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.
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.
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 -
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Unbearable Lightness of Being, Brand Street, Cessnock.
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