Living Spatially

Space, as you can perhaps gather by certain references in this blog, is of a particular fascination to me. I have always been aware of its various properties wherever I have been and have always tried to maintain an openness towards it. Indeed, just yesterday, atop the Kilpatrick Braes, I, alongside the cows, ruminated upon its very existence, and the difference in depth of feeling one can have from being in two different spaces. 

Almost Mediterranean (and it's not even April).... Must be the Corsican pine, and that late March lull. [Looking west-ish from the Kilpatrick Braes over the Clyde Estuary towards Langbank on the opposite shore].

For the second time this week, the Czech phenomenologist Jan Potocka accompanied me into the braes (if only in spirit and book). His wonderful set of lectures (translated by Erazim Kohak and edited by James Dodd) which comprise Body, Community, Language, World, had a profound effect on my thinking five years ago when I first came across it. This germ has directed my thinking ever since on ideas and practices of the body, and one's own locomotive force. So, I thought I would browse through it again, and what better place to do it than sitting up here on the braes sheltered by the great gnarledness of pine trees and serenaded by the mellifluous songs of robins, chiff-chaffs, and yellowhammers.

'There is a fundamental difference', proclaims Potocka, 'between being in space as a part of it, alongside other things, and living spatially, being aware of being in space, of relating to space... Our body is a life which is spatial in  itself and of itself, producing its location in space, and making itself spatial'.

This 'location', and the 'locating' force behind it, is all important. As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry once wrote (in Life is a Miracle), we don't know where we are anymore. Children are growing up with no sense of the local. And as the word local suggests, they are also growing up without a vital sense of place. 'Kowing where we are,' writes Potocka, 'is a necessary foundation and starting point of life.'

Part of the problem of course is the outsourcing of locomotion and the practice of living spatially. People are sealed off from space, and thus from their own 'lived corporeity'. The body and its vital energies, in the modern technologized and obesogenic environment have been sold off. This effective privatization of the body has devastating effects on the world as a whole, brought to light in the mental health issues of the day, the various economic/ecologic crises, the primitive conflicts that arise over sheer greed and debasedness, and the general inability of people en masse to think critically or independently of media or political garbage.

Living spatially is not just a matter of body then, but of bodymind. It is remarkable in this day and age how tightly packed people's minds are, almost as obese as their bodies, filled with second-hand thoughts, super-imposed templates, and spurious subroutines. Most people are locked in to this unoriginal thinking and being from a very early age and rarely break free from it convinced as they are that it's not so bad. And yet, now more than ever, what we need is spaciousness of mind, the ability to 'space out' and contemplate, to re-ignite that part of the mind that can see systemically, that can see poetically, that can see unhindered by prejudice and politics.

'Aisthesis and kinesis are inseparable.' announces Potocka. 'Our seeing is always linked to movement'.  Without this crucial movement, atrophy occurs: degeneration of brain, degeneration of body, in short, the complete collapse of bodymind. The inability to think critically and systemically, as well as perhaps the inability to move critically and systemically, is one of the most pressing concerns of a modern age which has lost sight of its self, or, which, in its betrothal to science and solipsism, simply does not care.

It follows then that if we do not move, on our own, of our own accord (whether mentally or physically), sua sponte, then we are, to put it mildly, in trouble. And it is the consequence of this 'trouble' - conflicts and crises, outsourcing and over-technologizing,. aggressive and primitive capitalism - that we can see all over the globalized world. Removed from the fundamental fabrics that enable the human, and trapped within a state of existential paralysis, man emerges as an invasive species, and the human submerged as an endangered one. Locomotion, bodying forth (as Buber would have it), and living spatially (which ineluctably leads to living poetically), are the keys to reignite our seeing, and understanding. Without this, we are as good as pallid acquiescent zombies unable to see beyond our own bloodstained hands.

The Phenomenal Fells

The living body, the organism, is a system of vital functions - eidos at work, en ergo. Reality is energeia, idea at work. 

Jan Potocka, Subject Body and Ancient Philosophy

On the train to Kilpatrick this morning I read a little of the great Czech phenomenologist Jan Potocka whose book Body, Community, Language, World was a revelation some five years ago upon finding it in Glasgow University Library.

Phenomenology (as Husserl saw it) arose out of a radical will to self-clarity, to grasping the ultimate ground for what it is that I am. For Potocka, more so than for Husserl or Heidegger, the body was key to this clarity: the body as a multiplicity of relations in and with this world, and specifically the situatedness of this body (its structures of perception, its bodily orientation in space, etc.).  This dynamism, of a body's ongoing correspondence with its world, and hence its evolution is precisely the principle of a living animate creature.

Potocka's philosophy of movement begins with the question - What sort of body? And then a partial answer - Not the body that anatomy or physiology examine, but body as a subjective phenomenon, the human body as we live it in lived experience.

The ground of phenomenology as its etymology suggests (phenomenon - that which presents itself; logos - meaningful discourse) is taken up by the living well-springs of experience. It seeks to keep ready-made theses at arm's length and instead investigate everything contained within experience, how we arrive at it, and what seen and lived realities underlie it. Potocka writes: only by speaking it out do we know something fully, only what we speak out do we fully see. 

At its most basic, its most essential, the practice of phenomenology is learning to think and see; in short learning to understand.... not through some intellectual exercise, but through living itself. I guess, as far as this is concerned, this whole exercise of essays and notes contained here in this blog, since it springs out of direct experience in the field, is phenomenological in essence. As far as I see it, the only way to truth is to live it.

The phenomenal Kilpatrick Braes at the beginning of Spring (21st March, 2015)

Every 'body' needs a perch from where it can gather the Self, space (and time) out, forget its small and corrupt self, and gaze across this fertile earth. And in so doing, reclaim its wholeness and holiness.

The absolute body (complete with broken wrist), perched on the pulpit of peace.  

A renewed attentiveness to bodily experience enables us to recognize and affirm our inevitable involvement in that which we observe, our corporeal immersion in the depths of a breathing Body much larger than our own. [...] Examining the contours of this world not as an immaterial mind but as a sentient body, I come to recognize my thorough inclusion within this world in a far more profound manner than our current language usually allows.  

David Abrams, Merleau-Ponty & The Voice of the Earth

In the field: process and transformation.

Frog spawn is its own galaxy, its own constellation.


WHAT SORT OF BODY?

What sort of body?
     The world-body
         the cosmic-body
the pre-fab body
    the shrink-wrapped body?

The tidal body, the river-body,
    the body that flows and
flows, down from the hills,
    into the sea, into the ocean?

The oceanic body?
Yes.
The oceanic body.

Not the over-clothed body,
    but the naked body,
the water-body,
    not the ornamented body, or
the product-body
     branded with value, branded with markings,
but the elemental body, eroded by lashings,
     by torrential and nirvanic thrashings:

The solar body, the stellar body, the galactic body -
constellated and considered -
the subject body, living, breathing, relating,

the open body, the every body
not limited to the tenuous envelope of skin and skull.

The rainbow body?
Yes.
The rainbow body.

Interstellar

Remember, I have power... I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master... Obey!

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein


There's a point in Nolan's movie near the beginning where a schoolteacher, in an attempt to convince a schoolchild's father of the importance of trying to save the planet Earth in favour of colonizing another, and of his son's predeliction for farming (as opposed to say astrophysics), speciously attempts to support her argument by mentioning 'how the Apollo missions were faked in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union'. She urges the father that 'if we don't want a repeat of the excess and the wastefulness of the 20th century, we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it....'

It's a poignant moment which only fails due to Nolan's belief that such a concern for our home planet is naive compared to the possibilities on offer by what I can only term as 'super-science'. At best, this 'super-science' is the mere positing of several perverted quantum theories which when lumped together attain the status of mawkish fantasy; at worst, it is implying that the earth and all who inhabit (and are sustained by) her, is expendable, and another dispensable commodity. In other words, interstellar travel (though they, the scientists, may try and convince you otherwise) is based on the simplistic and rather fatuous equation: (over) consume, (over) waste, (over) pollute, gtfo...

This attitude is exactly the attitude that has gotten us into this mess in the first place: the deluded hope that science is salvation, that humans are masters over nature instead of its stewards and custodians, and that somehow, something better will eventually come along to save us. 

It's a shame that Nolan thought that adding the bit about faked moon landings would somehow demonise and discredit the teacher's views about 'rockets and useless machines', make her out to be some kind of nut whose complaints about the excess and wastefulness of the 20th century would be construed as similarly madcap. But they're not, that's the point. What she says is perfectly true (apart from the faking of the Apollo missions in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union - Americans are just not that clever), but that Nolan has to somehow offset this with a statement of such ridiculousness, is a pity. For it reveals Nolan to be none other than another small-minded logical positivist trapped within the shimmering boundaries of super-science. A super-science that has, along with the reason and logic it so upholds, come to dominate the worldview of so many and infect the world with 'godlessness' (read 'desecration of land and animal' - 'existential and ecological apartheid'); science that has, with its emphasis on Cartesian dualism, Newtonian mechanics and the like, sought to reduce the living to un-living components, and see the routes to knowledge itself as restricted to the ruling modes of thought and conventional beliefs.

Science itself has propagated the wastefulness of the 20th century like no other force. Indeed, one might argue that wastefulness is the primary remit of science (beyond the quest for knowledge and proofs) for without it, it would not generate as much GDP, and thus provide the backbone for a flailing economic model like capitalism.

Super-science has created a throwaway society in which people are constantly being seduced by its startling advances. But behind every startling advance there are numerous atrocities which rarely see the light of day, yet which prevail and resonate across the planet eventually.

Science has created a fundamental distraction from the grounding that we so badly need, our attachment not necessarily to farming, but to the soil itself, and to the care and love of the land. Science has enabled the wholesale degradation of the topsoils of the Earth to the point where growing food has become severely if not entirely affected. Science may well have created machines that appear to 'benefit' mankind, but even these machines are inherently destructive due to their habit of outsourcing ingenuity and energy from the human. Thus, machines grow smarter as humans grow dumber. That may well be a scenario that appeals to the already zombified masses, but it is not the intelligent and sensitive response to a planet in peril. It is simply the response of a logical positivist with too much faith in science to solve all our problems.

Just as Islamism is taking the world to task for its lack of faith in the sacred, so too is Scientism taking the world to task for its thinking there is a God in the first place. The problem is that God, in a scientistically saturated world, has become an irrelevance. It's not so much that God is dead, but that people are (and thus the godhead within them). People, and animals, and the world and everything in it, have been reduced by science's efforts to mere components and mere variables. Gone are the relationships between them. Everything becomes either supercilious subject or supercilious object, one or the other, but not both, and definitely not between. Such a view of the world demands a certain unfeelingness towards said world, a certain unthinkingness (a denial of instinct and intuition), which we can see manifest in tourism, in modernity itself, in conspicuous (and inconspicuous) consumption, in need, in fear, and in our readiness to outsource our energies to machines and tech. It also demands perhaps more than anything else a level of self-interested myopia, that fails to see even after people like Rachel Carson and Masanobu Fukuoka write about it, that treating our soils with pesticides and disdain, will bode no good for future generations. Such myopia would appear to be part and parcel of science's remit to sell the world and humans into slavery, for when the world and its humans are enslaved to science, science will have nothing more to stand in its way. In this respect, science is like a great big ogre gorging on everything that stands in its way. 

Those who are against science, or at least do not see it as the be all and end all that most view its as, are in their looking towards 'God' in favour of more encompassing approach to life and death, a more conscientious approach to the world and one's place within it. It is this conscience (con-science as opposed to a singularly sterile science) that establishes our relationships and views the world and our place in it accordingly. This 'withness' of being (a being-with-the-world as simply and self-shrinkingly being-in-the-world presumably apart from everything else) is our original immanent condition. We had it once, but we have lost (sight of) it beneath the nonsense. However, that does not mean it cannot be regained. 

It is this, Nolan's naivety, and his reluctance to accept this truth, and instead to rush off in the name of science to promote, effectively, thoughtlessness, that leaves me cringing when I watch Interstellar. That he imposes this view on millions of others through the medium of film leaves me less cringing and more disappointed that people cannot, for the fantasy and science they coat their selves with, see the reality of their situation... that nothing is going to help them get out of this mess that they have made for themselves, not least spending $250m on what is effectively a propaganda exercise. But still the world continues to live in ignorance: inequality, war, economic and ecologic crises abounding; fear, need, greed. Has science not already told us that these things are ultimately self-destructive? Have we not learned anything from all this knowledge and information that we have managed to accumulate?

Apparently not.

So much, then, for science.

The sooner people stop off-loading and out-sourcing their own vital energies (that enable movement of mind and of body), the sooner they will realize that the self is everything, that interstellar space is not out there but in here, that god is not some crazy bearded staff-bearing monolith, but a sensitive and intuitive human being whose connections to the natural environment that nourishes him express themselves through his daily interactive being.

One Hundred Percent Space

 I am the space where I am. Noel Arnaud

In order to dream up a hand, I must first dream up the space to contain it. Graham Nerlich

Looking up, in a world which is increasingly looking down (into their iphones and ipads, into their navels), can be a real revolutionary act. In Glasgow, normally it's the clouds and the skies themselves that draw the eye upwards. But there are other coaxers too: birds, architecture, sculptures, all of which raise the eye (and thus the self) to a fresh and aerated level, above the mundane monotony of congestion and constrained space.

Looking up is thus an opportunity to accommodate space, to widen the self, and to learn...

Learning space, as the 12th century sage Dogen used to say, is learning wisdom. Learning wisdom is learning space. 

Architecture itself is a wonderful lead-in to this learning, if only to see how certain spaces can be bludgeoned to death and destroyed. Buildings are not simply nests to protect and shelter; they are also a mediation between the outside world and our inner state of mind; buildings and the like articulate existential space; they provide us with a marvelous continuity from our very primordial beginnings. The house, after all, as Gaston Bachelard makes out in The Poetics of Space, 'is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos.'

In a city like Glasgow, whose wealth of architecture old and new abounds, there are excellent opportunities for this acquisition of wisdom. After all, we are, fundamentally, and as the French poet Arnaud intimates, space itself.

Our grasp, as humans, of space (and of time) is woeful. Woeful to the point of dementia, to the point of existential collapse. We, after all, have been architectured too, constructed by our parents and teachers, too much media, and our experiences. What kind of building you end up is anybody's guess, but most of us are buildings whose space could do with a little spring-cleaning, a little renovation.

Glasgow, as its very name suggests, is fortunate in having hills, moors, and coast so near to its centre. These keystone spaces are another great way to learn and accommodate space and time. Just walking them with your mind open is a learning experience at its most vital. Normally, these spaces are seen as a means to an end, but when we start to treat them as ends in themselves - as 'creatures', say, with whom we can develop a relationship - well, things begin to change. 

And so, with all these spatial opportunities around us, there really is no excuse for the disappearance of the sage. Just as genius is the ability to access one's own hyper-organic powerhouse (one's own engines), so too is wisdom the ability to access one's fundamental and essential space. This access-ability will be defined by the relationship the human develops over the course of his life with space and, inevitably, with time too.

30 mins. by train from the centre of Glasgow, Irvine Bay: The sea, the sky, a selfie of an altogether more subtle sort...

Sky & Seagull: depth, dimension, distance & duration.

 From atop the holy mountain Dumgoyne, looking north....

 Standing at the Jaw's Edge (Jaw Reservoir in the Kilpatrick Hills).

MAMBA, as one tabloid journalist glibly called it, yet Miles and Miles of Bugger All can do wonders for the body-mind. [Atop Dumbreck in the Campsie Fells].

From atop Neilston Pad looking north-eastish towards Duncarnock Mount in the foreground, the Cathkin Braes just beyond, and the overall midland valley of Glasgow.

 Looking north from Muirshiel Country Park over Queenside Loch.



The braes, the fells,
The coast, the moors:
Keystone spaces
Keystone species,
Stellar soundings in the galaxy of the valley.

The Celestial Opera

We are assured by the experience of aesthetic contemplation that paradise is a reality. 

The Dance of Shiva, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

A ground squall sweeping northwards across Inchinnan.

You can learn a lot about the self by watching the theatrics of the sky.... movement, process, transformation...

In Celtic mythology, paradise was often connotated as the finn magh, or the 'white field', which could easily refer to the sky (around Britain, most assuredly closer to white than blue) as well as the ocean, and those higher snow-bound plateaux such as the highlands and lowlands or simply the peripheral plains of the midland valley.

There's something deeply nutritional about being able to see the weather coming. Thoreau once wrote of the joyous quality of the vast draughts of space that allowed a traveller to see a stranger approaching from miles off. Well, here, the equation is the same with a couple of small variable changes. 

Every creature needs a perch, and not just a nest. Indeed, I might go so far as to say that every creature needs several perches from where to gaze upon the remembered earth. And as far as Glasgow goes, being a valley with hills on all sides, there are an unlimited amount of perches and pulpits from where to contemplate, and subsequently receive the assurance that paradise is a reality!

Looking towards Glasgow's west end (with Glasgow University's tower front and centre) from the Loch Humphrey path above Kilpatrick.

The Pedestrian Underpasses of Cowcaddens

I can recall having a wonderful epiphany not in an underpass but near one where I lived as a boy, at the east entrance to Victoria Park in Whiteinch. It was a striking moment where, looking at a concrete beam that formed part of a slip-road and the inadvertent space it had formed beneath it, I understood not just the nature of impermanence but also the significance of being insignificant.

Naturally, underpasses or 'subways' are not insignificant, but they are hardly regarded with a poetic eye. And yet...

Every city has them. When I lived in Warsaw they even had them for animals, small tunnels and pipes that they could use to escape almost certain death by crossing busy roads or railway lines. I have always found them, like bridges, fascinating. Indeed, the underpass is itself a sort of inverted bridge. Perhaps it is the obvious 'connecting' quality that fascinates me, or simply the contrast of light and darkness, and the shady penumbras which cannot be classified as either. Perhaps it's just the quietness of these spaces, the 'off-worldness', while hordes of demented men outsource their own movement to machines above. Whatever the case, I am compelled to write about them, to photograph them and to smile each time I pass through them.

Underneath the M8 and A804, between Chinatown, Garnethill, & Braid Square, Woodside.

Location scouting for the ghost of Tarkovsky! [Underpass beneath Cowcaddens Road between Buchanan Bus Station & Caledonian University].

Transmission (of the Dharma) in the Trongate

The other day, in the swimming baths at North Woodside, I got talking to an elderly gentleman who was handing out leaflets (and accompanying psychobabble) about Maitreya, the Buddha Messiah, who will (according to your man) descend upon us at some suitable juncture and save us from ourselves. Though I have my reservations I was willing enough to accommodate him until he started talking about little green men. He was rather confused I surmised. Here's a man who has, to all intents and purposes, spent his whole life doing and thinking what others have told him to. And then, suddenly, somewhere in the polar regions of living, there comes an epiphany that seems to negate that 'whole life' and propose the shocking revelation that your life has been anything but 'whole'. The fragmentation of self, the loss of 'God' and religion, the absence of the sacred, combined with the rise of logical positivism, scientism, and an economy that is just not economic (and which exploits, violates and rapes the essence of the human), has led to a great deal of confusion and alienation for those people unwilling to work it out for themselves, and instead rely on manipulated truths vomited forth by the media.

It strikes me as alarming the amount of people I meet who cannot actually think (and thus be) for themselves, and who act upon super-imposed templates garnered from a hotch-potch of media, social networks, and their own prejudices. This 'unthinkingness', the readiness to accept conventional truths and ways of being in the world, means that the same forces that led to horrific events like the holocaust are still at work today, even though we like to convince ourselves that they're not. 

Our education system too is, in the words of the art critic Rudolph Arnheim, (if not in the words of Einstein or any number of free thinking philosophers): a fifteen year apprenticeship in aesthetic alienation, (the aesthetic being according to the pioneering cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, 'the patter that connects 'you' to 'it'). With so much alienation going on, from processes and patterns, it is hardly surprising that we are surrounded by aliens.

Anyway, this elderly gentleman suddenly proposed that aliens (he never actually made the link between Maitreya and the aliens) were amongs us and that one way of detecting their presnece was through strange light markings on the sides of buildings. When I suggested that these were perhaps optical phenomena, reflections and deflections of light, he told me of his 'experience' in Glencoe when he saw what he believed to be some sort of alien aircraft. Again, I asked him if he had ruled out the possibility of the Aurora Borealis, or noctilucent clouds, or any range of nephologic effects. He hadn't. Indeed, he struggled to even understand what I meant by these words. I suggested then that before he start imposing his rather undefined revelations upon others, he should really try and ascertain that what he is in fact saying is provable. I suggested also that he look at some of the earlier photgraphs on this blog where I have captured shots of various light motifs on the ground and walls (having being reflected or deflected through glass and by shiny surfaces). He wasn't interested. Indeed, after about ten minutes listening to him, I quickly realised that he was so absorbed in his own meanderings, that anything anyone else said that wasn't a total acceptance of his story was ignored.  When he realised that I would be too difficult to 'convert' he simply turned away from me mid-conversation and started on a young boy who had been listening in to his wild claims. Naturally, this young lad was much more open-minded, he suggested. Before I left, I told him that having an open mind is all well and good, but not so open that your brain falls out.

The alien hypothesis (which is arguably a lot more popular across the pond that it is here) is simply a mark of the extent to which we have lost touch with the authentic sources of reality, and alienated our selves from our selves. It is the extent to which we have 'lost "God"', and the sacred; the extent to which we have lost the connections to the processes that nourish us (the universal powerhouse). I wanted to urge him, this confused old man, to go into the hills and discover the aliens for himself, not as optical phenomena splashed across brightly lit walls, but as the myriad species of animal and elements that he had allowed himself to become estranged from. 

The alien hypothesis is a reflection like these lights themselves of the unoriginal human. It is a perversion of the original human. A facsimile of man. To be sure, undoubtedly, there exists life outside of the planet earth, elsewhere in the universe, but to focus on such a thing instead of your own world, indeed, to anthropo-morphosize these very aliens into our own image, simply reveals the extent of our own delusions, and perhaps worse still, of our own boredom with our own world (as if we somehow knew its every move). I once wrote a short poem up there in the moors above the city about this very subject, about the alien and the aborigine (aliens being aborigines who have simply lost their way), upon uncovering a boulder with all manner of 'alien' life beneath it:

ALIEN

The search for UFOs,
the case of alien abduction,
the extra-terrestrial hypothesis,
indictments
on man’s estrangement from his greater Self.

Close encounters are all around us. The extra-terrest right in front of us.

We
are the alien.

The luminous frontline of Parnie Street and the Trongate, a smorgasbord of visual delight (especially in winter).

The light is not without but within me, and I myself am the light. Johann Gottlieb Fichte