The Steppenwolf & The Russian Man

I "wolf" you! Inuit Saying

Being in Kazakhstan, and writing as I am of the end of the human, I thought it appropriate to mention Hesse not for the obvious choice of Steppenwolf which of course describes the confusions of a middle-aged man (I am neither middle-aged nor a 'man', nor indeed am I confused), but for a small volume of essays on Dostoevsky (who incidentally spent four years in exile in northern Kazakhstan in Semipalatinsk following four years in a prison in Omsk) called Blick Ins Chaos (In Sight of Chaos) which describes the collapse of belief and downfall of European morals (I am reminded here of the film-maker Carlos Reygadas' comments on Europe as a spiritually void place), and the concurrent arising of what he refers to as the 'Russian Man', an existential monster, post-human in the truest sense, who seeks only for his deluded self, and rejects all forms of thinking. He is a sort of beast divested of his own essence and ethic. 'It is the rejection of every strongly held moral or ethic on favour of a comperehensive laissez-faire', writes Hesse.

At the present moment, it is debatable as to whether the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, with his war-mongering antics, falls short of this description of the Russian man. But perhaps, more importantly, and what Hesse failed to foresee, is the rise of the American Man (who as we can see, needn't be hemmed in by nationality or borders). The American Man is a global phenomenon, and a toxic one. American Man, loud and brash, crude and inconsiderate, is the role-model of the new generation. He is desirous to a fault, his greed and want know no bounds. He stomps his way across the globe like some mechanical gorilla (the more divided the self, the more noise you make), unable any longer to control his self and his actions. He is marked by his constructiveness-destructiveness, his inability to respond to subtlety, his heavy-handedness in all matters relating to the heart and mind. He has been untethered from every life-giving network and instead has attached himself to artificial and life-destroying mechanisms, to scientism and certainty, to an absence of the sacred, to money and consumption. His most astonishing attribute lies not in his 'monstrous soul-stuff', nor in the fact that he is not awake or even alive in the truest sense (merely a function of proprioceptive sensations), but that he sees himself as an immortal amongst mortals, and as the epitome of civilization and progress. American Man is thus complete in his indoctrination, and his mechanization; he is entire in his dehumanization, and deadness. And this deadness continues to spread like a plague across the cool breath'd earth.

The steppenwolf here in Kazakhstan (Canis lupus lupus, also known as the Eurasian wolf or Russian forest wolf) in its plague too of overpopulation and destruction would appear to be an ideal comparison to the American Man, yet the wolf of the steppe has maintained a strict harmony with its nature in spite of its increasing numbers (caused unsurprisingly by interfering man). Hunting them, here in Kazakhstan, is almost a civic duty; there are more wolves here than in any other country, and the 'damage' they have caused to cattle and livestock (and children) is legendary. Their pelts are used as rugs and their fur for parka trims and coats the world over. Their skins are also worn by Kazakh wrestlers as if to defy theses beasts and show them who's boss. But the Steppenwolf, regardless of Homo poacher, will always be boss over man, wrestler or otherwise. The wolf of the steppe has blood coursing through its veins still, even moreso now than ever because of what man has done to it. The steppenwolf has not divided the self like man (and Hesse's Harry Haller), and confused itself with greed and gluttony and an outsourcing of its own vital energies. It makes no noise. It moves swiftly and quietly. Its howls are there to lament the death of the human (which of course is its own death too). The wolf of the steppe cannot be compared with man, indeed it would be a travesty to do so. Roaming the expansive steppe, following the herds of migrating saiga, the steppenwolf recognizes its purpose and follows it with his whole being. Man, on the contrary, boxes his self in, becomes unhealthy, becomes unholy, deludes and elides the self into thinking it is 'me'; packs it and bubble-wraps it until such a point where he is incapable of feeling anything anymore other than what he is told more often than not through the medium of sensationalism. There is no response. There is no blood coursing through him. There is no howling.

There is no wolf.

Wolf Hunt, 1862, Alexander Schwabe.

Rain-washed not Brain-washed: Waiting is Waking!

The meaning is in the waiting. R.S. Thomas


For some reason, I have tended to think of this blog as an autumn-winter thing, and not as a spring-summer one. I guess the slowness of fall and winter is more obvious than that of their more awakened counterparts. But, beneath the surface it needn't be the case, for even in the hottest season of the year, and 2014 was pretty damn hot for Glasgow, there is slowness and stillness and room for contemplation. I think the reason was that I was so invested in my Cycling Meditations (both blogs are interchangeable and should be seen as two limbs from the same body-mind) this spring and summer that I clean forgot (not about flowing slowly but) about this blog. Still, I keep a journal, and as I was flicking through it I found this rain-spattered entry for Thursday, August 13th:

[As a precursor, I have always been interested in language and the origin and relationships of words. In this case, the words are 'wait' and 'wake' and if you check out their etymologies you might find that they are not so different in their origins, coming from Old High German wahhon "to watch, be awake," related to Old English wacian "to be awake".... This has had a profound effect on me in several situations of waiting for several hours at a time: at a deserted Turkish-Greek border station waiting four hours for a train to Alexandroupoli, and at another deserted train station in Kashubia in northern Poland waiting for a train to Gdansk from Żukowo, as well as other similar points in time-space. The key here is the solitude and the silence with the actual waiting, which strangely allows the self to waken up to its surroundings in a way that is not normally evident. Waiting, thus, in such spots of silence, is actually awakening to the greater self, and should not be seen as some sort of chore as we have to view it in the west. It is perhaps more akin to an African waiting, where time-space dissolves into self and vice versa]. Anyway.... Thursday, August 13th:

Thursday, by the Kelvin - a light rain - a 'light' 'rain': can there be anything as fundamentally resuscitative? Light and water by the Kelvin, and a little cloud. And not a soul about. Even the birds have taken to the insides of trees, except that is, for the grey wagtail bobbing up and down on the river.

Utter peace. The rain seems to keep down the dust (not just of dirt and man, but of sound and echo). As a result, it is a peacefulness that is unequal to, let's say, the tranquility at the tops of mountains.

I'm waiting for big Ewan and a delivery of 'lemon'. The wood pigeons light up the sonic corridor  of this Kelvin gallery. It really is a little paradise. Indeed, my writing and my thinking (can one's thinking ever be one's own?) seem improved immensely by these few drops of rain. When I see the fools with their little designer umbrellas almost taking your eye out with their inconsiderate behaviour I have nothing but pity for them and their rain/heat/wind/ proof garments and add-ons. Effectively, they are, in their brain-washed (not rain-washed as it perhaps should be!) states, living proof that you can become life-proof.

Oh give me rain any day!

Waiting is waking!!

The Loss of the Slow & The Loss of Mind

If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom [...]  Jesus said, 'I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the infants of humanity because they are blind in their hearts and do not see...' [The Gospel of Thomas]


The loss of the slow is the loss of mind. It is a form of dementia, this loss. Indeed, the prevalence of dementia and dementia related diseases (dis-eases, unease of the self) in the 21st century is perhaps a reflection of how estranged we have become from this essential way of being. Slowness as contemplation, slowness as an understanding of one's place within the great grand scheme of things. It's little wonder that people are running about like headless chickens, searching for this and for that, gallivanting across the planet as tourists with no concern for anything other than their own narcissistic meanderings. But there is nothing to be found, at least not outside the self, nothing to search for.

"When will the kingdom come"? his followers asked. "It will not come by watching for it"


There is nothing to be found,
   even if I search.
There is nothing to do 
   but to warm myself on my own.
There is nothing to do 
   but to burn my own body and
   light the place around me.

Jukichi Yagi (1898-1927)

Now embedded within an orgy of technology and mechanics that usurps our very vitality and which seeks to further estrange us from the environment (which constitutes our self), it is no wonder that our existential constitution is now at odds with that of nature at large. And yet, since environment and organism evolve together and are so interdependent as to constitute a single evolutionary phenomenon, by succumbing to the mega-comforts and hyper-conveniences of modernity, we are effectively allowing ourselves to be estranged from our more mysterious and indefinite selves.

The kali yuga is upon us: l'age du cul. The age of spiritual and religious oblivion.

People are so attached to their ways, to their possessions, that when it finally comes to pass, the loss of those we have come to cling to (not 'love', for true love is a delicate state of acknowledgement that is far from a grasping or a gripping) causes a further devastation of mind.

People, then, engorged with an anti-contemplative way of life defined by the prevalence of business and the state of being busy (that has actually exceeded itself and become a state of manicness), have become maniacs. I have known people who, having nothing to propel them into activity, find themselves 'bored'. They are literally 'at a loss' of what to do, having no-one or no-thing to entertain them. Unable to entertain themselves (entertainment is a sort of hypnotic indoctrination), since they have never had a spare moment to develop their selves, they scurry about like agitated animals on the verge of being hunted. It is deeply disturbing to actually see this, and yet it happens every day and we pay it little attention (because, as a result of being over-convenienced, we simply cannot attend). Attention itself, as the act of attending, has become something of an encumbrance, something that, if at all possible, should be avoided at all costs. Slowness, on the other hand, as an act of deliberate attending, is an essential discipline that, like our mother tongue, we have lost to the clutter and clatter of a noise infested and spiritually oblivious society.

Demented people are all over the place. They walk among us hidden in plain sight, concealed by the masks of technology and monkey suits. In an age of terrorism, the paradox of terror is almost as  terrifying as the terror itself: The real terrorists are the consumers, the shoppers, the hedge-fund managers, stockbrokers and bankers, snake-oil salesmen, all preying (through their actions and desires, some unknowingly, some very knowingly) on the weak and the wounded. The real terrorists are those who work without living, in other words, whose job has nothing at all to do with their philosophy of life, but only to do with putting money on the table. Then there are the less innocuous terrorists, the simpletons who have allowed their brains to be outsourced to a tablet or an iphone, burying their brains and bodies in technologies and machines at every available moment, for no more reason than to espouse their own trivial and banal lives. The incapacity of people to think coherently, to think beyond mere cliche and super-imposed thoughts terrifies me, and terrifies most people who can think beyond sub-routines, for these people outnumber us and it is these people who vote, who lead, who make the ridiculous decisions to order and manipulate our society into the shambles that it is. It is these people who espouse the virtues of multiculturalism only for us to find out 30 years down the line that it was never culture (a cultivating growth) in the first place but 'exploiture' (a metaphysically void and debilitating bloating), and that the multi- just meant more money, and more GDP. It is these people who, simply counting the money, sell our ancient and semi-wild landscapes to toxic and vacuous businessmen for the sake of jobs that never in fact transpire, (and even if they did...). It is these people with their inability to think at a distance, with their greed and desire for an instant pay-off who poison our land and infect it with their dementia. Might I remind you that when Hitler came to power, the whole framework behind which he worked created thousands of jobs.

Buyers and merchants will not enter the places of my father.

It makes me want to weep when I see 'grown' men and women gazing into devices, mesmerized as a fish is by the glinting mask of its harpooner. It is a form of cerebral masturbation this behaviour, a form of indecent exposure having private phone calls in open public,  with people walking about as if with their genitalia out, demented... gone.... lost....

Plugged into the artificial and life-absorbing matrices, people no longer know how to respond, or correspond, with the world in which they are. 'World' instead of the verb it once was, is effectively now a noun, and a commodity, like everything else, like being and experience, like men and women, branded, designed, cosmeticised... and awaiting flotation on the market, occasionally tax deductible. Responsibility, as an ability to respond, is at an all time low. Maturity, (as metaphyscial growth), accordingly, is also rock bottom. And yet, especially now, is the time when we need it the most.

In an age when we have never had so much information and access to knowledge, I weep at the readiness of people to abandon the nirvana that is simply life and death as they are. [The kingdom is here and yet you do not see it]. I weep at their franticness of decorating and ornamenting; of cosmetics and not cosmos. I weep at the ignorance: at the inability to add one and one and get two, to see how their actions, their energy and existential illiteracy, their complicitous behaviours, cause the crises and conflicts that constantly afflict the world today. Their stuff: their homes and families, cars and computers, bank accounts and balderdash, are the fruits of this ignorance, of this complicity, and it is all covered in blood. I pray for them simply through being my Self, but prayer (from the few humans left in this posthumous world) is not enough. There is no hope, and those who dare speak of such a thing are clearly demented and attempting to negate their own ingrained guilt, trying to burn away the tattoos by the scratching of words.

Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβούμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος.

There is no hope. There is only reality. And the deeper you go, the clearer you see that the human is an endangered species, and man and woman an invasive one. This is why we honour the child so much, because we know, conscientiously, that they are still human, but that soon, like we adults (infants), they will have been forced to sell it out.

You have destroyed your self and deep down you know it.

If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom.

We live in an orgy of excess, of fantasy, and of fetish.

Hence, the dementia...

The Insanity of Progress

This morning, the little leprechaun that I live with, a 61 year old man from Birkenhead, tells me he’s off to the gym across the way, presumably to swing his shoulders and kid himself on that he’s getting fit. I’ve told him in no uncertain terms, cardio, cardio, cardio, but no, it’s too much of a chore, so he swings his shoulders and deludes himself in the process, in spite of the fact that no-one has ever died from shoulder-itis (or cancer of the shoulder). It has been a revelation living with the leprechaun (by the age of fifty we all deserve the face and body we have), if only to instil a sense of self-control in my tolerating his agitations and vacuousness. If ever there was an example of a man who has been led down the merry path of convention, it is the little leprechaun from Birkenhead. He admits it later when I press him and he tells me, “It was all there, so I took it, we all did”, when referring to the gluttony, the money, the excess of the 70s and 80s. ‘So, you just went along with the herd?’ I ask him. After a pause, he reluctantly says yes. He can’t say no, he more or less just told me as much. I can see that I have rocked his boat (of delusion). He had previously told me that he worked for Heinz as a process manager, and taster, and that’s how he got fat (actually obese). But he’s constantly back-paddling as he tries to retro-fit his thinking now to his actions then. I can see that there has been little discipline, little thought of any future consequences, no consideration of karma. Indeed, with his extremely limited intellect, a result of no reading beyond the likes of crime fiction, and of following the herd and donating all his available hours to developing macaroni cheese sauce, I very much doubt he knows what karma is. But now, of course, having neglected his body-mind for so long, it is karma who ineluctably comes calling.

Unable to think for themselves anymore, people have to be made aware of their problems by ‘professionals’, but shouldn’t we be capable of diagnosing our own problems, of listening to that inner teacher who goes by the name of intuition, and sorting it out ourselves? Are we not our own doctors, priests and metaphysicians, who, by the absurd nature of capitalism and progress have been told to outsource this innate vital talent to someone external who cannot possibly know what we feel or how we have lived other than what we articulate, and thereby cannot adequately prescribe a treatment? But no, the absurdity of progress continues unbridled and out of control, and we (careering) along with it.

Insanity is surely this 'careering' and devoting your best hours of the week over a period of decades to developing a macaroni cheese sauce and 'making a living' whilst foregoing the opportunity to actually live in and for yourself. In a word, insanity is working 50 hours a week for 40 years until you are told to piss off, like our little leprechaun, who now at the ripe old age of 61 thinks of becoming an EFL teacher, perhaps to indulge his love of tourism (as a sort of one-upmanship on his well-travelled friends), or to delude himself further into thinking he’s making a contribution. It may seem a little harsh to say it, but what can he possibly contribute to these fresh young minds other than delusion, having spent his whole life in delusion?

Insanity is this and more. Remembering that ‘sanity’ means ‘health’ and health’ means ‘wholeness’ and ‘wholeness’ means ‘holy-ness’, insanity then is neglect. Neglect of the sacred. Neglect, first and foremost of your own body and your own mind. Oh, the excuses I’ve heard you would not believe - more delusion - but if there is one thing humans are exceptional at (asides from deluding themselves) it is adapting, and no matter how many slipped discs, or sciatic nerves you have, no matter how bad your asthma or brittle bones, there is always a way to keep yourself healthy. Our reliance on modern comforts, however, have seduced us into insanity, have created that matter of 'out-sourcery' that means tendering out our own vital energies to the lowest bidder (often for little more than the minimum wage)… or to escalators and elevators or desk-jobs and sedentariness.

Neglect and negligence, let’s not forget, is the anti-thesis to religion [neg + ligio, to unbind from; re + ligio, to bind back to (kosmos: the beautiful whole)], and today within an increasingly anti-religious and sacrilegious westworld, vacuous and satanic (where satan can be defined as those who exploit the earth and others, and prey on the weak and the wounded), neglect is everywhere.

It is the great tragedy of man that he has forsaken his humanity, sold it out, and that as a consequence he has to redeem his self, and that, as is invariably the case, he always leaves it far too late. There is no redemption when there is no negligence. As I often say, believing in ‘God’ is irrelevant What is relevant and of major consequence, is that you are religious (or if that word hurts your head, then pro-contemplation and anti-neglectful). The recipe to wholeness is actually quite simple: first, get rid of any dogmatic and authoritarian versions of religion you've thus far been hit over the head with, and then start investigating. Read the great theologians, the great priests and masters, philosophers and metaphysicians, transcendentalists and poets: Merton, Picard, Pannikar…Takahashi, Seung-Sahn, Aoyama.. White, Watts, Whitman... Thoreau, Berry, Olson...  the ones who write for and from the heart and not for fame and fortune. Stop working for outfits that have little to do with your living. Realize the significance and opportunity of being 'unemployed'. Makes use of libraries and their treasures! Develop and expand the self, instead of allowing it to be shrink-wrapped and vacuum-packed by the pernicious figures of profit and power. Especially question those who need to decorate themselves with awards and costumes and titles, and who need to put letters after their names.

Bind the self back to the universe. Meditate upon your ligatures and the flowing open nature of the self. The human is not just present in the context of man, but in the context of the cosmos. Existential incest and metaphysical inbreeding is a form of dementia. Your relatives extend far beyond your own kind. Reconnect with silence and solitude. These will be your true friends. Not possessions, power and profit. With the disappearance of childhood, the greatest travesty of them all, adults have become as infants who need molly-cuddling and constantly looking after, but, really, who, in their soporific acquiescent states, should be battered over the head with a great big meditation stick!

It is only through slowness, which leads to stillness and contemplation, that we will ever be able to question critically and independently all the claptrap that a picnoleptic society violates us with and shoves in our faces. It is only through slowness that we will be able to reconnect with the sacred and critically appraise the systems and conventions we are expected to follow. Society, with its over-reliance on science (and corresponding lack of conscience) simultaneously negating other ways of knowing, with its arrogant and single-tracked view of progress and civilization, with its social imperatives that distance the self from the non-human (effectively splitting the self in two), with its epileptic state of self-consciousness and overall small-mindedness that sees relations stopping with its own kind instead of with the cosmos as a whole, is clearly mad. The anti-contemplative nature of business (busy-ness) is the road to ruin, and yet it is the backbone of economic growth and by extension of society. So, what does that tell you? It tells you that there has to be another way of growing over and above GD bloody P.  And there is: it’s called work on the self, through self-study, solitude, silence… and space. No human is an island to be sure, but we all need a little breathing space to live fully and sanely.

The Secret Art of Travel

To the eyes only looking hurriedly to the goal,
The sweetness of roaming cannot be savoured.
Forests and streams and all of the magnificent spectacles waiting along the way
Remain closed off.

Herman Hesse

The beautiful and serene Ballagan Burn near Strathblane.

The Empty City [A Postcard from Kazakhstan]

For the last several years, during the sharp, luminous months of Glasgow's mind - roughly from the end of November to the end of February - when the earth collects the sun's rays at such an angle as to highlight areas of the city hitherto unseen, I have been compiling a photo-poetic volume entitled The Empty City. This emptiness is an allusion to the fact that a city like Glasgow spends much of its time, contrary to popular belief, in a state of emptiness and silence (think of the night-times, those wet and windy days, even the sunny days when people are crammed into their pokey little offices). It's like a desert that, again contrary to conventional wisdom (which of course isn't wisdom at all but mere cleverness), spends most of its time not in boiling temperatures, but, rather, in a state of sub-zero coolness.

Anyway, here at the end of November, I am not even in Glasgow, and yet it resonates across the continents to be with me. The map is not the territory, I am. 

I am in Kazakhstan, teaching.... and learning. And here the light of Central Asia is sharp, and reminds me of the too few days when Glasgow becomes super-still and clear, full-sun-skied. Because of the flatness here, there is little to disrupt the pattern of the weather, so for the last 3 weeks it has been full sun in a full blue, largely windless sky. It has also been around minus fifteen degrees celsius, which if you wrap up and take into consideration the absence of any wind-chill factor, is actually not that cold. Yet, as I am forever telling my students who have been weaned on the wasteful and soporific effects of too much indoor heating, is fantastic for being awake (or if you prefer, awake being).

And so Glasgow is with me, even here. But why shouldn't it be, if, after all, Glasgow, from years of roaming and embedding myself in her hills and moors and buildings, has become me as I it? Glasgow travels as I travel. Glasgow goes where I goes....

And here, across the vastness of the great Eurasian steppe, there is silence and there is emptiness:

"Being and silence belong together." Max Picard

Silence is the soil
in which faith can grow:
faith as openness
faith as con-science.
The reality of silence
is that
silence is reality:
a relief of immediacy
an immediate relief.
The tongue we speak today
is no longer a mother tongue
but an orphaned one,
we mumble and mutter
in a wasteland of words
meaningless patterns, vicious
circles, noise-filled networks
in mere mud-cluttered minds.

Being and silence belong together.

 Ice-fishing on the Ural River.

Cool, Calm, Collected: The Coolness of Nature & Living Less

Cultivation runs to simplicity; half-way cultivation runs to ornamentation.

Bruce Lee


The original way needs nothing to be added, nor is it clogged up. It perfectly suffices in itself. Because human beings have the ability to think, they always want to add something, and soon everything gets clogged up.

Zen Master Kosho Uchiyama

The epitome of cool alas! is not Steve McQueen’s ride in Bullit but something far simpler, far less mechanical, some-thing that is in fact no-thing. I am of course speaking about Nature.

NATURE at large, whether a river, a hill, or a wood, exudes a coolness that one can feel as one approaches. I’m talking here primarily of coolness as a temperature as opposed to coolness as an aesthetic of attitude. Although, the attiude of a forest to remain where it is against all the odds, to remain standing and not to flee in the face of its murderers, is probably the epitome of cool as that aesthetic of attitude.

This coolness (whether attitude or temperature) is the exact opposite of the city’s heat island effect (and cringeworthy self-infatuation) where the temperature of the metropolis due to all that ‘hot air’ and wasted energy (all that fashioning and manufacturing) is a few degrees greater than the surrounding countryside. It’s not that the wood feels cool in comparison to the city, but that it is cool in its own right. Approach a forest, a mountain, or a river, preferably during summer or spring, and you will feel it, this exudation of coolness which in itself is a vision of calmness, and collectedness (where all things are bound together in this wasteless, self-enclosed ecosystem). It’s attitude too - ‘better to live on your feet than die on your knees’, ‘we shall not be moved’ - is cool in its uncompromising tone.

Where humans seem to achieve coolness with self-conscious aplomb, trees achieve it without. In other words, humans try to be cool, and in so doing, negate the very essence of coolness. Trees (or equally, rivers, and hills), in their absolute nakedness make no such effort. They simply are, and as a consequence, they are cool. There’s no trying, no ornamenting, no fashioning. At least, not from without. Humans, on the other hand, appear to think that coolness only comes from without, from what you put on, from how you decorate the self from the outside. But it’s not. That, I’m afraid, is just the wool that has been pulled over your eyes (as well as over the rest of your body) by those keen to exploit you, to profit from selling you the bells and whistles. There’s simply no money to be made from decorating you from the inside out, naturally. It’s all about the glittering surfaces, the coolness of man. But this is artifice. Identity is not what you put on, but what you take off.

It is one of the great illusions of the modern world - the greatest trick the devil ever played - the standalone identity of man as a ‘unique’ individual. Even the word ‘individual’, for anyone that still has some command of language beyond the limited syntax of a metaphysically illiterate society, tells us in no uncertain terms of our essential undividedness. If there is an identity, in other words, it is not that of a disintegrated ‘unit’ as we have come to know it, but as an integrated unity that sees the self and its environment as a single evolutionary event. As the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote in a poem he entitled Learning:

To believe you are magnificent.

And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.

Enough labour for one human life.

Real coolness needs nothing to improve it. Not even magnificence. Life itself is cool. Why should you have to add to it? Unless of course you’re under the illusion that you ‘need’. But ‘need’ is another illusion, another PR ploy that has been blown out of all proprtion for the sake of a self-destructive economic system predicated upon growth and greed.

If there were ever an adjective that could smite the coolness of man in one fell swoop it is ‘needy’. ‘Be more dog’ huge billboards scream out, the mantra of the west. Presumably, that translates as be more needy, be more dependent, be more excitable, and quite frankly, be more stupid.

‘Don’t ever tell me that you need anything’ a Zen master famously tells his pupil. Essentials like food and water, sleep and shelter, even simple clothing, is not need. It is essential. It is a necessity. But anything that is not essential, which is more or less the vast part of capitalism’s undertaking, is need. And need is not cool. Need causes dependency, pathology, obsessiveness, unhealthy attachment and addiction. It causes the brain to turn to mush.

To be sure, within the concocted lexicon of the modern day state (a modern day state predicated upon selling), ‘need’ is often portrayed as ‘quirkiness’ or ‘zaniness’ or simply eccentricity. In other words, need, like greed, according to the market, is good. Need helps the economy grow. Need makes you more comfortable. Need helps others. But of ourse this is just another fatuous rationalization on behalf of the market. Need may well help the economy grow but at what cost? Alas! the planet is not an infinite resource, and even if it were…

If there is a 'need' and an essential requirement for man, it is, as Theodore Roszak eloquently points out in The Cult of Information:

... our need to become serious human beings, people who grow by virtue of having struggled in the solitude of the heart to find both moral dignity and personal meaning. It is our need to live deeply, to take life in our hands, to weigh and feel it, to give it deliberate shape - our own shape, the shape of our peculiar experience. Debased consumer fantasies, selfish acquisitiveness, the careerist rat race, the corruptions of elitism: these are surely among the forces that thwart our need to grow.

So… man is not cool, for he is in a constant state of illusory need, whilst disregarding the essential requirement he needs the most. He is demented, for he has been removed of his own mind (the decline of civilizations begins with a decline in metaphysics and the eco-philosophic spirit). He is like a caged lion that has spent too long behind bars and has taken to chasing and eating its flea-bitten tail. Man now takes his cues not from the great teacher herself, Nature, but from tabloids, chat shows and corporations.

The human has lost his cool. And become Man (emphatically capitalised).

On the metaphysical front, man’s coolness has, by the looks of it, been destroyed altogether, coolness as collectedness and the ability to see events from an unself-conscious and wide-angled perspective. The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus was a great believer in accepting one’s fate calmly and dispassionately and viewing life from a broad perspective, living one’s philosophy without making a song and dance about it. He is known for his essentialist manifesto and his eagerness to simplify life to the limit, stripping it of superfluities and non-essential ingredients.

With a global population now in excess of 7 billion people and still climbing, and in spite of the astonishing scientific advances and economic progress of the modern world, worldwide suffering and inequality is still commonplace. Indeed, it is now estimated, at the onset of the third millennium, and in spite of the last half century’s efforts to reduce the inequality gap, that just 80 people, with their combined wealths, ‘own the world’.

Writing in his autobiography, Joy in Living, in 1957, the Scottish Thoreau and life-long advocate for the simple life, Dugald Semple, remarks: It is said that the Persian Empire decayed when 1 per cent of the people owned all the land, and that when Rome fell, 1,800 men owned all the then known world.

Civilization is on the edge of the precipice (yet again), having, apparently, learned nothing. So much for science and progress, and ‘civilization’. But then civilization is, paradoxically, midst our image-blasted and ocularcentric societies, not so much the art of looking at but the art of looking away, or, at the very best, the art of tele-vising and watching from a (safe enough) distance. The commodification and packaging of the individual (physically through fashion and narcissism, and metaphysically through scientism and desecration) has led man to think of himself as a finite, standalone entity. He has removed himself (and allowed his self to be removed) from nature, whilst embedding himself in concrete. He has degraded the soils and seas, treated the land like a rubbish tip when it isn’t a lumber yard and theme park, and sold his self out to the lowest bidder, occasionally tax deductible. He has sold his wings for wheels, and his eyes for screens. He can no longer entertain himself but rather needs to be entertained. His work furthermore has no bearing on his living and his philosophies are garnered from cereal boxes and TV chat shows. A century and a half ago the German philosopher Nietzsche created a stir with his pronouncement of the death of god. But it wasn’t really god that had died. It was the human in which god had been living. As far as that’s concerned, it might not be so far-fetched as to suggest that the human (man + humus) is already dead, and that people, zombified by the seduction and manipulation of an economic system predicated upon patheticness, are simply grotesque versions of their original selves with little or no capacity for independent thought.

The coolness of being human has long disappeared beneath the nonsense of man.

So what to do?

Semple, like most apostles of simple living, advocated a living closer to nature, getting out into the open air, daily walking and contact with the soil, healthy eating, and what he called ‘living biologically’. ‘We must live according to the eternal laws of life, and get rid of all this false science and craving for stimulation…’

‘To make a better world, we must aim at creating not so much better engineers but better men and women’.

Before architects and teachers, what we need are whole men and women, healthy and open-minded. ‘We cannot have architecture embodying wholeness until we have architects who are whole,’ writes Henryk Skolimowski in Living Philosophy.

In other words, go out into nature and learn from it: learn from its coolness, listen to its calmness; observe its less-ness: its wastelessness, its anxious-less-ness, its PR-less-ness, its deathlessness - there are vast lessons to be learned here, lessons that you will rarely encounter in a grasping, dualistic, and fragmented man-filled world.

Collect your self beyond the nervous energy of the city, and the cling-filmed package that you have been fashioned into, and enter your self…

Get beyond the con-fusion that has elided the small self with the indefinite self…

Question the ethics of the city…

Question the difference between man and hu-man…

Live less. Be cool!

‘Frugality is not a depressing abnegation and self-denial’, writes Skolimowski, but a positive manifestation of new qualities; only then will it become elegant frugality’.

‘Self-limitation’, writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘is the wisest and most fundamental step of a man who has obtained freedom. It is also the surest path towards its attainment.’

The orgy of excess has gone on long enough. Growth is not simply the accretion of matter around a nucleus, but a matter of inner maturity. Coolness eschews the superfluous and extraneous. Existential growth is metaphysical not material.

True coolness is nakedness.

'All our troubles began', writes Semple, 'when we put on clothes'.

A Presentation of Humanity on the Autumnal Kilpatrick Braes.....