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