The Perennial Re-surfacing of Man

 Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without improvement, are roads of genius.

William Blake

It's usually about this time of the year that all the major re-surfacing works begin on roads. And I've already seen a few up on the backroads behind Paisley, notably the Gateside Road at Killoch Glen (where I had to cycle through a field to circumvent it, try doing that on a road bike!), and the Greenfieldmuir Road between Mossneuk and Foreside Farms. 

The beautiful thing about cycling (especially on an all terrain bike) is that these signs are irrelevant if not slightly humorous.

Unlike these roads, which are resurfaced sporadically, man finds himself in a constant state of resurfacing to the point where he simply cannot penetrate the bedrock of Reality any longer. This is what happens when you begin to define the self by what you put on, by cosmetics and not 'cosmics', things and not artefacts, stasis and not dynamic.

Identity, however, is not idiosycracy. It is not what you put on (or drive) that makes you who you are, but what you relieve yourself of. Everyone has this same identity. To think of yourself as anything other than 'same' is to be deluded. This is the beauty of cycling these back roads. All the extraneous nonsense is swept off the self, by the exertion, the elements, the effervescence of being alone and all one. You realize that identity is identification of the underlying essence that unites all living creatures. It is to this end that I can safely say that I share more with a wildflower (moving, breathing, flourishing, and open to the elements) than I do with most covered-up humans. Humans have lost their way, allowed their selves to be dislocated and downgraded. They put an unconscionable amount of stuff on their bodies, and in them, which only succeeds in covering up who they really are. Whether its tattoos or clothes, handbags or all manner of fashion accessories, man has dolled himself up so much as to suffocate the greater self that lurks within.

What would happen if you allowed man to revert to his aboriginal state, stopped re-surfacing, stopped adding, but just left him alone to be? What would happen if you stopped cars and HGVs running over him, polluting him, fly-tipping on top of him? What do you think would happen?

Self-restraint is the key. The paradox is that only through the negating of the self, will the self ever appear in its entirety. 

Do not allow yourself to be resurfaced so readily. And think twice before parting with your hard-earned cash to buy something that will simply advertise the company you bought it from (surely they should be paying you?). I worry about cyclists who seem to think that if they have not got the latest clobber on they can't cycle. I am lucky enough to have a younger brother who has more clothes than he can shake a stick at (though he is learning), and has a tendency to throw them into the washing machine at a higher temperature than he should have. The result being that his three inch shorter, eleven year older brother, can makes use of them as if they had been specifically designed for his athletic five foot nine inch frame. Otherwise, I'd probably be cycling naked, or as I once did, in my everyday shorts and t-shirt, like a tramp. 

Helmets are for helmets as I say when I see cyclists kitted out in the latest fashions. There are studies that clearly show that wearing a helmet can be counter-productive and actually cause drivers (thinking you are safer) to not give you as much room when passing as they would with a non-helmet wearing cyclist.... 

It's all a big con, but those embroiled into the man-world cannot for the life of them see it. But, come into these hills often enough under your own steam, and you will develop the insight required to cut through all the bull-shit that the man-world is full of.

Try it!

What have you got to lose except your make-up?

Two tramps by the side of the cycle path. Not a helmet in sight. [Summer, 2006]

Samsara

I have, somewhere, already written of the nirvanic act of cycling, and the possibility of an awakening through the simple motion of pedalling and breathing. Yet, although I was aware of the etymology of the word nirvana (coming from Sanskrit nir [to negate] + vana [the wind]), I only discovered yesterday that the source of the word Samsara is sam- (the prefix denoting completeness, from where we get 'same') + sr- 'to run, to glide' from the Proto-Indo-European root ser- to flow. 

How pleased I was to find this I cannot tell you, for I have been writing of the 'Great Flow' for some time now, whether in my poems, my cycling, or simply through watching seagulls and their feathered brethren. Indeed, the word flow (as well as their conjugates, flower, flourish, float and fly) has been on my mind for some time now. It is the one word that I would pick if I had to choose a single word to describe cycling (or living). It is also, I believe, the one verb that man has most lost touch with, the rhythm of living, and the uninterrupted fluency of the universe. Within the rush and roar of modern life, the human has become man and lost this flow, and by extension, his cosmic capacity. He has also, this modern mutation of a human, lost the possibility to flower and flourish, since the flow pre-supposes this. If one does not flow, one cannot flower.

It is to this end that H.G. Wells writing nigh on a hundred years ago, wrote that cycle tracks would abound in Utopia...

When people start cycling as a way of life and not just as a means of getting somewhere, man will recollect his humanity, and his cosmic capacity, and be aware of the cyclicality of all life, matter, and existence...

As a great black-backed seagull once screeched to me: To cycle is to cycle....!

The 10,000 Perches

Remember yourself. George Ivanivitch Gurdjieff

Mind Yersel. Glasgow Variation

 'The Sacred Waterhole' in the Kilpatrick Braes.



Perish the thought that the perch should be the sole podium of the bird... Every creature needs a perch, preferably several dozen, from where to compost the stuff of life and death, and perhaps even compose something fruitful (or vegetal) from it. A perch is essential for any creature who recognizes the land, the sea and the sky as actual limbs of his vibrant vital body.

I imagine that the latest rounds of ill health that have struck modern man - the 'mind diseases' - are a consequence (directly and indirectly) of our recent rapid removal from these lands, seas, and skies... from our own vital body. 

'Memory' I have come to see outwith the narrow definitions that modern man has given it (episodic, semantic, annotational), and see 'it' more as a way of being with the world, as a way of re-connecting and re-constituting the great Body that has effectively been mutilated and cut up into little pieces. 

This dismembering of the Great Body (and the Great Mystery) has caused us to lose touch not only with our selves but with each other and with every other creature-entity in the universe. The only way to get better is to re-member the Great Body, and the best way to do that is to go into Nature, sit atop your perch, and recollect that which has been, not lost, but invariably sold.

The Earth by Navarre Scott Momaday

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon
the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up
to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from
as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon
it.

He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at
every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon
it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest
motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and
all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth.
It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which
we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race
is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as
deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones.

 'Contemplation Rock' in the Kilpatrick Hills...

'The Mohawk' on Neilston Pad.

 From the sky seat on Dechmont Hill.

 From the kissing tree in the Fereneze Braes...

From the Old Kirkton Road...

Valley Sounds

      the eloquent 

        tongue -

  Mountain Form:

           isn't it 

                   Pure Body? 

Su Shih

Mushroom

A couple of weeks ago, right at the end of July, and following a few days of wet weather, I found three liberty caps sitting together up here in the Kilpatrick Hills. I had wondered if, given the right weather conditions, if it was possible for magic mushrooms to thrive at any time of year, and generally, I have found out, it is, with flushes here and there from February through to December (unfrosty weather permitting). At any rate, these little guys are quite amazing, not least for what they allow your mind to tune into once ingested. In effect, the liberty cap mushroom is a tincture, not added to life, but transmuting life. It is the elixir of life that all existential alchemists have been looking for. If everyone sampled this experience, and made it a regular perennial ritual, I am sure that the world's constant crises would vanish very quickly. At any rate, this little poem came to me as I walked through the hills:

MUSHROOM

The room

in mush-room

refers to space -

the space itself

the mushroom.

 'My hand is the universe, it can do anything.' Shinkichi Takahashi

These big beauties were uncovered accidentally at the end of August (26th to be exact) following a few days of wettish weather.

[Mis] Encounters at the Edge of the World

It occured to me the other day, when seeing yet another person on cruise control, with a dog in one hand and an iphone in the other, and having just read a quote by the German psychologist Paul Christian (referenced in Karlfried Durckheim's wonderful book Absolute Living) that people, even when they go into Nature, are not really going into Nature, but simply skating about on its surface.

I was on the Loch Humphrey Path again, going up and into the Kilpatrick Braes, and I thought to myself when seeing all these distracted minds: What is the point?

And I came quite quickly to the conclusion that there is little point, except perhaps the point of self-delusion, thinking that by going into the hills, tied down by your dog and your iphone, you're actually going to see something. But of course, it's a means to an end, the hill, and as long as it remains a means and not an end in and for itself, it will forever be misinterpreted. We could then argue that going into the hills in such a deluded manner is actually counter-productive, that it will further reinforce in the mind of these people that the hill is simply some thing to be used, exploited, taken advantage of. But of course, it isn't. She isn't. These hills are your mother, and you would hardly take advantage of your poor mother, would you?

What we have here is what Martin Buber called a 'mis-meeting', something I had first recognized several years ago in Kelvingrove Park when I saw a couple of schoolteachers take their kids to the local duck pond only to stand at the side for the next half hour blethering and smoking amongst themselves, whilst the kids, without any guidance, screamed at the ducks and threw bread at the seagulls. Counter-productive, I thought. Better to stay in the classroom, I thought. What a stramash! I thought.

Anyway, here's Paul Christian, following on from Buber, writing about genuine meetings which he refers to as 'encounters':

To meet another person [here we can extrapolate Christian's 'person' to any living breathing entity] is to interpret him or her in terms of the objectively coherent and explicable world. To encounter him or her as a person is a matter of sharing directly in his or her existence, of identifying vitally, unreservedly with his or her actions, of personal commitment, and of mutual understanding and complicity.'

Meetings occur in the dehumanized zones like the city, the corporate office, and the workaday world. This is evident from Christian's definition. Yet, meetings also occur whenever you are tied down by the artificial and the conventional, by those things that prevent you from opening up to yourself. I call them 'existential stabilisers'. Castaneda called them 'shields'. Yet, whatever name you call them, they are virtual blindfolds that are pulled over Being, and which prevent Being not just from communing vitally and essentially, but which, more significantly, prevent you from identifying with what you are seeing. No longer do people have the space and the time to meditate upon a flower or a tree, or a hillside, or a stream, and see their own self within those processes that constitute the tree or the flower or the stream.... but emphatically they see a tree, a flower, and stream that is apart from who they are. Nature then becomes nature, and the I becomes me. No wonder the man world is in such conflict. Man creates it with his blindness.

Yet, there is the possibility to unencumber the self from these impositions. It is through  the quest of constant questioning, particularly of conventions and the way things are. I recall an interview with the French philosopher Alain Badiou where upon being a little riled by the interviewer implying that he was causing trouble, replied that the job of the philosopher was to question the state of things precisely because they are the way they are. It is then the job of every active human (not just the philosopher) to ask these self same questions. Why would you hire someone to think for you when you can do it for yourself?

What luck for leaders, Hitler once said, that men do not think.

So, get rid of your silly little 'mobile' devices. They are not mobile, you are. Get rid of the leashes. They only tie you down, and though they may engender 'meetings', actually prevent encounters. All these shields are as stabilisers, to protect your fractured inner geo-graphy. If you really want to encounter the world outwith the silliness then go into nature alone, with an open mind, and no agenda (maybe a vague outline)... under your own steam and at your own pace, and you will slowly begin to see.

And encounter.