20 miles east of Lyon, in the Rhone-Alpes region of France, is the railway station Satolas TGV. It is a monumental structure in the midst of full country whose expressive cantilevered design has garnered it the moniker The Bird. Its architect, the Spaniard Santiago Calatrava, in describing the railway station, remarks:
Little by little the station dissolves (dematerialises), losing elements, and we gradually prepare for the end of the station, the point where the last element disappears, and from then on you have nothing but emptiness before you.
Moving into the Kilpatrick Hills from the city, I can’t help thinking of Calatrava’s evocative description. The city gradually peters out. The peripheral elements, the suburbs, ‘prepare for the end of the station’. While the elements of the city disappear, the elements of the earth and of the land become more apprehensible. Until the city finally vanishes, and you have nothing but emptiness before you.
The city of Glasgow is stained and steeped in the free-flowing hills that surround it: the Kilpatricks, the Campsies, the Renfrewshire and Inverclyde hills and moors. With these hills goes Glasgow's sense of relations, near and remote, the connection to an influential source. The significance, the value of Glasgow, is all in this exotopic halo that surrounds and escorts it.
The space that these hills harbour is indicative of the space in one’s head. The space is a matter of communication. (The shape of space shapes).
‘[Space] is an entity in its own right, a real live thing in our ontology’, writes Liebniz in his ontology of space and time.
‘Learning space is wisdom, learning wisdom is space’, writes Dogen in his Shōbōgenzō (The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye) sometime in 13th century China.
Though itself a medium, the naturally sculpted space of the Kilpatricks - this strato-volcanic plateau - is largely devoid of any human signs or symbols. It is a remarkable place if only for its sense of isolation and remoteness so close to the city. When the braes are breached and one reaches the plateau of moor and heathland, space extends in all directions. There are signs here and there of the land's glacial past, evidence of great and gradual movements. The space and isolation does not expropriate the entity of self (why would it?) On the contrary, it lets the self be. There is, unlike perhaps down there in the city (where the emphasis shifts from being to buying), no fashioning of an id-entity, no marketing of a packaged and segregated self, and no manufacturing of a little bone-bound island which is so tenuously linked to everything else as to invite almost total solipsism.
Up here, the self is not reflected back.
The city, conversely, is like a great big infinity mirror for the super-id-entity of the ignorant.
Space goes so deep up here that the mind, as the sedated and mediated entity it has become, struggles to grasp it. Much like time, space has become human-centred, domesticated and enclosed. It’s no surprise then that space, as the unbounded entity it is, only ever becomes interesting (to those who are blind towards it) when it’s off-world and fictionalised.
The same could be said of Mind.
It’s this deeper reality that provokes Ronnie Laing, the radical Glasgow psychiatrist, into saying, ‘We are unconscious of our minds. Our minds are not unconscious’.
As well as harbouring ‘wild time’ and ‘wild space’ (and with it a little ‘wild mind’), hills (as opposed, say, to flat land) have another advantage. As forms in three dimensions, we garner authentic vantage points that would otherwise be impossible on a planar territory. In other words, hills offer the possibility of parallax. Through the dimension of height, hills enable the seeing of the land from a variety of angles, and in so doing proffer the realisation of how utterly different things appear when viewed from an alternate vantage point. This possibility of parallax, combined with a subtle psycho-physical indeterminacy, cannot be underestimated for its capacity to en-open and synthesize the self to the All.
Little by little the manufactured identity dissolves, losing elements as it goes, and we gradually prepare for the end of the station, the point where the last element disappears, and from then on you have nothing but emptiness before you.
Looking east from Auchineden (a high land Eden!) towards the Campsie Fells.
Looking east across Loch Humphrey.
From left to right: Little, middle and big Duncolm (the latter the highest elevation in the Kilpatrick Hills)
For more commentary and photographs of these wonderful hills, see my blog Zone which I put together several years ago. (Click on the icon in the sidebar)
No comments:
Post a Comment