Tannoy Spam: See it, Say it, Shut it!

There have been several times when standing quietly on the platform listening to the birds or the wind whisper through the tall trees when I have been jolted out of my ecstasy by some annoying hi-pitched voice coming across the tannoy telling me how to behave.

'Remember' it tells me, 'not to step in front of the train when it arrives.' 

'Remember' it continues, 'to stand up when entering the train.'

'Remember to press the button when opening the train door.'

'Remember to breathe... remember to open your eyes when you walk... remember to... be... alive...' or words to that effect. It's like the ten commandments for 21st century man, who is of course the stupefied infant whose development has been arrested by his buying into the overlaying of disembodying technologies.

'That's why I'm calling for a bonfire of the banalities, said Transport Secretary Grant Shapps regarding 'an endless torrent of repeated and unnecessary announcements'.

Dum spiro spero.

Pollokshaws West train station at the eastern edge of Pollok Country park has a wonderful array of trees and birdsong which is routinely drowned out by unnecessary tannoy announcements when there is no-one but me standing there.

Paisley Canal train station is its own tiny eco-system what with its regular residents of squirrels, jackdaws, magpies, and wood pigeons. Again, this natural quietness is regularly interrupted unecessarily with all too loud announcements, designed, presumably by the sounds of them, for and by infants.

Cowbell

Is it a plane or a bird? No, it's a dummy, a pacifier, a drip-feed, a cane, a crutch, a cuddly toy, an ignoring device, a pipeline, a tracker, a noose, a mesmerizing device, and a distraction...

It is this dis-traction and one's removal from the way (and the tract of the real) that causes us to carry such a device. Because we are lost souls, and the 'cowbell' convinces us that we are not.

Fjords and Swans from Glenburn

 

Visions of infinity... that which is un-finished, in other words that which grows, is in-finite. This is what infinite means: not finished. And when you're up here in the hills, everything is infinite. Down there in the filthy city, overtaken by that which does not grow but merely decays, nothing is infinite. Everything has been 'stopped' and is therefore 'stupid'. There is no growth and plenty of stupefaction. It's the difference between heaven and hell.

Up here of course it's heaven. This is what paradise means: 'elevated region' from the Sanskrit paradesha. But heaven also means to heave 'n go; to use you own steam and to physically exert yourself. This exertion is all important and it is why heaven, and holy places, are on the tops of hills and not at the bottom of them. To exert is to 'express art'. This art emerges from contravening Nature's universal inertia (the flow). Thus to exert is to push out that which has been arranged and composed artificially. Only then, emptied of all artifice, exerted and cleansed, will one realise the true nature of one's unfinished nature.

Hot Pink For A Grey Day: Paisley Patterns Al Fresco

 

You've got to love the Paisley pattern. And those wonderful bandanas. As a boy and a young man you couldn't get me away from them. My friends even asked to borrow them. I was a real revolutionary! And I still am... Now, in pandemic times, they make for a great 'mask' too. And so, like my flask and spare tube and pump, I rarely leave home without one (or two). I've always dreamed of going to L.A. and wearing them just to ask gang members (the Crips and the Bloods who wear the blue and red bandanas respectively as their gang colours) if they know where they come from. All other bandanas are just a poor imitation.

My Paisley pattern bandanas were so popular back in the day that I rented them out ;) 

Chef D'Oeuvre: Cooker Art

'Cooker', when I worked abroad as an ESOL teacher (teaching English to speakers of other languages), was 'the person who cooked', the chef in other words. It was the one vocabulary mistake that you could guarantee with even the most proficient of speakers. At any rate, they were all surprised when they discovered that the cooker was actually the mechanism, that big metal thing with gas and electric pipes going into it from the back. 

Ok, prologue over... 

My cooker, that big metal thing, is a work of art. It's actually a canvas that I clean maybe every three months or so, and then 'repaint'. One of my brothers cleans his cooker every time he uses it. I think this is daft, for not only are you creating more work for yourself, but you are missing out on a wonderful opportunity to see this big metal thing 'grow'.

And it does grow. This is what art is: growth in its original form. And so I only clean my cooker a few times a year like pruning a plant that gets too wayward. It's a wonderful thing watching the organic - Nature - add the finishing touches to your masterpiece ;)

A Natural Jackson Pollock...

Car-free Care-free

This was one of the aspects that attracted me to this area in Cessnock twelve years ago, the lack of cars, the wide streets, and the ample pavements. I've noticed however in recent years that even the poor can 'afford' big flashy cars, and so the streets have generally become busier. But today, I noticed that one side was entirely devoid of cars. Everybody's back at 'work' (I use the term loosely) and so are their cars. And I thought: What joy it is to live outwith the sight and sound (and smell) of the gas chamber!

Oh, and to have a huge (cabbage) palm tree staring up at you as you look out... :)

Attention Attention Attention!

Attention attention attention.... this was the mantra of the writer Peter Matthiessen. And he was right. Attention is everything. But slowly, today, it is being eroded and destructured by corporate morons who empty their techno-trash upon us every year. This trash combined with multi-media and multi-everything serves to diminish one's attention by overlaying it with distraction and entertainment. Entertainment however, if you know your etymologies, is nothing more than a devious form of tantric indoctrination that replaces your attending with a glut of frivolous distractions. As such, we see nothing except what they want us to see. So, when you stop and you start attending, when your sense become cleansed by not kowtowing to a moronic technology that is not 'the body in communication with the cosmos', you are sometimes startled by how much and what you can see.

Exiting Pollok Country Park at Pollokshaws West railway station. On a bicycle it is even easier to miss the plethora of 'tiny life' that is out there...

Dark City: A Movie of Beautiful Compositions

There's a moment in the film Dark City when a car pulls up in front of an apartment block. It's night-time and the street is lit by various coloured lamplights and headlights. The apartment block itself of which we can only see the lower portion looks monumental in size, and the car, an antique shiny black Bentley, looks as if it's been driven straight out of the showroom. Dark City's cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski, eventually won the 2008 National Board of Review Award for Excellence in Filmmaking.

But then I look at some of the photos I have taken of the natural settings where I have trudged in recent weeks. Not so much Dark City as Light Country. Here, the compositions are largely organic and natural. There are no miniatures like in Proyas' film which can fool your perspective, but there are plenty of miniatures (tiny creatures and their equally tiny micro-cosms) that welcome and enlarge your perspective.

Dark City is a extremely beautiful film to look at. As is the land. Except the land demands your attention to the body too, since the land is the body. Film demands the opposite: that you sit and be sedated. Yet Dark City also demands that you get out... of this sedation, when everyone falls asleep. It demands that we get to Shell Beach, and the great ocean. Which kinda makes it more than just a film, does it not?

The Snow Bag

The snow bag is just as important as the sun bag. Indeed, the sun lives inside the snow and so bagging it is a double whammy. And today, it came and went as if it were a migrating bird just passing through. And I bagged it, all of it! This is what the shamanic cyclist does: he gathers and hunts, not animals but his Self. He does this by collecting and re-collecting the elements. Through this process transmutation occurs. Man becomes transfigured by the elemental. His insides become transformed by the outside. Joy emerges through hardship and the trudge. Through space and through vision.

You could be anywhere. I like to think I'm up in the Pacific Northwest what with the gangly trees here. A beautiful little ridge path that no-one walks because of other more popular routes. This lack of people too adds to the quality of the path.

From Kilpatrick train station looking at the hump I've just gone up 'n over. The route is more or less from centre right to centre top (through the forested part just below the top). It took me about 90mins. (less time than a shit movie) from the train station and back again. 

And as if by magic, I arrive back at the train staion just as the train is pulling in, and, yes, I do not wear a watch. When you join forces with the Earth, with the elements and the animals, time dissolves into the body, so that now your walking is a sort of timing, in tune and in harmony with the All.

And finally, as if to end the perfect morning, I see that the old job centre in Herschell Street, my old stomping ground, has finally been pulled down... ('Job' is short for 'jobby', didn't you know that?)

The Sun Bag

Everyone has a sun bag. It's in there - that bodymind - somewhere, and during a Scottish winter when it gets awfy dreich and dreary it can be a very empty place. Hence, the importance of filling your sun bag up at every available opportunity. Sun-chasing is an art form in a Scottish winter just as avoiding the rain is in a Scottish summer. And when you're out in your own body, and not a dozy passenger in some hermetically sealed gas chamber, art is everywhere, thus your chance of bagging it is pretty good. Conversely, when you are in a car, or any transport that deports you from your own heart, there is no art anywhere (if there's no heart there's no art), only inertia that enfeebles, clouds, and destructures the body-mind-earth system. So, get out on your bike, chase the light, fill your sun bag, and harvest those beams later.