City of Infinite Possibility

On a bicycle, the possibilities and permutations are endless; in a car, they are few.

In 1979, the French film director Bertrand Tavernier was asked by Glasgow’s then Lord Provost why he had decided to film his sci-fi thriller, Mort en Direct (Deathwatch), not in the elegant capital Edinburgh, as one might expect, but in the industrially choked, and high-rise pocked Glasgow.

‘Edinburgh is just so very beautiful’, he answered.

Before the Glaswegian retorted, Tavernier added, ‘Glasgow is so much more than just beautiful. It is dramatic, so very dramatic, later enthusing to the Evening Times newspaper, ‘Glasgow is a city of infinite possibilities. I’m amazed that film companies haven’t flocked here over the years’.

I always remember this when I see a humble bicycle being ridden next to fancy cars. That in the society of the spectacle, in the society of the superficial, where surface is king and appearance everything, what lies beneath is what is important.

The real internal combustible engine is, as the word ‘internal’ suggests, inside. Inside, that is, not some fancy car you have to continually break your back in order to pay off and pay for, but inside your own body. Beware of things that promise to make your life easy, for in a spiral universe of profound circularity, sooner or later that ease will lead to dis-ease, and that comfort to discomfort.

On a bicycle, the possibilities and permutations are endless; in a car, they are few.

People Make Glasgow ?

The top-heavy dualism of Glasgow's new logo (People Make Glasgow) has troubled me since its inception a couple of years back...

Indeed, it's this sort of anthropocentredness and one-sidedness that has a subtle impact on the child's outlook, until, cognitively crowbarred enough with it, dualism is all he or she knows, and this idea (if not the practice) of all things engendering each other to various degrees (ultimate reciprocity) becomes something quite kooky and mystical. Of course, as long as we live in a people-heavy environment, and beneath the dualistic-scientistic cloud, we will forever struggle to get our little crowbarred brains around what the Jains call Inter-dependent Co-arising, or what our own native peoples, the Celts, referred to as enmeshment, depicted in the inter-weavings of their Celtic knotwork.

One could argue quite easily that in terms of Glasgow, the glas-chu, the green-grey hollow, the strath-clyde, was initiated not by people, but by geology, by the movement of glaciers, by the flow and course of rivers, in short by the elements and the climate. Glasgow long existed before any people came to it. And the reason it became a Glasgow of people is because of the river, then a small stream, and the Molendinar Burn, where Fergus' bulls stopped to take a drink.

This is the source of Glasgow. And we must respect the source at all times. Because if we don't, we will become lost and confused, and logos will start appearing that contradict the original logos.

and so.... in the spirit of all things collaborating together: people, rivers, hills, geology... a little Celtic knot-work... and a lord in the background with a traffic cone on his head.

Psylocibin & Poetry

Mid-October, overcast,

psylocibin and poetry

psylocibin and psyche:

The act of poetry, the act of painting,

- the act of entering these hills -

is in itself

an altered state of consciousness.

Liberty Cap Mushrooms in the Kilpatrick Hills

Fifty Three Seconds

The title here - 53 seconds - refers to the time it took yesterday to cross the river in the wee raft that plies the sound between Yoker and Renfrew. It's a minute of bliss, though the face of the ferryman may tell you otherwise... on my way from Govan into the hills.

Hills of Attitude (not Altitude)

The title for this blog came from the hills and their 'slow flow', so it seems only fitting that I should honor those hills by attending to them more intimately, more considerately. The result is a set of sketches which I became involved in this summer (2015) [I have been sketching and painting them for the past 3 years but these ones this year seemed more alive]. 

It seemed every time I went into the hills I had to sketch them. It wasn't good enough me finding my own way into their bodies, physically, but metaphysically, I had to express that body. The first half of the day would be spent getting into (impressing myself into) the hill; the second half would be spent expressing it. In this way, there would always be an autobiographical element involved in the painting or drawing. The hill always contained part of my self for my having reached it (and considered 'it') under my own steam.

Initially called The 12 Apostles, I soon realized that 12 wasn't enough. So, instead I put an emblem book together and called it Hills of Attitude Not Altitude:

Here are just a few...

The Whangie (Auchineden Hill)

 Dumgoyach, the bosky plug.

Turnave Hill

The Doughnot

Tomtain 

 Neilston Pad

Walls Hill 

Dunglass

Peel Glen Hill

The Birds of Glasgow

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

Ubi aves, ibi angeli. Thomas Aquinas




The pigeons of Walmer Crescent

       the starlings of Asda Ibrox

                the herring 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 -

The Soul of the Seagull

It often alarms me when it comes to nature the ignorance not just of the general public but of those who are in power and hold authority, a sort of general political authority that appears to give them another authority over nature. Speaking recently of the alleged aggressiveness of seagulls in Cornwall, David Cameron at least had the good sense to realize his limits when it comes to ecology, and dare I say it, compassion.

Cameron told BBC Radio Cornwall: “It is a dangerous one for the prime minister to dive in and come up with an instant answer with the issues of the protection of seagulls, whether there is a need for a cull, what should be done about eggs and nests. I think a big conversation needs to happen about this and frankly the people we need to listen to are people who really understand this issue in Cornwall, and the potential effects it is having. Reading the papers this morning about how aggressive the seagulls are now in St Ives, for instance, we do have a problem.”
 

A couple of years ago when cycling around Cowcaddens I saw a city council guy with a large bird of prey strapped to his arm. This was just outside Dundasvale high flats. I asked him what was up. He told me the gulls here were a pest and that the hen harrier he had was going to disturb them enough to make them move on. He seemed to take great pleasure in the fact that his bird had already maimed a few gulls and that he and his human cronies had removed eggs from rooftops. 

Just watching these gulls, the mother gull and the father gull, raising their two young on the rooftop opposite me for the past couple of months has made a huge impression on my already open mind regarding these incredible birds. I recall Wittgenstein once saying in one of his more lucid moments that to see the behaviour of a living thing was to see its soul. I could not disagree. And here, watching these birds, this family of sentient intelligent creatures, for these past several weeks has allowed me an insight into their lives that I would otherwise not have got from a book or eslewhere. I can see their communicating, their languaging, their learning; i can see the parent's exhaustion after working all week, day and night, to take care of their young, to find food and feed them 30 times a day if not more. I can see, furthermore, the young furball gulls, who appear more like furry little gremlins, clambering over that slippery slated rooftop balancing with a flap of their still tiny wings, preventing them presumably from slipping all the way down and off and onto the concrete floor 6 metres below. I can see the mother's trepidation in her movements, in the fluctuation of her calls. I can see all this and more, and I wonder why it has taken me 45 years to understand the soul of the seagull, why this hadn't been afforded to me when I was young, when I was at school. Surely, this is real education (teaching us about our living breathing earth, our wider and wiser Family), and not some phony education that sets us up for some future financial payoff, inevitably, at the cost of the earth and Family. Family with a capital F.

I pity the city council man who thinks these birds 'rats with wings'. Rats are actually, if you got to know them, very intelligent and capable creatures. But of course, it's blinding ignorance, and it's embarrassing when I hear it from my fellow man. When he actually had the gall to call them an invasive species, I suggested that he look in the mirror. Man, after all, is the most invasive of them all. 

Our schooling system needs to take into account the other life-forms we share our city with, our life with. The gulls of Govan as I remarked in a poem once are as much Glaswegian as we humans are. Surely, then, we should accord them similar rights? At the very least, allow them to live here, and be aware that it is us and our casual attitude to waste and litter who cause them to home in on our cities. To destroy them for something that is essentially our doing is just plain wrong when it isn't just plain diabolical.

I often think that when talking of culling: badgers, foxes, gannets et al. that man should perhaps begin with his own species. But of course, just mentioning this will raise a few eyebrows. But then, to not do so is to somehow presume that we are superior (one step beneath the angels), and that seagulls are simply expendable, and some kind of cartesian machine that doesn't have feelings. The reality, however, is quite different.

All in all, it seems a little rich for man to start berating the seagull for simply shitting on his car, or being tempted by overloaded wheelie bins. My advice is to watch these birds, and learn to understand them, learn to see the similarlities between you and them. And by watching I don't mean on your sofa in front of David Attenborough, I mean in the open, in the fresh wild air. For all that Attenborough has done for wildlife awareness, he has also managed, albeit inadvertently, to prevent this type of watching. Armchair ecologists abound, but you will never know a seagull by simply watching a programme (no matter how informed) about it. You can only know a seagull, as these events and others have shown me, by being with it in the open, and, as the cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock once wrote, by having a 'feeling for the organism'.

You cannot feel the seagull through a TV screen, or any other screen for that matter.

The (Paranormal) Silence of Animals

There are, if you attend carefully enough, moments in the course of your ordinary daily life that reveal deep insights over and above (beneath and below) the understanding you actually have of something. They appear to correlate, these epihapnies, to a feeling you have about something, about the state of society, about the state of the human, about the state of the western world of civilization and progress.

One man who has the latter close to his heart, John Gray (former Professor of European Thought at LSE), would be quite amused at my discovery the other day: that is, finding his latest anti-man tract The Silence of Animals, not as one might expect to find it in the philosophy section (or even in the food and nutrition section), but... wait for it... in the Paranormal section of the local library (Hillhead, Glasgow). You might think this unimportant, and it probably is on the surface, but insights don't deal with surfaces. For me, this discovery was as powerful as discovering the absence of a philosophy section in the WH Smith's (Strathclyde Uni's Bookshop) in Cathedral Street, or the placing of the philosophy section of Border's Books in Buchanan Street next to the toilet in the windowless dungeon-like basement. And Gray's book wasn't there by accident. Apparently, so they told me, when I suggested to the staff that perhaps it was in the wrong section, it belongs there. 

Hmmm.

You think?

Then, I got to thinking that maybe, just maybe, it does belong there, insofar as speaking out against 'man' and his ascent towards godliness (if he isn't already there), against progress and western civilisation (the art of destruction-construction-corruption), is going against the grain to the point where 'you are not normal', and this is not normal. It's beyond normal. Ok, I'll maybe go along with that. Normal people don't speak of civilization as a disease, of man as a deluded little god, of his behaviour as demented and quite frankly shameful. Normal people just go about their business, inadvertently contributing to the problem in many cases, whilst thinking ahbout nothing in particular. Indeed, many people (living a life of quiet desperation) do not like to think period. They are afraid of what might emerge if they do. So they don't. They distract their selves to the point of dementia. And this is what we call 'normal'.

So, I guess, paranormal is the new philosophy, the new cultural crit. The new metaphysics, and poetry. Everything else is 'normal': the fiction, the travel, the shit-lit, the reams and reams of books about nothing, and about the same old shit. Maybe then, the library should be divided into two sections under which all other sections could then be assumed: Normal, and Paranormal, normal being for the already deluded with no intention of undeluding their selves, and paranormal being for the same deluded but with a view to undeluding their selves. Maybe.

The silence of animals is different from the silence of men. Max Picard

The Root Human

Dare to leap into the origin.  Asvaghosa, The Awakening of Faith

Be alert for you do not know which day your Lord is coming. Matthew 24:42


Dare to leap into the origin
into the Glasgow
the greater glasgow
on your own
by your self
riverring here riverring there.

Dare to engineer the origin,
engineering based on the human heart,
dare to move
dare to know
through one’s own organs:

Organise
Originate
Dare
To Engineer
To Navigate
To re-member

To intuit

These are the verbs of being
The existential imperatives!

Do not listen to people,
especially those in power,
decorated with titles and awards. Instead
watch how they live, see how they are, how they behave…
See their soul through their actions,
not through their words.

Their message is their living
not their hollow proclamations.

Be aware, and beware!
as deceivers and predators walk amongst you.
Being on the lookout - alertness and vigilance -
is the sign of every intelligent creature.

Intelligence, the ability to decrypt,
To read between
The sign of every human
being.

Slow down! Open up!
Speed and screens are symptoms of dementia.
Dementia a sign of our separation from Mind.

Engage the engines!
Braincraft, bodycraft…
The art of moving under your own steam
is the art of the origin,
the art of being.
Tool on tool makes the machine.

Beware of those who wish to convey you,
who wish to think and thank you.
For they are devils in disguise. Predators preying
on the weak and the wounded. Not quite the blind leading the blind
as the self-unaware
deceiving and misleading
the impoverished and impressionable.

Do everything yourself! Never give your life-force away for anything.
Be especially aware of the buzzwords of banality:
Comfort, ease, convenience…
View them as eagles view men
with suspicion if not disdain
for they will corrupt you,
get inside you, camouflage your origins,
lay waste to your ingenious treasury
of engines…

Get out into the land; let the local lure you:
Plants, birds, rocks…
Place!
Genius loci.
Crags and coasts.
To know your territory is to know your self.

Learn of the wind from the wind.
Treat birds and plants as your long lost cousins.
Relatives of a much wider - much wiser -
family.

Now,
Reassess the abstracts:

God, Family, Love…

In aboriginal terms,
as they flow out from you,
not as they have been inherited,
as they have been handed
down
to you.

Consider developing the self
before consigning it
to a lifetime of purgatory
behind a desk
enclosed in a pen,
behind an engine
emphatically not yours.

Consider the stars as part of your self:
Consider language the configuration of consciousness.
Consider not languaging, and when you do, consider carefully your words.

Words require work to know who they are.
There are phantonyms in our midst, spectral words
that are not part of the logos,
but which have been corrupted to conform
to a limited corporate objective.

Consider then the body: the corporate and the corpus…
The bodies within bodies, the great body
that encompasses all other bodies.
Consider it carefully.
Do not be a passenger in your own body.

Consider ‘it’ as all.

Then think of religion as a binding back, perhaps even as a binding to,
not of bondage, but of delicate connection, fragile filaments
reaching out into the cosmos as a whole.

Consider the real radical,
Homo radix,
as a ‘root-human’,
as a being dependent on the soil,
dependent on the soul of the whole,
from which he flows and flowers.

Our own roots, our own dendrites,
whether you like it or not,
are inexorably caught up with the roots of trees
with the taproots of stars.

Consider even the planet as human
or the human as planet
wandering-wondering,
poetically,
through the cosmos.

Consider the true, the good, and the beautiful
as an outpouring of the undistorted self.
Kosmos as the beautiful whole
integral to the human.

Then, consider the self as indefinite,
the boundaries of which are not to be found on this planet
perhaps not even on this plane.

Consider the imagination
unlimited by the spatio-temporal
as an aspect of what you call ‘god’.

Then consider ‘god’ as its source suggests
as a gathering together of goodness,
a goodness which includes evil,
as inexorable connectivity
through which the voice of the individual is expressed.

Then consider the individual as indivisible,
not dependent on the eye,
but rather Mind.

Mind, as they say in Glasgow,
here in the grey green hollow,
to remember
to recall
to re-enchant.

Sing your song then.



2.

Dare to explore the source code of words….
Their original states,
their original meanings:
Idiot, human, demon…
And be surprised when you learn how they have been dislodged
from the Word.


If we saw language as sacred
then to abuse it and bludgeon it,
to discriminate against certain word-races,
would be a crime,
and advertisers, politicians, newscasters, and authoritarians,
would be held accountable for war-crimes.

The real terror is desecration. Of language, of land, of love.
The true terrorists those
who by their actions and inactions
allow such desecration to occur:
Unbridled consumption is an obesity of brain.
The man-handling of language, the man-handling of land,
the obsession to decorate
effectively, to deracinate,
a pathology of being.

War is their business,
the commodity is the military;
the troops the over-consuming herds:
Consider civilization as all-out war.

The considering itself is a process of delicate unlearning.

Consider then the nature of business:
The state of being busy,
and its antithesis, stillness.
Be still and know!
Be busy and barren.

Dare to question that little external brain
you carry around in your heavy hands
and lovingly rub
like a magic lamp:

It guides and placates you like a little lost dog
yet the genie, the genius, is the engine inside you.

Dare to examine the nature of memory
the nature of navigating, of manual steering,
the membranes of the brain like an old growth forest.
Depending on technology to do it for you
techno-dependency
akin to withering.

Dare to explore the world of silence…
the world of solitude
that lurks behind every façade.
For they, even before nature, are your true parents.

Consider the state of our domesticity
where home is a noun, and homing
something done by pigeons.
Consider our lack of savagery,
and soul-ecology,
where wildness and wilderness enrich the spirit
and the tamed - the sedentary and sedated -
depletes it.

Consider then the nature of travel, and its perversion, tourism:
Planetary gallivanting and quantity surveying
prostituting place and industrializing culture.

Travel like charity begins at home.
To travel is to travail; to travail to work.
Travelling as an educative enterprise. A pilgrimage.
Tourism as a form of low-end entertainment.

Consider the essential as essential to living,
and the superfluous and extraneous as not.

Do not ever tell me you need anything!

Be on the lookout for those who manufacture ‘needs’
for they are the pushers
and you the users.
Soon those needs will become essential to your life.
Until you realize that life is not living.

Become the carpenter - the craftsman, the joiner -
who hones the wood, unites it, conjoins it,
with other woods.

Consider ‘man’ as a mutation of hu-man,
the creature connected to soil, homo radix,
not the arrogance of homo sapiens.

The crises:
Economic
Ecologic
Existential
are all man-made

And most of all
Consider the nature of being aware:
Be aware of all these considerings:
self-observation - self-excavation - is the key
to the root-human.

Atop the Kilpatrick Plateau.

The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once said God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!"

Bullfinch in the Botanics...

Whilst waiting for the herb-master for a delivery in the herb garden at the Botanic Gardens, a bullfinch, its own little herb-master, gives me the once over as it chows down on dandelion floss...

And whilst on the subject of avian alliteration, that very morning perched in the Kilaptrick Hills I saw my second ever cuckoo, and the first I have been able to photograph....

Cuckoo in the Kilpatricks...

The Tao of Dead Man

What is your name?

My name is Nobody.

Excuse me? 

My name is Exaybachay: He who talks loud, say nothing.

[Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch] 

Having just watched the phenomenal Dead Man (again) by Jim Jarmusch, an account to all intents of the 'stupid fucking white man' and his (stupid fucking) ways, I cannot refrain from quoting Gary Farmer's native Indian Nobody, and contriving to tie it in with the following passage I read last week in a book called Quiet by Susan Cain:

From fruit flies to house cats to mountain goats, from sunfish to bushbaby primates to Eurasian tit birds, scientists have discovered that approximately 20% of the members of many species are 'slow to warm up' while the other 80% are 'fast'  types who venture forth boldly without noticing much of what's going on around them.

If fast and slow animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, 'some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don't get any respect. Slow animals are best described as shy, sensitive types. They don't asserts themselves, but they are observant and notice things that are invisible to the bullies. They are the writers and the artists at the party who have interesting conversations out of earshot of the bullies. They are the inventors who figure out new ways to behave, while the bullies steal their patents by copying their behaviour.

So...

Not only do we have a correlation between fast and loud (slow and quiet) but we also learn that fast types are, by and large, 'bullies'.... We might extrapolate this even further and conclude that the world of business (busy-ness, fastness) is a diminished context populated and driven by coercers and aggressors (preying on and exploiting the weak and the wounded). We could also conclude from this that the fast world is a world devoid of awareness and thus awakeness; that speed (though it may propel us from point A to point B quickly) is a form of sleep. One only has to read the opening preface to Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire to understand this.

In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.

And so we have the equation: Business = Fastness = Loudness = Vacuousness = Dead Man

He who talks loud say nothing. And he who rushes around like a headless chicken see nothing.

But of course, the converse is also true:

Stillness = Slowness = Quietness = Plenitude = Alive Human

Those who know do not speak...

The Call of the Cuckoo from atop Neilston Pad

 

The Desertic Moor

It comes as no surprise to learn of the monks and the desert:
There’s nothing to attach the mind to;
The body too has trouble clinging to that sloshing oceanic sand.

Purification by space -
Perfection through silence -
Natural gradual movement.

The desertic moor devoid of detail
Gives space to the senses
Unleashes them;
Now destitute of all the homely furniture of thought
Lets them wander out and get lost -

One day perhaps they’ll stay out there:
The seeing, the hearing, the feeling,
And I, a being with no shell, shaken by every sound,
Will wander around in crystalline simplicity
With saffron eyes, and tensile tendrils, connected to every earth capillary,
No longer simply a human being,
Holed up in his own kind,
But a universal life form,
Whose powers of identification have dissolved
Have wandered out extravagantly
Have been emboldened
In the depths of the highland moor, in the heights of the braes,
in the sinuous wings of birds.

The human with a cloud for a body.... ;)                        [Atop The Kilpatrick Braes, May 2015]

Un Promontoire Dans L'Infini

Life is an April day; Art the long slope. Thomas Scott Cairncross

O contemplation splendide!  Victor Hugo

Sometimes I think that faced with such unfathomable spaces, such immense volumes of air, the mind, unable to fathom it, simply 'spaces out' and gets lost in amongst it. It is this getting lost that facilitates the opening of 'Mind' as opposed to 'mind'. [This Mind is not limited to the tenuous envelope of skin and skull but is essentially universal, moving out from what it has hitherto been taught to know]. Contemplation as a sort of reverie whilst still fully awake is the consequence. And there is nothing more splendid!

The first task of any human being who dreams of flying is to find a promontory onto the infinite from where he can take off. The actual flying is then a matter of Mind.

Living in the Lull

God I love Glasgow!

Not only does it have the facilities of a large city: museums, galleries, pigeons and people, but it also has that quiet village feel, especially if you are like me cutting about the city or around it during 'office hours'. Take this photo for example: not an unusual event by any means, boarding an utterly empty tube train, or railway carriage for that matter in my many excursions to Irvine, Kilpatrick or Balloch. You try that in any other 'major city' and you'll invariably get hit, not only with excessive prices, but with overcrowded and noisy carriages with little opportunity for study or for gazing contemplatively 'oot the windae'.

Each morning I take the train to Kilpatrick (at the moment I am exempt from cycling due to a broken wrist) I rejoice in the 'travelling lounge' I have at my disposal for the 20 minute trip to the foot of the braes. Not only do I have the meditative vibrations of a smooth flowing locomotive, but I have a whole carriage to myself (not that I need it), a table upon which to rest my books, and views of the city petering away as I leave it, and the country entering in.

It is this lack of congestion - of coagulation - that is vital to the soul of the human being (the spirit of the animal). Not to mention reasonable prices for its carriage ;)

I have lived in cities like London and Paris, bold and brash and verging on the monstrous. Sure, if you're one of the limousine liberals with more money than brain cells, then of course it's a joy, but if you're not, if you're one of the many who struggle to pay the rent or to 'not work', then it sure as hell ain't. What it is, instead, with its congestion, its exorbitant prices, and its general overcrowdedness, is a crime against humanity and a non-stop headache. Cities like this are not so much cities as they are businesses, and symptoms of an over-excessive economic model which only sees good in calorific growth.

Glasgow, apparently, has no such illusions, although it may have had in the past.

I sometimes think it is a lull. A period of quietness, not necessarily deliberate in this case, that lies between two periods of excessive activity.

In any case, this lull is joyful, and I make the most of it, for I fear that soon, Glasgow may become again the mess that it once was. Is that not the whole aim of the economic model? To make a mess of our cities? To prostitute them out to tourism and migrant workers? To cram them full of buildings and people? And enslave them to the small-minded ego-nomic model with both eyes on the money?

But a city should not be a mess. It should be a celebration of space and of life, of buildings and of fields. It should be affordable and pleasant. It should en-joy the citizen as the citizen en-joys it. Indeed, the citizen should be as much 'paysan' and a man of the land as he is of the city.

The Purification of Being at North Woodside Baths

I've been to a lot of swimmies in my time. I have even frequented the rather plush Piscine Molitor in Paris' well-to-do 16th arrondissement (before it was closed down in 1989). As a boy, the baths at Whiteinch in the west of Glasgow, in a wonderful old red-brick building (now luxury apartments), was my introduction. Later, whilst living in cities like Istanbul in Turkey and Tripoli in Libya, I had the opportunity to test out their baths - the hammam - and similarly enjoy the refreshing and revitalising experience of cleansing oneself.

At school, we were sometimes taken to the Arlington Baths in Woodlands (it was just down the road from St. Aloysius in Garnethill). Here, it was the last 5 minutes that I always looked forward to - free time as it was called, where we could try out the hoops and the trapezes, and the diving dale (all something of a crazy novelty since Glasgow's swimming pools due to bizarre health & safety regulations had no diving dales and certainly no acrobatics). It was this five minutes of  'free time' - spontaneous time and natural time in which time itself cannot be said to exist - that made the whole 2 hour trip worth the while. 

Later, I would happen upon North Woodside baths just round the corner, another example of a Victorian bath-house with all the features you would expect. Its 2 floor interior, with collonades and full roof skylight, is exquisite, and the pool itself is always surprisingly empty. It's also a lot cheaper and a lot less exclusive than the Arlington although it doesn't have the trapezes. It is one of Glasgow's little gems, since so many of Glasgow's old bath-houses have either been demolished or been converted into pokey overpriced condos. In terms of a 'slow flow of Glasgow', you reallyu can't get any slower than North Woodside baths. And its entrance is impeccable!

Art Skool is for Gimps

I've always thought it rather conceited to 'want to become an artist' or to 'be a poet'.

I've also thought it conceited for those who are perhaps artists and poets to call themselves so. It's like saying you have attained enlightenment. For the enlightened among us, they know that this is just silly, for if you have to declare your own awakening so explicitly then clearly you are not awake.

The same goes for the self-conferred artists and poets. I would much prefer it if they simply called themselves humans-simply-being.

For the nature of art is such that it unites man with nature and so creates the human. The human - man in tune with nature - in turn, brings forth the being of Being. Action within this sphere, whatever that action might be, is spontaneous - sua sponte - of one's own free will. This spontaneous action, naturally arising from the great field of Being, is Art.

The person without art, the artless and the inert among us, are simply the mutations of an organism that has been separated from the field which allows it to blossom, that is, nature. Removed of one's natural and spontaneous context, one's growth becomes 'perverted' and squeezed through the hoops and gunloops of a society in decline. The resulting creation is, as the word mutation might suggest, something monstrous, that treats its matricial field as something either to be ignored or exploited, certainly not something to cherish, respect and uphold. 

Just as certain people proclaim that we are all born enlightened, so too do I suggest that we are all born human, but through the course of jumping through hoops, lose that humanness in favour of a more mechanical and contrived response. Consequently, there are those that wish to reclaim it, who wish to become artists and poets. That in itself is no bad thing. But the art school isn't going to do it for you. What it will do is hone your talent and pop you into a box: designer, painter, etc. etc. And make you a 'professional'.

But the true artist is never a professional. The true artist never contrived. How can they be? Art is all about humility, about the humbleness of being human, and of the joyful celebration of the creative drive that nature provides. To call yourself a professional is not only to deride your own being but to welcome derision from others too. True artists are always amateur with a beginner's mind. Even the word 'professional' has something about it which conveys an element of disrepute.

And so, as the graffiti at the bottom of Buccleuch Street proclaimed all those years ago when I stumbled upon it, Art Skool is for Gimps....

...and the recent burning down of the Art Skool, albeit accidental, something of a stark symbol of this.

Art outside the art school in Buccleuch Street.

The Essentials of Originals

We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally - that is, for himself - which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.

Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom 

I can recall the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami saying something like - If people read the same books then they'll think the same thoughts - Extrapolate this into everday actions and aspirations and what you end up with is a society full of clones and copies, no-one original: no-one who has sourced his own thoughts, his own consciousness, his own depths, but instead, just a whole bunch of 'people' doing what everyone else does, thinking what everyone else 'thinks'.

In her wonderful book The Essentials of Mysticism, written in the early part of the 1900s, Evelyn Underhill undertakes the grand task of describing the essential elements of the spiritual-mystical experience. Underhill herself described mysticism as:

the direct intuition or experience of God -

and the mystic as:

one whose religion and life are centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge.

The problem we have today is that there is little of that 'first hand personal knowledge', and too much of the second hand stuff vomited forth by the mire of media sources we are all enmeshed in. Man has lost the power to think critically, to think originally. Our education system has a vested interest in keeping the dissent down. It is a business after all, an industry that props up and fuels the capitalist paradigm.

As Underhill eloquently states:

The majority of the 'well-educated' probably pass through life... with at best the vaguest notions of the hygiene of the soul.

Sourcing our own knowledge through reflection and contemplation is the only way to avoid becoming a xerox. Really, the only way to 'educate' the self. We need to liberate the self from its strictures. Free up time and space, and the self, for a more contemplative, and slow, approach to living. We need to stop making a living, and do the living. An epileptic consciousness is no consciousness. In order to think, first we must have the necessary space to do so. It is written in the Bhuddist canons that when there is no more space left between thoughts a dark age will have descended upon us.

In the chapter entitled The Education of the Spirit, Underhill writes:

Were reality able to come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, were we able to enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves - then, we should all be artists... Deep in our souls we should hear the uninterrupted melody of our inner life: a music often gay, more often sad, always original.

Time and space is the key. 

Slowness, in other words.

Dead atop Dunglass

... and the young see nothing, they're moving too fast; they're bouncing off the walls, they're going from one adventure to the next  they don't even stop to name the flowers or the trees; nowadays I can tell you the names of trees, it's a big breakthrough, believe me.  

Clive James, BBC Front Row, 3.4.15

Yesterday evening, upon listening to Clive James being interviewed, I got the impression as the above quote suggests that he didn't know the half of it until he was confined to a deathbed. He was forever bouncing off the walls, and going from one adventure to the next. To the point where, finally, confined to stillness by force, he had time to contemplate, truly contemplate the grounds of life, death, and existence.


In the anti-contemplative society, the state of stillness is the archenemy of business.


'Perhaps collectively, man is subject to an inevitable self-destroying madness, if he does not question and understand the real purpose of his existence,' write William Corlett & John Moore in The Islamic Space.

And this is what is happening. Man destroys (de-structures) his self every day by not questioning and understanding the real purpose of his existence. To the point where, when death finally comes knocking, the self is so fragmented that it doesn't know what to do. It frets and fears the coming of the dark. But it needn't be like this. Contemplation opens up the organ of death within us, allows us to commune with it. Near death experiences needn't be so panic-stricken. Indeed, in Zen Buddhism, they speak of the moment of satori (kensho, awakening) almost as if it were an NDE, the moment when one sees clearly into one's true nature, and when all anxiety disappears, replaced by an overwhelming sense of peace.

One can 'die' then whilst still alive, but in order to do this one requires a certain stillness, a certain tranquility that allows one to plumb the depths of self, unimpeded. Distractions and diversions are counterproductive to this process of dying.


DEAD ATOP DUNGLASS

Up on the plug
whose side profile from the east
resembles a stretched phantom’s face
battered by the wind
hovering above the heather
gazing all around
one’s capacity to die whilst still alive
increases
faced with such sights and weather:
the fells
the valley
the moor
the wind.

It’s long division enlightenment
where you throw off the shackles of the body whilst still living in it:
dead whilst still alive,
Nirvana with a remainder,
fractioned sartori -
the flaming torch upon the hill crest -
Elysium -
in the wind.

Atop Dunglass in 2006 (when I had hair)...

Zero Distortion Above Duntocher

What I'm interested in, involved in, is an understanding of the mountain, a high experience of the mountain, founded on the encounter with brute matter, and with wind, light, space, emptiness.

Kenneth White, Mountain Walking

When Erwin Strauss wrote of sound that it 'is somewhere between thing and no-thing' he was onto something (or perhaps, more significantly, nothing). 'It is not a thing, but neither is it no thing,' he concludes. 

Curious, no? Paradoxical, perhaps?

The truth is that sound is not a thing just a a human being is not a thing. It is a vibration, a series of ripples within the sonic sphere that we occasionally  and partially inhabit. Sounds, like most everything else, inundate our lives. Most of it, admittedly, is noise in disguise, clutter for an already over-cluttered head. Some of it however, like Satie and the sound of a hillside creaking under its own weight, is something else. Which could be termed as 'music'.

Acoustics too, how this sound (or music) is modified (or not) by the space it inhabits, is of equal import here. Especially up on the hillside. I'm not sure if the quarter Scot Satie would have agreed to have his compositions played up here but there are other sounds that are entirely at home up here: the sound of running, walking, falling, water, the sound of a distant buzzard whistling; the sound of the sky, the sound of geese and ravens, the sound of the wind weaving through the heather, the sound of one's own heart beating.... There is a sensitivity to hearing and listening that sight just does not have: a communicativeness of listening over and above the aggressiveness of vision. In a moment of cognitive clarity, one could perhaps argue that the downfall of western civilization is predicated on its ocular-centric attitudes, its eye-addled tendencies: possessiveness, competitiveness, masculinity... its fashion-frenzied self-hood.

In his exhaustive study The Listening Self, David Levin writes of the ears as an 'ontological organ': an 'organ always already inherent in, belonging to, and attuned by, the openness of the dimensionality of Being as a whole, presencing for our hearing as an auditory field, a sonorous field. 

He then goes on to write that 'since the suffering of nihilism lies in our closure to Being, I believe the conclusion is inevitable that we need to learn a way of listening that is more ontologically attuned, more open to Being'.

I have always maintained from the very first occasions that I happened upon these spaces - The Kilpatrick Braes (and plateaux), The Campsie Fells (and plateaux) [more plateaux than face] - that simply coming up here on your own to be at one with the elements and the birds (and the relatives you never knew you had), to have that encounter with brute matter, is good enough for the 'ontologically attuned' being. It is also good enough to transform 'a man' (emphatically countable) into (the inexorably uncountable) 'human'.

The paradox is clear: that up here where many perceive there to be nothing, there is in truth everything. And that down there, in the noise-bowl, where there is 'everything', there is in truth nothing, only distortion, diversion, distraction. It is no coincidence that all the great prophets and visionaries (perhaps we should call them 'auditors') sought out these spaces in order to understand; that they sought out spaces of quietness and expansiveness (places of zero distortion) in order that they might hear, and attune, like a radio receiver, to the ultimate ground of Being.

An Angel Falls just above Old Kilpatrick.

Zero Distortion just above Duntocher

Contact

There's a point near the end of Robert Zemeckis' Contact where the scientist Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), having been propelled through various wormholes on the way to Vega, sees the star system from the porthole of her IPV. As she stares in a state of incredulous awe she stutters into her recording device, almost unable to speak:

No words... no words... Poetry.... 

they should have sent a poet. 

It's so beautiful, so beautiful... so beautiful.... 

I had no idea... I had no idea... no idea....


And there you have it. 


They should have sent a poet.

Coming to Grips with the Inextricable

We're all backward. Our machines are all modern and shit - but our minds - our minds are primitive.

James Mangold, Cop Land

Three of the most radical thinkers of the 19th & 20th centuries had the word 'White' insinuated into their names: the American Walt Whitman, the Englishman Alfred North Whitehead, and the Glasgow-born Kenneth White. Coincidence? Probably not.

As for the whiteness (of their names or of their work), one can read this as a metaphor for incandescence, and for the ultimate ground of Being that these colossi sought to expound through their various philosophies, theories, and poetics.

Alfred North Whitehead started off as a scientist and abtsract philosopher, a mathematician whose maths was so complex that even experts struggled to understand it. Soon, though Whitehead was delving into nature treating it in much the same way as he treated maths: as a subject that was separate from the mind enquiring into it, that is, as some thing at the end of a microscope or telescope. It was only till he encountered the problem of the enquiring mind (and how it could not possibly be separated from that which was being enquired) that he began to rethink his theories on Nature (now emphatically capitalised). A purely scientific approach to philosophy was, he felt, an impossibility.

In his last period of life, his metaphysical period, he accepts that the current strictures of science are not conducive to knowing one's self, indeed, that they may prevent it. It is at this time that he writes Religion in the Making and Science & the Modern World. At the outset of this period, the last 25 years of his life, he proclaims his message like a prophetic visionary, more in line with Blake or Law, than with a mathematician who was well known for being obscure:

My theme is the energising of a state of mind in the modern world... and its impact upon other spiritual forces.

Whitehead wasn't the only hard-headed scientist to make this turnaround during his lifetime. Niels Bohr, Einstein almost, Erwin Schrodinger, Richard Feynman, the astronomers John Archibald Wheeler and Carl Sagan, the theoretical physicist David Bohm (whose Wholeness & The Implicate Order and On Creativity are examples of a more conscientious approach to the physics), and Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life), also made significant modifications to extant theories, and incorporated these in an attempt to bridge the clefts that had arisen between the sciences, philosophy (the arts), and theology.

Whitehead was aware that science could get the better of itself, that the intellect which fed on logic and reason alone was only half a brain, half a human (namely 'man').

Religion, of course, was the answer, a 'primordial' religion that was more akin to poeisis than it was to anything the institutionalized Church could throw at us. Religion as solitariness (as Whitehead makes out) and as a coming to grips with the inextricable. This religion is more verb than a noun; it is a manner of fastening - religioning - the individual to one's community, to one's land, to one's being. It is a matter of moving, and of transforming. Of becoming part of the 'family'. 'Family', not as some anthropocentred, overheated vortex but as a binding to the essentials which bring forth life and growth, and maturity, and which enables the realization of inextricability. One's relatives are one's relations, and since relations are part of the process and reality of one's living, we are inevitably overcome with a sense of belonging, since now we can recognize these vital energies that cultivate. Religion, then, as far as this is concerned, is nothing more than a genuine recognition (a living) of one's inclusion and involvement in breathing bodies larger than our own.

In his Web of Life, Fritjof Capra concludes with a similar exposition of religion. And in The Tao of Physics, he writes of the moment when science, upon the propogation of quantum theory, confirmed what the mystics and the poets had known all along - that the individual is inextricable, and that the universe (filled with flowings and flowerings) is all there is:

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer.

 ....

As the British anthropologist Tim Ingold remarks, 'Something must be wrong somewhere if the only way to understand our own creative involvement is by first taking ourselves out of it.'

The answer of course is our reconnecting with Nature, and with the being of Being (as Heidegger calls it), and with the local. Globalization has seduced us into thinking we can go anywhere, and be anything. It has reduced the local and the parochial to a kind of dungeon-type existence. The lure of the local has been topped by the admiration of distance and the promise of the exotic. But it's all nonsense.

Backwardness itself is a virtue, progress a curse of Sisyphean proportions. Viewed from this perspective, some kind of peasant connection (the word peasant is derived from Old French paisent meaning local inhabitant) is vital to one's religioning. Crucial to one's coming to grips with the inextricable.

The Eclipse of Reason.

The disease of reason is that reason was born from man's urge to dominate nature; and recovery depends on insight into the nature of the original disease, not on a cure of the latest symptoms.

Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason 

Backbone & Brain

Sounds like an existential detective agency, Backbone & Brain, and I suppose it is, in a way. Because without them, one cannot inquire very deeply into the nature of being human, into the nature of the cosmic whole. Again and again, one comes up against obstacles: obstacles of language (where words and grammar lead us away from the truth and not towards it), obstacles of conventions (where conventional wisdom and ways of doing things go unquestioned), and obstacles of identity - of the self - (where delusions of what you are and not how you are take precedence over reality).

If there is one thing that is required of the sincere philosopher it is courage. This courage though it could equally be represented by the heart (le coeur) is symbolized here by the backbone, by the ability to stand up and speak your mind, and not kowtow to false idols. Once erect, the brain comes into its own: enquiry, questioning, imagining... applying.  

Seeing.

In Luc Besson's most recent effort, Lucy, he makes allusions to the fact that we use a pitifully small amount of our cerebral capacity. I would perhaps say that it's not really the amount we use, but how we use it, how we channel it. In other words, a hundred percent brain power could still produce an imbecile, except here we would be privy to a remarkable imbecile, who gets things remarkably wrong.

The backbone then is what stirs the brain into right action, and into right thinking. And when the time comes, equally, into non-action, and into non-thinking. In other words, the spine is not only located at the base of the brain, but it is, in fact the basis of the brain.

I guess the germ of this entry is Martin Heidegger's memorial address at the celebration of the 175th anniversary of the birth of the German composer Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849) in Messkirch in 1955 which can be found in the great little book Discourse on Thinking. In particular, at the end of his address in which he has castigated science's arrogance, and dependence on logic and reason to light the way - calculative thinking over meditative thinking - where he states:

What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning, and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have thrown away his own special nature - that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive. Yet releasement towards things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent and courageous thinking.

Both flourish, in other words, through the application of backbone and brain. Lose either of these (although there is an argument to say that they are inseparable) and you are no longer human in the fullest sense, but simply a spineless robot (a man) who works without thinking of the consequences of that work, and whose work is not an end in itself but always a means to something else.

Revelation of the Subcutaneous

There's a moment near the beginning of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin when I almost fall off my chair after realising the van that Scarlett Johansson's alien is driving was cutting about just outside where I live. She stops and asks some poor unsuspecting Govanite for directions back onto the M8 motorway. He asks her if she knows where Asda is, because the motorway's right behind it. She doesn't so he hops in to direct her. Meanwhile, muggins here is shouting at the screen, 'I know where it is, it's just round the corner. I'll show you.'

The revelation here was two-fold : that I could've possibly missed the production crew and the van scouting about my hood, and the obvious one, of an alien, slightly confused and bewildered in this human bodymind, cutting about Glasgow in a transit van. I surmised that at about the time of filming (sometime in late 2012 when I began this blog) they must have spotted me tramping the streets like a lone wolf as a likely candidate for a pick-up. Chances are, being the cinephile that I am, I would've scuppered any opportunity for hoodwinking that they might have had. Yet, I was disappointed that I hadn't been stopped, considering the amount of city walking I did that winter. My ego aside however, the film was a strange one, and deeply affecting. It used the sea, the trees, and the tarmac rivers of greater Glasgow (i.e. Scotland) to great effect.

I had always thought of using the plantations that surround Glasgow as some sort of setting for a horror movie. Whereas being in a wood or a forest is a primordial experience, being in a plantation is not. It is firstly, for those of us who can attune to space and life, a perverting and horrific experience where not even death lives: trees so tightly packed together (for the sole purpose of being cut down) that not even light enters the thickly set canopy. The plantation floor, unlike that of a forest or a wood, is dead, matted solely with fallen spruce needles and fetid water. One of the more terrifying experiences of my life was trying to find my way through Lennox Forest (actually plantation) several years ago and losing my way. I almost had a panic attack finding that even the body (nevermind the body and mountain bike) was struggling to pass between the ever-tightening gaps between trees. I felt like I was slowly being swallowed up.... alive. The Blair Witch never had a look in.

At any rate, Glazer's film touched a chord, that Michel Faber's book (of the same title) didn't. Perhaps it was the Glasgow locations, and the plantations which I could directly relate to. Or perhaps it was just the revelation of the subcutaneous itself: that under the skin (within a dualistic, and anti-contemplative society) we are all alien, to each other, and to our selves. That, quite possibly, the only way to return to the sacred, to the godhead within, is to enter the void (as one of Mica Levi's sound tracks is called), and release one's self from the pathetic nonsense that we are invariably involved in; entering the void being synonymous with the Buddhist expression of burning your house and heading into the east.

The Belgian-born writer, poet and painter, Henri Michaux, once wrote of painting that it is the production of a thing which breaks 'the skin of things'. Well, here, if you can excuse the coincidental title, Glazer breaks the skin of film, and delves deeper into its flesh, so deep, one might say, that he actually hits the bone. And when that happens, you cannot help but feel it.

Spruce plantation up above Dumbarton in the Kilpatrick Hills....

Living Spatially

Space, as you can perhaps gather by certain references in this blog, is of a particular fascination to me. I have always been aware of its various properties wherever I have been and have always tried to maintain an openness towards it. Indeed, just yesterday, atop the Kilpatrick Braes, I, alongside the cows, ruminated upon its very existence, and the difference in depth of feeling one can have from being in two different spaces. 

Almost Mediterranean (and it's not even April).... Must be the Corsican pine, and that late March lull. [Looking west-ish from the Kilpatrick Braes over the Clyde Estuary towards Langbank on the opposite shore].

For the second time this week, the Czech phenomenologist Jan Potocka accompanied me into the braes (if only in spirit and book). His wonderful set of lectures (translated by Erazim Kohak and edited by James Dodd) which comprise Body, Community, Language, World, had a profound effect on my thinking five years ago when I first came across it. This germ has directed my thinking ever since on ideas and practices of the body, and one's own locomotive force. So, I thought I would browse through it again, and what better place to do it than sitting up here on the braes sheltered by the great gnarledness of pine trees and serenaded by the mellifluous songs of robins, chiff-chaffs, and yellowhammers.

'There is a fundamental difference', proclaims Potocka, 'between being in space as a part of it, alongside other things, and living spatially, being aware of being in space, of relating to space... Our body is a life which is spatial in  itself and of itself, producing its location in space, and making itself spatial'.

This 'location', and the 'locating' force behind it, is all important. As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry once wrote (in Life is a Miracle), we don't know where we are anymore. Children are growing up with no sense of the local. And as the word local suggests, they are also growing up without a vital sense of place. 'Kowing where we are,' writes Potocka, 'is a necessary foundation and starting point of life.'

Part of the problem of course is the outsourcing of locomotion and the practice of living spatially. People are sealed off from space, and thus from their own 'lived corporeity'. The body and its vital energies, in the modern technologized and obesogenic environment have been sold off. This effective privatization of the body has devastating effects on the world as a whole, brought to light in the mental health issues of the day, the various economic/ecologic crises, the primitive conflicts that arise over sheer greed and debasedness, and the general inability of people en masse to think critically or independently of media or political garbage.

Living spatially is not just a matter of body then, but of bodymind. It is remarkable in this day and age how tightly packed people's minds are, almost as obese as their bodies, filled with second-hand thoughts, super-imposed templates, and spurious subroutines. Most people are locked in to this unoriginal thinking and being from a very early age and rarely break free from it convinced as they are that it's not so bad. And yet, now more than ever, what we need is spaciousness of mind, the ability to 'space out' and contemplate, to re-ignite that part of the mind that can see systemically, that can see poetically, that can see unhindered by prejudice and politics.

'Aisthesis and kinesis are inseparable.' announces Potocka. 'Our seeing is always linked to movement'.  Without this crucial movement, atrophy occurs: degeneration of brain, degeneration of body, in short, the complete collapse of bodymind. The inability to think critically and systemically, as well as perhaps the inability to move critically and systemically, is one of the most pressing concerns of a modern age which has lost sight of its self, or, which, in its betrothal to science and solipsism, simply does not care.

It follows then that if we do not move, on our own, of our own accord (whether mentally or physically), sua sponte, then we are, to put it mildly, in trouble. And it is the consequence of this 'trouble' - conflicts and crises, outsourcing and over-technologizing,. aggressive and primitive capitalism - that we can see all over the globalized world. Removed from the fundamental fabrics that enable the human, and trapped within a state of existential paralysis, man emerges as an invasive species, and the human submerged as an endangered one. Locomotion, bodying forth (as Buber would have it), and living spatially (which ineluctably leads to living poetically), are the keys to reignite our seeing, and understanding. Without this, we are as good as pallid acquiescent zombies unable to see beyond our own bloodstained hands.