Hiroshige in Kelvingrove Duck Pond

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a 30 acre landscaped garden near Dumfries designed by Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie. Its cosmic dimension comes from its landscaping themes on black holes and fractals, and elegant scientific equations built in to natural features.

In the accompanying book of the same title which I came across in GoMA library today, there is a short passage under the chapter heading The Poetics of Going Slow, which reads:

Renaissance garden designers, following ideas developed in the seminal Villa Medici at Fiesole, noted the importance of slow perception. A landscape garden should not be a place through which one races on the way to go somewhere else, but rather a place of imaginative exploration.

The question here is -

Is the city, in this case Glasgow, not its own landscaped garden, and its own constellation?

'Garden of Cosmic Speculation'

An Album of the City's Adolescence

Map me no maps, sir: my head is a map, a map of the whole world. Henry Fielding




Nothing flows quite so slowly as a map...

On the walls of my kitchen I have several of Glasgow:


Timothy Pont's  General Map of the Clyde Area, c.1596.

James Colquhoun's First 'Portrait' of Glasgow, c.1641.

Joan Blaeu's 1654 Praefectura Renfroana (The Barony of Renfrew), a representation of Timothy Pont's earlier map.

Thomas Richardson,  Map of the Town of Glasgow and Country Seven Miles Around, 1795.

Edward Meiklehame, Map of Glasgow 10 Miles Round, 1852.

Hugh McDonald's concentric map of Greater Glasgow c.1852 (which accompanied his Rambles Round Glasgow in the 1850s)

Ordnance Survey 1st Edition 1857-8

Bartholomew Survey Atlas of Scotland, Plan of Glasgow, 1912.

Ordnance Survey 1967

Ordnance Survey 2008


As I cook I travel through time... and space.... a city growing up gradually....

My kitchen, at least its walls, could be seen, then, as something of a wide-angled metropolitan mural, that is, a map which travels through (and charts) the 'growing up' and transformation of the city over the course of several centuries. Call it an album of the city's adolescence... (stained in places with spaghetti).

 

James Colquhoun, First 'Portrait of Glasgow, 1641.

Thomas Richardson,  Map of the Town of Glasgow and Country Seven Miles Around, 1795.

Edward Meiklehame, Map of Glasgow 10 Miles Round, 1852.

Ordnance Survey County Series Lanarkshire, Glasgow, 1858. 

Bartholomew Survey Atlas of Scotland, Plan of Glasgow, 1912.

OS Map Glasgow 2008

La Lenteur

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.  Thomas Merton


In the opening chapter of Milan Kundera`s novella La Lenteur (Slowness) he describes in philosophic detail the ecstasy of driving a car:

"I am driving, and in the rearview mirror I notice a car behind me. The small left light is blinking, and the whole car emits waves of impatience. The driver is watching for the chance to pass me; he is watching for the moment the way a hawk watches for a sparrow... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words he is in a state of ecstasy. In that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed upon man... Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?"

The ecstasy...

and the agony.

Spacing Out on Pacific Quay

Science without conscience is the soul's perdition. Francois Rabelais, Pantagruel

It is poetry which recreates lost paradises; science and technology alone are not enough. M. François

Pacific Quay in Glasgow is a rather pacific place to space out, listen to the river, and watch the slow-flowing Kilpatrick hills melt away to the north-west. It's a place of poetry, of process and flow...

But it is also, thanks to the Science Centre and the new BBC studios, a place of science and media...

Science:  from Latin scientia "knowledge," scire "to know," related to scindere "to cut, divide," (cf. Greek skhizein "to split, rend, cleave").

Medium: substance through which something is conveyed -

Where the scientist looks out the poet looks in.

Poetry:   from Greek poesis "composition, poetry," from poein, poiein "to make or compose"

Compose: from com- "with" + poser "to place,"

The scientist: science, media

The poet: con-science...immedia...

Observer and observed are inextricably bound

conscientiously 

immediately

like wings on a gull.

'Poetry Vanquishing Science on Pacific Quay'  

[The science tower, which stands on these steps, has been fraught with problems since its inauguration and is now shabbily cordoned off with the whole area beginning to show signs of 'poetic' decay. The gulls however, having been evicted from their flotilla on the neighbouring cantin basin (the flotilla was used as a training module for the emergency services but has now been removed), have made it their new chill-out site! Note the art deco 'spinster flats' of Crathie Court (completed in 1952) in the background contrasting nicely against the 'steel barn' in front of it, the outlandish new Museum of Transport (completed in 2012) designed by Zaha Hadid].

Kensho in Kinning Park

Value is perishing from the earth because no-one cares to fight down to it beneath the glowing surfaces so attractive to all. Der Weg stirbt.   

Charles Olson, Human Universe


There are no parts. 

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life 

One of the great problems of today is that people take things too literally...

...take too much at (sur) face value...

accept the glowing surfaces

'refuse to fight down to it' -

into the tangled root system.

Nothing exists a priori.

There are no parts.


Excavate the self. Fight down to it.

Become nothing...

no... thing...

Fight
down
to
it...


... Die seele erwacht. 

Illuminations in the Bluebell Woods

No I ain't doin' much, doin' nothing means a lot to me....  

AC/DC, Down Payment Blues


Man is the only animal that has to work. 

Immanuel Kant


Now we know as the result of work which Fabre first published in 1853 that in fact doing nothing is quite an important animal activity.

Jacob Bronowski, the Origins of Knowledge & Imagination

Whilst reading Jacob Bronowski's The Origins of Knowledge & Imagination this evening in the bath (the bath and the bicycle are vehicles of revelation!) I was a little perturbed to see how often he used the words 'advantage' and 'gift' to describe how man had evolutionarily distanced himself from (ascended beyond) that state of the animal... To be sure, Bronowski still believed man, at the fundamental level, to be animal  but it was the implication through these particular words that somehow man was superior, or at the very least privileged to be in such a state. He even went as far to commend man on his 'foresight' which he stated was one of the defining characteristics that led man to this exalted (one might even say transcendent) position beyond the animal.

Whilst walking through Garscadden Wood (the ancient 'bluebell woods' demarcating Bearsden from Drumchapel) this fine April afternoon, my companion asked me what I did all day (when I wasn't employed abroad as a Teacher of English as a foreign language). Of course he had some idea but he wanted me to lay it out for him.... The idea, let alone the practice, of doing nothing all day, every day, is, quite rightly for many, perplexing, if not downright alarming!

I laid out the rhythm of the day: writing, reading, walking, cycling, bathing, the occasional painting... and told him that the days passed often without my noticing. This, I told him, was my 'doing nothing'....

'But that's not nothing', one might have retorted. 'I know', I would have said. 'But to many, who correlate 'work' with 'paid employ', it is'. 

I might have added that, furthermore, since I am not at the beck and call of some puppetmaster (who, albeit inadvertently, solidifies one's liquid rhythm of being into a concrete 'making a living'), this 'doing nothing' (which is not doing nothing at all) is at least a type of listening and singing - call it a spontaneous breathing in and breathing out - on a more expansive-dissipative scale. A song of the self let's say, and its great web.

Many, however, and quite tragically, are pre-vented (their wind has been taken from them) from tuning into their song. 'Work' and obligation, (the self has been committed), interfere with and dis-attract the self from its true commitment, from the beautiful truth of emptiness. The idea of metaphysics (and lightness) appears almost repulsive. One no longer dissipates and inter-acts but accumulates and does. Diversion and a horror vacui, benchmarks of the modern culture of clutter, are the dark beacons to which many, if not most, people are attracted.

Perhaps it is confusing to use the terms 'work' and 'doing nothing'. Work for many has ceased to become work, instead becoming toil and coarse superfluous labour. This extraneous rock-breaking is, furthermore, and contrary to what we might think, not at all devoid of meaning, rather, its meaning is at complete odds with who we are quintessentially as universal and divinely immanent (and empty) beings. It is this toil (and our effecting it) that causes tremendous existential angst, for we cannot see our own place within it. It pushes us into a corner, and estranges the self from itself. It is effectively work that is irrelevant (that does not lighten, from the Latin 'relevare'), that does not nourish, and does not dignify; it is a soil that dehumanizes (takes the humus right out of us) instead of universalizing. Unlike the ancient soil here in the bluebell woods of Drumchapel perennially pushing forth a mysterious green chaos, the soil of the seduced self has been run down to the point where nothing really grows upon it at all, and if it does, it is so ordered and 'logical' that the mystery of it all is nowhere to be seen.

This is where I disagree - at the root level - with Bronowski's sentiments. Man does not have foresight. One could even go so far as to say that he doesn't even possess the gift of sight. What man does have is a particularly limited if not a wholly selective type of seeing, one which actually verges on a deep-seated blindness. The particular brand of foresight that Bronowski champions is not a blessing as he makes out, but in fact a curse. It has thus led man out of nature and into the machine with disastrous consequences for both 'man' and animal. If man could simply see, (the doors of perception cleansed), all his problems would be solved. His wind would return, his soil would nourish, and with it, ineluctably, would come his song.

In order to regain his sight, and perhaps even to transcend it and welcome vision, man needs to stop committing the self to obligation. He needs to stop kneeling before false economic idols and a conventional status quo that relies on second-hand thinking, and which piles upon the self so much clutter that the divine oracle within all of us is almost permanently silenced. In short, man needs to make work relevant. When this occurs, work, in turn, will make man relevant. As Bronowski said to two thousand children as part of a United Nations address... '[Y]ou are going to have to stop listening to your parents....'

The result of all this will be a mind which is 'belligerent, contrary, questioning, challenging...' Work will then find man, uncover and discover him from beneath all that heaviness. With his soil now nourished, and his humus returned, man will begin to grow and flourish like the delicate (yet hardy) bluebell throughout these woods. It will only be a matter of time before the wind ventilates him once again.

Man will thus become animal. For no animal has ever had to toil.

Doing nothing is quite an important animal activity

A red fox on Camstradden Road next to Garscadden Wood.

Looking north along Peel Glen Road. The Romans built a fort here at the most elevated point as part of the Antonine Wall's fortifications. Just to the right is Garscadden Wood, part of the ancient woodland that, once upon a time, covered most of this land.

Being There

In Hal Ashby's film of Jerzy Kosinski's novella (I came across it today in Hillhead Library) and screenplay Being There, Chance the gardener (played impeccably by Peter Sellers) is quickly evicted by unscrupulous lawyers, when the old man dies, from the big house where he has lived all his life as the gardener. He suddenly finds himself outside the high-walled garden and the even higher-walled brownstone house in Washington D.C. which has up until now been his world.

We watch amusingly as the simple and socially inept Chance (everything he knows he has learned from television and his garden) makes his way through the streets of late 70s Washington to the sound of Deodato's funk version of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. The music is strangely appropriate.

Within hours of setting foot outside he is fortuitously taken in by a wealthy industrialist whose chauffeur inadvertently hits him with his car. Within days, Chance's simplicity and slowness (words that have, sadly, in a world obsessed with speed and sophistication, become pejorative terms) are (mis)taken for profundity, which in a way, emulating the deep-rooted plants he once tended, they are. Some days later, Chance, through having been introduced to the President through the wealthy industrialist receives a presidential nomination. His frugality of form and austerity of speech (in short, his naturalness) have led him to what is considered the most powerful post in the world. Passing through a gauntlet of paparazzi in the hallway of the big house where he now lives, Chance goes out into the (Edenic) garden where he is caressed by a gentle breeze. He sees the fresh shoots and slender stems of taut branches, and listens to the wind whisper through the bushes. 'Not a thought lifted itself from Chance's brain. Peace filled his chest.'

The film version's coda sees Chance in a more overt pose, taking the most direct route to a drowned tree, and walking across the water of the pond. This is the same peace as we find in Chance's chest at the end of the novella, though now it is televisual. He is the master of his self.

It is no coincidence that the names Chance and Christ share a similarity. Christ's walking on water was a metaphor for levity and living lightly. Like the birds in the sky, they had escaped karma and the cycle of birth/rebirth through a genuine forgiveness forged out of simplicity and slowness. Chance, in his naturalness, left no trace, and his footsteps left no mark. He walks on water because his un-captive mind does not profess to know....

It is curious to note that this was Sellers' last performance (if you can excuse his appearance in The Bride of Fu Manchu the folowing year) before dying at the tender age of 54. When he was offered the part of Chance, Sellers immediately knew what he was up against:

Most actors want to play 'Othello', but all I've really wanted to play is Chance the Gardener. I feel what the character, the story is all about is not merely the triumph of a simple man, an illiterate. It's God's message again that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Perhaps the paradox of the novella/film is that in being 'not all there' (in being 'unworlded', in not conforming to the rush and roar of progress, and to the coded constructs of a topsy-turvy society) you are in truth 'all there'...

A 'down-to-earth' philosophy leads Chance to new heights...

Slow Boat to China (via Possil)

[Forth & Clyde Canal, Firhill Basin, 2.9.2012]

Bank of Earth

'Success' is lying on a bench all day and not feeling guilty about it.

The word bench derives from the proto-Germanic word "bankiz" referring to a 'man-made earthwork' or a 'bank of earth'. In my years of living (and not living) in Glasgow, I have come to discover many of these earthen banks, some of which are not so much earthy as woody or irony. Occasionally, a bench is so finely integrated into the environment that it is easy to miss it. But when you spend as much time as I do cutting about the city, on foot, and by bike, you start seeing benches in the most concealed of places. 'The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot', the German filmmaker Werner Herzog once said. And for many a weary traveller, these well-positioned benches, (doubling as perches for the poet inside), are an important part of this world.

[Top: Bench by the River Kelvin in the arboretum at Kirklee... 10th October, 2012 ]

[Middle: A 'bank of earth' in Bothwell Wood, by the evergreen River Clyde... 1st March 2013]

[Bottom: One of the many benches of serenity in the Fossil Grove, Victoria Park... 18th February, 2013]

The Slow Train to Arisaig

'Only long miles of strangeness can lead us to our home'. Kenneth White


Everything is connected, that much we know. And 'Glasgow', as an autopoietic entity in its own right - living, breathing, evolving, self-organizing - is no different. Its paths and roads, tracks and tributaries, lead us out into a wider Glasgow that, depending on where you go, physically - metaphysically, can come to encompass the whole cosmos. Whether the self or the city, entities are never confined to the boundaries of their epidermal envelopes...

The train from Glasgow Queen Street to Mallaig on the north-west coast some 200 miles distant is one of the great train journeys of the world. The scenery is stunning: mountains, bridges, lochs and gorges... the occasional golden eagle. The train itself, this late February morning is practically empty. I feel like royalty, royalty that has paid a mere fifteen notes each way for this utter privilege. My only 'complaint' is that I hadn't done it sooner. The short cycle along the river to the station from my Glasgow flat took ten minutes. The downhill glide from Arisaig station (2 stops shy of Mallaig) to my lodgings took about two. The slow train to Arisaig, though it may have taken 5 hours, was in truth infinite: 'in-finite' as unfinished, these trips do not simply vanish once 'completed', they live within you forever, invariably growing with power after the fact.

Having travelled the world several times over, I now realise the power of my own native land. It has taken some time and some miles, but finally the stranger has come home.

Portnadoran, just round the corner from Arisaig.

'How much do you think this bay is worth?' asks the American businessman in Local Hero (part of the film was shot on these shores). To which Fulton McKay (the man who lives and works on the beach, the local hero) just laughs.

Back of Keppoch, a 5 minute cycle from Arisaig, with a view of the Cuillin Range on Skye, and the washing-line (are they prayer flags?).

 The woods of Rhu...

 Looking over the bay to Arisaig from Rhu.

From the frozen shore at Arisaig looking across to Eigg and Rum.

Earth-turn from Arisaig...

Ken & Hermann

Ken the cormorant, basking by the Clyde at Braehead (with Kirkton and Kingsway Flats in the background)

Hermann the heron by the canal between Lock 26 & Cleveden Road.

Ferry Meditations

'Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?'

Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse


'Few of us know the river's source...'  

Memories of Silver River, Kenneth White

This incalescent February afternoon, as I hop onto the Renfrew-Yoker 'ferry' (now more of a raft) I make a point of remarking to the youthful ferryman of the beauty of the river. 'Aye, but there's few folk that know it,' he replies. To be sure, today, mid-February, it's wall to wall sunshine. There is a windlessness that renders everything clear and crisp, and quickly beautiful. Sounds hang in the air like vapour trails. 

Enlightened by this warm February sunshine, what can often be confused as Charon carrying his passengers across the River Styx is now the quiet and wise Vasudeva plowing the gentle waters of the upper Ganges.

There's nothing quite like crossing a river by boat. It's a real meditative experience, where one can (especially here with the Kilpatrick Hills in the distance) space out and extemporize the self, and tune into the voice of the river. This particular crossing, from Renfrew on the south-side to Yoker on the north, though it probably only takes a few minutes, is actually timeless. It is a real mystical experience, as people like Hesse and White and Whitman only too well knew. 

In Siddhartha by Hesse, the eponymous seeker finally uncovers inner peace and ultimate truth in the river herself. Vasudeva, the ferryman, plying his bamboo raft, remarks to his passenger Siddhartha that to most the river has been 'nothing but a hindrance on their journey...'. That, amongst the thousands he has taken across, 'there have been a few, four or five, to whom the river was not an obstacle,' who 'have heard its voice and listened to it, and the river has become holy to them...' 

The Yoker side of the River Clyde.

'Greater' Glasgow

For most, the idea of a Greater Glasgow is an administrative one and nothing more. For me, for whom administration is a complete anathema, Greater Glasgow refers not to its politics and districts but to its metaphysic enormity, an enormity that transcends any geographies and physical appearances and which instead concentres itself upon the depths of Glasgow as a universal entity. When you understand this sense of 'greatness' (not as merely large but as infinitely profound) you no longer have to go out into the world, the world comes to you. Once rid of administrations and politics - the city/the world (which is also the universe) appears where you are. 

'Take your time and be everywhere you are,' wrote the Irish philosopher John O' Donohue in Divine Beauty. When this happens, greatness occurs. This is fundamental when I speak of a Slow Flow of Glasgow and/or a Greater Glasgow.

A Little Piece of Poland (not far from Faifley)

Every time I pass this quiet little reservoir (Greenland Reservoir No.1, just west of Loch Humphrey in the Kilpatrick Hills) I always think of two places: Thoreau and his little wooden hut on the banks of Walden Pond near Concorde, Massachussets, and the small dystrophic lakes of the Wigry region in north-east Poland. The scene, if the truth be told, with its audience of spruce (z prus, from Prussia), and the gentle dimensions of the pond, is more akin to the latter; Walden Pond in Concorde, after all, is not so much a pond as a sizeable lake, and distastefully decorated with tourists and locals alike.

It may be that because this sheltered little reservoir is 'walled in' that I have been drawn to Thoreau and his 'pond'; that, and the images I had conjured up when I read Walden. Realistically though, and if you can get beyond the artifice of the spruce and fir plantations, Greenland Reservoir No.1 is a little piece of Poland... not far from Faifley.

The Stairway to Heaven

OK, so it's the Loch Humphrey Path (again), but it might as well be called 'The Stairway to Heaven' for its steepness and its culmination in tranquility. In Siddhartha Hermann Hesse speaks of the river's capacity to teach and inform, and to communicate with one's own inner voice. Here, with the hills ('river' in different form) it is no different. And you don't have to be 'in them' in order to hear this voice. I hear it every day from the centre of the city, from the city's many drumlins, through its telescopic streets, from my fourth floor window.

Being up here mid-February, looking across the estuary shimmering in that late winter light, reminds me of a poem by the nomad Scot Kenneth White:

A HIGH BLUE DAY ON SCALPAY

this is the summit of contemplation, and

      no art can touch it

blue, so blue, the far-out archipelago

      and the sea shimmering, shimmering

no art can touch it, the mind can only

      try to become attuned to it

to become quiet and space itself out, to

      become open and still, unworlded

knowing itself in the diamond country, in

      the ultimate unlettered light.

Spacing out on Loch Humphrey...

Living by the River

The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it.

Hermann Hesse 


Be water my friend!

Bruce Lee

The Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova once wrote that her only regret in life were those days that were not spent living by the sea. I know how she felt. There’s something deeply mysterious about the sea, and though I live some 20 miles from it in Govan, I nevertheless have access to the tidal movements of the river right next to me, and the sea’s seaweedy smells. To be sure, there isn’t the vast expanse of emptiness that draws the mind out, and that so inspired Akhmatova’s poetry, but there are ‘insinuations’ that, if carefully attended to, can bring the sea all the way into the city.

One cannot underestimate the power of the river to influence and 'flow in'. Though it might not flow in physically (at least not directly), there is a definite ‘poetic’ in-flow, where the river (if attended to sufficiently) breathes in to you its behaviour and its life. 'To see the behaviour of a living thing', writes Wittgenstrein in one of his more lucid moments, 'is to see its soul'. Thus, in the simple act of apprehending the river, one becomes more riverine as a result.

‘The river is the greatest teacher,’ proclaims the ferryman Vasuveda to the young, as of yet unenlightened Siddartha, in the novel by Hermann Hesse, for he knows, this ferryman, that our prior condition is ‘river’. 'Is not the body its own molded river?' asks the young German poet Novalis. In this sense, to deny (or to allow ourselves to forget) this original riverine essence is sufficient case for regret.

A rare glimpse of a Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud formation from Lancefield Quay.   [11th February, 2013]

The Zone

What guides poetic thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization.

Hannah Arendt


There are no ruined stones...

Hugh McDiarmid



Every city, (every self), has a Tarkovskian element to it -

Let's call it 'the strange majesty of Nature

                         reclaiming its territory'-

'Growth

           not opposed

to decay...'

 Flooded underpass, Cowcaddens.

St. Peter's Seminary, Cardross

The A-listed and very derelict Prince's Graving Docks in Govan (with all the shiny new stuff behind it)

'Interstice' (Between Anderston and the river)

'Spare Ground' (Brand Street, Cessnock)

The Bucolic John Knox

No "slow flow of Glasgow" would be complete without a few paintings by the Paisley-born landscape artist John Knox (1778-1845). His works (a few of which can be seen in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery) include several pastoral landscapes of the Clyde estuary which give us some idea of how things have changed (or not) in this area in the interim two hundred years since they were painted. Other notable paintings by Knox include two views from the summit of Ben Lomond (both in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery), and 'The First Steamboat on the Clyde' (c.1820).

Knox was heavily influenced by the style of another Scot, Alexander Nasmyth, who was 20 years older and who, along with his family, was amongst the first exponents of Scottish landscape painting during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Knox and his pupil Horatio McCulloch continued this tradition during the mid to late 19th century, with McCulloch later becoming the acknowledged master of the archetypal Highland landscape. This was the 'slow' Scotland that became a magnet for tourists from all over the world, and artists such as Turner, Landseer, and Arthur Perigal Jr.

Below are some of Knox's bucolic views and sylvan settings juxtaposed against photographs from the present day.

(Above) View of the Clyde, c.1820

(Below) View of the Clyde from Faifley & Duntocher c.1825

  

The Rebirth of Metaphysics

Education cannot help us as long as it accords no place to metaphysics… Education can only help us if it produces ‘whole men.’ E.F. Schumacher

Be still and know. Psalm 46:10


The practice of ‘being slow’ is the practice of becoming whole again; in effect, being slow (or equally, slow being) is to resuscitate the right hemisphere of the brain and break free of what Goethe called ‘the gloom of the empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber’ (mechanistic and quantative thinking, and too much left-braining). By this, I mean that, through the process of slowing down (of un-busying one’s self) and inviting a more synthetic-meditative (and less analytic-fragmentive) outlook of self and world, one begins to apprehend (and synthesise) one’s universal relations more clearly, thus, effectively, instituting one’s route to health and wholeness.

Within an anti-contemplative (and picnoleptic) society that predicates itself on ‘keeping busy’ and whose economic mantra is ‘growth for growth’s sake’, there really is no route to health that does not exploit nature and/or man’s wholeness as integration into (and harmonization with) this nature. Indeed, our growth-economy (when it doesn’t demand it) requires dis-integration from, and fragmentation of, nature in order to ‘work’.  Our education system itself appears to be nothing more than the systematic outfitting of the mindset required to deal efficiently with this scenario. As E.F. Schumacher remarks in Small is Beautiful:
 

Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as man’s greatest resoucrce, will then be an agent of destruction, in accordance with the principle corruptio optimi pessima.

Metaphysics, as the art of being still and allowing that stillness to inform (through a process of in-sourcing, in-forming, and refining) stands at complete odds with a society whose very economic heartbeat demands out-sourcing and ex-forming (in-forming and de-fining you from the outside). Metaphysics, then, is the difference between original thinking/original living and second-hand thinking/second-hand living. By 'original' I mean not that it hasn't been done before but that it originates from within. In welcoming Metaphysics (born of a 'religious slowness' that allows us to see things 'as they are'), we may proclaim Freedom. A state of freedom where our thoughts are our own, where our journeys have been made under our own steam, and where our central convictions have been forged within the heart's own fire.

Until then, until that point where we begin to think on our own two feet (left and right), we shall have to make do with our ignorance, and our loneliness, and our lack of comprehension of the self’s universal relations.

'Relatives are Universal'   [Sculpted epitaph at the entrance to SECC, Finnieston]

How to Change the World through Being Slow

Man is not himself only, he is all that he sees, all that flows to him from a thousand sources, he is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys. Mary Austin

The body is the world. Alan Watts


'Slowness' as a term to describe a way of being-in-the-world is perhaps confusing. It implies being 'slow', but what is 'being slow'? How does one actually be slow? What is 'slow'?

Fundamentally, 'being slow', if anything, is about denying the dictates of 'modern life', about renouncing 'ambition' and the pressure of 'doing'. It is about stepping outside of a manufactured time whilst embracing the freedom of Time as a whole. It is about allowing one's natural rhythms to shine through whilst allowing the seasons to penetrate. And  allowing one's own trajective energy (walking as opposed to driving for example) to body one forth. Being slow is about allowing oneself the essential space and time to cultivate a mind clear enough to see through the illusions of the ruling modes of thought. Being slow, then, is thus a 'coming to one's senses', and a re-evaluation of what it means to be human, and to world.

No longer hostage to the rush and roar of speed, one begins to see things afresh and to re-cognize connections that had hitherto passed one by. This process of re-cognition, enabled through our new-found slowness, is vital to the blossoming of the self into its matrix of relations.

Being slow then becomes a process of revitalising oneself and becoming healthy again; it is about 'knowing with again' (re-co-gnize), and recognizing that 'The ‘with’ is not just a mode of being-in-the-world, but our transcendental condition' [Jean-Luc Nancy]; it is about reinserting the self into its greater natural matrix from which it has been unnaturally extracted. 'Civilization,' Freud reminds us, 'has arisen out of the renunciation of instinct, the gaining of control over the forces of nature, and the building of a cultural superego'.

Being slow is about re-evaluating what it means not just to be human, but to be individual as 'undivided' and not as 'atomised'. It is culture true and pure, about realizing one's self as part of Nature and not apart from it.

In cultivating this clarity, we slowly begin to see the self as a flowing open system whose tenuous envelope of skin and bone is not so much a barrier as an invitation. 'Inner and outer' as a concept no longer makes sense. 'Electrically and chemically', the biologist John Bliebtreu announces, 'the world moves right through us as though we were made of mist'.

World and self merge. Synergies abound.

Through the process of being slow, the organism becomes more intimately integrated with its environment. Nature becomes one as one becomes Nature. And one is naturally drawn to nature through being slow and undistracted. One's self-interest naturally expands to encompass that of the environment, and, by extension, further beyond.

It is like this that by changing one's self, and by 'slowing' down, one changes the world...

Magpie Meet

The annual magpie meet, almost a sort of 'lek' in itself, takes place on the city's pedestals: the aerials and the chimneys, the satellite dishes and the treetops. This morning, some 9 magpies (it could've been 10), ventured forth onto the aerials and rooftop opposite my kitchen window. The crows came in too (there's a family of four or five that lives just round the corner) to offer some counsel for the forthcoming spring. It's difficult to tell what exactly is going on (in spite of my corvid brain), but I get the feeling that it is territorial, and there is some kind of demarcation of space for the upcoming season of mating, nesting and the rest. There is never any physical contact between the crows and magpies in spite of their vociferous to-ing and fro-ing, but the energy in this open-air council meeting is unmistakeable. Almost as quickly as it began, five minutes later (why can't all meetings be like this?), they disperse, crows first, then soon after, the magpies, fluttering away, presumably (though I have learned not to presume too much with these creatures) to implement the minutes.

'Magpie Telegraph'

                                                                'Council Meeting'

The Birds of Glasgow

The City of Glasgow did not have a Coat of Arms until the middle of the 19th century. The Lord Lyon King at Arms gave approval for one to be adopted in 1866, which incorporated a number of symbols and emblems that were assocciated with the legends surrounding St. Mungo, namely bird, tree, bell, and fish.

The bird commemorates a wild robin that St. Serf, Mungo's old master, tamed, and which would eat food out of the Saint's hand. When Serf recited the Psalms the little robin would perch on Serf's shoulder and flap his wings.

The robin was allegedly killed by Mungo's 'classmates' who blamed Mungo whom they considered something of a 'swot' and 'teacher's pet'. When Serf confronted Mungo with the dead bird, Mungo took the robin in his hands and prayed over it, whenupon it was restored to life and flew chirping to its Serf. 

If you go down to Fairlie (not far from Largs), to the Parish Church there, you will see a stained glass window of Mungo (aka. Kentigern) reading to the gulls on the shore. It's a wonderful depiction of inter-species communication and of the self integrating itself into its wider domain. Mungo (Kentigern) wasn't the only saint to be associated with birds. There was St. Columba and the heron, the wren nesting in the cloak of St. Malo, St. Werburga and the goose, and of course St. Francis and the sparrows. 

Whether real or not, these stories (or parables) reveal the lightness of the saints in question, their lightness of living, of heart, of spirit, the capacity to elevate their selves above the grim reality of mere survival. Birds were so highly regarded in certain cultures (Egyptian, Persian, Mayan, Greek and Roman) that it was thought that they could traverse between the two realms of heaven and earth. The Romans even named hell after its birdlessness. They called the watery entrance to the Underworld Avernus (from Greek, a-ornus meaning 'without bird'), thus a tenebrous place without soul, heart or light. 

It is thus that birds (of any city) bring it one step closer to heaven on earth...

THE BIRDS OF GLASGOW

Bird by bird I have come to know the earth. Pablo Neruda

Ubi aves, ibi angeli (Where there are birds there are angels). St. Thomas Aquinas



The pigeons of George Square

       The starlings of Asda Ibrox

                The gulls of Govan Cross


are all primally Glaswegian -


   The Yoker swans

          The Kelvin herons

                 The blackbirds of those interstitial spaces -

are all fundamentally seasoned

by this west-coast air.


An understanding of these birds,

    The geese of Glasgow Green

           The falcons of Finnieston

                The crows of supermarket car-parks

The magpies!

is crucial to my understanding of Glasgow -


the visiting redwings

the elusive waxwings

the whooper swans

and pink-feeted geese

crucial

to my understanding of world -

Herring gulls, lesser black-backed gulls and the odd cormorant on a flotilla (now sadly gone) in the Govan canting basin by the Science Centre.

Swans crossing at Renfrew.

'The Cannondale - the birds love it!'    [Serf's robin in Kelvingrove Park].

Chimneyed blackbird, Scotstoun.

The Telescopic City

I have always known Glasgow to be a hilly city. I was, before all, educated on two hills: Camphill in Langside and Garnethill in the centre itself. I had to climb one of Glasgow’s  steepest streets (Scott Street, gradient 1:5) every morning, five days a week, to get to school. From my art class window in the appropriately named Hill Street, the solid outline of the Campsie Fells provided all the art that was necessary.

 From Garnethill looking north to the Camspie Fells.

Within Glasgow the hills are many (Glasgow is something of a hill-strewn hollow, masses of moraine and glacial deposits rising up as drumlins):

Scotstounhill - Jordanhill - Maryhill

Partickhill - Gilmorehill - Ruchill

Lambhill - Balgrayhill - Stobhill

Firhill - Sighthill - Petershill

Blackhill - Cranhill - Sandyhills

Simshill - Priesthill - Nitshill

Crosshill - Govanhill -

Mounts Florida and Vernon -

to name but a few...


Their streets are like telescopes drawing us into the distance.

The streets, too, of the city centre combine to make something of a San Fran Glasgow (Alas! without the trams) -

Scott Street - Pitt Street - Douglas Street
Wellington Street - Hope Street - Renfield Street
Bath Street - West George Street - St. Vincent Street

Montrose Street - North Portland Street

The sloping city, stuck onto the side of a hill.

 North Portland Street


To say nothing of the old favourites further out, streets whose pavements boast bannisters:

Cleveden Road
Gardner Street
Clarence Drive

The city's slender curves meet us at the end of every street. From the top of  Buchanan Street we are propelled into the hinterland behind Eaglesham (a bit like Rudolph Hess in 1941 when his plane came down at Floors Farm) and the hill of Dunwan, (thought at some point to be an extant Iron Age hill fort, but now thought more of as a ‘prestige homestead’ from some time during the 1st millennium AD). From Byres Road, (Glasgow’s second busiest thoroughfare after Buchanan Street), looking south, we are shot into the inimitable Mohawk of Neilston Pad some 20km away, its conifer comb-over striking a rare pose. From Crow Road, it’s the sheer-faced ‘Craigie’, Duncarnock Mount, behind Barrhead, upon which a sermon is given every Easter Sunday, one hopes to the hills themselves. From Great Western Road, looking west, it’s the Kilpatrick Hills, and from Lincoln Avenue, looking north, it’s the asymmetrical mound of Carneddans Wood on the eastern corner of the Kilpatricks.

From practically every north-south street on the south side of the city, it’s the Campsies and Kilpatricks that gently rear up in front of you. And looking west, it’s the Kilpatricks again, and/or the serene misshapen slopes of the hills of Kilmacolm and Inverclyde, Queenside Muir and Duchal Moor. The importance of this horizon aspect, this clawing curvature, cannot be underestimated for its capacity to lead one out and to 'educate'.

Looking down the barrel of Buchanan Street into the Renfrewshire Hills beyond.

Looking south on Byres Road towards the inimitable mohawk of Neilston Pad some 10km distant.

Looking north along Armadale Street in Dennistoun into the Cathkin Braes beyond.

Looking west from Kent Road outside the Mitchell Library to Mistylaw and Queenside Hill.

The aptly named Rose Street, a street with hills at both ends... and an art house cinema.

Rose Street looking north.

The Great Western Road looking west towards the Kilpatrick Hills.

From Barrhead train station looking north to the Kilpatrick Hills and its highest point, the dome of Duncolm.

The avenue that started it all: Lincoln Avenue in Scotstounhill looking north through Knightswood to Carneddans Wood on the eastern edge of the Kilpatrick Hills.