Anima l

One of the great difficulties of being human in an all too human world is realizing your fundamental animality. Within the rush and roar of modern society, it's often very difficult to tap into one's primordial essence. The required ingredients of remoteness, solitude, quietness, and wilderness are all too often too far out of reach from the confines of the city. Yet, it is the responsibility of very human to re-engage their original essence, and their aboriginal aliveness in the form of animal-being.

The key attributes of 'animal' are as its etymology suggests: a highly tuned sense of movement (agility, nimbleness, balance, stillness), and an equally highly tuned sense of consciousness (perception, awareness, wits, wherewithal) ...

This highly tuned nature of these attributes is what distinguishes animals from people. In terms of movement and consciousness, people are rather sluggish in comparison to animals. Their level of animation has been hindered by too much 'progress', and too much outsourcing to technologies that propose to do it for us. Animals on the other hand have never really gone in for this type of outsourcing, have never really given in to the dubious proposition that 'having technology' is better than 'being alive'.

As a result, animals are in constant touch with their environment, for they know that this is what feeds and shelters them, what effectively allows their aliveness. Humans, on the other hand, in their arrogance and egregiousness (in their removal from the flock of all animals), have decided in their infinite wisdom (which isn't wisdom at all but rather disconnected facts) that the domination of nature and their fellow animal kin is no big deal. In this grand perversion of the natural flow, the human animal has almost been extinguished (entirely dammed up), with 'deluded man' (Homo mendax) stepping in to take his place. This Homo mendax, as his title now suggests, is the problem, for he not only deceives others but also his own self. This deception is at the root of the biblical 'devil' or any other demon for that matter. To deceive is to demonise, and to bedevil. And sadly, within a rapacious world of advertising, sensationalist media, and the big sell, deception, in their various guises, is rife.

It is only by re-engaging 'anima' - hyper-critical thinking and hyper-critical moving - that we will have any chance of exorcising these demons from the world, and embracing, not the beast, but the animal within. It is every human's responsibility.

The Clearest Way into the Universe

The clearest way into the universe, Thoreau once wrote, was through a forest wilderness. 

Sadly, for we Scots, most of our forests have long been felled, and what remains of them is surely not a forest but a remnant, and vestigial limbs of a once tree-covered land. Yet, I know what Thoreau means. One of my greatest and most profound epiphanies (see The Map is not the Territory post) occurred whilst wandering through a forest in the Suwalki region of north-eastern Poland. In the forest city of Warsaw, where I lived and wandered freely for three whole years, I had many magical moments in the primeval las and pusczca of Bielanski, Kampinoski, Mazoviecki, Slupecka, and even in the rather regimented Las Kabacki. Indeed, even in the elegantly ornamented Royal Lazieki Park, where the old growth trees encouraged and enabled a greater spread of bird and general wildlife (from deer to boar and foxes), I could recognize, without too  much effort, the universe in front of me. 

It was the entanglement that did it.

This entanglement, though not so readily available in forest format in Scotland, is available in other ways. I, personally, get it from the tops of hills, from being enclosed not by a canopy of trees and their various inhabitants, but from being enveloped (or maybe, embraced) by the biosphere and its elements, the often cloud-laden sky, and those sledgehammer panoramas. I get it through gazing upon the vast landscapes that peel away before me and those bare-faced vistas. To be sure, I still yearn for forests - real forests that are so large that getting lost can often mean getting dead, and not a few trees clumped together as some sort of pitiful monument to the fallen and felled - but so long as I am in Scotland, I will have to make do with the hills, which to my cosmic mind are Poland's wonderfully enchanted forests.

The Polish capital Warsaw from Siekerki Bridge...

The cultural capital of Scotland (where culture is defined in terms of nature and not tourism), Glasgow, from the Kilpatrick Braes (an angle that is just not possible in Warsaw unless you climb the few artificial tells (or the rubbish dump!) that are dotted around the city.