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The Garden of Cosmic Speculation
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a 30 acre landscaped garden near Dumfries designed by Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie. Its cosmic dimension comes from its landscaping themes on black holes and fractals, and elegant scientific equations built in to natural features.
In the accompanying book of the same title which I came across in GoMA library today, there is a short passage under the chapter heading The Poetics of Going Slow, which reads:
Renaissance garden designers, following ideas developed in the seminal Villa Medici at Fiesole, noted the importance of slow perception. A landscape garden should not be a place through which one races on the way to go somewhere else, but rather a place of imaginative exploration.
The question here is -
Is the city, in this case Glasgow, not its own landscaped garden, and its own constellation?
'Garden of Cosmic Speculation'
An Album of the City's Adolescence
Map me no maps, sir: my head is a map, a map of the whole world. Henry Fielding
Nothing flows quite so slowly as a map...
On the walls of my kitchen I have several of Glasgow:
Timothy Pont's General Map of the Clyde Area, c.1596.
James Colquhoun's First 'Portrait' of Glasgow, c.1641.
Joan Blaeu's 1654 Praefectura Renfroana (The Barony of Renfrew), a representation of Timothy Pont's earlier map.
Thomas Richardson, Map of the Town of Glasgow and Country Seven Miles Around, 1795.
Edward Meiklehame, Map of Glasgow 10 Miles Round, 1852.
Hugh McDonald's concentric map of Greater Glasgow c.1852 (which accompanied his Rambles Round Glasgow in the 1850s)
Ordnance Survey 1st Edition 1857-8
Bartholomew Survey Atlas of Scotland, Plan of Glasgow, 1912.
Ordnance Survey 1967
Ordnance Survey 2008
As I cook I travel through time... and space.... a city growing up gradually....
My kitchen, at least its walls, could be seen, then, as
something of a wide-angled metropolitan mural, that is, a map which travels
through (and charts) the 'growing up'
and transformation of the city over the course of several centuries.
Call it an album of the city's adolescence... (stained in places with spaghetti).
James Colquhoun, First 'Portrait of Glasgow, 1641.
Thomas Richardson, Map of the Town of Glasgow and Country Seven Miles Around, 1795.
Edward Meiklehame, Map of Glasgow 10 Miles Round, 1852.
Ordnance Survey County Series Lanarkshire, Glasgow, 1858.
Bartholomew Survey Atlas of Scotland, Plan of Glasgow, 1912.
OS Map Glasgow 2008
La Lenteur
The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. Thomas Merton
In the opening chapter of Milan Kundera`s novella La Lenteur (Slowness) he describes in philosophic detail the ecstasy of driving a car:
In the opening chapter of Milan Kundera`s novella La Lenteur (Slowness) he describes in philosophic detail the ecstasy of driving a car:
"I am driving, and in the rearview mirror I notice a car behind me. The small left light is blinking, and the whole car emits waves of impatience. The driver is watching for the chance to pass me; he is watching for the moment the way a hawk watches for a sparrow... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words he is in a state of ecstasy. In that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed upon man... Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?"
and the agony.
Spacing Out on Pacific Quay
Science without conscience is the soul's perdition. Francois Rabelais, Pantagruel
It is poetry which recreates lost paradises; science and technology alone are not enough. M. François
But it is also, thanks to the Science Centre and the new BBC studios, a place of science and media...
Science: from Latin scientia "knowledge," scire "to know," related to scindere "to cut, divide," (cf. Greek skhizein "to split, rend, cleave").
Medium: substance through which something is conveyed -
Where the scientist looks out the poet looks in.
Poetry: from Greek poesis "composition, poetry," from poein, poiein "to make or compose"
Compose: from com- "with" + poser "to place,"
The scientist: science, media
The poet: con-science...immedia...
Observer and observed are inextricably bound
conscientiously
immediately
like wings on a gull.
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'Poetry Vanquishing Science on Pacific Quay'
[The science tower, which stands on these steps, has been fraught with problems since its inauguration and is now shabbily cordoned off with the whole area beginning to show signs of 'poetic' decay. The gulls however, having been evicted from their flotilla on the neighbouring cantin basin (the flotilla was used as a training module for the emergency services but has now been removed), have made it their new chill-out site! Note the art deco 'spinster flats' of Crathie Court (completed in 1952) in the background contrasting nicely against the 'steel barn' in front of it, the outlandish new Museum of Transport (completed in 2012) designed by Zaha Hadid].
Kensho in Kinning Park
Value is perishing from the earth because no-one cares to fight down to it beneath the glowing surfaces so attractive to all. Der Weg stirbt.
Charles Olson, Human Universe
There are no parts.
Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life
One of the great problems of today is that people take things too literally...
...take too much at (sur) face value...
accept the glowing surfaces
'refuse to fight down to it' -
into the tangled root system.
...take too much at (sur) face value...
accept the glowing surfaces
'refuse to fight down to it' -
into the tangled root system.
Nothing exists a priori.
There are no parts.
Excavate the self. Fight down to it.
Become nothing...
no... thing...
Fight
down
to
it...
... Die seele erwacht.
There are no parts.
Excavate the self. Fight down to it.
Become nothing...
no... thing...
Fight
down
to
it...
... Die seele erwacht.
Illuminations in the Bluebell Woods
No I ain't doin' much, doin' nothing means a lot to me....
AC/DC, Down Payment Blues
Man is the only animal that has to work.
Immanuel Kant
Now we know as the result of work which Fabre first published in 1853 that in fact doing nothing is quite an important animal activity.
Jacob Bronowski, the Origins of Knowledge & Imagination
Whilst reading Jacob Bronowski's The Origins of Knowledge & Imagination this evening in the bath (the bath and the bicycle are vehicles of revelation!) I was a little perturbed to see how often he used the words 'advantage' and 'gift' to describe how man had evolutionarily distanced himself from (ascended beyond) that state of the animal... To be sure, Bronowski still believed man, at the fundamental level, to be animal but it was the implication through these particular words that somehow man was superior, or at the very least privileged to be in such a state. He even went as far to commend man on his 'foresight' which he stated was one of the defining characteristics that led man to this exalted (one might even say transcendent) position beyond the animal.
Whilst walking through Garscadden Wood (the ancient 'bluebell woods' demarcating Bearsden from Drumchapel) this fine April afternoon, my companion asked me what I did all day (when I wasn't employed abroad as a Teacher of English as a foreign language). Of course he had some idea but he wanted me to lay it out for him.... The idea, let alone the practice, of doing nothing all day, every day, is, quite rightly for many, perplexing, if not downright alarming!
I laid out the rhythm of the day: writing, reading, walking, cycling, bathing, the occasional painting... and told him that the days passed often without my noticing. This, I told him, was my 'doing nothing'....
'But that's not nothing', one might have retorted. 'I know', I would have said. 'But to many, who correlate 'work' with 'paid employ', it is'.
I might have added that, furthermore, since I am not at the beck and call of some puppetmaster (who, albeit inadvertently, solidifies one's liquid rhythm of being into a concrete 'making a living'), this 'doing nothing' (which is not doing nothing at all) is at least a type of listening and singing - call it a spontaneous breathing in and breathing out - on a more expansive-dissipative scale. A song of the self let's say, and its great web.
Many, however, and quite tragically, are pre-vented (their wind has been taken from them) from tuning into their song. 'Work' and obligation, (the self has been committed), interfere with and dis-attract the self from its true commitment, from the beautiful truth of emptiness. The idea of metaphysics (and lightness) appears almost repulsive. One no longer dissipates and inter-acts but accumulates and does. Diversion and a horror vacui, benchmarks of the modern culture of clutter, are the dark beacons to which many, if not most, people are attracted.
Perhaps it is confusing to use the terms 'work' and 'doing nothing'. Work for many has ceased to become work, instead becoming toil and coarse superfluous labour. This extraneous rock-breaking is, furthermore, and contrary to what we might think, not at all devoid of meaning, rather, its meaning is at complete odds with who we are quintessentially as universal and divinely immanent (and empty) beings. It is this toil (and our effecting it) that causes tremendous existential angst, for we cannot see our own place within it. It pushes us into a corner, and estranges the self from itself. It is effectively work that is irrelevant (that does not lighten, from the Latin 'relevare'), that does not nourish, and does not dignify; it is a soil that dehumanizes (takes the humus right out of us) instead of universalizing. Unlike the ancient soil here in the bluebell woods of Drumchapel perennially pushing forth a mysterious green chaos, the soil of the seduced self has been run down to the point where nothing really grows upon it at all, and if it does, it is so ordered and 'logical' that the mystery of it all is nowhere to be seen.
Many, however, and quite tragically, are pre-vented (their wind has been taken from them) from tuning into their song. 'Work' and obligation, (the self has been committed), interfere with and dis-attract the self from its true commitment, from the beautiful truth of emptiness. The idea of metaphysics (and lightness) appears almost repulsive. One no longer dissipates and inter-acts but accumulates and does. Diversion and a horror vacui, benchmarks of the modern culture of clutter, are the dark beacons to which many, if not most, people are attracted.
Perhaps it is confusing to use the terms 'work' and 'doing nothing'. Work for many has ceased to become work, instead becoming toil and coarse superfluous labour. This extraneous rock-breaking is, furthermore, and contrary to what we might think, not at all devoid of meaning, rather, its meaning is at complete odds with who we are quintessentially as universal and divinely immanent (and empty) beings. It is this toil (and our effecting it) that causes tremendous existential angst, for we cannot see our own place within it. It pushes us into a corner, and estranges the self from itself. It is effectively work that is irrelevant (that does not lighten, from the Latin 'relevare'), that does not nourish, and does not dignify; it is a soil that dehumanizes (takes the humus right out of us) instead of universalizing. Unlike the ancient soil here in the bluebell woods of Drumchapel perennially pushing forth a mysterious green chaos, the soil of the seduced self has been run down to the point where nothing really grows upon it at all, and if it does, it is so ordered and 'logical' that the mystery of it all is nowhere to be seen.
This is where I disagree - at the root level - with Bronowski's sentiments. Man does not have foresight. One could even go so far as to say that he doesn't even possess the gift of sight. What man does have is a particularly limited if not a wholly selective type of seeing, one which actually verges on a deep-seated blindness. The particular brand of foresight that Bronowski champions is not a blessing as he makes out, but in fact a curse. It has thus led man out of nature and into the machine with disastrous consequences for both 'man' and animal. If man could simply see, (the doors of perception cleansed), all his problems would be solved. His wind would return, his soil would nourish, and with it, ineluctably, would come his song.
In order to regain his sight, and perhaps even to transcend it and welcome vision, man needs to stop committing the self to obligation. He needs to stop kneeling before false economic idols and a conventional status quo that relies on second-hand thinking, and which piles upon the self so much clutter that the divine oracle within all of us is almost permanently silenced. In short, man needs to make work relevant. When this occurs, work, in turn, will make man relevant. As Bronowski said to two thousand children as part of a United Nations address... '[Y]ou are going to have to stop listening to your parents....'
The result of all this will be a mind which is 'belligerent, contrary, questioning, challenging...' Work will then find man, uncover and discover him from beneath all that heaviness. With his soil now nourished, and his humus returned, man will begin to grow and flourish like the delicate (yet hardy) bluebell throughout these woods. It will only be a matter of time before the wind ventilates him once again.
Man will thus become animal. For no animal has ever had to toil.
In order to regain his sight, and perhaps even to transcend it and welcome vision, man needs to stop committing the self to obligation. He needs to stop kneeling before false economic idols and a conventional status quo that relies on second-hand thinking, and which piles upon the self so much clutter that the divine oracle within all of us is almost permanently silenced. In short, man needs to make work relevant. When this occurs, work, in turn, will make man relevant. As Bronowski said to two thousand children as part of a United Nations address... '[Y]ou are going to have to stop listening to your parents....'
The result of all this will be a mind which is 'belligerent, contrary, questioning, challenging...' Work will then find man, uncover and discover him from beneath all that heaviness. With his soil now nourished, and his humus returned, man will begin to grow and flourish like the delicate (yet hardy) bluebell throughout these woods. It will only be a matter of time before the wind ventilates him once again.
Man will thus become animal. For no animal has ever had to toil.
Doing nothing is quite an important animal activity
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A red fox on Camstradden Road next to Garscadden Wood.
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Looking north along Peel Glen Road. The Romans built a fort here at the most elevated point as part of the Antonine Wall's fortifications. Just to the right is Garscadden Wood, part of the ancient woodland that, once upon a time, covered most of this land.
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