they give up; they simply set up camp at some point on the journey. They abandon the pilgrimage and become residents: lifelong caterpillars or chrysalises, from which no butterfly ever emerges.

'Physis in Possil Marsh' - July 2012

The Great Buddha of Gilmorehill

Glasgow University Library, a cluster of six vertical elements, is, admittedly, not the most elegant of architectural structures. But then, also with six elements - 4 limbs, a torso and a head - neither, particularly, is the human being. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos (for whom all ornamentation was a crime) used to say that a building was for living in not for looking at. I have come to understand the university library thusly, as a building to be inhabited and not looked at. Once beyond its raw, artex-ed exterior, the library reveals itself as one of the great wonders of the human world. It is for this reason that I sometimes refer to it as The Great Buddha of Gilmorehill: for the wisdom on the inside, and not for an inelegant outside.

Having been constructed between 1965-68 and based on designs by William Whitfield, the library itself is (at the point of writing this in 2013) almost 50 years old. Whitfield's incorporation of independent towers was praised by the Architectural Review for changing the outline of the building 'from that of a lumpish cube to that of a cluster of vertical elements' thereby making a successful contribution to the skyline. Whitfield himself described it as 'a kind of disruptive camouflage' and claimed to have been influenced by the geometrical form of Northumbrian border castles.

Unlike the border castle however, the university library with its various attributes and properties evokes more of a religious aura. With its its light and airy cetacean interior, its 2 million plus books spread across 12 floors, its stunning panoramic views, Glasgow University Library is a virtual cathedral on top of a hill.

It is a sacred place where even the wind sings of its power.

There are some wonderful images and information detailing the construction phase at -
http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/sept2008.html

'Beneath the Cloud of Unkowing'

[From the canal towpath at Firhill, the eccentric library sits off to the right.]

Poetry and Living Lightly

Plain living and high thinking. William Wordsworth, 1802.

Words, words, words. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, c.1601.

Poetry, as Hamlet well knew, has never really been about words, but action. All poetry begins with action. All action begins with the search for one’s self. 'Poetry is an act which engenders new realities,' writes Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life; 'it is the fulfillment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence'.

It is curious to note how few poets (the commercial poets you see on the shelves) live poetically, live 'revolutionarily'. By this, I mean of course lightly and slowly. But then, their poetry isn’t really poetry. When it isn’t metaphoric marmalade or window-dressing, it’s a devilish hubbub of words, words, words, and a curious cleverness that hynotises and mesmerises but never really pares away. Poetry, however, is never about cleverness and clothing. It is a privileged state of being. If anything, it is about undressing and getting to nakedness, slowing down and learning to see and be. It is getting through to the essential energies that our civilization has sought to outsource and cover over. If there is one thing consumerist-capitalism excels at, it is out-sourcing the body’s own wellspring of energy so that it may sell the body its own energy back.

To be sure, there is a Zen aspect to poetry. Indeed, the two may well be mutually inclusive. 'When I raise my hand', says Daisetz Suzuki, 'this is Zen. But when I assert that I have raised my hand, Zen is no more'.

Or equally, the Tao:

The days flow on empty and awake; the doer has vanished into the deed. Poetry as such cannot be said to exist. It is a way of life that expresses itself. In living. 

Real poetry is cutting away that clutter (of assertion, of consumerism and coverings) and getting through to that simplicity-complexity-emptiness of living and being. Half-way poetry (which isn’t a poetry at all but a bastardization of it) runs to ornamentation and adornment.

‘As I grow older,’ said the Scottish-American industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (a man who realized poetry-as-action in his later life), ‘I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.’

There is no other realm so full of hypocrisy than that of poetry. Poets ought to be defined by their behaviour not by what they write and sell. In this way the façade will quickly crumble, and with it, the airs and the graces, and the masks.

O Friend! I know not which way I must look
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,
To think that now our life is only drest
For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,
Or groom!—We must run glittering like a brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest:
The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
This is idolatry; and these we adore:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.

['Written in London. September, 1802', William Wordsworth]

'Plain Living - High Thinking... Above Govan'  (November 2012)

The Bird Path

The man who has exhausted truth is vast and void, and leaves no trace. All things are one’s own making. He who realizes all things as himself is none other than a sage.

Jo Hoshi (A.D. 382-414)

The Slow Flow of Glasgow

Should we not investigate how we listen to streams, how we look at the form of mountains?

Dogen



The rhythm of the hills

the flow

the north glow

that Mistylaw blue

the silhouette moors

the slow flow

of glasgow

this vision of serenity

at least

The Man of Light in Maryhill

As for the sunworld, it is to be reached in the north, through searching for the self.

Prashna Upanishad


Little did I know that 'north' would refer to Maryhill...

Go back in yourself and look: if you do not see yourself as beautiful, then do as the sculptor... he chisels away one part, and levels off another, makes one spot smooth and another clear, until he shows forth a beautiful face on the statue. Like him, remove what is superfluous, straighten what is crooked, clean up what is dark and make it bright, and never stop sculpting your own statue, until this godlike splendor of virtue shines forth to you... If you have become this, and seen it, and become pure and alone with yourself, with nothing now preventing you from becoming one in this way, and have nothing extraneous mixed within yourself... if you see that this is what you have become, then you have become vision. Be confident in yourself: you have already ascended here and now, and no longer need someone to show you the way. Open your eyes and see.  (I 6, 9, 7-24)

Bit by bit, the material sculpture conforms itself to the sculptor's vision. When, however, sculptor and statue are one - when they are both one and the same soul - soon the statue is nothing other than vision itself, and beauty is nothing more than a state of complete simplicity and pure light.

[Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision, translated by Michael Chase]

[Sculpture is in West of Scotland Science Park, Maryhill Road]

Chez Voltaire & Rousseau in Otago Lane

'What thou seest, write in a book...' [Revelations 1:11]

Second-hand bookshops are in some ways the lifeblood of the slow spirit (is there any other kind?). Glasgow has its fair share, and I salute them and their owners who struggle to keep them ticking over. For some it is an end itself I imagine, for the love of it. Profit doesn't come into it. Why should it? I've always thought that when art (and literature) gets mixe up in the pernicious penny-counting of profits, it anihilates itself. Art is a gift, or an exchange. It is not a commodity, not product.

The west-end of Glasgow is particularly fortunate in having several 2nd hand bookshops: Voltaire & Rousseau in Otago Lane (Waterstones it ain't!), Thistle Books (a lane away from V&R), Caledonian Books on Great Western Road just around the corner, and the more florescent well-organised Oxfams on Byres road. These four bookshops are all within the same ward of Glasgow, namely Hillhead, with the first three literally being within book throwing distance of each other.

Whilst browsing in Caledonian Books the other day I overheard the owners blethering away (as is their custom at the far end of the store next to the hearth) about Messieurs V&R : 

'Aye, you need a flask and a climbing rope when you're in there. People have gone missing in that back room.'

It's true that if you're in a rush, or even just looking for something in particular, perhaps V&R is not for you. It's a place to while away a rainy afternoon, to slowly pore over the obscure titles and the ones that you vaguely recall from long long ago.If the truth be told it's like a great mine which occasionally throws up a diamond from its depths. It was here I uncovered a first edition of Guillaume Apollinaire's 'Zone' (translated by Samuel Beckett), and an exquisite cloth-bound edition of R.D. Laing's poetic compendium 'Knots'. You just can't get that on the interweb, that feeling of surprise, of book-nirvana, when you clear away the deposits and finally strike the bedrock.

Just remember your flask and rope - you'll need it to get up there on the high ground.

On Travelling Under Your Own Steam

'The World is us as soon as we learn how to move'. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Whether cycling or walking, there really is no substitute for moving through a landscape under your own steam. It’s not just about those encounters and cometary intrusions along the way, nor the open-ness of the bodymind to the elements, but, intrinsically, it is the symbiosis of planetary movement: of mind (through wonder fostered by the passing land), of body (through the wander itself), and of planet (through its wandering, its ‘planetting’). It is this continuous harmony that engenders a real sense of religion (from the Latin religio, to bind), and the unity that fastens, religions, every thing together.

In a car, everywhere you go, the whole world is an archipelago, each place an island in a void of travel, discontinuous, dislocated, broken up. The world becomes a noun, vehemently, of places. On a bicycle, or on foot, the paths themselves become verbal interconnectings. They become spokenly open. Places seep into each other as you seep into them. The world becomes a verb, of coming and going, moving and homing.

There can be no greater contrast than that of walking or cycling (on car-free paths) and driving. The bicycle versus the car is perhaps one of the more acute examples of the difference between contemplative (organic) and calculative (mechanistic) thinking, and between an open and a closed system.

Understanding this (and thus feeling it) one can come closer to a reciprocal earthly living that is both compassionate and cultivating in the best possible sense, where one both en-joys the world, and is correspondingly en-joyed by it.

It’s the sort of thing that prompted H.G.Wells to write, well before the full wrath of the motor car had descended upon us, ‘Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia’.

And which prompted me to think that you'll never find more exquisite and efficient vehicles than the body or the bicycle.

    Central Station, Glasgow

The Life Expectancy of Inanimate Objects

My Hi-Mountain rucksack finally breathed its last yesterday outside Asda in spite of that nice cobbler in the Savoy Centre the other week fixing the busted zips for free. At least it died a 'natural death', having lived a full 6 years from its purchase in Warsaw back in October 2006. Granted, its last few months were marred with 'rucksackthritis' and the general malaise of old age but it still meant a lot to me. I placed it respectfully into the recycle bin at Asda, said a silent prayer, and transferred my shopping into a plastic bag (that Asda is still not charging for).

All too often the life expectancy of inanimate objects (is anything really 'inanimate'?) is cut short as they are discarded and rejected, abused and neglected, more often than not through simple boredom and the seductive calling of those unscrupulous shopping Sirenes for more more more. These objects are effectively, in being prematurely discarded, buried alive, and cut down in their prime. I, personally, believe that things should decay naturally, to see my t-shirts and rucksacks fall off of me before I allow another my company. Vanity and narcissism, however, are big business, and sometimes with all the bombardment that we receive (Satan comes in many guises) it's difficult to resist. We allow ourselves to be convinced that it's worth it, and therein lies the fall.

Clothes shopping (its seduction and manipulation of man, woman and now child) is the great disease of the modern world encouraging waste and a frivolous (if not completely pathologic) attitude towards these things that help us on our way (and by extension to the people who manufacture and sell them). The ramifications of this blase attitude (that is, if your brain is still capable of joining the dots) is sweat shops, child exploitation, and nothing short of modern day slavery. In other words, our unbridled consumption of things that, let's face it, we simply do not need, (how many pairs of shoes or bags does one actually need?), effects our complicity within the exploitation of not just our own kind but myriad species that co-exist alongside us through the exploitation of their habitat. This is effectively the double-standard of the society we live in. On the one hand we proclaim ourselves 'civilized' whilst on the other we 'rape' and 'pillage' for the sake of profit. Yet our cavalier attitude prevails because at every turn it is simply encouraged, even demanded. If you look like a tramp, then you are obviously less of a human being, maybe a sociopath. Clothes, after all, maketh the man, no? Perhaps more significantly, though less obviously to the brainwashed ignoramuses with closets full of clothes, the flipside of this encouragement of 'having' is the discouragement of simply 'being'. 'Cultivation runs to simplicity' wrote the philosopher-martial artist Bruce Lee in his Tao of Jeet Kune Do, 'half-way cultivation runs to ornamentation and adornment.'

At the moment, 25th November, I am appalled at the radio presenters (Classic FM) already talking about Christmas shopping as if it were a vital necessity that they could not live without. But then, most of these radio stations will readily sell themselves out to the highest bidder. Just listen (really listen!) to some of the adverts out there, which are not only becoming more regular and rapacious, but more offensive to the simplicity of 'being'. It's a pandemic, a clear-cut case of  'incitement to metaphysical hatred' that is so deviously concealed beneath jingles and fake smiles that no-one has the slightest clue of the deeper goings-on. And yet part of us can't help but know it, yet we just go along with it, with the burden of convention upon us, go with the frivolous flow like dead fish.

I can recall not so long ago watching the exquisite production of the life of Francis of Assisi, Brother Sun Sister Moon, by Franco Zefferelli. It is simply a wonderful film that everyone should watch at some point in their lives (preferably when they're younger) and pay close attention to. There is a scene not far into the film when Francis, having returned from war (and seen through the darkness of greed into the light of simplicity), realizes how spendthrift and wasteful his father is. In a moment of sheer being (some might say impetuousness) he gathers his father's damask robes and begins to hurl them from the window of the belltower. He then strips off his own clothes and goes out into the square, naked, to be taunted by the villagers and beaten by his father. Naturally, the people think him mad and request that the bishop (who himself is adorned with so much cloth and bling that he has to be carried) do something about it. It's a very telling scene that has a deep resonance today, and which, sadly, will continue to do so until we realize the intrinsic value of being over the extrinsic value of having. The sparrows that we so associate with St. Francis are themselves metaphors of this ethereal 'living lightly'.

A wise man once said that all sin is simply that which is unnecessary. Is it not about time you seriously asked yourself: do I actually need this? Is it a matter of life and death, or am I simply being carried away by the song of the Sirenes into that dark land of having and heaviness?

  
   5.8.2005 - 26.10. 2009  R.I.P

A Fine Winter

There's nothing quite like a good winter. By 'good', naturally, I mean long, snow-bound, and very cold. Three years in Warsaw soon brings you round to the idea of a real winter. Unlike the Poles however, the Scots always moan about it, as if they could never see it coming. It is I suppose, living on the west coast as we Glaswegians do, our prerogative to moan and whine. It's the wind you see (something that was conspicuous by its absence in Warsaw) that communicates through us! The Glaswegian winter of 2009-10 was particularly fine and gave way to crystalline skies with a sunlight that shot right through to the core.

Cold?
No.

Sublime?
Yes.

A damn fine winter!



All things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must surely be part of the original frame of the universe. Henry David Thoreau, A Winter Walk

Tranquility in Movement

What appeared to be an empty landscape a few moments ago reveals itself to be buzzing with activity. The blue tits appear from out the trees and flit across the steps in front of me. A couple of wood pigeons come down onto the steps as if to eye me up and scrutinise this silent and still entity. From out of nowehere, a white cat appears at the foot of the stairs. Our gazes interlock. There is a flash of recognition (as if to say 'we come from the same stock'); she slowly climbs the stairs softly, eventually reaching me, whenupon she brushes against me and then disappears.

These entities seem to gravitate towards the self, but it’s just that the self, in tuning in, in expanding outwards, dissolves into them and comes to them. The I then becomes the bird, becomes the water, becomes the cat. Yet, crucially, the bird is still the bird, the water is still the water, and the cat is still the cat. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. The mystery of the universe reveals itself to those who are still (a 'stillness' that does not preclude movement). There is tranquility in movement and movement in tranquility. This is what the Irish poet-philosopher John O Donohue meant when he wrote in Divine Beauty in a chapter entitled 'Towards a Reverence of Approach':

When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us... When we walk on the earth with reverence beauty will decide to trust us... Beauty is mysterious, a slow presence who waits for the ready, expectant heart.

'The Buddha of Immeasurable Light & Life at the bottom of Park Terrace steps'.

The Last Great Apostle of Rugged Individualism

Down by the confluence of the Rivers Kelvin and Clyde (a city is privileged enough to have one river) by the new outlandish Transport Museum (it's far more interesting outside and around it), I come across a solitary giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) standing in the twilight with its branches splayed as if it were Shiva. The whole scene reminds me of the wonderful 1936 film The Petrified Forest with Humphrey Bogart playing a Dillinger-like gangster called Duke and Leslie Howard playing a burnt-out English intellectual who refers to Duke whom he secretly admires as the 'last great apostle of rugged individualism'.

It's a moment of illumination not just for the crepuscular rays that fall upon this giant hogweed's tough but gentle body. This whole area, Pointhouse Quay, and further west with the Grand Harbour Development, has been under redevelopment for the best part of the past decade with obscene amounts of money being spent on buildings whose purpose many are still questioning. In amongst all the destruction, the great granary has fallen as too have many innocent spaces whose purpose (if such a thing can be said) was simply to 'wild out'.

This giant hogweed represents Duke in amidst a petrified forest - the last great apostle of rugged individualism.The hogweed (aka, wild rhubarb, giant cow parsely) along with japanese knotweed is public enemy no.1. Because of its phototoxicity and invasive nature, it is often actively removed in spite of what it brings in terms of beauty. In the UK, the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 makes it an offence to plant or cause giant hogweed to grow in the wild. No doubt, like Duke, this one's days are numbered, as the posse close in.

The cranes of Fairfields Shipyard in Govan can be seen off to the south-west, but they're not a patch on this great hogweed. I like to think of them as 'buddhas' which unlike Duke (who, let's face it, hadn't really attained buddhahood) don't put up a fight when the developers come around.

Which only adds to their mystery and power -