More Ships

This is the P222 patrol vessel which has just been fitted out at Scotstoun, having been put together over the last two years at Govan. Costing £116 million (small beer in today's militarized landscape), the MOD ordered three (you can see the P223 below), and they are now being sailed down to Portsmouth.

The P223 patrol vessel (used for anti-piracy and counter-terrorism) at Scotstoun, being fitted out before being sailed down to Portsmouth.























A Wilson (ferro) cargo carrier passing Dumbarton, taken  from Barscube Hill.

A Dutch cargo carrier leaving George V dock (with old Harbour Head crane in background).

Sacrificing Your Self

The art of sacrifice depends on one's ability to see correspondences in things. 

Tim Addey, The Unfolding Wings
 

'Thing' is a horrible word. It presupposes separation, isolation, alienation and demarcation. It is cold and alone, a thing. But since 'aloneness' is an aberration of Mind, so too is the 'thing'. Indeed, the 'thing' (as some have already suggested) is a monster... and a pretty horrific one at that.

Here, instead, in a universe of no-things, we have systems, and correspondences: reciprocities and mutualities. Everything is in everything else. The only question here is to what degree. Sacrifice depends on knowing this. Yet, as Tim Addey writes, sacrifice like prayer is in a terrible state of misunderstanding. 

When one becomes aware of this fundamental nature of the universe, one can understand how things are not merely things, but trans-things. In other words, things affect other 'things' simply by being. But understanding the essence of a thing is at the same time to understand that the human being is also not a thing, but an intricate system of subtlety that has evolved over great periods. Sacrifice can then occur through this knowing, as the making sacred (sacer + facere) of the self. This consecration is at first what appears to be a loss; in the Christian calendar we have Lent (marking the lengthening of the light) where people 'fast'. Yet, this 'fasting' (from Gothic 'fastan' to keep, to observe) is a matter of self-control and self-discipline, and of making of the self a disciple of the Earth. It is, in the grand scheme of systems, a re-turning to our natural way of being, observing the self, and not letting the self go, as is so easy to do in a society that has lost all sense of fasting and gone over to the dark side of excess, gluttony, and greed. 

 Just as prayer is a form of communion so too is sacrifice. 

'In sacrifice we conjoin ourselves to the convertive power of the universe in which all things - the most intellectual as well as the most material - are returned to their divine source... Sacrifice is a symbolic act which acknowledges our relationship... to the entire macrocosm'.

Insofar as this is concerned, sacrifice is all about getting over yourself...

Alone in the Open & The Shape of Water

You can't imagine how intensely I was living. How good it is to be on your own. You climb up and look back at your boat. There is the sea, the wind, the sound of the water. Above all, the beauty of the boat surging forward. On your own you can discover who you really are.

Bernard Moitissier


I have heard nothing. I have heard nothing. Donald Crowhurst


Around the world without stopping, eight months alone, completely alone, with all that that entails... Everything revolved around that word alone: the nervous tension, the food, the exhaustion, my whole outlook. Things which mattered at the start didn't matter at all now. The rules of the game had changed. The rules within me had changed.

Bernard Moitissier

Watching the fantastic documentary Deep Water (2006) the other evening about the amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst and his ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the earth, I understood that 'to be alone in the open' is not just something I have felt (and celebrated through Being) in the hills and moors above my home city of Glasgow, but is a state of grace that is felt by many who have confronted the true nature of the Self. Whether on the planet's vast oceans, or in its deserts or mountain ranges, there is this sense of the boundless and limitless. And a rare glimpse of You.

Where a city has definite and definable limits the Self does not, in spite of our society's attempts to fashion otherwise. Yet, we have grown up in a world of hubris and arrogance against Nature (and nakedness) where we have not just been named (and thus specified quite unnaturally beyond the species) but where we have been fashioned and manufactured (by vestments and educations) to excel within that sphere of 'presumption towards the gods' (as in the dominion and control over all other entities). Through the remit of science and progress, we have (pathologically) measured and calculated, defined and demarcated, and in so doing lost the immense nature of the Self. One might suggest that it is nothing more than an aberration of Mind to want to measure everything, yet this, before anything else, is the mandate of the economic system we labour under. And the first 'thing' to be measured is the self. (There's a reason why the greatest horror film ever made is called The Thing!)

But how can you measure the immense? Where does the entity start and stop? A creature's perceptions and imaginations are proof that we are not limited to the sealed envelope of skin and skull. Only through being demented, and removed from Mind can we begin to package the entity with a straight face. Nowadays, dementia is a real problem and will prove to be an even bigger one as we continue through the 21st century in a similar 'Mindset' as to the previous two. Indeed, one might suggest that it is precisely because 'Mind' has set (and been awarded a definite article for its troubles) that we now find ourSelves in so much conflict.

The mind is now a bona fide commodity which trades itself on the global market through the purchase and the sale of its Self.

Yet, the mind is not Mind, and never will be until it can let go of itself, and embrace its immensity. It is this immensity that Crowhurst 'saw' towards the end of his voyage whilst penning his 25000 word thesis on the Cosmic Being. His 'racing' competitor Moitissier saw it too when he finally decided to abandon the race and return to the Pacific, and to the immense peace of the open seas, abandoning his waiting city-ridden wife and children in the process.

Part of this peace no doubt comes from the 'desert aspect' of being at sea (nothing reflected back to confirm the small-minded ago), and the fact that there are no 'pointers' to tell you that you are a 'man'. The scene is natural and immense: alone in the Open; primal scenery, no pylons, no roads, not a trace of modernity or progress (even the boat is primal, if we can compare it to an ancient dugout)... Primacy of Being then emerges naturally out of the primal setting. It is why so many go 'mad' when involved with such 'indefinition' and indifference. Yet this 'madness' is actually a clarifying of the immense Self, the in-difference of a violent ocean revealing the same-ness (or equally, identitylessness and voidness) that underlies the All.

It is an area full of paradox, the Open. The power of space enters, as does the power of privacy in plain sight. We have become too crowded as a species, and too scared of our immensity, and consequently sought safety in the herd. Yet, it is only through solitude, preferably in the Open, that one will come round to (and come to) the truth, and/or indeed love.

As the Mexican film-maker Guillermo Del Toro insightfully remarked today in an interview with Radio 4's Francine Stock promoting his new film The Shape of Water: 

We cannot live without water, we are 90% water... And I must say, we cannot live without love... Seriously, we are 90% love; when you are in love you don't need anything, and this is not just a song The Beatles came up with, it's a fact. When you need the car, need the salary, need the recognition, you are 100% not in love. When you are in love, not just infatuation, real love, you really don't need anyone or anything except that person.

That 'person' is the Open...

More Vocal Gulls: The Art of Philosophy without Philosophizing

To be animal is to be on the lookout; this is the job of every philosopher. Gilles Deleuze

We live in a world now where it seems you can't say anything critical now without having to face a jury of a million idiots collectively throwing their toys out of their prams. Whether it's criticising the uneconomic economy and the people that celebrate and support it, or the 'perverted' way of being in the world that so many are now accustomed to (called 'civilization'), the critical view is a rare beast. Yet, the importance of the critical view has never been so urgent. We have become so distracted (by small-minded notions of work, family, love...) that the contract between thought and time has been broken, and with it our souls and minds.

This aspect of critical thinking, of insight and deep awareness of what is actually going on, is lost to the glitter and noise of the modern day world, and its apparent inability to attend, sensitively and naturally, to the animate Earth at large. Distraction is not just part of the problem, it is the whole problem. Whether through work, family, or indeed love, we have been sidelined into become something that we are not: a permanent gullible consumer devoid of spirit whose life revolves around the non-essential. Our existential awareness has dulled as a result, as has our own locomotive/locating forces in an effort to uncover things for ourselves. The end result of all this is a pallid acquiescent zombie who grows more pallid and more acquiescent by the day. Like a prisoner, and if we can zoom out a little from the apparent choice-laden society that capitalist man inhabits, people simply do what conventions tell them without radically asking why.

It is this radical asking that these here gulls are involved in. I rarely meet creatures (humans included) who are as vocal and exuberant and animated as gulls, yet also sensitive, caring and endearing to the questioning soul. These animals are aware in a way that man is not, or that man does not care for. These animals, as the etymology of the word awareness (from Proto-Indo-European root *wer meaning to perceive, to look out for, to be vigilant) suggests, are true philosophers without actually being philosophers. In other words, they are the voices we ignore at our peril.


Thus, the seventh day - which in our day is supposed finally to have arrived in so many ways -is used not to rest from historical work but to criticize. 
 
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony

In thinking about technology within the present climate of technological worship, emphasize the negative. This brings balance. Negativity is positive.
 
Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred

Recording the Strath: Returning to the Heart the Valley

The heart one might argue is everything. With it comes body and backbone, and courage, and Lord knows, it takes great courage these days to remain human.

To be sure, I am wary of recording devices which can usurp our own sensory receptivity: one need only look around at the dazzled masses gazing glaekitly into their dumb little smart phones, the regressed monkeys holding their electronic bananas. In spite of me not possessing a smartphone, I have always had a camera. Yet, it is only recently that I have begun using that camera for its video facility (which is rather good considering its a pretty dated camera). As a document of the strath it reveals the valley that Glasgow and its outlying villages and towns lie in. Indeed, it is as much a recording of the light as it is of the strath, and by 'recording' I mean both documenting and, as its etymology suggests from Old French re + couer, returning to the heart again. It is in this way, that I consider my Self as much 'valley being' as I do 'human being'. Though my face and body never appear in front of the camera, I am in fact recording myself, the Self being inextricable from the environment that allowed it to emerge and be. It is to this end that I consider these 5 minute videos autobiographical. They are also purely spontaneous, like Being itself, springing out of the moment, and the momentum that I have gathered.

The perches that I use, also provide a sense of 'pulpit', whereby I can voice my concerns to the world without interruption. It is a healthy and therapeutic act, lecturing the city... and singing the song of the self that sees the land and the elements as much a part of your body as your hands and legs.

Know thyself was the pronouncement of the Oracle of Delphi....

yet in order to do that, we must first know where we are... 

https://www.youtube.com/user/weemikey70/videos?view_as=subscriber

Cycling through the Great Brain

What is it then that the thinker experiences  when this journey is completed? Whatever the starting point of the dialectic exercise, the philosopher finally beholds the real being which has been manifest through the truth which has been questioned. This 'beholding' is contemplation. It is the natural and unforced rest which is the result of our previous activity: for this reason the student who uses the dialectic exercise as the basis for formal or informal meditation would be wise to allow a moment of stillness to follow each meditation in order to invite the contemplative fruit of his labours to arise from the depths of his or her being. The keynote of contemplation is receptivity, while that of meditation is direction.

Tim Addey, The Unfolding Wings

I once read somewhere that the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (the raven) died of a heart-attack whilst he was in the Mediterranean 'swimming into the sun'. I thought at the time that there could be worse ways to go, I still do: A sort of double-decker nirvana, the light inside the light...

But all physical death aside, swimming (or indeed cycling or walking) into the sun can be a real clarifying experience. Take yesterday's cycle around 'Saturn' (Dechmont Hill) just behind Cambuslang: no wind, full sun, cold temps.

Once you get the body going, the mind can start wandering into that spacious territory called 'Soul'. This is the beauty of any sort of locomotion and the galvanizing of the body-mind-cosmos system: anchoring the body through movement so the mind can float off, and behold a wide-ranging discourse with Itself. It is nirvana with a remainder as they say, dead whilst still alive, the dead part referring to the artificial ego, the 'decorated self' that has been fashioned by a wayward society. It is this 'deadwood' that is shook off whilst locomoting solitarily in (semi) wild places.  Insofar as this is concerned the journey-pilgrimage outwards is always the journey-pilgrimage inwards.

Cycling with a companion I have found invites a different set of behaviour, and a different type of exploration, one which is not as conducive to 'spacing out' and cosmic contemplations. Though there may be plenty of other benefits from cycling together, I find that companionship in this way hampers rather than expands Mind.

Contemplation, moreso than meditation, is an activity that is more effective when alone. The fruits and flowers of this contemplation often manifest themselves through being itself, but occasionally overflow into words or images, or great silences. I suppose then that all my work is a function of this meditating (cycling) and contemplating (resting). The interplay of remaining and stravaiging...

 The view from the Platform at Newton looking south towards Dechmont Hill.

Car-based man is actually a cyclical-based man, but he will not know it until he wakes up and starts moving under his own steam...

 Swanning in the sun... Coffee with a swan can be a real interesting experience...

 Last year at Glasgowbad...