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.