The Rebirth of Metaphysics

Education cannot help us as long as it accords no place to metaphysics… Education can only help us if it produces ‘whole men.’ E.F. Schumacher

Be still and know. Psalm 46:10


The practice of ‘being slow’ is the practice of becoming whole again; in effect, being slow (or equally, slow being) is to resuscitate the right hemisphere of the brain and break free of what Goethe called ‘the gloom of the empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber’ (mechanistic and quantative thinking, and too much left-braining). By this, I mean that, through the process of slowing down (of un-busying one’s self) and inviting a more synthetic-meditative (and less analytic-fragmentive) outlook of self and world, one begins to apprehend (and synthesise) one’s universal relations more clearly, thus, effectively, instituting one’s route to health and wholeness.

Within an anti-contemplative (and picnoleptic) society that predicates itself on ‘keeping busy’ and whose economic mantra is ‘growth for growth’s sake’, there really is no route to health that does not exploit nature and/or man’s wholeness as integration into (and harmonization with) this nature. Indeed, our growth-economy (when it doesn’t demand it) requires dis-integration from, and fragmentation of, nature in order to ‘work’.  Our education system itself appears to be nothing more than the systematic outfitting of the mindset required to deal efficiently with this scenario. As E.F. Schumacher remarks in Small is Beautiful:
 

Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as man’s greatest resoucrce, will then be an agent of destruction, in accordance with the principle corruptio optimi pessima.

Metaphysics, as the art of being still and allowing that stillness to inform (through a process of in-sourcing, in-forming, and refining) stands at complete odds with a society whose very economic heartbeat demands out-sourcing and ex-forming (in-forming and de-fining you from the outside). Metaphysics, then, is the difference between original thinking/original living and second-hand thinking/second-hand living. By 'original' I mean not that it hasn't been done before but that it originates from within. In welcoming Metaphysics (born of a 'religious slowness' that allows us to see things 'as they are'), we may proclaim Freedom. A state of freedom where our thoughts are our own, where our journeys have been made under our own steam, and where our central convictions have been forged within the heart's own fire.

Until then, until that point where we begin to think on our own two feet (left and right), we shall have to make do with our ignorance, and our loneliness, and our lack of comprehension of the self’s universal relations.

'Relatives are Universal'   [Sculpted epitaph at the entrance to SECC, Finnieston]

How to Change the World through Being Slow

Man is not himself only, he is all that he sees, all that flows to him from a thousand sources, he is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys. Mary Austin

The body is the world. Alan Watts


'Slowness' as a term to describe a way of being-in-the-world is perhaps confusing. It implies being 'slow', but what is 'being slow'? How does one actually be slow? What is 'slow'?

Fundamentally, 'being slow', if anything, is about denying the dictates of 'modern life', about renouncing 'ambition' and the pressure of 'doing'. It is about stepping outside of a manufactured time whilst embracing the freedom of Time as a whole. It is about allowing one's natural rhythms to shine through whilst allowing the seasons to penetrate. And  allowing one's own trajective energy (walking as opposed to driving for example) to body one forth. Being slow is about allowing oneself the essential space and time to cultivate a mind clear enough to see through the illusions of the ruling modes of thought. Being slow, then, is thus a 'coming to one's senses', and a re-evaluation of what it means to be human, and to world.

No longer hostage to the rush and roar of speed, one begins to see things afresh and to re-cognize connections that had hitherto passed one by. This process of re-cognition, enabled through our new-found slowness, is vital to the blossoming of the self into its matrix of relations.

Being slow then becomes a process of revitalising oneself and becoming healthy again; it is about 'knowing with again' (re-co-gnize), and recognizing that 'The ‘with’ is not just a mode of being-in-the-world, but our transcendental condition' [Jean-Luc Nancy]; it is about reinserting the self into its greater natural matrix from which it has been unnaturally extracted. 'Civilization,' Freud reminds us, 'has arisen out of the renunciation of instinct, the gaining of control over the forces of nature, and the building of a cultural superego'.

Being slow is about re-evaluating what it means not just to be human, but to be individual as 'undivided' and not as 'atomised'. It is culture true and pure, about realizing one's self as part of Nature and not apart from it.

In cultivating this clarity, we slowly begin to see the self as a flowing open system whose tenuous envelope of skin and bone is not so much a barrier as an invitation. 'Inner and outer' as a concept no longer makes sense. 'Electrically and chemically', the biologist John Bliebtreu announces, 'the world moves right through us as though we were made of mist'.

World and self merge. Synergies abound.

Through the process of being slow, the organism becomes more intimately integrated with its environment. Nature becomes one as one becomes Nature. And one is naturally drawn to nature through being slow and undistracted. One's self-interest naturally expands to encompass that of the environment, and, by extension, further beyond.

It is like this that by changing one's self, and by 'slowing' down, one changes the world...

Magpie Meet

The annual magpie meet, almost a sort of 'lek' in itself, takes place on the city's pedestals: the aerials and the chimneys, the satellite dishes and the treetops. This morning, some 9 magpies (it could've been 10), ventured forth onto the aerials and rooftop opposite my kitchen window. The crows came in too (there's a family of four or five that lives just round the corner) to offer some counsel for the forthcoming spring. It's difficult to tell what exactly is going on (in spite of my corvid brain), but I get the feeling that it is territorial, and there is some kind of demarcation of space for the upcoming season of mating, nesting and the rest. There is never any physical contact between the crows and magpies in spite of their vociferous to-ing and fro-ing, but the energy in this open-air council meeting is unmistakeable. Almost as quickly as it began, five minutes later (why can't all meetings be like this?), they disperse, crows first, then soon after, the magpies, fluttering away, presumably (though I have learned not to presume too much with these creatures) to implement the minutes.

'Magpie Telegraph'

                                                                'Council Meeting'

The Birds of Glasgow

The City of Glasgow did not have a Coat of Arms until the middle of the 19th century. The Lord Lyon King at Arms gave approval for one to be adopted in 1866, which incorporated a number of symbols and emblems that were assocciated with the legends surrounding St. Mungo, namely bird, tree, bell, and fish.

The bird commemorates a wild robin that St. Serf, Mungo's old master, tamed, and which would eat food out of the Saint's hand. When Serf recited the Psalms the little robin would perch on Serf's shoulder and flap his wings.

The robin was allegedly killed by Mungo's 'classmates' who blamed Mungo whom they considered something of a 'swot' and 'teacher's pet'. When Serf confronted Mungo with the dead bird, Mungo took the robin in his hands and prayed over it, whenupon it was restored to life and flew chirping to its Serf. 

If you go down to Fairlie (not far from Largs), to the Parish Church there, you will see a stained glass window of Mungo (aka. Kentigern) reading to the gulls on the shore. It's a wonderful depiction of inter-species communication and of the self integrating itself into its wider domain. Mungo (Kentigern) wasn't the only saint to be associated with birds. There was St. Columba and the heron, the wren nesting in the cloak of St. Malo, St. Werburga and the goose, and of course St. Francis and the sparrows. 

Whether real or not, these stories (or parables) reveal the lightness of the saints in question, their lightness of living, of heart, of spirit, the capacity to elevate their selves above the grim reality of mere survival. Birds were so highly regarded in certain cultures (Egyptian, Persian, Mayan, Greek and Roman) that it was thought that they could traverse between the two realms of heaven and earth. The Romans even named hell after its birdlessness. They called the watery entrance to the Underworld Avernus (from Greek, a-ornus meaning 'without bird'), thus a tenebrous place without soul, heart or light. 

It is thus that birds (of any city) bring it one step closer to heaven on earth...

THE BIRDS OF GLASGOW

Bird by bird I have come to know the earth. Pablo Neruda

Ubi aves, ibi angeli (Where there are birds there are angels). St. Thomas Aquinas



The pigeons of George Square

       The starlings of Asda Ibrox

                The gulls of Govan Cross


are all primally Glaswegian -


   The Yoker swans

          The Kelvin herons

                 The blackbirds of those interstitial spaces -

are all fundamentally seasoned

by this west-coast air.


An understanding of these birds,

    The geese of Glasgow Green

           The falcons of Finnieston

                The crows of supermarket car-parks

The magpies!

is crucial to my understanding of Glasgow -


the visiting redwings

the elusive waxwings

the whooper swans

and pink-feeted geese

crucial

to my understanding of world -

Herring gulls, lesser black-backed gulls and the odd cormorant on a flotilla (now sadly gone) in the Govan canting basin by the Science Centre.

Swans crossing at Renfrew.

'The Cannondale - the birds love it!'    [Serf's robin in Kelvingrove Park].

Chimneyed blackbird, Scotstoun.

The Telescopic City

I have always known Glasgow to be a hilly city. I was, before all, educated on two hills: Camphill in Langside and Garnethill in the centre itself. I had to climb one of Glasgow’s  steepest streets (Scott Street, gradient 1:5) every morning, five days a week, to get to school. From my art class window in the appropriately named Hill Street, the solid outline of the Campsie Fells provided all the art that was necessary.

 From Garnethill looking north to the Camspie Fells.

Within Glasgow the hills are many (Glasgow is something of a hill-strewn hollow, masses of moraine and glacial deposits rising up as drumlins):

Scotstounhill - Jordanhill - Maryhill

Partickhill - Gilmorehill - Ruchill

Lambhill - Balgrayhill - Stobhill

Firhill - Sighthill - Petershill

Blackhill - Cranhill - Sandyhills

Simshill - Priesthill - Nitshill

Crosshill - Govanhill -

Mounts Florida and Vernon -

to name but a few...


Their streets are like telescopes drawing us into the distance.

The streets, too, of the city centre combine to make something of a San Fran Glasgow (Alas! without the trams) -

Scott Street - Pitt Street - Douglas Street
Wellington Street - Hope Street - Renfield Street
Bath Street - West George Street - St. Vincent Street

Montrose Street - North Portland Street

The sloping city, stuck onto the side of a hill.

 North Portland Street


To say nothing of the old favourites further out, streets whose pavements boast bannisters:

Cleveden Road
Gardner Street
Clarence Drive

The city's slender curves meet us at the end of every street. From the top of  Buchanan Street we are propelled into the hinterland behind Eaglesham (a bit like Rudolph Hess in 1941 when his plane came down at Floors Farm) and the hill of Dunwan, (thought at some point to be an extant Iron Age hill fort, but now thought more of as a ‘prestige homestead’ from some time during the 1st millennium AD). From Byres Road, (Glasgow’s second busiest thoroughfare after Buchanan Street), looking south, we are shot into the inimitable Mohawk of Neilston Pad some 20km away, its conifer comb-over striking a rare pose. From Crow Road, it’s the sheer-faced ‘Craigie’, Duncarnock Mount, behind Barrhead, upon which a sermon is given every Easter Sunday, one hopes to the hills themselves. From Great Western Road, looking west, it’s the Kilpatrick Hills, and from Lincoln Avenue, looking north, it’s the asymmetrical mound of Carneddans Wood on the eastern corner of the Kilpatricks.

From practically every north-south street on the south side of the city, it’s the Campsies and Kilpatricks that gently rear up in front of you. And looking west, it’s the Kilpatricks again, and/or the serene misshapen slopes of the hills of Kilmacolm and Inverclyde, Queenside Muir and Duchal Moor. The importance of this horizon aspect, this clawing curvature, cannot be underestimated for its capacity to lead one out and to 'educate'.

Looking down the barrel of Buchanan Street into the Renfrewshire Hills beyond.

Looking south on Byres Road towards the inimitable mohawk of Neilston Pad some 10km distant.

Looking north along Armadale Street in Dennistoun into the Cathkin Braes beyond.

Looking west from Kent Road outside the Mitchell Library to Mistylaw and Queenside Hill.

The aptly named Rose Street, a street with hills at both ends... and an art house cinema.

Rose Street looking north.

The Great Western Road looking west towards the Kilpatrick Hills.

From Barrhead train station looking north to the Kilpatrick Hills and its highest point, the dome of Duncolm.

The avenue that started it all: Lincoln Avenue in Scotstounhill looking north through Knightswood to Carneddans Wood on the eastern edge of the Kilpatrick Hills.

Valley Sounds, Mountain Form

In any given cityscape the lack of a discernible horizon (hills in the distance, a clawing coast), can have the distressing and dispiriting effect of rendering the city a place without end, and a place without an easy escape route. As animals, this 'lack of exit' can have a visceral and deeply upsetting effect on us. At a subconscious level of being, we begin to feel enclosed as opposed to enopened, hemmed in as opposed to aerated.  The city can then have an asphyxiating effect on the spirit until such a point where the spirit can no longer be said to exist.

With its cincture of hills, its relatively large geographic area, and its amenable population of some 700,000, Glasgow as a cityscape is a city that finds favour with being 'small' and aerated. I'm sure if Kentigern were to see it today, a view from one of the hills, he might be quite surprised at how much Glasgow has managed to maintain its glas chu ('dear green hollow') aspect, considering that some 50 years ago and more, you wouldn't have been able to see anything such were the atrocious levels of pollution from factories, shipyards and the like. It's as if the body of the city, grown up from infancy through industrialistaion (adolescence and adulthood), has emerged into the wisdom of middle age - no more smoking, no more obesity, a growing eco-geo awareness...

 HORIZON 0 : Looking north-west to the Campsie Fells from Queen's Park.

HORIZON 1: Looking north in winter to the Campsie Fells from Queen's Park.

HORIZON 2: Looking north-west from Duncarnock Mount to the city of Glasgow and the great lava banks of the Kilpatrick Hills and the Campsie Fells beyond.

HORIZON 3: From just behind Newton Mearns looking north-west to the unmistakeable contours of Glasgow's northern hills.

HORIZON 4: 'The Dear Green Hollow'. Looking south in summer from Cochno Hill.

HORIZON 5: From Glennifer Braes looking north, north-east, over Paisley & Glasgow.
 

Valley sounds:

     the eloquent

       tongue -

     Mountain Form:

     isn't it

                     Pure Body?

 Su Shih

Sous Les Pavés, La Plage!

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.   

Raoul Vaneigem

Never work!   Guy Debord 

Much of the Situationists' thesis is a reworking of  Marx's view of alienation: the worker is alienated from his product and from his fellow workers and finds himself living in an alien world. To this end, work is counter-productive, even self-defeating. People are treated like passive objects, not active subjects. After degrading being into having, the society of the spectacle ['The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image'] has further transformed having into merely appearing. The result is an appalling contrast between cultural poverty and economic wealth, between what is and what could be.

The way out for the Situationists was not to wait for a distant revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now. By liberating oneself, one could change the power relations that existed between your self and everything else, thus transforming society. The process of liberation involved quite simply wandering and wondering, and questioning the power structures that shackled life and society together often with devastating effects.

In Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life he echoes Tolstoy - 'Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself' - when writing, 'People who talk about revolution without referring explicitly to everyday life... such people have a corpse in their mouth'. The Situationists were aware that ground zero was the self, and that society was a collection of selves, and thus any changes that were to happen in society had to happen first in the self. Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle' was an indictment not only on the loss of self that had occurred on a grand scale across the capitalist-consumerist world (which one might think reprehensible enough) but it was also a disparaging commentary on the lengths people will be led to for the sale of that self in return for the most meagre of rewards.

In place of the society of the spectacle, and the consumerist clutter that people had clotted their selves with,the Situationists proposed a communistic society bereft of money, commodity production, wage labor, classes, private property and the State. Pseudo-desires would be replaced by real needs. The division of labour and the antagonism between work and play would be overcome thereby opening up a society founded on the love of spontaneity, of free play, characterized by the refusal to be led, to make sacrifices, and to perform roles. Above all, they insisted that every individual should actively and consciously participate in the reconstruction of every moment of life. They called themselves Situationists precisely because they believed that all individuals should construct the situations of their lives and release their own potential thereby finding their own way, and thus their own Self. 

One of their slogans was, after all:

Beneath the paving stones, the beach!

'What Lies Beneath'   Merkland Street