Response-ability, and a Re-turn to the Sacred

'We all know the same truth and our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.' Woody Allen
 

The Celts who inhabited these lands once upon a time considered the hills and the rivers as integral to their very being, and to their 'slow' way of living.  The hills and rivers nourished them, and were part of the great open system through which the Celts themselves were gradually cycled and recycled. Through this unhurried process, a certain health was attained, a health that was, as the etymology of the word testifies to, inextricably linked with wholeness (from the proto-Germanic 'hale', from where we get health, whole, holy, and all their offshoots).

Further down the line, the processes and cycles are still there, though now they are significantly more concealed, and, much to our detriment, significantly more punctured. There are many tragic examples nowadays of these punctures: children not knowing where their food comes from, not knowing the simple cycle of a river; conversely, and more alarmingly, their knowing more corporate logos than local birds or trees. Their call of duty now is apparently to a video game or an iPad, and no longer to the land which feeds them, which allows them to play their games... The call for eco-literacy and a return to the sacredness of the Celtic spirit  that embraces this health and wholeness is of vital importance... to us, to the land, to 'well-being' in general.

This is no easy task, especially when living in cities and faced on a daily basis with its howling busyness. One's ability to respond to nature is constantly being ground down by the limited objectives of an increasingly monied society. Nature's intrinsic value is of little import. Its wealth lies emphatically within its externalisation and its subsequent commodification. But the wealth of the sacred, of wholeness, cannot be equated in such a fashion. To do so is to be blinded to the great natural kingdom that lies before you. 'Paradise' in the Celtic world was 'fin-mag', a white field, symbolising fertility, nourishment and the cyclical patterns of nature. Heaven is not something that lies beyond living.

An increasing re-cognition and re-minding of Nature is the key to paradise. Only then will we be able to respond to nature naturally, and see our own selves within that metamorphic and transfigurative process that does not grow 'old' but simply cycles. This 'response-ability' and this 're-turn' is the elixir of life that we have all been searching for and which has been right in front of us all along. Only when we learn how to respond to nature, and how to converse with our greater self, will we attain any sense of deep health (health that is not just physical/biological but spiritual and metaphysical). Then, and only then, will we inhabit the truth from the inside, instead of distorting it from without.

Glascaux - The Painted Caves Beneath the City

Life is like a tunnel. Granted, it is a rather curious and misshapen tunnel, full of tangential offshoots here and there, but a tunnel nonetheless. If you are fortunate enough to exit the tunnel whilst still alive you will understand what I'm on about. Most, however, will only exit the tunnel upon death.

It is not just for this reason (the vital reminder) that I like to come down here, to the Clyde Tunnel walkway between Linthouse on the south of the river and Whiteinch on the north. But more because the tunnel itself is like a giant cave on whose walls are painted a wide variety of territorial markings. In short, the tunnel is a veritable open gallery for the disenfranchised and the confused, but not entirely capsized.

I have been coming down here, maybe two, three times a year for the best part of my Glasgow life. The tunnel - dank, tenebrous and fetid - has always had that strange ethereal magnetism about it; scary, sure, but aren't all the deepest darkest truths? In all my incursions I have yet to meet any of the taggers who scrawl on these walls; I barely meet anyone save for a lone pedestrian or cyclist going the other way. It is a desolate place, destitute and desertic, but it is primarily because of this that I find myself here. The emptiness of the desert and the nakedness of the destitute can often reveal one's own impoverishment, one's closeness to the bone. That said, there is often a congeniality attached to these tunnels which finds itself scrawled on its walls; a sense of the Glasgow banter, that aggressive, primitive, caveman conviviality that only exists in areas where harshness and community have co-existed side by side, and mutually nourished each other. To be sure, Linthouse/Govan and Whiteinch/Scotstoun are mere shadows of their former selves, but even shadows, on those rare occasions, offer up some light...

Whatever the case, the Clyde Tunnel (The Collide Tonne-L) is a dark Joycean U-bend through the (anti-) poetic bowels of the slow city and, as the limestone nests of Lascaux (or Chauvet) might testify to, a cave of forgotten dreams...

[The following montage of photographs taken over the past decade features both tunnels in all their gloom and glory and is accompanied by the great Jazz Suite No. 2 by Shostakovich.  Enjoy!]

Incandescent Limbo - From West Street to Govanhill

There's a lot of physics in my metaphysics. Kenneth White

Wandering is a necessary precursor to wondering. A city such as Glasgow, with its vast spread of interconnected villages and communities, and in spite of its sometimes awkward body, presents us with many occasions for both wondering and wandering. Some see the city increasingly as a chaotic mess, but this is certainly not true of Glasgow whose geographic width, occupying as it does much of the western midland valley (and the surrounding hills), can dissipate fairly easily any chaos that may arise. At any rate, in chaos there is opportunity.

But you've got to get out into it - wander it out, wonder it through.... it's only by getting through the city, physically-metaphysically, that you'll come out the other end, into the hills, and into the light. If truth be told, I am like a rat who knows his territory so well, his escape routes, his paths to the food (physical/metaphysical), that there is no recourse for stress, for neuroses. The city, then, becomes a calm place to be. It does not dictate what should be done but instead offers opportunities, opportunities that are now, emphatically, in the light. This is the paradox: having gone through the city and come out into the hills, and into the light, I am still in the city.

['The Empty City'  Kilbirnie Street, Port Eglinton]

From the underground at West Street (it could well be the moon for its desolate isolation), I head towards Govanhill. As the earth turns to collect the last light of the sun, the face of Kilbirnie Street glows. Even in the most hostile environment there is beauty! And, in the desolate, a glowing ember for the heart...

[St. Andrew's Gas Works, Pollokshaws Road, December 12th 2012]

Passing Eggy Toll (Eglinton Toll) I note a couple of fine pieces of architecture dating from roughly a century ago. The most recent additions, however, can hardly qualify as architecture since in their functionality appear almost completely devoid of any aesthetic. I'm speaking of these new fangled 'luxury apartment complexes' (the name itself should set alarm bells ringing - beauty need not call itself beauty!) which are springing up all over the city with depressing regularity. I find myself looking at the works 'of old', solid, tectonic buildings with the gods of love and attention still inhabiting their finely wrought details. Look at this one above - ok, so it's a little run-down but you can't deny the gods that still live in those arches, those rondels and finials, its scale and material. This great structure communes with the weather, grows old with it.  The new 'cattle-sheds' that are being thrown up (vomited forth) have no such communion with the landscape. It's all cardboard, plastic, glass and steel - no sensibility to the weather, no attachment to the land, little solidity, even less durability (durability in a short-termist economy is counter-productive) and spaciousness. It's all a little pokey and depressing as if people no longer care what they live in, how they dwell, what they inhabit. Give me a tenement any day of the week!

Which leads me to Ardbeg Street in Govanhill, number 21 right at the top, round the corner from the wonderful library (just look at those domes, those pediments and pedestals!). It was here at 21 Ardbeg Street where the radical Glaswegian pyschiatrist Ronald David Laing lived for the first third of his life. There is a small plaque attached to the wall above the close entrance. It simply reads R.D. Laing was born here...

I feel like adding one of his poems, brighten it up a little....

All in all each man in all men

all men in each man

all being in each being

all in each 

each in all

all distinctions are mind,

by mind, in mind, of mind,

no distinctions, no mind to distinguish.

A little further east (what other possible direction is there after this?), I come across this in Boyd Street, and my afternoon is complete...

The B-listed Govanhill Picture House opened in 1926. Built to the designs of Eric A. Sutherland, it featured a
unique Egyptian-styled facade, with columns and a moulded scarab above the entranceway. It is now currently being used as a warehouse, and plans are afoot to demolish it and build.... a luxury apartment complex. Thankfully, the facade is to be retained. Small mercy for such a fantastic structure.

The Map is Not the Territory - On the Path to Loch Humphrey

The holy man goes into the hills in solitude. When he returns to men, he teaches them what the Great Mystery has bidden him to tell.

Sioux Indian


The hills call me this morning... every morning I have a fanfare of fells from my living room window..

As they collect the dawn, the Campsie Fells (beyond science and knowledge) prostrate themselves in reverence to the presence of the Sun...

This morning I decide to brave the more gentle (but no less majestic) Kilpatrick hills to the west... and the path to Loch Humphrey just behind the Kilpatrick braes.

By tube (from Cessnock), train (from Partick) and foot (from Kilpatrick) it is a mere 2 hours (going slowly with plenty of pauses to take in those wide estuarine views) from door to loch. I am always amazed at how near this remoteness is.

And it is remote! Up here, away from the prying eyes of the city, the music of the landscape resounds so deeply that all that comes back is silence. A few travellers are met along the way, a few nods of the head, a couple of buzzards calling out:

'wheeeueuuuuu.....

.....wheeeeueuuuuu....

                         ....here ah'm ur....

....here ah'm ur....'

'Clyde & Cloud' [11th December 2012]

The solitude is exquisite, so exquisite that the 4 odd hours between leaving Kilpatrick train station and returning to it seem to pass in an instant. One has become, in accordance with the moment, and in accordance with being fully present, extemporaneous. Escorting this is a feeling of continuity and fluency, not of time (since we are 'now' outwith it), but of space. Within this spaciousness (what I like to call 'the splendid vastness of the uncontained Mind') there is a feeling of what can only be described as an 'ineluctable inextricability' (that governs all things and non-things). One is now, as a passenger on the train of the unconscious-consciousness, united with the land. Territory and organism melt into each other. No distinction can now be made. Equally, it could be said that they dissipate into a state of 'emptiness', an emptiness that is absolutely awake. The consequence of this experience is the profound assurance that Paradise is a reality.

 [Looking east across Loch Humphrey towards the Campsie Fells in the distance]


The territory of thought, much like that of land, needs to be mapped, needs to be ‘thought out’, so that one might proceed into pure Spontaneity, and the realm of the unthinking. 'Reality cannot be equated with the nature of consciousness,' writes Raimond Panikkar in Invisible Harmony.

The best way to map out thought, to think out thinking, is to move right through it.

Reality may well be subjective in the words of Kierkegaard, but it is also an activity. You need to work at it, travel it, travail it. Thus, the event of 'Glasgow' itself becomes an activity. Left to its own devices Glasgow, as any other place, is merely a dictionarily defined 'city' - on the move, however, it shapeshifts with one's consciousness. Thus, when I'm in Warsaw I am warsaw; when I'm in Glasgow I am glasgow. The map is not the territory - I am.

[From the Kilpatrick Braes looking east. At this height everything moves slowly...]

As I approach the end of the path returning towards Kilpatrick Railway Station, a young lad on his mountain bike wheelies past. I find him at his car another hundred yards or so down.

'Not brave enough to leave the car at home?' I cheekily venture.

He removes his pigtailed Tibetan hood, 'Sorry?'

I repeat it.

'Not if I'm coming from Glasgow' he says.

I move on, and think to myself how limited Glasgow has become in some people's heads. For me these hills, whether Kilpatrick or Campsie, Renfrewshire or Inverclyde, have always been 'Glasgow'. Always will be. Sure, they're hardly in the city-centre, but that's not such a bad thing. Indeed, I might cheekily venture that these hills, fells and moors are more central to Glasgow than any city-centre. To paraphrase the American anthropololgist Edward Twitchell Hall, 'The heart of the self extends far beyond the boundaries of the body'.

Here Ah'm Ur - Ecce Sum

This morning in a newly renovated and sunlit Govan Cross I came across a plaque in the ground of two small feet (oh what wonders await those who are prepared to stop and look down!) from which a spiral of words emerged:

'The dance of nature proceeds on one side; the dance of enlightenment on the other. Fix your mind in the centre of the latter.'   [Thiruvarut Payan, Sacred Utterances of the Tamil]

Meetings with Remarkable Trees

It is no mere coincidence that a tree is the arch-symbol of this web-log, and of the slow flow of Glasgow. One might say that trees, operate on a different temporal scale... a different dimension even. Glasgow has many wonderful trees, though when I lived in Warsaw in Poland I had my eyes opened to trees in a way that I never thought possible. Glasgow, in spite of her profusion of parks and trees, could well take a leaf out of Warsaw's book - in fact, every city could. It is perhaps testament to layers of modernism that trees get uprooted especially on pavements and at roadsides, and are not replaced with others. Warsaw has not yet suffered the ignominy of this breach of the peace, not because it doesn't have modernism or the city itself has not been 'breached', but because it seems particularly aware of its streets trees as real live entities in their own right. Glasgow's street trees are few and far between but they do exist here and there, though not sufficiently. Trees in parks and arboretums are all well and good but surely we should be welcoming more of them into our neighbourhoods, aside our streets, into our communities? In Cessnock, at each end of Elizabeth Street where I live, there is a magnificent tree, one great and old, the other slight but no less majestic. Indeed, one of the great things about the streets here is that there are trees upon them. The main drag of Paisley Road West has some beautiful rowan trees which turn the street iridescent orange and red come October, and in front of the old baronial Bellahouston Academy there's a phalanx of wonderful sycamore. In the final analysis, street trees don't just enliven what can sometimes be a dreary built-up area, they bring biodiversity into our lives via the birds and insects they provide food and accomodation for. They enrich our lives as well as our cities, and above all bring a sense of glorious slowness to the city's table.

Zen on Atlantic Quay

...Zen takes up neither the deification of man, a positively naive position assumed in modern times, nor the position of a transcendent God insisted upon by dialectical theology. The crucial position of Zen is to affirm the 'sacred in man' by retrieving the sacred from the reaches of the transcendent or objective and returning it to the folds of human subjectivity.

[Buddha-Nature, N.Waddell & Abe Masao]