Teleport

Upon jumping the 'bullet to the moor' (the Helensburgh Express train) this morning to Dalmuir I made a grand discovery as I sat and sipped coffee from my flask whilst gazing out the window. I realised that this train (as with all trains that I take) is not a form of transport at all (since all wild animals and shamanic cyclists eschew transportation) but a teleportation device. This is what a tele-port is: a device that transfers you across a distance 'instantaneously'. And if  you think about it, this is exactly what happens here. In the case of Partick to Dalmuir this morning, it was a distance of some seven miles covered in ten minutes. Yet this 'ten minutes' is 'dissolved' through the act of mimesis, that is, of my mimicking the exact same motions that I would go through had I stayed at home (namely, sitting down, gazing at the 'passing landscape' on my computer and through my kitchen window, writing, and sipping coffee). Thus, through the mimetic act of 'being in my kitchen' the ten minute journey time is evaporated so to speak. When that happens, there is no duration anymore; nothing endures since everything is 'in the moment' and 'ecstatically present'. I enter the 'train' at the same time as I exit it. It is like this then that I can call the trains I take teleportation devices. It is also like this, that despite living in the centre of the city, I am practically living in the hills. 

 

Pacemaker

Exiting the train at Kilpatrick this morning I am confronted with another young man staring into his hand whilst trying to move forwards. I immediately think that it is his heart (as in a pacemaker) that he is carrying, like a drip-feed that he cannot let go of for fear that he might die. I shake my head once more at how a whole generation of youngsters (the only people who can get us out of this  mess) have been kidnapped and stupefied (and thus rendered stupid and incapable) by imposter tech. and their existentially vacuous purveyors.

I wonder again at the fascination people (young and old) have with this terrible little handheld device, and how mesmerized and arrested they are by it. I question the efficacy of the pacemaker as I walk into the hills. What does this little 'pacemaker' actually do? Well, the pacemaker keeps you apace and up to date through (unnatural) technology and media, just as your heart in the natural realm keeps you apace and up to date with natural technology (body) and media (Nature: the land, the elements etc.). As I walk up these hills, I become aware that my 'smartphone' is my beating heart which is interpreting the landscape through which it is navigating. My 'fingering of the screen' is none other than a 'legging through the land'. I can see it as clear as day as I scale these braes: my 'internet' and the great web of life (most of it nonhuman) that I tune into and attune to, but which never ever distracts (from the essential).

I guess then you could say that I'm like everyone else, which, on a superficial level, would be true. Except my technology and my inter-net involves a lot more nonhuman than human and does not rape Nature, Being, and the Earth, in order to work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The soul the Arabs say can only go as fast as the pace of a trotting camel (or perhaps even a very dirty mountain bike).

Brae

 

 

 

 

 

Sabre - Braes that Slice the Bodymind Open

That's what these braes are (my oracle said as much as I was descending them today): an original (cliff) face that helps you understand your own original face. This, however, appears to be a contradiction in terms: the face as fascia and surface (and thus superficial if not artificial) versus the original and 'that which originates' presumably from the depths. Yet, it's this contradiction (this speaking against) - depth and surface, artifice and originality - that eventually cuts you open like a sabre. Because it's not really a contradiction but a communication. Which is what these braes are in a roundabout way.

Saber (n.)

Type of single-edged sword, 1670s, from French sabre "heavy, curved sword" (17c.), alteration of sable (1630s), from German Sabel, Säbel, probably ultimately from Hungarian szablya "saber," literally "tool to cut with," from szabni "to cut."

If you look at the strath that Glasgow  sits in you will see the hills, braes and fells form a sort of sabre around the valley with an open end towards the east. The hills do not encircle Glasgow completely, but 'sabre' it as in 'almost encircle', or as in 'a heavy curve'.  So, it comes as a happy coincidence that the word 'braes' also contains the letters for the word 'sabre'. Because if the above contradiction doesn't slice you open, walking and/or cycling them most certainly will.

 

 

 

From this footbridge over the expressway we can see the tops of all three sides of the curved sabre. Here, looking west, we can see (just) behind the high-rises on the right of the image the Kilpatrick braes and hills.

 

 

 

Looking south, I can see (with the naked eye) the unmistakeable bend of the 'kissing tree' behind Barrhead and Ferenese Golf Course. Amazing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking south-east, we fall upon the Cathkin braes... 

It is important for city-dwellers to have aspects that give onto the country, flightlines for the soul. I did a blogpost very early on about 'Hills that live at the ends of streets'. It's one of my favourite posts that I made into a photographic artist book. When these flightlines into the outside become blocked by constructors and their monstrous buildings we ourselves become violated and 'blocked'. This is the danger of living in a city like London or Paris (et al.). You can't see anything of the outside from the city. And when this happens you no longer have a city but a 'shithole'.

 

 Don't let Glasgow become one too...

 

What A Day, Man!

This morning, on my way to contemplation rock up there in the Kilpatrick Hills, I say without thinking another phrase that spontaenously erupts whenever I'm at one with the earth: What a day, man! And then I realize as it sounds itself through this high altitude air, that what I am actually saying is, 'What a daemon!' the daemon being that inner oracle, that fully conscious subconscious, that cosmic being, that knows everything and nothing.

'What a daemon!' as in 'my oracle is some entity', for it has guided me up here into the rarefied airs, away from the noise and into silence, where I might contemplate existence in its everythingness and nothingness. 

What a day, man, indeed!

 

 

 

Walking as a Four-legged Activity

Walking I gathered this morning whilst cycling through Pollok Country Park and seeing a man 'walking' with his hands in his pockets is a four-legged enterprise. You see, the arms are actually legs that we have reconditioned away from the ground. This, one might argue, is where it all went wrong for the monkey (whilst all going right for 'man'). You can't really walk with your hands in your pockets. Indeed, you can't really do anything with your hands cuffed like that, can you? The legs need the other legs to keep in time, to offset the trot with a sort of pendulous swinging, harking back to our good old monkey days. Without this swing, the legs are not as free to move, not as rhythmic, and consequently the body (as the summit and pinnacle of those legs) not as spontaneously energized (and thus joyful). It's perhaps a measure of our own incarceration within our small made selves that we imprison the hands so readily, whether in pockets (that are actually handcuffs) or by constantly holding our phone like a child holds its doll, thus stifling our Being through hampering the primal activity of self-propulsion and immediate being. Walking requires the swing in order to be itself. Walking has always been a four legged activity even with the onset of bipedal creatures like man. We have just become so used to thinking differently, to seeing ourselves as different from other animals, but we're not. The sooner we transform our arms back into legs the better for everyone, for that will mean walking will become natural and joyful again (it's much easier to walk with four legs than with two). And that means no pockets or phones to conceal your being in.

 

Turnstile

 

I had this image of a turnstile in the countryside from where I have just returned - a coin-operated turnstile where you have to pay to 'enter Nature' and the unpaved. In the not so remote future, Nature has become so rare in her openness and pristineness that we have closed her up and coin-operated her and outfitted her with the mechanisms of the city. 

The stile is now the turnstile.