The Essentials of Originals

We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally - that is, for himself - which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.

Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom 

I can recall the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami saying something like - If people read the same books then they'll think the same thoughts - Extrapolate this into everday actions and aspirations and what you end up with is a society full of clones and copies, no-one original: no-one who has sourced his own thoughts, his own consciousness, his own depths, but instead, just a whole bunch of 'people' doing what everyone else does, thinking what everyone else 'thinks'.

In her wonderful book The Essentials of Mysticism, written in the early part of the 1900s, Evelyn Underhill undertakes the grand task of describing the essential elements of the spiritual-mystical experience. Underhill herself described mysticism as:

the direct intuition or experience of God -

and the mystic as:

one whose religion and life are centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge.

The problem we have today is that there is little of that 'first hand personal knowledge', and too much of the second hand stuff vomited forth by the mire of media sources we are all enmeshed in. Man has lost the power to think critically, to think originally. Our education system has a vested interest in keeping the dissent down. It is a business after all, an industry that props up and fuels the capitalist paradigm.

As Underhill eloquently states:

The majority of the 'well-educated' probably pass through life... with at best the vaguest notions of the hygiene of the soul.

Sourcing our own knowledge through reflection and contemplation is the only way to avoid becoming a xerox. Really, the only way to 'educate' the self. We need to liberate the self from its strictures. Free up time and space, and the self, for a more contemplative, and slow, approach to living. We need to stop making a living, and do the living. An epileptic consciousness is no consciousness. In order to think, first we must have the necessary space to do so. It is written in the Bhuddist canons that when there is no more space left between thoughts a dark age will have descended upon us.

In the chapter entitled The Education of the Spirit, Underhill writes:

Were reality able to come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, were we able to enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves - then, we should all be artists... Deep in our souls we should hear the uninterrupted melody of our inner life: a music often gay, more often sad, always original.

Time and space is the key. 

Slowness, in other words.

Dead atop Dunglass

... and the young see nothing, they're moving too fast; they're bouncing off the walls, they're going from one adventure to the next  they don't even stop to name the flowers or the trees; nowadays I can tell you the names of trees, it's a big breakthrough, believe me.  

Clive James, BBC Front Row, 3.4.15

Yesterday evening, upon listening to Clive James being interviewed, I got the impression as the above quote suggests that he didn't know the half of it until he was confined to a deathbed. He was forever bouncing off the walls, and going from one adventure to the next. To the point where, finally, confined to stillness by force, he had time to contemplate, truly contemplate the grounds of life, death, and existence.


In the anti-contemplative society, the state of stillness is the archenemy of business.


'Perhaps collectively, man is subject to an inevitable self-destroying madness, if he does not question and understand the real purpose of his existence,' write William Corlett & John Moore in The Islamic Space.

And this is what is happening. Man destroys (de-structures) his self every day by not questioning and understanding the real purpose of his existence. To the point where, when death finally comes knocking, the self is so fragmented that it doesn't know what to do. It frets and fears the coming of the dark. But it needn't be like this. Contemplation opens up the organ of death within us, allows us to commune with it. Near death experiences needn't be so panic-stricken. Indeed, in Zen Buddhism, they speak of the moment of satori (kensho, awakening) almost as if it were an NDE, the moment when one sees clearly into one's true nature, and when all anxiety disappears, replaced by an overwhelming sense of peace.

One can 'die' then whilst still alive, but in order to do this one requires a certain stillness, a certain tranquility that allows one to plumb the depths of self, unimpeded. Distractions and diversions are counterproductive to this process of dying.


DEAD ATOP DUNGLASS

Up on the plug
whose side profile from the east
resembles a stretched phantom’s face
battered by the wind
hovering above the heather
gazing all around
one’s capacity to die whilst still alive
increases
faced with such sights and weather:
the fells
the valley
the moor
the wind.

It’s long division enlightenment
where you throw off the shackles of the body whilst still living in it:
dead whilst still alive,
Nirvana with a remainder,
fractioned sartori -
the flaming torch upon the hill crest -
Elysium -
in the wind.

Atop Dunglass in 2006 (when I had hair)...

Zero Distortion Above Duntocher

What I'm interested in, involved in, is an understanding of the mountain, a high experience of the mountain, founded on the encounter with brute matter, and with wind, light, space, emptiness.

Kenneth White, Mountain Walking

When Erwin Strauss wrote of sound that it 'is somewhere between thing and no-thing' he was onto something (or perhaps, more significantly, nothing). 'It is not a thing, but neither is it no thing,' he concludes. 

Curious, no? Paradoxical, perhaps?

The truth is that sound is not a thing just a a human being is not a thing. It is a vibration, a series of ripples within the sonic sphere that we occasionally  and partially inhabit. Sounds, like most everything else, inundate our lives. Most of it, admittedly, is noise in disguise, clutter for an already over-cluttered head. Some of it however, like Satie and the sound of a hillside creaking under its own weight, is something else. Which could be termed as 'music'.

Acoustics too, how this sound (or music) is modified (or not) by the space it inhabits, is of equal import here. Especially up on the hillside. I'm not sure if the quarter Scot Satie would have agreed to have his compositions played up here but there are other sounds that are entirely at home up here: the sound of running, walking, falling, water, the sound of a distant buzzard whistling; the sound of the sky, the sound of geese and ravens, the sound of the wind weaving through the heather, the sound of one's own heart beating.... There is a sensitivity to hearing and listening that sight just does not have: a communicativeness of listening over and above the aggressiveness of vision. In a moment of cognitive clarity, one could perhaps argue that the downfall of western civilization is predicated on its ocular-centric attitudes, its eye-addled tendencies: possessiveness, competitiveness, masculinity... its fashion-frenzied self-hood.

In his exhaustive study The Listening Self, David Levin writes of the ears as an 'ontological organ': an 'organ always already inherent in, belonging to, and attuned by, the openness of the dimensionality of Being as a whole, presencing for our hearing as an auditory field, a sonorous field. 

He then goes on to write that 'since the suffering of nihilism lies in our closure to Being, I believe the conclusion is inevitable that we need to learn a way of listening that is more ontologically attuned, more open to Being'.

I have always maintained from the very first occasions that I happened upon these spaces - The Kilpatrick Braes (and plateaux), The Campsie Fells (and plateaux) [more plateaux than face] - that simply coming up here on your own to be at one with the elements and the birds (and the relatives you never knew you had), to have that encounter with brute matter, is good enough for the 'ontologically attuned' being. It is also good enough to transform 'a man' (emphatically countable) into (the inexorably uncountable) 'human'.

The paradox is clear: that up here where many perceive there to be nothing, there is in truth everything. And that down there, in the noise-bowl, where there is 'everything', there is in truth nothing, only distortion, diversion, distraction. It is no coincidence that all the great prophets and visionaries (perhaps we should call them 'auditors') sought out these spaces in order to understand; that they sought out spaces of quietness and expansiveness (places of zero distortion) in order that they might hear, and attune, like a radio receiver, to the ultimate ground of Being.

An Angel Falls just above Old Kilpatrick.

Zero Distortion just above Duntocher

Contact

There's a point near the end of Robert Zemeckis' Contact where the scientist Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), having been propelled through various wormholes on the way to Vega, sees the star system from the porthole of her IPV. As she stares in a state of incredulous awe she stutters into her recording device, almost unable to speak:

No words... no words... Poetry.... 

they should have sent a poet. 

It's so beautiful, so beautiful... so beautiful.... 

I had no idea... I had no idea... no idea....


And there you have it. 


They should have sent a poet.

Coming to Grips with the Inextricable

We're all backward. Our machines are all modern and shit - but our minds - our minds are primitive.

James Mangold, Cop Land

Three of the most radical thinkers of the 19th & 20th centuries had the word 'White' insinuated into their names: the American Walt Whitman, the Englishman Alfred North Whitehead, and the Glasgow-born Kenneth White. Coincidence? Probably not.

As for the whiteness (of their names or of their work), one can read this as a metaphor for incandescence, and for the ultimate ground of Being that these colossi sought to expound through their various philosophies, theories, and poetics.

Alfred North Whitehead started off as a scientist and abtsract philosopher, a mathematician whose maths was so complex that even experts struggled to understand it. Soon, though Whitehead was delving into nature treating it in much the same way as he treated maths: as a subject that was separate from the mind enquiring into it, that is, as some thing at the end of a microscope or telescope. It was only till he encountered the problem of the enquiring mind (and how it could not possibly be separated from that which was being enquired) that he began to rethink his theories on Nature (now emphatically capitalised). A purely scientific approach to philosophy was, he felt, an impossibility.

In his last period of life, his metaphysical period, he accepts that the current strictures of science are not conducive to knowing one's self, indeed, that they may prevent it. It is at this time that he writes Religion in the Making and Science & the Modern World. At the outset of this period, the last 25 years of his life, he proclaims his message like a prophetic visionary, more in line with Blake or Law, than with a mathematician who was well known for being obscure:

My theme is the energising of a state of mind in the modern world... and its impact upon other spiritual forces.

Whitehead wasn't the only hard-headed scientist to make this turnaround during his lifetime. Niels Bohr, Einstein almost, Erwin Schrodinger, Richard Feynman, the astronomers John Archibald Wheeler and Carl Sagan, the theoretical physicist David Bohm (whose Wholeness & The Implicate Order and On Creativity are examples of a more conscientious approach to the physics), and Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life), also made significant modifications to extant theories, and incorporated these in an attempt to bridge the clefts that had arisen between the sciences, philosophy (the arts), and theology.

Whitehead was aware that science could get the better of itself, that the intellect which fed on logic and reason alone was only half a brain, half a human (namely 'man').

Religion, of course, was the answer, a 'primordial' religion that was more akin to poeisis than it was to anything the institutionalized Church could throw at us. Religion as solitariness (as Whitehead makes out) and as a coming to grips with the inextricable. This religion is more verb than a noun; it is a manner of fastening - religioning - the individual to one's community, to one's land, to one's being. It is a matter of moving, and of transforming. Of becoming part of the 'family'. 'Family', not as some anthropocentred, overheated vortex but as a binding to the essentials which bring forth life and growth, and maturity, and which enables the realization of inextricability. One's relatives are one's relations, and since relations are part of the process and reality of one's living, we are inevitably overcome with a sense of belonging, since now we can recognize these vital energies that cultivate. Religion, then, as far as this is concerned, is nothing more than a genuine recognition (a living) of one's inclusion and involvement in breathing bodies larger than our own.

In his Web of Life, Fritjof Capra concludes with a similar exposition of religion. And in The Tao of Physics, he writes of the moment when science, upon the propogation of quantum theory, confirmed what the mystics and the poets had known all along - that the individual is inextricable, and that the universe (filled with flowings and flowerings) is all there is:

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer.

 ....

As the British anthropologist Tim Ingold remarks, 'Something must be wrong somewhere if the only way to understand our own creative involvement is by first taking ourselves out of it.'

The answer of course is our reconnecting with Nature, and with the being of Being (as Heidegger calls it), and with the local. Globalization has seduced us into thinking we can go anywhere, and be anything. It has reduced the local and the parochial to a kind of dungeon-type existence. The lure of the local has been topped by the admiration of distance and the promise of the exotic. But it's all nonsense.

Backwardness itself is a virtue, progress a curse of Sisyphean proportions. Viewed from this perspective, some kind of peasant connection (the word peasant is derived from Old French paisent meaning local inhabitant) is vital to one's religioning. Crucial to one's coming to grips with the inextricable.

The Eclipse of Reason.

The disease of reason is that reason was born from man's urge to dominate nature; and recovery depends on insight into the nature of the original disease, not on a cure of the latest symptoms.

Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason 

Backbone & Brain

Sounds like an existential detective agency, Backbone & Brain, and I suppose it is, in a way. Because without them, one cannot inquire very deeply into the nature of being human, into the nature of the cosmic whole. Again and again, one comes up against obstacles: obstacles of language (where words and grammar lead us away from the truth and not towards it), obstacles of conventions (where conventional wisdom and ways of doing things go unquestioned), and obstacles of identity - of the self - (where delusions of what you are and not how you are take precedence over reality).

If there is one thing that is required of the sincere philosopher it is courage. This courage though it could equally be represented by the heart (le coeur) is symbolized here by the backbone, by the ability to stand up and speak your mind, and not kowtow to false idols. Once erect, the brain comes into its own: enquiry, questioning, imagining... applying.  

Seeing.

In Luc Besson's most recent effort, Lucy, he makes allusions to the fact that we use a pitifully small amount of our cerebral capacity. I would perhaps say that it's not really the amount we use, but how we use it, how we channel it. In other words, a hundred percent brain power could still produce an imbecile, except here we would be privy to a remarkable imbecile, who gets things remarkably wrong.

The backbone then is what stirs the brain into right action, and into right thinking. And when the time comes, equally, into non-action, and into non-thinking. In other words, the spine is not only located at the base of the brain, but it is, in fact the basis of the brain.

I guess the germ of this entry is Martin Heidegger's memorial address at the celebration of the 175th anniversary of the birth of the German composer Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849) in Messkirch in 1955 which can be found in the great little book Discourse on Thinking. In particular, at the end of his address in which he has castigated science's arrogance, and dependence on logic and reason to light the way - calculative thinking over meditative thinking - where he states:

What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning, and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have thrown away his own special nature - that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive. Yet releasement towards things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent and courageous thinking.

Both flourish, in other words, through the application of backbone and brain. Lose either of these (although there is an argument to say that they are inseparable) and you are no longer human in the fullest sense, but simply a spineless robot (a man) who works without thinking of the consequences of that work, and whose work is not an end in itself but always a means to something else.

Revelation of the Subcutaneous

There's a moment near the beginning of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin when I almost fall off my chair after realising the van that Scarlett Johansson's alien is driving was cutting about just outside where I live. She stops and asks some poor unsuspecting Govanite for directions back onto the M8 motorway. He asks her if she knows where Asda is, because the motorway's right behind it. She doesn't so he hops in to direct her. Meanwhile, muggins here is shouting at the screen, 'I know where it is, it's just round the corner. I'll show you.'

The revelation here was two-fold : that I could've possibly missed the production crew and the van scouting about my hood, and the obvious one, of an alien, slightly confused and bewildered in this human bodymind, cutting about Glasgow in a transit van. I surmised that at about the time of filming (sometime in late 2012 when I began this blog) they must have spotted me tramping the streets like a lone wolf as a likely candidate for a pick-up. Chances are, being the cinephile that I am, I would've scuppered any opportunity for hoodwinking that they might have had. Yet, I was disappointed that I hadn't been stopped, considering the amount of city walking I did that winter. My ego aside however, the film was a strange one, and deeply affecting. It used the sea, the trees, and the tarmac rivers of greater Glasgow (i.e. Scotland) to great effect.

I had always thought of using the plantations that surround Glasgow as some sort of setting for a horror movie. Whereas being in a wood or a forest is a primordial experience, being in a plantation is not. It is firstly, for those of us who can attune to space and life, a perverting and horrific experience where not even death lives: trees so tightly packed together (for the sole purpose of being cut down) that not even light enters the thickly set canopy. The plantation floor, unlike that of a forest or a wood, is dead, matted solely with fallen spruce needles and fetid water. One of the more terrifying experiences of my life was trying to find my way through Lennox Forest (actually plantation) several years ago and losing my way. I almost had a panic attack finding that even the body (nevermind the body and mountain bike) was struggling to pass between the ever-tightening gaps between trees. I felt like I was slowly being swallowed up.... alive. The Blair Witch never had a look in.

At any rate, Glazer's film touched a chord, that Michel Faber's book (of the same title) didn't. Perhaps it was the Glasgow locations, and the plantations which I could directly relate to. Or perhaps it was just the revelation of the subcutaneous itself: that under the skin (within a dualistic, and anti-contemplative society) we are all alien, to each other, and to our selves. That, quite possibly, the only way to return to the sacred, to the godhead within, is to enter the void (as one of Mica Levi's sound tracks is called), and release one's self from the pathetic nonsense that we are invariably involved in; entering the void being synonymous with the Buddhist expression of burning your house and heading into the east.

The Belgian-born writer, poet and painter, Henri Michaux, once wrote of painting that it is the production of a thing which breaks 'the skin of things'. Well, here, if you can excuse the coincidental title, Glazer breaks the skin of film, and delves deeper into its flesh, so deep, one might say, that he actually hits the bone. And when that happens, you cannot help but feel it.

Spruce plantation up above Dumbarton in the Kilpatrick Hills....