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