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.