The Violence Hidden in Plain Sight

Does the advent of capitalism and, indeed, civilization cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of the 'neighbour'?And could the appropriate form of action against violence today simply be to contemplate, to think?

Violence, Slavoj Zizek


What luck for leaders that men do not think.

Adolf Hitler


In a world increasingly dominated by the 'city' and its pressures, noises, and distortions, it becomes increasingly difficult for those growing up in such a pressure cooker to find not just a way out of this stramash, but more vitally a way in to one's self. It is this in - this entrance to one's Self - that is blocked by the noise and pressures - the violence - of the workaday world. And if one cannot find a way in, and excavate the Self (while it's still reachable) from beneath the rubble of an ecologically-existentially shattered society, then the violence of one's living will continue unabated and unchecked.

By violence I mean existential and ecological violence (Zizek calls it 'systemic' violence, endemic to our socio-economic order) where one's nature is papered over, so that one no longer knows who or where one is. By 'where' I mean a place that nourishes. If this where does not nourish being it is not a place but a non-place or a product. If one inhabits this non-place long enough one becomes a non-entity. A non-entity that has no vested interest any longer in place or in the where or who. It is this uprooted non-entity that commits violent acts without thinking of them as violent:

Abandoning your locomotive force to a machine whose violence is not just in disembodying you from space and sealing you up behind screen and speed (thus altering your perception of the world for the worse), but in polluting yourself (the ambient pollution within a car being driven is higher than the pollution outside it) and the environment one is being mechanically prammed through. The automobile and driving is perhaps the most violent of all our acts yet possibly also the most innocuous. Yet this is the deviousness of our economic model that is neither eco-nomic nor eco-logic: to pull the wool over your eyes, to swaddle your very being in comfort ease and convenience so that you become more and more amenable to more and more comfort... Man's life has effectively within our modern age of capitalism become more and more pedomorphic, that is, child-like and infantile. Adolescence, that period of growth between childhood and adulthood, is now far longer than what it used to be. One might even argue that evolution and a small-minded socialization process have combined to render man's whole life as entirely adolescent. Man, as such, remains in a permanent state of boyishness and pre-maturity. He indulges his whims without any wide-ranging concern for the larger matrix within which his actions are contained and 'act'. It is this 'unthinking' (or Violence if you prefer) that sees our oceans with islands larger than Texas made entirely of our disposable and non-biodegradable waste; and more importantly, why this is not broadcast every evening on prime-time television until we do something about it.

But then, you could argue that television is a form of violence also (Jerry Mander did, very convincingly in his 4 Arguments for the Elimination of Television, as did Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death), a nefarious form of mesmerism that sees our children raised not by humans but by the spurious messages delivered electronically via the cathode ray tube in our brains.

Then you could look at the language of these messages and see that language itself, instead of being an instrument of lucidity, has been weaponized like everything else under the banner of capitalism to make you obey, to make you consume more than you need.

Then there is our violent education system which sees more import in setting our children up for the capitalist ballgame instead of releasing them into their selves through inculcating an intimate relationship with Nature.

Then  there is the workaday world and the world of toil. It is a measure of the previous point that (language as violence) that we think of this toil as 'work', yet 'work' is not toil, not even close. Toil is that which is unnecessary and non-essential, that is not vitally nourishing. Work re-invigorates and re-connects naturally and essentially; toil depletes and exhausts, and fragments to the point of nihilism. In the former we have wholeness and health, in the latter, emptiness and dis-ease. 

In a circular universe let's not forget, the price of ease is dis-ease...

All this violence (against place, language, work) is nothing more that the violation of one's existential Self, an open structured self that includes all things by way of not being separate from them. One is brought up in the world of men as a product, or as a pet. One is named even before one is born, the naming process being nothing more than the beginning of separation and discrimination. This is further reinforced as one is reared within the unnatural enclosures of one's home, school and society. One is dominated from birth by one's parents, as they themselves were dominated and domesticated by theirs. All domestication thus becomes domination, the two words derive from the same root, and all parents become terrorists, as they now terrorize you into conforming to societal ways, and to embracing the rules of the prison.

Effectively then, civilization is some kind of penitentiary. In the capitalized world, one is born into imprisonment and reared by the guards of that prison (the teachers, the parents, the television presenters). The right of all creatures to live naturally is rescinded by way of the fact that the land has been parceled up and sold. There is no freedom anymore, freedom being nothing more than the existential right of every living creature to be at one with its natural environment, and to have at their disposal the sacred right of migration to move across this earth without being unnaturally blocked by walls or fences or political borders.

Now, I have to 'buy' the land to even attempt to live as Nature intended, otherwise I run the risk of being hounded as a trespasser. Yet, the real trespassers are those that have put a price on our heads and on the land, who formulate rules to prevent the natural course of events from ever taking place. All property is not just a form of theft but a violation against the very self and against the very thing that has been appropriated.

Property is just another prop, another crutch, to keep man from falling down, and from touching and smelling the gentle earth.

This morning, Boxing Day, I listened cautiously to some commercial shop-owners being interviewed on Radio 4 (or is that Radio Bore?), about their sales and their tactics (to get people to consume more than they need). I say cautiously because what now passes for news these days is more often than not a concealed  directive to play along with society's ways, and to consume. Most programs and films when they're not just downright offensive with their puerile and fantastical messages are simply advertisements for the orthodox conventions of the day. At any rate, apart from the inarticulacy of the interviewees (how expressive can you get when your whole life revolves around selling 'shit you don't need'?), I was alarmed at just how glib and blase most were regarding current states of consumption. One interviewee even had the nerve to say, 'Oh there's the Blue Planet box set, half price, that's fun.' I mean, seriously? It's this sort of cognitive dissonance - Oh the world is drowning beneath our plastic, but there's the Blue Planet box set... despite everyone having seen it on telly a few weeks back - that makes the workaday world go round. It doesn't even enter the mind that that box set will invariably end up in landfill in a few years, and/or find itself floating about in our oceans as a veritable new species, Boxus settus non-biodegradabulus, in its own right. This is the Violence I speak of, Violence with a capital V: the cognitive disconnect that allows us to perform such actions whilst denying their overarching consequences. It is a sort of self-propelled insanity, that violently and aggressively sells the Earth (and the organism with it) down the plastic-strewn river, whilst we all jump about gaily.

Selling, then, is a form of violence. In a sane society, nobody sells, and there is no such thing as 'money'. All commerce is effected through barter and exchange, through trading in practical local materials, and 'local economics'. That way, excess and wealth is avoided. And to a large part, greed too. The emphasis becomes growth of community, home and family - soul and spirit of place in which creatures and environment are harmoniously bound together - instead of the mere accumulation of 'stuff' as a function of your  new-found status anxiety. The perversions of greed and want and disease that have emerged out of a perverted system (a system that has turned away from Nature and been turned through [per + vertere] an unnatural eco-nomy [the exploitation of Nature]) are replaced by their natural counterparts, frugality and fruitfulness, and wholeness. In this situation, the local takes precedence over the global, and place is resuscitated to reveal the earth within it. 

Growth then becomes something other than what Capitalism has made of it, as the mere accretion of matter around a nucleus. It becomes a spread of energies on all sides; a synergetic enterprise between organism and organism, and organism and environment.

In fact, 'economic growth' in today's modern market world has become pornographic, not just in the stuff that gets sold but in the actual act itself, the word 'porn' deriving from the Ancient Greek word pernanai, which derives itself from the Proto-Indo-European root per-, meaning to traffic in, or to sell.

Buying too (as 'Shopping' and 'Perverted Consumption'), as the modern state has made it, is a violent act. Shops engage in aggressive marketing and advertising to force through the stuff that is not sold. The language that surrounds this palaver has been taken straight out of a military tactician's handbook. If they could, sellers would taser you into buying their rubbish, but they can't so they just psychologize the violence (which is less noticeable to the witless observer) and advertise instead. All of this of course is a perversion of the natural order: natural consumption and need perverted into unnatural consumption and want, so that one can presumably un-equal one's self from everyone else. This is the basis of the modern day society - inequality, discrimination, and imprisonment - and yet so many under the spell of it, cannot see it, but actually celebrate it.

The long and short of it is that our society is Violent at its base, every capitalist society having been engineered off the backs of the disposable workhorse that were previous generations. The very architecture of any given city is testament enough to this bloodletting and violation of a natural order, and yet we celebrate it as if somehow stupidity had become a virtue.

Alas! It has. The stupor has got you. The American essayist Charles Olsen called it the 'satanic glitter' (Christmas being an especially prominent time for this!), Jerry Mander referred to it as the quicksilver mask that enraptures the small fish about to be harpooned. Debord called it 'generalized autism', whilst Agamben refers to it as 'the apparatus' that opposes the animal that we essentially are. The modern day mind finds favour with the zombie and the ghoul (unthinking creatures whose appetites cannot be satiated). Yet, whatever the curse we have hypnotized ourselves with, the human is nowhere to be seen.

It's interesting to note the etymology of the word 'violate' - from the Proto-Indo-European root *weie- 'to chase after, pursue with vigor or desire'. This craving for, and hankering after, is at the root of our violence, and is cleverly concealed beneath modern day ambition. Whether it be our dreams (more often than not delusions spurred on by the capitalist-conventional mandate) that we chase after or 'careers' (the word 'career' stems from the same root as 'car' and 'carry'), we are, from the get-go, under the cosh of 'Violence' and covetousness, and the conventional thinking of the day (which of course is not thinking at all but thinking in fragments).

So, either you are some kind of unthinking, undiscerning ghoul who consumes without thinking, or a human being. There is no halfway house. 

So, what to do?

Un-pet the self! Examine your Karma! Learn your Essence! Start thinking for yourself.

And wake up to the Violence hidden in plain sight!



FREE

Born free
to be caught
and fashioned
and shaped
and freed to wander
within
a caged 
dream of tears.

Merle Collins 


Then there is the worst violence of them all - the brainwashing of our new born into a system of violence that sees nature and the organism as disposable and exploitable. The selling of childhood is the most miserable thing you could possibly do to a child, reconfiguring it away from its natural matrices into a galaxy of toil, convention, and stress. Yet, this is par for the course for the modern day capitalist state. We now have hyper-parenting and zero hour lessons, teens and pre-teens suffering from stress related disorders and exhibiting signs of depression. I speak from experience having taught swathes of 'young adults' in a variety of countries, notably in Warsaw, Poland, where half of my young adult classes had bags under their eyes that could have passed as suitcases, in spite of their average age being only 15. I regularly cycle past the SECC and see parents lining up with their children for the latest round of 'pop-idolisation'. It's horrific to see so many children being inculcated into this televisual, celebritized universe. The result is that the televisual soon becomes a state of being in the world, where things cannot be seen close-up, but only from a blurry distance. The image takes precedence over the word, and soon people can only garble and mumble in unintelligible sounds.


As for the celebrity side of things, this is arguably worse, where one's most sacred power - anonymity (which is really the flipside of omni-nymity) - is readily sold to the highest bidder without so much as a second thought (thinking is not something we readily do in the prammed society) as to what we are actually doing. What we are effectively doing when we buy into fame is selling out our existential solidarity with all breathing creatures (and even those who do not breathe). It is a quest for approval, an infantile grasping for attention and recognition, which is compounded by our ego-bound self. It is the way we have been raised, to be unique, to be individual (or 'dividual' as Deleuze correctly asserts), to be better than all the rest. Even the Jesuits who tried to educate me had their motto - Ad Majora Natus Sum (Born for Greater Things) - yet what greater spokesman can a child have than Nature herself: the Unnamed, the Ego-less?

Cartoon Characters Who Like to Get Stoned

We live in a world of cartoons. People have become cartoons of their selves. The ego is a cartoon, as well as a carton to stop the spirit from being.

Look no further than the two most (supposedly) powerful men in the world right now: Trump and Putin, not to mention a whole host of other country leaders. They're all cartoons... 

Moreover, Man has become a cartoon of the human... a juvenile, infantile, spoilt being, who sees nothing wrong with indulgence and perversion. The cartoon is a perversion  of the actual character, a caricature: a representation, pictorial or descriptive, in which beauties or favorable points are concealed or perverted and peculiarities or defects exaggerated, so as to make the person or thing represented ridiculous, while a general likeness is retained. 

These cartoons  have become self-aware to the point where they now know they are cartoons.  But now they're doing something about it. Hence, the green...

As an old master once said: The student of Zen must learn to waste time conscientiously.... 

An Advocate for the Animated : Verses from the Animal Voice

Recently, upon seeing yet another lioness on a billboard advertising cheap whisky, I wondered if there are such things as animal lawyers (who could perhaps defend the lioness in terms of defamation of character, and exploiting her fine image without permission or payment). We have all heard of animal rights, so I figured that there should be.

The truth of the matter is that although there are a few look-warm legal agencies that try and support animals, the bulk of the animal world gets short shrift from the human community.  From a purely legal standpoint, animals have no legal voice because they are considered property under the law. This appears to be the same statute that applied to slaves and slavery under Roman law: slaves had no voice of their own, only their masters could speak for them.

Not only do we farm and kill animals for no more reason than indulgence and stupidity (our meat and car-based society is a brain-washed society), but we 'grow' them in order to make things out of them. I mean, can you imagine, looking after a family of crocs just so you can skin them and have a nice little handbag? 

So, it got me wondering, what animals might say if we could hear them? Indeed, you can hear them, if you go to the right places, and are in the right 'frame of mind'. All animals speak, whether through their body-land interactions or through their very mouths themselves. There is very little 'small-talk' in the animal's world, so much of what you hear is essential, that is, it derives from the essence that is 'Live-Reality'. We humans inhabit that self-same-essence, and so if you can manage to tap into it (get yourself deep enough into your root system and clear away all the claptrap), then you can easily 'interpret' what animals are saying.

Speaking as someone who has had the privilege to study many of the world's human languages, and having lived in over a dozen countries as an EFL teacher, I can safely say that learning 'animal' whether it be gull, salmon, or deer, requires just as much patience and application as learning any other language. It's not so much a matter of zoo- or xeno-linguistics, or 'words', as it is of bodily essences and expanding circles, and getting into the wild zone where wild original voices (or indeed, The Soul) will be heard.

'Voice', as the philosopher Jean Luc Nancy writes in Vox Clamans in Deserto, 'is language's intimate precession, even if it is a stranger to language itself.'

Thus, the words here, though they be in English or Scots, are actually the earth's own tremblings. They're not so much 'human words' as 'earthy vocalisations' and 'hearkenings'. After all, animal and environment are one, so what the animal says must first come through the land.

In our current climate of crisis and conflict, and verbosity (all functions of our losing touch with the essential and being simultaneously overwhelmed with the extraneous), we would do well to pay heed to the penetrating voice of the earth.

WORDS

I don't take your words.
Merely as words.
Far from it.
I listen.
To what makes you talk.
Whatever that is. And me listen.

Shinkichi Takahashi, The Triumph of the Sparrow



Each voice cries out in the wilderness, like that of the prophet. And it is in the wilderness of forsaken existence, prey to both lack and absence, that the voice first makes itself heard.

Jean Luc Nancy, Vox Clamans in Deserto

...voice arises first in the animal... it is the animal's mode of trembling freely in himself. His soul resides in this trembling... it is the gabbling vocalization of access to being... and this voice which, without signifying anything, signifies signification itself, coincides with the most universal dimension of signification, with being.

...the voice calls the other nomad, or else calls him to become a nomad. It throws out the name of a nomad, which is a precession of his proper name. Which prompts him to leave himself, to give his voice in turn. Voice calls the other to come out in his own voice. Listen.

...it is the soul itself which the voice calls forth from the other... The soul arouses the other within itself. That is voice.

Jean Luc Nancy

Voice defines pure poetry. Paul Valery

...

The Seventh Perch: Escaping the Penal Colony on a Raft of Coconuts

Man is in prison. If he has a chance to escape, then he must begin by realizing that he is in prison. Until he has reached this point, he cannot even begin. Then arises the question: how to escape?

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff


L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. (Man is born free, but everywhere lies in chains).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau


I can recall watching many moons ago the wonderful film Papillon with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman imprisoned on the French Penal Colony of Devil's Island. At the end, just before McQueen jumps from the high cliffs into the raging sea and onto his raft of coconuts, he tells Hoffman's character who has decided to stay behind and tend his garden that he has counted the waves and that it's the seventh wave that will take him out beyond the reach of the swell that would force him onto the rocks, and to his death.

The Seventh Perch just above Eaglesham, where the eagles (and the butterflies) fly...

My raft of coconuts, with three curious horses... wondering how they too can make their escape.


At the end of the film, the epilogue reveals that Pappy was successful in his escape attempt:

Papillon made it to freedom

and for the remaining years of his life

he lived a free man.



The message is clear then: Unchain your Self, get your raft together, chuck it in to the sea...

and start paddling and pedaling...

The Ravens of Lairdside Hill

It's a strange thing to be sure, coming up here and finding yourself utterly immersed in remoteness. An hour's walk or so from the nearest house and you can be sure that it's just you and the rams, just you and the ravens. It's a fine feeling, tapping deep into that primordial relationship. It wasn't that long ago that man in this land roamed the hills as a living, and it made him a man for it. Nowadays, things are a little different....

Wildflowers for a Wild Flow-er

 'Occasionally, whilst airing my bed clothes, I tried to divert their conversation, especially from football, by drawing their attention to some little wildflower. But evidently they considered 'whether the St. Mirren would beat the Celtic' a more interesting topic, and diagnosed wildflowers only as weeds, although they smoked in their pipes a most poisonous one.'

Dugald Semple, Joy in Living (recalling the time when visitors would come to see him in his wheelhouse in Linwood Moss in the early 1900s).




It was only a few years ago that I made the crucial realization that I was a wild flower. OK, so a wildflower who had spent much of his flowerhood with a cut stem and in a vase, but a wild flower nonetheless. To be sure, I'm still in a vase, but I have at least realized my original face, and am making some efforts to re-engage it. One of these efforts is collecting wildflowers that I encounter along the way during my pastoral cycling excursions (to see what plant attributes I can commonly identify with). I started collecting these colourful and fragrant roadside beauties last year and adding them to my kitchen vase on a weekly basis. That way, the natural and seasonal year passed its time in my kitchen at least in colour and fragrance.

July, 2017. Blue Lettuce (Lactuca tatarica), Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia), Red Clover (Trifolium pratense), Spotted Orchid (Dactylorizha fuchsii), Field Scabious (Knauta arvensis)...

Viper's Bugloss (Echium vulgare), the blue flower, centre, Black Knapweed (Centaurea nigra) in the back left. These were picked up along the Sustrans cyclepath between Kilbarchan and Howwood, a wonderful wildlfower corridor if ever there were one.

On the Way to Contemplation Rock

I have uncovered a great many perches over the past ten years of walking and cycling the strath...

Contemplation Rock, in the Kilpatrick Hills, is just one of these....

The Ecology of a Glasgow Tenement

I first became aware of the biodiversity of a building when I lived in Warsaw, on the top floor of a four storey social housing block. It was a marvellous little apartment looking onto a wonderful 'square' of grass, replete with huge Elm tree and various shrubs. The life that I encountered in and around that flat was often more non-human than human such was the proliferation of green. All manner of birds made the square their home, and nested in the strangest of places, including air vents (blue tits), the eaves (sparrows) and the trees themselves (magpies, woodpeckers et al.). When I returned to Glasgow, I was immediately disappointed with the lack of biodiversity in my courtyard. I had found a little flat in Cessnock, top floor social housing again, that looked onto a slightly smaller square of green. Granted, the courtyard had just been renovated from a wash of middens and concrete, and the council had planted birch trees (they grow quickly) and hedgerows. Soon, within a few years, the birds started coming. Even a pair of seagulls took to the roof and made it their home for 6 months of the year. Blackbirds and sparrows (the most recent visitors) regularly dive in to the courtyard for a butchers, checking out the lawns and the hedges for titbits. Wood pigeons and as well as the more common pigeon regularly come in too, and generally speaking, the neighbours too, especially those who live on the ground floor have made a real effort to welcome in our non-human brethren by planting shrubs and plants that can offer solace and food to these winged visitors.

In terms of 'architecture', space is vital. Not just for humans (let's not forget the dialectic of being human: that you are only human in contact and conviviality with what is not human), but for birds and other animals. Indeed, the French architect Corbusier noted that green space was as vital to the building as the bricks themselves. Nevertheless, you could be forgiven for thinking the opposite when wandering around some of Glasgow's housing schemes ('Spot the Tree' is a game I play), or any city for that matter.

What struck me about Warsaw and Varsovians was immediate: that they had this space, this vital space, in place. Courtyards were overflowing with trees and grass, shrubs and all manner of plantlife. Naturally, insects too, butterflies and birds abounded. Trees had buckets tied around them filled with leftover bread urging locals to please feed the birds (Warsaw winters were horrendously cold). Strings of fat hung from branches, and communal squares (which were actually gardens) had all manner of bird feeders and water baths. The birds loved it, and they showed their love by roosting in the architecture.

After three years living in one of these social housing 'squares', though my knowledge of the Polish language was pretty lamentable overall, I found myself speaking 'Crow' (Warsaw is a corvid crossroads like no other), 'Kafka' (the Polish word for Jackdaw), and 'Woodpecker' (an astonishing variety of woodpeckers even within the city limits) to a pretty proficient standard. I had always thought of language as a uniquely human faculty, but of course I was young and stupid and so 'up my own arse' in terms of 'human superiority' that I could not see very far beyond my own broken nose. I now talk to birds as well as humans, and sometimes they talk back.

In his wonderful book The Ecology of a Summer House, the American naturalist Vincent Dethier makes a note of the plant and animal life that make of his Maine summer house their home during the year. It is a fascinating account of a biodiverse home that has been recognized as such. I am all too aware of people who when they see a spider crawling across their living room carpet make a mad dash for the newspaper. Yet, it is a blessing to have such creatures in your home (unless you live in Australia!). Think about it. They have chosen your home to settle into. When I lived in Jizan in Saudi Arabia we had gekkos coming into our bungalows, and wild arabian dwarf bees nesting in our football goal posts. I was amazed at the number of so-called intelligent people whose immediate reaction was one of fear or murder. The unknown scared them, these big galoots. Their ignorance of the animal world simply revealed an ignorance of their very own selves. I mean, how can you be scared of a bee? Ok, a few thousand bees is a different matter, but they're not concerned with you unless of course you disturb them. The same goes with most animals and insects that come into your home. They know you're there. The last thing they're going to do is jeopordize their tenancy!

Ever since I moved into my flat here seven years ago, I have not killed a single fly. Perhaps, this is because my knowledge of flies (and myself) is a little bit wider than what it used to be. In fact, Dethier himself wrote a book called To Know a Fly. The problem we have here in the west is that we think we have better things to do than to get to know a fly. Yet, getting to know a fly is possibly one of the most amazing things you can do. It gives you insight, knowing a fly. It gives you wings learning that a fly and you are not so far apart.

So, next time, you're ready to squash a poor insect for nothing more than finding your home a pretty good environment to co-habit, or in the case of flies or wasps, getting lost behind those diabolical panes of nothingness (how frustrating must that be?), spare a thought for biodiversity, for all life-forms (ugly and beautiful); imagine how you would feel stuck in a glass box that you can't get out of, headbutting nothing until your brains fall out. Our winged brethren, whether a wasp or a bird, share with us and all animals the horror of being trapped. But you have the power to liberate....

to liberate your Self, through the freeing of a fly...

Think about it..

How Glas is My Strath!

It rarely matters when you are.... most eras in the history of civilization are marked by toil and recovery, construction-destruction, and suffering. I see it here, in my own city of Glasgow, people misunderstanding the nature of living. Indeed, like the Welsh mining town in the 1941 film How Green Was My Valley, there is a lot of ill-health even in today's so-called progressive economy. We may have done away with the coal pits and the chimney sweeps but we have replaced them with call centres and deliveroo. This is the nature of man - deception: deceiving himself, deceiving others. Call centres, in their boxing in and aggressive selling, are simply modern day collieries. And the people who work in them, modern day miners.

And yet, the city of Glasgow is not its call centres, nor its shopping malls. People may make Glasgow as the slogan goes (more selling), but the hills made the people, and without the rivers and streams, there would be no Glas chu (Glasgow's original name, from the Gaelic meaning grey-green hollow). And yet, how many of Glasgow's youth know of its peripheral hills, know of the 'valley aspect', know of its sources and springs? Not many, from what I can gather in my pastoral excursions. I rarely encounter another person when I'm out and about, nevermind young people. It would appear that people are simply unaware of the health benefits of hills and wide open spaces, of the natural setting that can lead to one's awakening from the city's slumber, of hill-walking, or strath-cycling. Most, and this reveals the hamster-like nature of what man has been fashioned into, prefer a treadmill in a noisy enclosed gym. But man is more than just his body. One might say that the human's body is indefinable, since it is an open-flowing system that is intimately entwined with the elements and the earth at large.

Walking the hills or cycling the strath is a case then of getting to know yourself, getting to know again the 'body' that you were estranged from soon after birth, when the brainwashing and the conditioning began. In terms of its periphery of semi-wild spaces - the Campsie Fells, the Kilpatrick Hills, the Renfrewshire Moors and the lumps and bumps of Inverclyde - I have lived and breathed in no finer city (with perhaps the exception of Warsaw in Poland whose lack of hills is more than made up for by its forests). And I have been about - living in around 15 cities worldwide over the past two decades since the age of 25.

Indeed, a city that does not have a halo of hills (or forest) surrounding it (that can sanitize and canonize), or green fingers that penetrate and ventilate (allowing ease of access/escape), is not a city but a symptom of the great existential-ecological disease that the modern day coagulated city seems predicated upon. I mean, look at cities like London or Paris or New York for instance - they're so big and noisy that to grow up in them is to positively welcome mental and bodily illness. And that's to say nothing of the Chinese cities like Xian, or Beijing, whose pollution levels are simply a crime against humanity and all of Nature.

When I lived in Warsaw (for 3 years) I was immediately aware of her green 'fingers' which were virtual corridors of green-ness coming from the exurban countryside that almost penetrated the city's centre. I was also aware that in spite of Warsaw's fairly strict policy of maintaining these green corridors there was always the possibility of corruption: spaces being developed when they should be left alone. Indeed, it's a constant battle against the developers who see the city (as most are apt to do) as a big dollar sign waiting to be cashed in. One's 'body' is being contantly violated by the rapaciousness of developers and short-sighted, small-minded, capitalists. 

Glasgow is fortunate in that it has seen a great number of its citizens give back to the city in terms of green-ness. Maxwell, Burrell, Elder et al. have all donated large spaces to be left alone. Imagine if didn't have people who saw the existential benefits from the leaving alone of nature? 

Becoming Hill

'It isn't what you know in your head but what you've become that matters most...'

Belden Lane, Backpacking with the Saints

Words and language have always fascinated me. Ever since I can remember I've always wanted to get to the bare roots of language, pare it all down and see/feel its essence. In a way, to paraphrase a fellow teacher who remarked insightfully one afternoon that 'teaching, sometimes, just gets in the way', language too can be a big red herring.

Man has tendency to over-complicate things, a tendency to show off (like a rooster shows off), and to over-use language to get his point across. Though I might not conform to a lexicon of just three words (as in Robert Lepage's oneiric film Possible Worlds), I am of the opinion that we don't need that many in order to 'essentialize ourselves'. Words just get in the way.

At any rate, tapping in to words, following their roots down to the source (or as near as one can get), is a fascinating activity. Words emerged from the land after all. And from our interaction with it. Language was natural back then, salted with seaweed, and flavored with rain. Now, so much artifice gets in the way that some words need to be positively and absolutely strip-searched in order to reveal their essence. Some words, such is the backwardness of modern man, have come to mean the opposite of what they were intended (look no further than, idiot, individual, demon, human etc..).

Other words are so transparent and simple that often we just use them without really knowing what we are saying. In other words, the over-use leads to ab-use, and when we abuse language we might as well abuse the land and ourselves with it. (Which of course we do).

The word here I want to highlight is the word Belden uses in the epigram that opens this post. The word 'become'. Now we all know the word 'come' which derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root as the word 'go'. It's simple enough. But stick a little prefix in front of it, in this case be- and we have a slight shift in meaning.  To come to something is one thing, to become this something is quite another. When I go into the hills, I come to the hills, and in so doing become them. This sounds rather freaky I admit, for I do not look like a hill. I am still very much in the shape of a humanoid. Yet, I am also mind as well as body, and though my body may still appear to be that of a human, my mind is very much in the shape of a hill.

In other words, the mind is shaped by the body's workings. If the body spends its time sitting at a desk performing duties that merely serve to put money in his pocket and little else, this will manifest itself in the mind. The mind will become boxed in, alienated, and calculative. If the body, however, spends its time exerting itself, spending its being in the rarefied air of the hills, listening to nature by way of our solitude and spaciousness, then the mind will become likewise.

And it's all in this little word be-come (I prefer it with a hyphen for its upsets the usual form to the point where we do a double-take). To become a saint one must go to saintliness. But what is saintliness?

It is no coincidence that the word sanity and saint look alike. Sanctitude is sanity. Sanity of course is Health with a capital H; in another word, wholeness. And of course wholeness is holiness. So, a saint is a Healthy entity, one which is systemically bound in to everyone else,whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. One who is open to the earth, who recognises his humus composition and his roots... that go way down. That bind him back into the great matrix thatg he so eagerly wants to leave behind. This is the nature of religion, from the Lstin re+ligio meaning to restrain or to bind back.

A saint is someone who uses his own locomotive force in order to 'arrive'. Who restrains his self from being carried. Indeed, one might say that a saint is an 'arriver', one who arrives at places by virtue of this locomotive force and of a bodymind negotiating the land and the elements that gave rise to him.

It is an active participation in the Earth's own flows. In the modern era where cars are a ubiquitous form of 'travel', we have been blindsided once again by language and those who ab-use it. Car, let's be honest, is short for 'carry'. And yet, there are few car 'drivers' who would admit to being carried, who would, through the ab-use of language, probably say that driving is an active event. And in a way, it is. But the backbone of it is undeniably passive. One has abandoned one's own locomotive force (and thus any possibility of arriving, and of place). Locations become non-places as a result, or packaged spaces, there but for the good of you. Roads themselves, especially motorways, display an unnatural form of straightness geared for speed. Runways where man does not run.One has given up one's active moving, and yet I know of no other animal (that hasn't been tamed, imprisoned, injured, or dead) that will allow itself to be carried. Man, one could conclude, is the only animal that has give up life. Maybe this is why he is fascinated with death so much.

At any rate, I'm careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I do realise that the car can be a very handy device. Nevertheless, like a powerful drug, cars need to be kept in check. But we are addicted to being carried. Man has been made into a big junky baby who is pushed around in a big pram. And yet he cannot see this.

Take my word for it. Be-come the hills. You don't know how lucky you are if you live in Glasgow to have hills, gentle hills, on all sides. There is remoteness, space to listen, space to see. Space enough to be-come your Self.

 

Books in the Braes

I'd always intuited from a very early age that the reading of a book and the garnering of its fruits relied on some part on the where of its reading. Indeed, some books positively cry out to be read outwith the domesticated apparatus of civilization. Or 'read' in such a way that it does not send you to sleep, or propogate you back into the slumber that you sought to emerge from.

Books, much like anything, can be of two sorts - the sort that cleaves your head open and draws air into that brain, or the sort that sends you back to sleep within the soporific cliched existence of the pusillanimous and posthumous. Kafka said as much when he remarked that if your book is not of the latter species then it is not a book, but something to wipe your bum with. Sadly, in today's all too soporific society, where single-linear-mindedness triumphs, there is much toilet paper to go around.

Recently, whilst reading Belden Lane's Backpacking with the Saints, I was over the moon to read the following:

Reading a potentially dangerous book in a landscape perceived to be dangerous can be doubly hazardous. The place heightens the vulnerability occasioned by the text. Challenging books lose their bite when they're read comfortably at home in a favorite armchair. Their riskiness increases, however, when read by firelight in a forest glade, ten miles from the nearest road.

Here, it's not so much reading in the gloaming, as meditations on the peaks and the sides of hills, an endeavor I began in earnest a few years ago having felt what Lane just iterated, that a book can elevate more than usual if read within the 'correct' context.

Most of my thinking deals with Nature and how we can return once more to a harmonious way of being in the world, so it stands to reason that most of the books I go through (and study, not so much read), are books of that ilk.

I am tremendously fortunate in having retained a special readership at my alma mater Glasgow University's Library which, though not an especially exciting building from the outside (12 floors straight up), has views over the valley like no other (situated as it is on the top of Gimorehill). I had recognized many moons ago that reading on Level 11 (Philosophy & Fine Art), with the gulls outside, and the horizons beckoning, was better than reading in the bath, 'better' in that something more came through the text than the actual text itself. 

I then realized that if I went into the hills (which I could see from the upper floors of the library), I could jump the train with the bicycle in tow, and have ten-twenty minutes of reading on the train before getting off. This would invariably instil a notion in my mind which would then take shape on my way into the hills. Invariably, by the time I got halfway to the top (we're only talking wee hills here, 200-500m, more attitude than altitude), that notion, ventilated by the cool quiet of the hillside would have manifested itself into something quite insightful. 

This is the mountain study.... collecting the white-gathered element.

The benefits I found with a taking a book into the hills didn't stop there however. I found that the author's mind was actually somehow present, as a sort of companion, but a companion that didn't talk, that didn't stop every five metres to examine the bog asphodel and sphagnum (my botanist pal is guilty of such staccato movement), that didn't need watering or feeding, that didn't get tired and start complaining, in short, a companion that was there without being there. To be sure, there are benefits to having a botanically-minded stravaiging companion, and all the rest, but sometimes, to understand anything you have to arrive through your own power of solitude.

David Levin's The Listening Self....

Karlfried Graf Durckheim's Absolute Living...

William Corlett & John Moore's The Islamic Space...

Hakuin's The Four Ways of Knowing...

Absolute Living!

I'll tell you what it's not for........ (to use the words of Ellen Ripley).......it's not for screwing each other over (and every other animal for that matter) for a goddamn percentage.

 Julius Evola's Meditations on the Peaks

The Dhammapada

 Franco Berardi's The Soul at Work

 Belden Lane's Landscapes of the Sacred...

 Betrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness...

Herbert Marcuse's Reason & Eros

Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment...

 Marcel Mauss' A General Theory of Magic...

 Belden Lane's Backpacking with the Saints....

 Evelyn Underhill's Essentials of Mysticism...

 Edward Carpenter's Civilization: Its Cause and Cure...

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Franz Kafka

Deer-leg through the Gorse: Kilpatrick to Dalmuir via the Golden Hill and Amen Corner

Today's wander through the gorse laden hillside behind Duntocher revealed something of a mystery when I fell upon a severed deer leg in the undergrowth (especially since I had, just last night, downloaded and watched the first two episodes of David Lynch's new season of Twin Peaks - I had yet to watch the third installment which I did this very night in which lo and behold! and severed dog leg is discovered...).

Duntocher could well be Twin Peaks then... ! What an idyllic little village, with some lovely well-crafted bungalows and well-detached local-stone villas! Apart from the odd ponderosa that looks as if its been built by a Saudi with its fake lawn and all the trimmings (you'll know it when you see it!), Duntocher is a lovely little residential quarter with the Kilpatrick Hills for its rather wild back garden.  I've always thought (at least for the past year or so since I first cycled through Duntocher) that, when I have enough cash (which'll probably be never), I should have a little villa in Roman Hill Road (since my surname is Roman and I love hills!). But then you start thinking that maybe I love the hills because of the dialectic of living apart from them, that maybe, if I lived in them, I wouldn't love them as much....

At any rate, from Kilpatrick, it's an easy enough route up through the sloping fields to 'coffee rock' and then down again avoiding the gorse bushes, to the dual carraigeway and across into Dalmuir Wood.

 An impeccable grey wagtail (more yellow than grey!) singing its song from the top of the braes.

Don't build a wall, plant some gorse!  My first recollections of gorse are on the golf course and searching for wayward balls. Not a pleasant experience! But I have managed to come round to gorse, over the years, in a more intimate way, let's say, although getting intimate with a gorse bush is not something I would recommend. The intimacy I speak of is to do with 'a sitting quietly with' and 'an identifying with' that is possible through this quietness. It is only through this kind of intimacy and quietness that you will come to see your self in the gorse and vice versa, to the point where you can exclaim, at least in my case, that 'I am Gorse!' Which is probably well and good since I am pretty thorny at first touch, but radiant with it!

May 23rd, and the Hawthorns are out in force. Some years they trickle by, but this year, maybe due to the dryness that preceded this week, they bloom like nothing else, amd the sides of the hills above Duntocher are afloat with Hawthorn.

A truly bizarre find, a deer-leg in the undergrowth. Blue Velvet indeed! Duntocher is the quiet peaceful village with secrets, apparently...

The golden hills of Duntocher! (More white than gold with all that Hawthorn). Plotting a way through this wall of gorse and brush is vital when you're at the top looking down, because by the time you get down there you can't see anything! (And this stuff can swallow you up whole!).

Through the wonderful Dalmuir Wood into the wonderful Dalmuir Municipal Golf Course. Both empty of people!! I wonder at what everyone is doing, since, in my humble (and humate) opinion, there is no better way to live than to walk the earth.... and allow it to speak through you.

 'The Wee Drap' is one of the most iconic golf holes of the world!! With the beautiful stream coming through, down from the hills from where we ourselves have just tumbled, it is Glasgow's very own Amen Corner, except here, there are no toffs in monkey suits keeping you out. This Amen Corner is open to everyone.... (note the garden party with their 'alky tans' just downstream at the other bridge).

Idyllic! Where would you rather drink? In a stuffy old pub, or by a babbling brook, beneath the sun-dappled shade of an enchanted wood? (In tribute to the 'jakies' who regularly gather here to drink and blether).