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.