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.

The Phenomenal Fells

The living body, the organism, is a system of vital functions - eidos at work, en ergo. Reality is energeia, idea at work. 

Jan Potocka, Subject Body and Ancient Philosophy

On the train to Kilpatrick this morning I read a little of the great Czech phenomenologist Jan Potocka whose book Body, Community, Language, World was a revelation some five years ago upon finding it in Glasgow University Library.

Phenomenology (as Husserl saw it) arose out of a radical will to self-clarity, to grasping the ultimate ground for what it is that I am. For Potocka, more so than for Husserl or Heidegger, the body was key to this clarity: the body as a multiplicity of relations in and with this world, and specifically the situatedness of this body (its structures of perception, its bodily orientation in space, etc.).  This dynamism, of a body's ongoing correspondence with its world, and hence its evolution is precisely the principle of a living animate creature.

Potocka's philosophy of movement begins with the question - What sort of body? And then a partial answer - Not the body that anatomy or physiology examine, but body as a subjective phenomenon, the human body as we live it in lived experience.

The ground of phenomenology as its etymology suggests (phenomenon - that which presents itself; logos - meaningful discourse) is taken up by the living well-springs of experience. It seeks to keep ready-made theses at arm's length and instead investigate everything contained within experience, how we arrive at it, and what seen and lived realities underlie it. Potocka writes: only by speaking it out do we know something fully, only what we speak out do we fully see. 

At its most basic, its most essential, the practice of phenomenology is learning to think and see; in short learning to understand.... not through some intellectual exercise, but through living itself. I guess, as far as this is concerned, this whole exercise of essays and notes contained here in this blog, since it springs out of direct experience in the field, is phenomenological in essence. As far as I see it, the only way to truth is to live it.

The phenomenal Kilpatrick Braes at the beginning of Spring (21st March, 2015)

Every 'body' needs a perch from where it can gather the Self, space (and time) out, forget its small and corrupt self, and gaze across this fertile earth. And in so doing, reclaim its wholeness and holiness.

The absolute body (complete with broken wrist), perched on the pulpit of peace.  

A renewed attentiveness to bodily experience enables us to recognize and affirm our inevitable involvement in that which we observe, our corporeal immersion in the depths of a breathing Body much larger than our own. [...] Examining the contours of this world not as an immaterial mind but as a sentient body, I come to recognize my thorough inclusion within this world in a far more profound manner than our current language usually allows.  

David Abrams, Merleau-Ponty & The Voice of the Earth

In the field: process and transformation.

Frog spawn is its own galaxy, its own constellation.


WHAT SORT OF BODY?

What sort of body?
     The world-body
         the cosmic-body
the pre-fab body
    the shrink-wrapped body?

The tidal body, the river-body,
    the body that flows and
flows, down from the hills,
    into the sea, into the ocean?

The oceanic body?
Yes.
The oceanic body.

Not the over-clothed body,
    but the naked body,
the water-body,
    not the ornamented body, or
the product-body
     branded with value, branded with markings,
but the elemental body, eroded by lashings,
     by torrential and nirvanic thrashings:

The solar body, the stellar body, the galactic body -
constellated and considered -
the subject body, living, breathing, relating,

the open body, the every body
not limited to the tenuous envelope of skin and skull.

The rainbow body?
Yes.
The rainbow body.

Interstellar

Remember, I have power... I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master... Obey!

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein


There's a point in Nolan's movie near the beginning where a schoolteacher, in an attempt to convince a schoolchild's father of the importance of trying to save the planet Earth in favour of colonizing another, and of his son's predeliction for farming (as opposed to say astrophysics), speciously attempts to support her argument by mentioning 'how the Apollo missions were faked in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union'. She urges the father that 'if we don't want a repeat of the excess and the wastefulness of the 20th century, we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it....'

It's a poignant moment which only fails due to Nolan's belief that such a concern for our home planet is naive compared to the possibilities on offer by what I can only term as 'super-science'. At best, this 'super-science' is the mere positing of several perverted quantum theories which when lumped together attain the status of mawkish fantasy; at worst, it is implying that the earth and all who inhabit (and are sustained by) her, is expendable, and another dispensable commodity. In other words, interstellar travel (though they, the scientists, may try and convince you otherwise) is based on the simplistic and rather fatuous equation: (over) consume, (over) waste, (over) pollute, gtfo...

This attitude is exactly the attitude that has gotten us into this mess in the first place: the deluded hope that science is salvation, that humans are masters over nature instead of its stewards and custodians, and that somehow, something better will eventually come along to save us. 

It's a shame that Nolan thought that adding the bit about faked moon landings would somehow demonise and discredit the teacher's views about 'rockets and useless machines', make her out to be some kind of nut whose complaints about the excess and wastefulness of the 20th century would be construed as similarly madcap. But they're not, that's the point. What she says is perfectly true (apart from the faking of the Apollo missions in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union - Americans are just not that clever), but that Nolan has to somehow offset this with a statement of such ridiculousness, is a pity. For it reveals Nolan to be none other than another small-minded logical positivist trapped within the shimmering boundaries of super-science. A super-science that has, along with the reason and logic it so upholds, come to dominate the worldview of so many and infect the world with 'godlessness' (read 'desecration of land and animal' - 'existential and ecological apartheid'); science that has, with its emphasis on Cartesian dualism, Newtonian mechanics and the like, sought to reduce the living to un-living components, and see the routes to knowledge itself as restricted to the ruling modes of thought and conventional beliefs.

Science itself has propagated the wastefulness of the 20th century like no other force. Indeed, one might argue that wastefulness is the primary remit of science (beyond the quest for knowledge and proofs) for without it, it would not generate as much GDP, and thus provide the backbone for a flailing economic model like capitalism.

Super-science has created a throwaway society in which people are constantly being seduced by its startling advances. But behind every startling advance there are numerous atrocities which rarely see the light of day, yet which prevail and resonate across the planet eventually.

Science has created a fundamental distraction from the grounding that we so badly need, our attachment not necessarily to farming, but to the soil itself, and to the care and love of the land. Science has enabled the wholesale degradation of the topsoils of the Earth to the point where growing food has become severely if not entirely affected. Science may well have created machines that appear to 'benefit' mankind, but even these machines are inherently destructive due to their habit of outsourcing ingenuity and energy from the human. Thus, machines grow smarter as humans grow dumber. That may well be a scenario that appeals to the already zombified masses, but it is not the intelligent and sensitive response to a planet in peril. It is simply the response of a logical positivist with too much faith in science to solve all our problems.

Just as Islamism is taking the world to task for its lack of faith in the sacred, so too is Scientism taking the world to task for its thinking there is a God in the first place. The problem is that God, in a scientistically saturated world, has become an irrelevance. It's not so much that God is dead, but that people are (and thus the godhead within them). People, and animals, and the world and everything in it, have been reduced by science's efforts to mere components and mere variables. Gone are the relationships between them. Everything becomes either supercilious subject or supercilious object, one or the other, but not both, and definitely not between. Such a view of the world demands a certain unfeelingness towards said world, a certain unthinkingness (a denial of instinct and intuition), which we can see manifest in tourism, in modernity itself, in conspicuous (and inconspicuous) consumption, in need, in fear, and in our readiness to outsource our energies to machines and tech. It also demands perhaps more than anything else a level of self-interested myopia, that fails to see even after people like Rachel Carson and Masanobu Fukuoka write about it, that treating our soils with pesticides and disdain, will bode no good for future generations. Such myopia would appear to be part and parcel of science's remit to sell the world and humans into slavery, for when the world and its humans are enslaved to science, science will have nothing more to stand in its way. In this respect, science is like a great big ogre gorging on everything that stands in its way. 

Those who are against science, or at least do not see it as the be all and end all that most view its as, are in their looking towards 'God' in favour of more encompassing approach to life and death, a more conscientious approach to the world and one's place within it. It is this conscience (con-science as opposed to a singularly sterile science) that establishes our relationships and views the world and our place in it accordingly. This 'withness' of being (a being-with-the-world as simply and self-shrinkingly being-in-the-world presumably apart from everything else) is our original immanent condition. We had it once, but we have lost (sight of) it beneath the nonsense. However, that does not mean it cannot be regained. 

It is this, Nolan's naivety, and his reluctance to accept this truth, and instead to rush off in the name of science to promote, effectively, thoughtlessness, that leaves me cringing when I watch Interstellar. That he imposes this view on millions of others through the medium of film leaves me less cringing and more disappointed that people cannot, for the fantasy and science they coat their selves with, see the reality of their situation... that nothing is going to help them get out of this mess that they have made for themselves, not least spending $250m on what is effectively a propaganda exercise. But still the world continues to live in ignorance: inequality, war, economic and ecologic crises abounding; fear, need, greed. Has science not already told us that these things are ultimately self-destructive? Have we not learned anything from all this knowledge and information that we have managed to accumulate?

Apparently not.

So much, then, for science.

The sooner people stop off-loading and out-sourcing their own vital energies (that enable movement of mind and of body), the sooner they will realize that the self is everything, that interstellar space is not out there but in here, that god is not some crazy bearded staff-bearing monolith, but a sensitive and intuitive human being whose connections to the natural environment that nourishes him express themselves through his daily interactive being.

One Hundred Percent Space

 I am the space where I am. Noel Arnaud

In order to dream up a hand, I must first dream up the space to contain it. Graham Nerlich

Looking up, in a world which is increasingly looking down (into their iphones and ipads, into their navels), can be a real revolutionary act. In Glasgow, normally it's the clouds and the skies themselves that draw the eye upwards. But there are other coaxers too: birds, architecture, sculptures, all of which raise the eye (and thus the self) to a fresh and aerated level, above the mundane monotony of congestion and constrained space.

Looking up is thus an opportunity to accommodate space, to widen the self, and to learn...

Learning space, as the 12th century sage Dogen used to say, is learning wisdom. Learning wisdom is learning space. 

Architecture itself is a wonderful lead-in to this learning, if only to see how certain spaces can be bludgeoned to death and destroyed. Buildings are not simply nests to protect and shelter; they are also a mediation between the outside world and our inner state of mind; buildings and the like articulate existential space; they provide us with a marvelous continuity from our very primordial beginnings. The house, after all, as Gaston Bachelard makes out in The Poetics of Space, 'is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos.'

In a city like Glasgow, whose wealth of architecture old and new abounds, there are excellent opportunities for this acquisition of wisdom. After all, we are, fundamentally, and as the French poet Arnaud intimates, space itself.

Our grasp, as humans, of space (and of time) is woeful. Woeful to the point of dementia, to the point of existential collapse. We, after all, have been architectured too, constructed by our parents and teachers, too much media, and our experiences. What kind of building you end up is anybody's guess, but most of us are buildings whose space could do with a little spring-cleaning, a little renovation.

Glasgow, as its very name suggests, is fortunate in having hills, moors, and coast so near to its centre. These keystone spaces are another great way to learn and accommodate space and time. Just walking them with your mind open is a learning experience at its most vital. Normally, these spaces are seen as a means to an end, but when we start to treat them as ends in themselves - as 'creatures', say, with whom we can develop a relationship - well, things begin to change. 

And so, with all these spatial opportunities around us, there really is no excuse for the disappearance of the sage. Just as genius is the ability to access one's own hyper-organic powerhouse (one's own engines), so too is wisdom the ability to access one's fundamental and essential space. This access-ability will be defined by the relationship the human develops over the course of his life with space and, inevitably, with time too.

30 mins. by train from the centre of Glasgow, Irvine Bay: The sea, the sky, a selfie of an altogether more subtle sort...

Sky & Seagull: depth, dimension, distance & duration.

 From atop the holy mountain Dumgoyne, looking north....

 Standing at the Jaw's Edge (Jaw Reservoir in the Kilpatrick Hills).

MAMBA, as one tabloid journalist glibly called it, yet Miles and Miles of Bugger All can do wonders for the body-mind. [Atop Dumbreck in the Campsie Fells].

From atop Neilston Pad looking north-eastish towards Duncarnock Mount in the foreground, the Cathkin Braes just beyond, and the overall midland valley of Glasgow.

 Looking north from Muirshiel Country Park over Queenside Loch.



The braes, the fells,
The coast, the moors:
Keystone spaces
Keystone species,
Stellar soundings in the galaxy of the valley.