The Aboriginal Bicycle

Origin is the goal.

Karl Kraus

 

The aboriginal bicycle is that bicycle that allows the origin to seep through into you. It allows you to touch the source by taking you to it. The bicycle is not just a great way to travel economically, ecologically and efficiently, but also aboriginally, especially, if, like me, you live in a city surrounded by primal hills.

The bicycle like the body locates, locomotes, and localizes. The story of man's demise is the story of dislocation, is the story of the anti-bicycle, the motor-car. The motor car doesn't just dislocate and disembody the driver from space (and the origin), it destroys the earth piece by piece by paving it over and treating it like a grand car park. Car drivers are thus destroyers hidden in plain sight, destroyers who shrug their shoulders at being called destroyers because someone has said that it's ok to destroy. 

The aboriginal bicycle on the other hand is a conjoiner and seeks to right the destruction the car has done. The bicycle locates the cyclist in space and time thus universalizing her. One becomes not just the earth when one moves under one's own steam but the whole cosmos. This is the difference between moving yourself and allowing a pollutant to carry you.

Only dead and injured animals, farm animals, circus animals, animals on their way to the slaughter, allow themselves to be carried...

 

 

Orgasm on Bells Bridge

For the the double Rs to have a clean car back then like that we just had an orgasm.

Style Wars

Last week it looked as if there was an outbreak of Covid On Bells Bridge in Glasgow's city centre. It was locked at both ends and two men in what looked like hazmat suits could be seen hosing down the fifteen pillars that hold up its canopy. 

 

 

Yet, it wasn't Covid they were cleaning from its surfaces but my stencils (over three hundred of them) that I had put up earlier this year over the course of April, May, and June. I can't complain, I got a better run than most exhibitions and to be honest I was waiting for the cleaners to come. Why? Because I couldn't be bothered cleaning it myself, since I have, over the past few months, been 'too busy' preparing the next 'exhibit'. This is the orgasm: a completely clean bridge, and me with over 200 new stencils in my rucksack. I didn't want to paint over my own stuff, and since the public here seem to have taken quite a liking to it, they haven't painted over it either, so I had to wait not knowing if or when it would be cleaned. But now that it has, there are few feelings quite like it.

The Light Fantastic

October is a special month not just for the mushrooms that spring up all over the strath but for the light too. It's a raking light that lowlights everything in a wonderful aura. You get this light up until February and each winter month is special for this quality. I like to think of this light as gold and every time I see it I go out to 'collect' it. It's almost as 'valuable' (as natural aboriginal medicine) as magic mushrooms themselves. Indeed, if you can manage to get your hands on both...

At any rate, here are some photos of the light fantastic during October:

Song of the Source

What soul has not been strengthened by the sound of a babbling brook?

This impeccable October afternoon atop the braes, I find myself in a desert of heather and strange greywacke rocks. The view across the valley is sweeping: I can see Tinto thirty miles away to the south-east and the shadowy adumbration of Ailsa Craig some fifty miles to the south-west. I can also see the ocean to the west  and the tops of the highland range to the north. But none of these primal giants embrace me as warmly as the trickling stream I have just plonked myself down beside. This is the source of some of the burns and streams you will see down there in Dalmuir and Kilpatrick before they run into the great Ganges that is Glasgow's River Clyde. And it is this source that trickles so gently but so evocatively that has now got my undivided attention. It is the complete opposite of a tap running. What is this sound then that holds me in such admiration? It is the absence of the man-made and the artificial. The absence too of the industrial and the enclosed. Here, we have water flowing not falling, and trickling across and through mineral and vegetable in the open. This water is thus 'convivial' as in accommodating other life within it. It is not industrial as in banishing life from it. This is why this stream sounds the way it does - because of its 'aboriginal conviviality' - and does not sound like a tap that has been turned on. What's more, because of its unenclosed nature, the mountains, the ocean, the clouds and the river, are all present here within this source and thus lend their 'flourishes' to this overall trickle. Which is why, if you listen to the stream carefully, your soul will be strengthened, for you too, along with the mountains, the ocean, the clouds and the river, will be accommodated within its song.

 

 

The Mist

Aside the Kilpatrick braes this misty monday morning... the moisturizer rolls in...

 

 

My Legs Are My Face

Orwell once wrote that 'you deserve the face you have by the age of fifty' having presumably served it up to yourself via your behaviour, your diet, and the way you move and treat your own body. Personally, my face is my legs and boy do I deserve these, having served them up to myself via lots of hill-walking, lots of cycling, lots of car-avoidance, and a fairly healthy diet. Should we not be looking at our legs more and our faces less then since we are walking creatures and not facial ones? Should the legs and not the face (or any other part of the anatomy) be the first port of call for anyone searching for a mate? But we have the nasty habit of covering them up these days with things called 'trousers', long 'skirts' and 'slacks'. But it wasn't always the case. Once upon a time in Scotland, men bore their legs proudly via the 'kilt' (from Old Norse kjalta 'fold made by gathering up to the knees') which put them more in kilter with Nature since they could now feel that wind brush against (if not sculpt) them. So, let your legs be your face, and let your face be your legs. Unleash yourself. A man with trousers is a man with his 'legs in pockets'. 

 

Visions of the Infinite

Today, up on the plateau of the skylark, I walked through the sky. The hills up here are devoid of anything that might identify you as a standalone entity. The only screens and mirrors up here is Nature and the locomotive body. As such, when one is up here Oneness (and not fracturedness) is reflected back. It's all this heather and sameness, not to mention the vastness that holds it all together. Down there in the city - in the torture chamber - it's the opposite. Everything reflects back your distorted self because the scene itself has been distorted. That's what a city is: utter distortion if not utter perversion and utter pollution, the perversion being the natural (uni)version that has been forced through the medium of waste, murder, and rape (of Nature). Thus, in the hills, and with continuous practice, one has visions of the infinite because that's 'who you hang about with'. Conversely, down there in the manky city (and Glasgow is nowhere near as manky as some cities), you don't have visions at all because you cannot see anything except your own distorted and polluted self. 

Just a few images from the past week... (Kilpatricks, Campsies, Lochwinnoch). Every week I fill my boots with the infinite, and every weekend I levitate.