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 ;)