Fight Back

Whether its adverts for banks (HSBC, RBS, et al.) telling us how good they are (when they are in fact convicted fraudsters) or any number of profiteers lying to us bareface because they want us to buy their product or service, we are being psychologically assaulted on a daily basis often without our being aware of it. The corporate in its fake personhood (the corporation is legally a person with all the same rights but with few of the punitive measures for stepping over the mark) usurps the person and distorts it to the point of fakery. The real person (through which the Origin sounds) is thus displaced and replaced by the fake person as the corporation (through which the false resounds). Thus, we have considerate constructors, ethical banking, eco-consumerism, meat-eating priests, car-driving ecologists, caring scientists, responsible bookmakers, amiable rapists, and thoughtful murderers. People are so utterly stupefied by it all (civilization being a form of mesmerism) that they don't even bother anymore. My mesmerism and stupefaction however has been tempered by my pastoral excursions into full blown Nature. Nature has guided my body and my mind to safety and made it ferociously aware of predators, especially those predators that purport to be your friend. These are the worst kinds of predators who prey on the weak and the wounded, the stupefied and the mesmerized, whilst telling them that they're helping. Our society is replete with these predators who contaminate our bodies and infect our minds with their trash and corporate gobbledygook. These stencils are an active weapon in fighting back against these lies hidden in plain sight and re-minding people as in giving them their natural Mind back. Nature is bare Truth, Society is a candy-coated lie. Re-mind yourself of this every day, and soon you'll be fighting back yourself.

The Poetry of the Sledgehammer

Wanting people to listen you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore, you need to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention.
John Doe, Se7en

 








People have been overpowered with too much noise and so their listening has receded in order to protect itself. Not listening then becomes a defense mechanism often employed without the user's knowledge. The power to listen thus atrophies over time so that when the time comes to listen (to extract and retain the essential information that is voiced by another), there is no capacity left to do so. The person thinks he can listen but he can't. His ability to retain information and penetrate the essence of what is being said is lamentably low. This is why in the past few days in Minneapolis things have kicked off and riots have come to the streets: because nobody is listening to what the black community are saying. This is why the sledgehammer is such an important weapon in the armory of the poet-artist, the sledgehammer as a ramping up as a poetic license let's say, a polemic with bite, something that grabs your attention and makes you think.

The poetry of the sledgehammer awakens.... opens up... dismantles all the nonsense that you have been filled in with. As the John Doe character in Se7en clearly tells Brad Pitt's police officer in the final scene of the movie, 'You can't just tap people on the shoulder and expect them to listen... you need to hit them with a sledgehammer.' And it's true. The noise of society's institutions and its institutionalized lies are too loud for any single voice to be heard anymore. But if you're radical enough, root-based enough and in touch with Nature, that single voice will always find a way, because that radicale and root goes way down and in doing so connects with other radicales and other roots, and together, form a great Voice that can be heard the world over.

Society is a violent phenomenon under progress and capitalism. Its violence has been drilled into us (and thus accepted) so much that it cannot be seen anymore. Whether its society's institutions which sell Life and Land in a variety of clever ways, or simply the idea that technology is some machine outside the body, the violence is serious and deadly. We are violated on a daily basis whether through the act of being transported or the act of work which is not nourishing but depleting. We are violated in our very homes simply by having a television or any number of tools and machines that suck the earth's energies dry. We are so inured to the violence hidden in plain sight (because we were born into it) that we actually buy into it and celebrate it. This is the problem with a 'culture' that is not transmitted naturally (through the technology of Nature and not the machine) that it becomes violated and thus transmitted violently. Our evolution has been replaced with progress and thus our genetic transmission displaced by the printing press and all its sundry delivery items. Our knowledge thus comes from the machine and is thus violent. Accordingly it is not knowledge but an 'in-formation' that does not come from the inside and form us according to Nature's precepts but which deforms us because it is imposed from without. This is why our world is in constant strife, why we peddle about in pollutants that destroy our land and our bodyminds, because we are deformed creatures whose minds can no longer think but which act according to the thoughts placed into them.

In western societies, you are surrounded and perforated by lies and trickery and deception. And falsehood. Nature by contrast in her wholeness is Truth. But the city, by its very essence, is anti-Nature and thus anti-Truth. The incessant cultural monster continues unabated mediated through its various tentacles: social media, news, movies, TV, consumerism, work... science, progress, bla bla bla. It is all mediated and thus all false. Here, the poetry of the sledgehammer is the poetry of Nature cracking open the kevlar carapace (and bomb suit) that has been fitted onto you, and dispensing with the mediated. Once into the immediate, one begins to see Reality itself outwith all man's decorations and descriptions.

And so here it is, from the belly of the capacious cactus herself, spines and needles included, the (universal) sledgehammer in all its slender yet powerful (and cosmic) glory...

Arbeit Macht Huawei, Vorsprung Durch Pish

 

Arbeit Macht Daewoo was a stencil I saw in Warsaw about 14 years ago when I first arrived there to work. I was taken aback by its simplicity and its ferociousness. It was a quick and easy way to compare the office spaces and working environments of some companies like death camps. I recall the Societe Generale fiasco in France too where employees (who could not be fired because they were classed as 'civil servants') were slowly humiliated by their bosses so that they would resign 'voluntarily'. It was a horrible case that soon hit the news headlines with SG being taken to court (eventually losing) for causing numerous suicides amongst its staff. One man (with wife and children) decided to self-immolate at the building he worked at, and for days there was a scorch stain against the side of his office block where he had torched himself. These scenarios will never be forgotten by me. It reminds me of one of the last jobs I had teaching English as a Foreign Language, working at Saudi Aramco (a monster of a company if ever there was one, cf. Daniel Plainview of There Will Be Blood), where the teachers were regularly hounded by staff and 'overseers' to the point where one lad had a nervous breakdown. What did Aramco do? They deported him but not before deducting the costs of his airfare from his salary. Monsters is too good a word for these corporations, and for some of the people who work for them. It was soon after they fired me (for being a good teacher no less) that I stopped working altogether (for others) and started working for the Self...

Arbeit Macht Aramco, Vorsprung Durch Pish...

Responsible Gambling

I've always been a little dismayed by the presence of bookmakers in our cities. The last time I cycled through Dumbarton I saw three - 3! - William Hill betting shops within a mile of each other. Out of them fell forlorn faces, pasty white and sickly. Next door to me in Cessnock there's a Coral that looks as if it's a methadone clinic. And its facade is replete with 'special offers', 'fantastic deals' and the like. In my opinion, bookmakers and people who work and support them are some of the lowest bottomfeeders of our sad upturned society. They will try anything to get you in the door. And their tricks are legendary. In many ways, even drug dealers don't stoop this low, you never see them offering you a free five pound bag for every bag you buy. You never see you local smack dealer trying to confuse you with different size bags and accumulators. A smack dealer is relatively tame compared with these monsters. So, I decided to dedicate a stencil to them, and their own font too, on the bridge of wisdom (and criticism) over the Clyde...

Responsible Gambling...
 

Really?

I mean, that's like saying 'responsible crack-smoking'... 'responsible alcoholism'... 'responsible homicide'...

There is no response (and thus response ability) when dealing with these evils. One cannot respond to addiction, one can only succumb and submit to it.

[S]Car

Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of the society's members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell...

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Joni Mitchell

There are two things that I can recall from the depths of my being that have relevance here. The first is my grandmother at my grandfather's funeral telling a young five or six year old wide-eyed boy to always mind his health, that health was everything. The second was a little later in life, as a teenager, and my father offering me some sage advice: Never ever buy a car Michael, it will bleed you dry.

It's only now, some forty odd years after the first incident and perhaps thirty or so after the second that I realize how well I received those seminal 'offerings', and how they managed to seed themselves in me and grow.

To be sure, I have driven cars, and been prammed across the land like most people. In fact I used to love driving, as a twenty something who was very much under the motor car's spell of speed and power and dislocation; not to mention, comfort, ease, status, and convenience.
It was only however when I started living and working in other countries (Qatar, Libya, Saudi Arabia) with far worse road accident records than my own, that I realized just how brainless and moronic cars, and the act of being carried, were. It woke me up to the great age of conveyance that we in the west are currently embroiled in. We are conveyed physically as well as mentally. The success of the automobile (or the all-polluting pram if you prefer), is proof enough of this.
Indeed, one's brain suffers remarkably when one gives up one's locomotive force. Locomotion itself is the basis for cognition, its locative and navigational component the basis for memory: I move therefore I think; I locate therefore I remember: remembering as a re-limbing of the open circuit of Being.

When one abandons one's locomotion, one abandons also one's ability to 'think on one's feet'. One interferes with the open circuit of Being, deliberately closing off channels, and thus impeding the flow of local forces and the recognition of a profound chthonic insinuation. As John Bliebtreu writes in The Parable of the Beast:
Electrically and chemically, the world flows through us as we flow through it.

Yet if we do not flow, if we allow ourselves to be carried and prammed... the consequences are biblical. The wits and the wherewithal of the live exuberant entity are the first to go, followed soon after by a critical vision of the world we have made for ourselves. As the paths in our modern world become paved and standardized so too do the pathways in our brain. No longer able to see into or hearken (attributes of a brain tuned into natural commotion), we become like infants, kept in an almost permanent state of pre-maturity: gullible, impressionable, noisy and egocentric.

It's a vicious spiral downwards: the less wits and wherewithal people have, the more readily they buy into being prammed and carried.

Cars are not just the number one source of carbon emissions in many places but they are the biggest killer of our children. Cars directly kill more people than wars (including the oil-wars fought to keep us in cars) whilst indirectly killing many more. 1.25 million people die because of cars each year. 

Never before have humans been this unhealthy, and most of it is down to the car. Not only does the car promote a loss of the locomotive but it promotes too the loss of the local. It allows us to traverse a greater distance than before without the need for our locomotive force, thus dis-locating us and removing us from 'place'. It also allows to carry more stuff, consume more, and generally circumvent Nature's healthy alternatives. The car allows us furthermore to erase space by disembodying us quite remarkably from it. Yet, place, and any spirit thereof, can only truly be felt through the open circuit of Being, not through screen and speed, and certainly not through pollution and noise.

More worryingly, the loss of our locomotive force also extends to a loss of our ability to locate, since the concrete floggings across our tarmacked land now indicate rather unsubtly where we are headed, without us having to encompass ourselves with natural landmarks and the stars.

In short, the car is not a natural way of moving. It is perhaps the least natural way of moving: mechanical pollutive passive-aggressive moving. Which begs the question, how on earth did it become so popular? Michael Zezima writing in Road Kill: 50 Reasons Why Cars Suck, has some ideas:

The automobile and the lifestyle it inspires have risen to prominence through the power of relentless suggestion. There's nothing delicate about car commercials and car toys and the hundreds of songs and movies that venerate the irrefutable gratification of owning an internal combustion engine of your very own. Like cigarettes, television, and the meat-based diet, cars are profoundly ingrained within modern human existence. It doesn't even register when a movie character hops into a car and screeches away from the curb. We no longer consciously acknowledge the presence of cars on the street, the highway, and in driveways from coast-to-coast...

...The efficacy of the car culture is based upon a façade, on billions of dollars of advertising, on the insecurity and gullibility of humans living in a society that feeds on and cashes in on insecurity and gullibility. 

Some forty years before Zezima wrote that, Ivan Illich wrote this:

The typical American male devotes 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

So, not only have we established that you're just as quick walking, but we've also established that relying on high doses of external energy to power us is unsustainable. The car in other words with its whole panoply of add-ons is a disaster in the waiting. The world cannot sustain every adult driving a car or being carried in some form of pollutive external-energy-consuming transport. That much is clear. So why do we celebrate it? Simply for the wealth it creates for the few, and who, with this wealth, glamorize and sell the car as a necessity of living.


Yet, the car is possibly the least essential item on anyone's list. There is always a non-pollutive alternative. As a cyclist whose bicycle wheels have over the decades melded with my legs, I am deeply aware of how much better the bicycle is on every level compared with the car. Everyone knows this, not just me. But it's testament to how weaned we have become on the car (and not the bicycle and our own steam) that we are all ferried about in pollutants and celebrate the fact. We convince ourselves that it gives us independence and freedom, but these are just words advertisers and manufacturers use to ease our deep-seated guilt that we are all complicit in the desecration of our environment. If you want freedom, cycle; walk. If you want independence (or even interdependence), use your own steam. Grace emerges out of this galvanizing of Being. The car, on the other hand, as a pollutive carrying device that divests, distorts and divides, is one of the most disgraceful inventions ever. Saints cycle, madmen drive. Grace cannot enter via a pollutant. To enter a car is to hold hands with a known serial killer. 

Conversely, a bicycle engages; it galvanizes. It creates 'you' as you pedal. Even at a leisurely pace a slow cyclist will cover 6-8 miles an hour, a speed that would appeal to a trotting camel. Endearing, open, inviting, and curious, a cyclist will always attract the attention of children precisely because the cyclist is open, and is there. A car driver by contrast is absent, is not there. Even in a convertible a car driver will be sealed behind speed and screen, and pollution, not to mention a huge hunk of metal (and his ego). There is no screen between the child and the cyclist. 

In allowing his self to be carried at speed, a passenger in his own body - man, the car-driver, has thus miniaturized the world, and in so doing made his pollutive 'footprint' inarguably bigger. 'Participatory democracy', writes Illich in Energy and Equity, 'demands low energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle'.
Man no longer gathers his self through his own locomotion, collecting and recollecting as he goes. To 'gather' for modern man means to be brought together by vehicles. Yet, to gather can only be done through your own energy. Togetherness, thus, is a function of organic forces not mechanical ones. This may explain why the western world is forever in conflict in spite of its supposed affluence: its practice of gathering has been infected and deformed by the machine. Yet, if man cannot gather together naturally, he will forever remain alone and 'vivially separate'. This is the state of modern man: a vivisected entity who has designed his own aloneness and dementia through abandoning his locomotive force to a life-destroying pollutant. 

Car is short for carnage, never forget that.

My small contribution on Bell's Bridge to raising awareness of the monster hidden in plain sight.

Doveglion

Doveglion was the artistic sobriquet of the Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa. It symbolized the dove, eagle, and lion in one, and also the manner of his brave and deep poems which recollects Nature in her fullness even in spite of his living in the chaotic milieu of New York. There is no such poetry to my work here.. only the hammer (which is its own kind of hard-hitting poem). People - the common tranquillized and over-accessorized young person - these days would struggle to apprehend Villa's message through his intricate wordsmithery. My words have been pared back to almost nothing and reveal the poetry through this spareness and bareness. Poetry, as always, as Truth with a capital T.

Never fly unless you have wings...!

A tribute to Villa on Bell's Bridge.

The Great Erratic of Cloch-A-Druid

No, it's not me... the great erratic... but it could be ;) Instead it's a stone, a big one, near Howwood and Kilbarchan. I had passed nearby many a time along the cycle path to Lochwinnoch and beyond but never made the short detour to see it and pay it hommage. When I lived in Warsaw, there were erratic boulders all over. Indeed, the Glaz Mazur of Piasceczno was almost as big as this one. It was fenced in near a housing estate to the south of the Polish capital which only made it seem more fantastic. You can see the great Polish rock here:

http://wandersthroughwarsaw.blogspot.com/2008/07/warsaw-is-full-of-erratic-boulders-glaz.html

But, yes, the Cloch-A-Druid stone is noted for its one piece size and for travelling a good many miles to get here (who says rocks don't roll?). Theodore Brotchie makes reference to it in his Some Sylvan Scenes Near Glasgow and includes a rather nice little pencil sketch of it too.

This huge mass of whinstone is not an outcrop, 

but has been hewn from an elevated rock 
a little to the east and on which stands a farm-house 
called, also, Clochodrich. So late as 1790 it rested on 
a very narrow base, and a writer in that year supposed
that at one period it had been a rocking-stone. Chalmers, 
in his " Caledonia," seems to think that it was a battle- 
stone of the old tribes of Strathclyde. Hut the name 
which tradition has handed down the ages rather suggests 
that in prehistoric days the weird rites of Thor and Odin 
were celebrated around this ancient temple, while the 
Bael-fires gleamed from its surface. Certainly its position 
commands on the one hand the site of Beli-geith, and 
on the other the rocking Druidical stone of Lows in Beith, 
which serves to show in some degree that its site was 
selected in remote ages for purposes of signalling. 
Whether for Druidical rites, as the names suggests, or as 
a battle-stone from which the gathering-fire would flame 
its alarm, we cannot tell, but that for some such purpose 
it was used there can be no doubt. Our sketch conveys 
an idea of its shape and huge proportions, and a 
measurement of its dimensions gives us a length of 22 
feet: breadth, 17 feet; and height, 12 feet. Whate'er 
the history of Cloch-a-Druid, its lines have fallen on 
pleasant places these days. It stands in the midst of a 
peaceful agricultural country, and as we sketch its rude 
form, the only sound to break the stillness of the summer's 
afternoon is the restful wimple of the little burn of St. 
Bride, which meanders along its pebbly bed but a few 
yards from the base of the rude memorial. 

Check it out. You won't regret it.

Slow Train to Crookston

No, Crookston, a few miles to the south-west of Glasgow, is not the town of crooks but the town of Robert de Croc. Crookston is in other words, more poetical words, the croc town. But thankfully, unlike the youtube video I watched last night showing a huge croc crossing a golf course in Florida, there are no real crocs here, just the history of one Croc whose castle you can see not too far from here. At any rate, I had always wanted to take a photo of the station and 'enter it' from the road having previously only seen it from a moving or stationary train. It reminded me of my pad in Warsaw, lots of greenery, flowers, trees, birds. Sadly in Glasgow though, most social housing does not have this profusion of nature, which is why Crookston is so special. And its wee station a wee gem...