Aside the Kilpatrick braes this misty monday morning... the moisturizer rolls in...
My Legs Are My Face
Orwell once wrote that 'you deserve the face you have by the age of fifty' having presumably served it up to yourself via your behaviour, your diet, and the way you move and treat your own body. Personally, my face is my legs and boy do I deserve these, having served them up to myself via lots of hill-walking, lots of cycling, lots of car-avoidance, and a fairly healthy diet. Should we not be looking at our legs more and our faces less then since we are walking creatures and not facial ones? Should the legs and not the face (or any other part of the anatomy) be the first port of call for anyone searching for a mate? But we have the nasty habit of covering them up these days with things called 'trousers', long 'skirts' and 'slacks'. But it wasn't always the case. Once upon a time in Scotland, men bore their legs proudly via the 'kilt' (from Old Norse kjalta 'fold made by gathering up to the knees') which put them more in kilter with Nature since they could now feel that wind brush against (if not sculpt) them. So, let your legs be your face, and let your face be your legs. Unleash yourself. A man with trousers is a man with his 'legs in pockets'.
Visions of the Infinite
Today, up on the plateau of the skylark, I walked through the sky. The hills up here are devoid of anything that might identify you as a standalone entity. The only screens and mirrors up here is Nature and the locomotive body. As such, when one is up here Oneness (and not fracturedness) is reflected back. It's all this heather and sameness, not to mention the vastness that holds it all together. Down there in the city - in the torture chamber - it's the opposite. Everything reflects back your distorted self because the scene itself has been distorted. That's what a city is: utter distortion if not utter perversion and utter pollution, the perversion being the natural (uni)version that has been forced through the medium of waste, murder, and rape (of Nature). Thus, in the hills, and with continuous practice, one has visions of the infinite because that's 'who you hang about with'. Conversely, down there in the manky city (and Glasgow is nowhere near as manky as some cities), you don't have visions at all because you cannot see anything except your own distorted and polluted self.
Just a few images from the past week... (Kilpatricks, Campsies, Lochwinnoch). Every week I fill my boots with the infinite, and every weekend I levitate.
Climbing the Walls with Style
We Glaswegians are fortunate insofar as we live in a strath. That means that there are hills afoot and if like me you live more or less in the centre of this strath it also means that the only way out is up. You could imagine the city then in its wastefulness and general carbon footprint (more car-track than footprint) as a prison whose walls have to be scaled in order to escape. This is your escape: the land-scape and the hills. When you climb them every day, whether at a snail's pace or a raven's, you escape not just the prison of a denatured and polluted environment but the prison of a concocted and fabricated self. This is how you climb the walls with style, with ab-originality, and an originality that doesn't just strengthen your abs but your connection to the source. So when many are 'climbing the walls' indoors and lamenting the lockdown and the psycho-physical-spiritual degradation of being cooped up inside, the real geniuses are climbing the walls 'with style' outdoors in the blessed space of Nature, whilst exerting their divine right to breathe and engage your own locomotive body.
The Immortal 8
Duncarnock Mount (one of the eight immortals) from above Woodneuk Farm in the Ferenese Hills.
The eight immortals are a group of legendary immortals in Chinese mythology. Look no further than the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum for a depiction of their human forms. It is said that each immortal's powers can be transferred to a vessel that can bestow life or destroy evil. Together, these eight vessels are known as the 'Covert Eight'.
The immortals themselves are generally recognized as Taoists as in guardians of the Tao and the life-force of the universe. They are said to live on a group of five islands in the Bohai Sea, but really, they inhabit the Glasgow strath in the form of hills and crags.
It has taken me many years to find these guardians and immortals (without even looking), and thus am reluctant to reveal their true locations. Yet, reveal them I shall, for in coming to them and beseeching them with your locomotive body, you come to embody the very powers the immortals possess. Yet, you must come to them alone and without encumbrances. Even at the right location the immortal who inhabits this area will not appear if you are weighed down and 'unavailable'. This means you have to avail yourself of all nonsense and approach the immortal 'naked' (not so much unclothed but without any preconceived ideas of what form this immortal may take). It is only then that the covert immortal will reveal itself to you and share some of its secrets with you.
The eight immortals then with combined height of less than 2000m (and an average height of 250m) are smaller than perhaps you imagined. Just think Yoda in hill form:
1. Dumgoyne (427m)
2. The Slacks (365m)
3. Blairskaith (218m)
4. Duncarnock (204m)
5. Barscube Hill (195m)
6. Hill of Barnaigh (189m)
7. Dechmont (183m)
8. Barr Hill (155m)
These are the 'inner eight', the immortals that protect the inner sanctum. The outer eight are another story and include such notables as Hill of Stake, Meikle Bin, Tinto, Tomtain et al. but we will tackle these shortly. First things first... get your ass immortalised by biking and hiking (no cars, if you are carried in any way by a pollutant that disembodies you from your own vital force [trains excepted] then the immortal will not appear).
The Hard to Kill Hill: Turning 'Heart' into 'Earth'
This is the hill of hills: the sloping field that is just steep and long enough to get that heart pumping so much and so strongly that the 'h' of your heart will spontaneously take off and land causing your once tiny heart to become the size of the 'eart-h'. This is what happens when you start behaving naturally and aboriginally - you reconnect with the source and start earthing if not universing.Your heart becomes strong and so too does your mind. You begin reconnecting to the whole and thus the healthy and holy, the sane and saintly. When this happens you slowly emerge from the cocoon that your small ego-self has been fabricated into and become not a standalone 'thing' that is named, decorated and applied (to a profoundly sick society) but a universal system that realizes the infinite breadth of his relations.
One begins to identify not with homo sapiens and your own demented kind that has clearly lost its way but with the Way itself, that all Beings follow. You begin to share fundamentally what you and all beings have in common: (loco)motion self-propulsion.You begin to see a cosmic solidarity emerge that includes and involves you, and which empowers you.
This power comes through the heart, but only through the heart that still beats like a heart. This means getting back into the Earth and into the real 'gym' (of 'nakedness' and the elements). Though your heart may pump on a treadmill in a fitness centre whilst staring into a mirror and listening to the latest dross on the narcissistic echo-chamber, the heart misses out on its true nakedness by being sidelined by the ego and vanity. This means that the fitness centre makes you fit, whilst Nature makes you healthy (and thus whole as a universal entity and not some uber-fit clown with big muscles). This is the reason I think that this scene of Seagal running up a hill (and then perching at the top like an eagle) has stayed with me for thirty years. And why I have not entered a gym for about ten. Because Nature renders powerful like an eagle (able to see everything) whilst the gym and fitness centre renders you docile like a hamster (able only to see your own small, made-up, and broken self).
Seagal-like on Contemplation Rock... ;)
Teleport
Upon jumping the 'bullet to the moor' (the Helensburgh Express train) this morning to Dalmuir I made a grand discovery as I sat and sipped coffee from my flask whilst gazing out the window. I realised that this train (as with all trains that I take) is not a form of transport at all (since all wild animals and shamanic cyclists eschew transportation) but a teleportation device. This is what a tele-port is: a device that transfers you across a distance 'instantaneously'. And if you think about it, this is exactly what happens here. In the case of Partick to Dalmuir this morning, it was a distance of some seven miles covered in ten minutes. Yet this 'ten minutes' is 'dissolved' through the act of mimesis, that is, of my mimicking the exact same motions that I would go through had I stayed at home (namely, sitting down, gazing at the 'passing landscape' on my computer and through my kitchen window, writing, and sipping coffee). Thus, through the mimetic act of 'being in my kitchen' the ten minute journey time is evaporated so to speak. When that happens, there is no duration anymore; nothing endures since everything is 'in the moment' and 'ecstatically present'. I enter the 'train' at the same time as I exit it. It is like this then that I can call the trains I take teleportation devices. It is also like this, that despite living in the centre of the city, I am practically living in the hills.
Pacemaker
Exiting the train at Kilpatrick this morning I am confronted with another young man staring into his hand whilst trying to move forwards. I immediately think that it is his heart (as in a pacemaker) that he is carrying, like a drip-feed that he cannot let go of for fear that he might die. I shake my head once more at how a whole generation of youngsters (the only people who can get us out of this mess) have been kidnapped and stupefied (and thus rendered stupid and incapable) by imposter tech. and their existentially vacuous purveyors.
I wonder again at the fascination people (young and old) have with this terrible little handheld device, and how mesmerized and arrested they are by it. I question the efficacy of the pacemaker as I walk into the hills. What does this little 'pacemaker' actually do? Well, the pacemaker keeps you apace and up to date through (unnatural) technology and media, just as your heart in the natural realm keeps you apace and up to date with natural technology (body) and media (Nature: the land, the elements etc.). As I walk up these hills, I become aware that my 'smartphone' is my beating heart which is interpreting the landscape through which it is navigating. My 'fingering of the screen' is none other than a 'legging through the land'. I can see it as clear as day as I scale these braes: my 'internet' and the great web of life (most of it nonhuman) that I tune into and attune to, but which never ever distracts (from the essential).
I guess then you could say that I'm like everyone else, which, on a superficial level, would be true. Except my technology and my inter-net involves a lot more nonhuman than human and does not rape Nature, Being, and the Earth, in order to work.
The soul the Arabs say can only go as fast as the pace of a trotting camel (or perhaps even a very dirty mountain bike).
Sabre - Braes that Slice the Bodymind Open
That's what these braes are (my oracle said as much as I was descending them today): an original (cliff) face that helps you understand your own original face. This, however, appears to be a contradiction in terms: the face as fascia and surface (and thus superficial if not artificial) versus the original and 'that which originates' presumably from the depths. Yet, it's this contradiction (this speaking against) - depth and surface, artifice and originality - that eventually cuts you open like a sabre. Because it's not really a contradiction but a communication. Which is what these braes are in a roundabout way.
Type of single-edged sword, 1670s, from French sabre "heavy, curved sword" (17c.), alteration of sable (1630s), from German Sabel, Säbel, probably ultimately from Hungarian szablya "saber," literally "tool to cut with," from szabni "to cut."
If you look at the strath that Glasgow sits in you will see the hills, braes and fells form a sort of sabre around the valley with an open end towards the east. The hills do not encircle Glasgow completely, but 'sabre' it as in 'almost encircle', or as in 'a heavy curve'. So, it comes as a happy coincidence that the word 'braes' also contains the letters for the word 'sabre'. Because if the above contradiction doesn't slice you open, walking and/or cycling them most certainly will.
From this footbridge over the expressway we can see the tops of all three sides of the curved sabre. Here, looking west, we can see (just) behind the high-rises on the right of the image the Kilpatrick braes and hills.
Looking south, I can see (with the naked eye) the unmistakeable bend of the 'kissing tree' behind Barrhead and Ferenese Golf Course. Amazing!
Looking south-east, we fall upon the Cathkin braes...
It is important for city-dwellers to have aspects that give onto the country, flightlines for the soul. I did a blogpost very early on about 'Hills that live at the ends of streets'. It's one of my favourite posts that I made into a photographic artist book. When these flightlines into the outside become blocked by constructors and their monstrous buildings we ourselves become violated and 'blocked'. This is the danger of living in a city like London or Paris (et al.). You can't see anything of the outside from the city. And when this happens you no longer have a city but a 'shithole'.
Don't let Glasgow become one too...
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