The Seat As Cage
Once upon a time, long before you were born, to be seated was a form of punishment. Like transportation, sitting someone down was a penance. Because it meant that you were in a cage, and that you couldn't stand up, and that you couldn't walk. Nowadays however, such is the state of our memory - history being a luxury that most people cannot afford - we have no idea that the very foundations of modern society - transport and sedentariness - are steeped in torture methods of old. Who would've thunk it?
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Don Peyote
My sacred plant - are not all plants sacred? - arrived today from down south. I had initially thought them illegal in UK but they're not.
| “Hallucinogenic cacti are not illegal in the UK, unless prepared for consumption as a hallucinogen. This could include drying them, or cutting them into edible ‘buttons’ |
At any rate, I had tried germinating some seeds I bought online from Germany but not only were they terribly expensive but even with my grow lights and tents I found them difficult to get going. And so, I bought one that was already mature (about 5 years old). So, here's hoping it's not too stressed after 5 days in a box (the chap sent it second class!). Next year, all things being equal, it should flower and produce seeds. And then we'll really be cooking with gas.
Exit-ability: Ease of Exit
Exitability, not to be confused with excitability, is one's capacity to exit and leave a city's confines as effortlessly and smoothly as possible. The parameters are simple: no car, and bicycle (no electric bikes) and trains are allowed. So, the question then becomes: How quickly can you get into the hills, into the unpeopled realm, into the unpolluted and undomesticated dimension? I have an idea of attempting a project which sees me being dropped into the centre of a major city and then having to root my way out of it. In Glasgow, I can do it in 30minutes. Do you think you could trump that? And no racing and rushing. And what about New York or Tokyo? How fast do you think you get into the outside from these places? What about London? I imagine we're talking hours here not minutes. And so, exitability is a craft, a skill that the wild cyclist attains and finetunes simply through the regularity by which he leaves the city. He knows the train stations, the different lines and timetables, the rat-runs through residential areas, and of course the location of the pot of gold. And with this local knowledge (is there any other kind?) he exits the city, and by doing so, enters something else.
Haole: White Man at Silverburn
Haole is a term used by native Hawaiians to describe non-native foreigners and the white man. The word means 'without breath, wind, or spirit'. When I worked and lived in Senegal they used the word toubab to describe the pasty-faced invader. When I cycled thru Pollok this morning however, past the monstrous Silverburn shopping mall, a giant car park if ever there was one, and through the heavily polluted air (the M77 being a few hundred metres away), I had never seen a white man as white as Pollok man. Indeed, this 'white' wasn't so much white as it was an absence of colour. This absence of colour itself was an absence of the outside combined with an absence of the moving blood. I honestly felt like a different species compared to these peely-wally skins and faces that made the proverbial 'death warmed up' look lively. They all looked like junkies with their bedraggled bodies and withered faces. But they weren't. These were ordinary people. And even though they aren't junkies in the traditional sense they are junkies nonetheless since it is 'junk life' - cars, processed food, bullshit jobs - that these people are addicted to. Which kinda makes them a different species, a species that is no longer 'human' in the sense that they are close to the land and in harmony with it, but post-human. This post-humous entity is as the word suggests not really alive, sealed in as it is to gas chambers (cars) and coffins (offices and apartments). Modern day man - Homo pollokus - is an entity without breath, wind, or spirit, and the animating power of the Earth. Which goes in some way to explaining the pasty-faced nature of these live-action corpses.
The Sun In November
This past week alone we have had three golden days of full sunshine. The temperature has been a mild fifteen degrees during the day. And so there is no excuse not to get on your bike and head out and up into the hills. I took a selfie yesterday up beside Glenburn reservoir behind Paisley and it looked as if I had a sun tan. And yet, the only sun I've had is this Scottish one. But it's not just the sun that works its way into the lining of your skin. It's the rain, the wind, the fresh air, the occasional colliding insect, the mud that my bike throws up... Nature in other words, raw and cosmic. This is the real cosmetic that doesn't so much cover your skin as invest it and imbue it with a radiance that is normally reserved for aborigines and wild birds. But then, I am an aborigine albeit with a bicycle, a wild bird (because of the bicycle), who has aligned myself Nature and thus the self-cleansing and not with the industrial and the self-filthying. Obvious, isn't it?
Not so much weather-beaten as weather-loved ;)
The Witty Comeback As Knockout Punch
Just call me Touche Turtle. I am always on guard, or as they say in these here parts, aye ready. The wits you see are part of the wild for they allow you to 'operate' the wilderness and yourself within it. The problem with today's superimposed humans removed from the wild is that their wits have also been removed to machines and devices that purport to witness for them. And so, modern man has become a prisoner of and a slave to his machines, and his wits have suffered terribly as a consequence. Not so for the animal who inhabits not delusion and the car park but full-blown Nature, wild and uncontaminated. This animal witnesses everything that needs to be witnessed, that is, the essential. And through this witnessing, the wits and the spirit are galvanized and strengthened. So that today, when I tried to explain to a young man up in the hills that really his two dogs should be on leashes in order to protect the ground-nesting birds and respect the wild, and he said, 'Ah'll fuckin' dae whit ah want, I am the wild,' I replied without even thinking, 'How you can be wild when you've got two barbie dolls with you?' And that was that.
Spider Season
The LA Times announces this morning that it's spider season in LA County as well as elsewhere in the world. I have over fifty spiders in my tiny home and they all love it here! But my spiders are not the web-spinning sort although they do spin some kind of 'web'. Nor do my spiders bite or scare, or scurry under unliftable objects. And my spiders pop out little spiders like nothing on earth perhaps as much as the eight-legged variety. Look and see for yourself...
Ruchill
Ruchill is in north Glagow just beside the canal. It has been cleaned up somewhat (canal and Ruchill) in recent years with the addition of a bridge and various nature walks. The sizeable park is almost always empty and has some great views. Also, the flagpole summit is worth a visit for the vista over the city and beyond although the tall trees could do with a light haircut and comb.
Sun Ray
You kinda forget how exquisite the light is at this time of year. Which is strange because the sun in October (as well as September et al.) is unforgettable. Yet, each time, this season arrives I marvel anew at this star's brilliant light. And so here we have a 'ray' hitting the Earth (around Dalmuir) having travelled some 93 million miles. Wonderful, isn't it?
Swallows & Nothingness
Life is motion.
Wallace Stevens
Imagine that, having to fly 200 miles a day covering some 5000 miles and you've only just been born. This is why these little guys inhabit nothingness: because of this migratory habit and their sacred right of migration. The animal and the land is one just as the animal and the land and nothingness is one. Man is split (and 'legion') because he no longer inhabits Nature (and the sacred), but is carried by his infantile consciousness which then de-structures and destroys him. This destructuring removes him from nothingness. And it is here, with this retarded removal - this miscarriage of Being - that all of man's problems begin.
Another Overweight Moron on a Power Tool Trying to Look Cool
They do!
They think (I use the word loosely) that it's cool to breenge through a pastoral and serene landscape with their noise and pollution. I've seen it too many times now, whether a leaf-blower blowing nothing, or the Range Rover that thinks it's a bicycle, they think it's cool to shit all over the Earth like an infant and expect somone else to clean it all up. Like this overweight moron on his jet-ski slicing through an otherwise idyllic little landscape.
General Breaker: The Farm as Concentration Camp
It's only when you pass thru farms as often as I do that you realise that they really are concentration camps for animals. The word 'farm' itself is wholly innocuous and conveys nothing of the horror that happens on it. I regularly hear howls and screaming from animals from nearby sheds when I pass through farms. Animals in fields generally look bored and sedated and afraid. And then there are the torture instruments lying around in the most unusual of places. Today, it was the 'general breaker', a supergun of terrifying proportions that is used to break various things including I imagine the land.
Synchronicity by the Police
I've had my fair share of the uncanny, the synchronous, and the downright weird and bizarre, but none moreso than this morning when I turned up at a spot I had earmarked for some street art only to find a police car waiting. It was like that scene in Heat when the cops are waiting for the robbers outside the bank. Except there, the polis were tipped off. Here, no-one tipped them off because no-one knew except me. Now, let me qualify this. This is a spot I have cycled past hundreds of times without spray paint cans in my bag. And yet, the one day I decide to paint some road sign, I have two police people standing right next to it. When I passed I asked the female police officer what the problem was. She answered as all police people answer, obtusely, and said there was no problem. When I then pointed to the moped that had been parked half on the pavement and half on the road and asked her what this was doing here, she replied that someone had reported it stolen bla bla bla. 'Oh, so that's the problem', I said before cycling on. I then embarked upon my route into the hills and back, having stashed my cans just out of sight of the police, and when I returned two hours later they were still there, now sitting in their car. I could not believe the coincidence and the synchronicity of these events. Clearly, or maybe, unclearly, I am trying to say something to myself. But what?
Answers on a postcard please.
Putting Your Finger On It
Today I returned from a beautiful cycle into the hills only to see a mural that had been started that morning at the end of my street getting finished. I stopped to enquire as to what they were painting and it turned out they were celebrating the nature of our neighbourhoods, Cessnock, Ibrox, and Govan. There were newts, bats, a bird man (of Pollok), a local pond, and a badger (Ibrox meaning the place of the badger). There were no people, no pets, no smartphones, and no cars. And then I saw my name, Roman, that the artist had just signed in the middle of the mural not because this was his name but because, apparently, someone had walked by with a dog called Roman. And I just couldn't put my finger on it, the strangeness, the synchronicity, of my extolling the virtues of Nature these past couple of years in this area amongst others via the stencil. I had never put my name to them though, and so I chortled at the coincidence. That somehow the universe was saying something to me, that somehow I was saying something to myself. But I just couldn't put my finger on it.
Road Signs as Frames
And so, another frame (another useless road sign) gets painted along the Sustrans cycle path with something a little less useless.
A437
Ok, so you've probably guessed that I hate cars. The car is the most demented and stupid item man has ever created. And yet...
And so when I came across this useless little road sign telling foot pedestrians on a footbridge that this open gas pipeline (road) is the A437 I thought 'Nice one, what a lovely little frame.'
Kermit by Kilbarchan
Boy was I surprised at how evil some people can be when I came across poor Jeanne Moreau's 'figure' defaced so violently. I had put up a stencil of her (see previous post) on an opportune plaque along the sustrans cycle path at Kilbarchan. The following week when I passed here, I noticed (you couldn't not notice) that someone had taken their keys or a knife to the wood itself upon which it was painted and gouged it so violently that I actually wanted to meet this 'evil person' to ask him why he did it. At any rate, today I painted over it as best as I could and put Kermit up in Moreau's place. But the site has been ruined for good I fear due to this moron's antics. What can you do? You put up some art and people destroy it. Go figure.
Steam
Ok, so the picture above is not mine, but what a cracker! And it's the same steam engine that I saw yesterday chugging through Kilpatrick station which you can see below. It's one of the Strathspey/Jacobite engines now which has been plying Britain's railways since 1945. And I saw it, and it was good. Everyone else missed it cause they were staring into their hands.
Engine 44871 passing through Kilpatrick. (Above) The same engine passing across Rannoch Moor.
Two Jeanne Moreaux & A Jean-Pierre Leaud
On my routine cycle where nothing is ever routine since I'm out on the open on a bicycle I pass three schools in amongst the villages and towns. For a large part of the route I'm on the Sustrans cycle path - a bucolic corridor of a million trees that leads us down to the coast as serenely as possible. And so, a little tasteful 'artwork' and not 'graffiti' as the three lads having a pathside San Miguel corrected me.
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