The Empty City [A Postcard from Kazakhstan]

For the last several years, during the sharp, luminous months of Glasgow's mind - roughly from the end of November to the end of February - when the earth collects the sun's rays at such an angle as to highlight areas of the city hitherto unseen, I have been compiling a photo-poetic volume entitled The Empty City. This emptiness is an allusion to the fact that a city like Glasgow spends much of its time, contrary to popular belief, in a state of emptiness and silence (think of the night-times, those wet and windy days, even the sunny days when people are crammed into their pokey little offices). It's like a desert that, again contrary to conventional wisdom (which of course isn't wisdom at all but mere cleverness), spends most of its time not in boiling temperatures, but, rather, in a state of sub-zero coolness.

Anyway, here at the end of November, I am not even in Glasgow, and yet it resonates across the continents to be with me. The map is not the territory, I am. 

I am in Kazakhstan, teaching.... and learning. And here the light of Central Asia is sharp, and reminds me of the too few days when Glasgow becomes super-still and clear, full-sun-skied. Because of the flatness here, there is little to disrupt the pattern of the weather, so for the last 3 weeks it has been full sun in a full blue, largely windless sky. It has also been around minus fifteen degrees celsius, which if you wrap up and take into consideration the absence of any wind-chill factor, is actually not that cold. Yet, as I am forever telling my students who have been weaned on the wasteful and soporific effects of too much indoor heating, is fantastic for being awake (or if you prefer, awake being).

And so Glasgow is with me, even here. But why shouldn't it be, if, after all, Glasgow, from years of roaming and embedding myself in her hills and moors and buildings, has become me as I it? Glasgow travels as I travel. Glasgow goes where I goes....

And here, across the vastness of the great Eurasian steppe, there is silence and there is emptiness:

"Being and silence belong together." Max Picard

Silence is the soil
in which faith can grow:
faith as openness
faith as con-science.
The reality of silence
is that
silence is reality:
a relief of immediacy
an immediate relief.
The tongue we speak today
is no longer a mother tongue
but an orphaned one,
we mumble and mutter
in a wasteland of words
meaningless patterns, vicious
circles, noise-filled networks
in mere mud-cluttered minds.

Being and silence belong together.

 Ice-fishing on the Ural River.