Life is like a tunnel. Granted, it is a rather curious and misshapen tunnel, full of tangential offshoots here and there, but a tunnel nonetheless. If you are fortunate enough to exit the tunnel whilst still alive you will understand what I'm on about. Most, however, will only exit the tunnel upon death.
It is not just for this reason (the vital reminder) that I like to come down here, to the Clyde Tunnel walkway between Linthouse on the south of the river and Whiteinch on the north. But more because the tunnel itself is like a giant cave on whose walls are painted a wide variety of territorial markings. In short, the tunnel is a veritable open gallery for the disenfranchised and the confused, but not entirely capsized.
I have been coming down here, maybe two, three times a year for the best part of my Glasgow life. The tunnel - dank, tenebrous and fetid - has always had that strange ethereal magnetism about it; scary, sure, but aren't all the deepest darkest truths? In all my incursions I have yet to meet any of the taggers who scrawl on these walls; I barely meet anyone save for a lone pedestrian or cyclist going the other way. It is a desolate place, destitute and desertic, but it is primarily because of this that I find myself here. The emptiness of the desert and the nakedness of the destitute can often reveal one's own impoverishment, one's closeness to the bone. That said, there is often a congeniality attached to these tunnels which finds itself scrawled on its walls; a sense of the Glasgow banter, that aggressive, primitive, caveman conviviality that only exists in areas where harshness and community have co-existed side by side, and mutually nourished each other. To be sure, Linthouse/Govan and Whiteinch/Scotstoun are mere shadows of their former selves, but even shadows, on those rare occasions, offer up some light...
Whatever the case, the Clyde Tunnel (The Collide Tonne-L) is a dark Joycean U-bend through the (anti-) poetic bowels of the slow city and, as the limestone nests of Lascaux (or Chauvet) might testify to, a cave of forgotten dreams...
[The following montage of photographs taken over the past decade features both tunnels in all their gloom and glory and is accompanied by the great Jazz Suite No. 2 by Shostakovich. Enjoy!]
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