The Slow Flow of Glasgow

The Birds of Glasgow

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

Ubi aves, ibi angeli. Thomas Aquinas

The pigeons of Walmer Crescent

       the starlings of Asda Ibrox

                the herring 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 -

The Soul of the Seagull

It often alarms me when it comes to nature the ignorance not just of the general public but of those who are in power and hold authority, a sort of general political authority that appears to give them another authority over nature. Speaking recently of the alleged aggressiveness of seagulls in Cornwall, David Cameron at least had the good sense to realize his limits when it comes to ecology, and dare I say it, compassion.

Cameron told BBC Radio Cornwall: “It is a dangerous one for the prime minister to dive in and come up with an instant answer with the issues of the protection of seagulls, whether there is a need for a cull, what should be done about eggs and nests. I think a big conversation needs to happen about this and frankly the people we need to listen to are people who really understand this issue in Cornwall, and the potential effects it is having. Reading the papers this morning about how aggressive the seagulls are now in St Ives, for instance, we do have a problem.”

A couple of years ago when cycling around Cowcaddens I saw a city council guy with a large bird of prey strapped to his arm. This was just outside Dundasvale high flats. I asked him what was up. He told me the gulls here were a pest and that the hen harrier he had was going to disturb them enough to make them move on. He seemed to take great pleasure in the fact that his bird had already maimed a few gulls and that he and his human cronies had removed eggs from rooftops.

Just watching these gulls, the mother gull and the father gull, raising their two young on the rooftop opposite me for the past couple of months has made a huge impression on my already open mind regarding these incredible birds. I recall Wittgenstein once saying in one of his more lucid moments that to see the behaviour of a living thing was to see its soul. I could not disagree. And here, watching these birds, this family of sentient intelligent creatures, for these past several weeks has allowed me an insight into their lives that I would otherwise not have got from a book or eslewhere. I can see their communicating, their languaging, their learning; i can see the parent's exhaustion after working all week, day and night, to take care of their young, to find food and feed them 30 times a day if not more. I can see, furthermore, the young furball gulls, who appear more like furry little gremlins, clambering over that slippery slated rooftop balancing with a flap of their still tiny wings, preventing them presumably from slipping all the way down and off and onto the concrete floor 6 metres below. I can see the mother's trepidation in her movements, in the fluctuation of her calls. I can see all this and more, and I wonder why it has taken me 45 years to understand the soul of the seagull, why this hadn't been afforded to me when I was young, when I was at school. Surely, this is real education (teaching us about our living breathing earth, our wider and wiser Family), and not some phony education that sets us up for some future financial payoff, inevitably, at the cost of the earth and Family. Family with a capital F.

I pity the city council man who thinks these birds 'rats with wings'. Rats are actually, if you got to know them, very intelligent and capable creatures. But of course, it's blinding ignorance, and it's embarrassing when I hear it from my fellow man. When he actually had the gall to call them an invasive species, I suggested that he look in the mirror. Man, after all, is the most invasive of them all.

Our schooling system needs to take into account the other life-forms we share our city with, our life with. The gulls of Govan as I remarked in a poem once are as much Glaswegian as we humans are. Surely, then, we should accord them similar rights? At the very least, allow them to live here, and be aware that it is us and our casual attitude to waste and litter who cause them to home in on our cities. To destroy them for something that is essentially our doing is just plain wrong when it isn't just plain diabolical.

I often think that when talking of culling: badgers, foxes, gannets et al. that man should perhaps begin with his own species. But of course, just mentioning this will raise a few eyebrows. But then, to not do so is to somehow presume that we are superior (one step beneath the angels), and that seagulls are simply expendable, and some kind of cartesian machine that doesn't have feelings. The reality, however, is quite different.

All in all, it seems a little rich for man to start berating the seagull for simply shitting on his car, or being tempted by overloaded wheelie bins. My advice is to watch these birds, and learn to understand them, learn to see the similarlities between you and them. And by watching I don't mean on your sofa in front of David Attenborough, I mean in the open, in the fresh wild air. For all that Attenborough has done for wildlife awareness, he has also managed, albeit inadvertently, to prevent this type of watching. Armchair ecologists abound, but you will never know a seagull by simply watching a programme (no matter how informed) about it. You can only know a seagull, as these events and others have shown me, by being with it in the open, and, as the cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock once wrote, by having a 'feeling for the organism'.

You cannot feel the seagull through a TV screen, or any other screen for that matter.

The (Paranormal) Silence of Animals

There are, if you attend carefully enough, moments in the course of your ordinary daily life that reveal deep insights over and above (beneath and below) the understanding you actually have of something. They appear to correlate, these epihapnies, to a feeling you have about something, about the state of society, about the state of the human, about the state of the western world of civilization and progress.

One man who has the latter close to his heart, John Gray (former Professor of European Thought at LSE), would be quite amused at my discovery the other day: that is, finding his latest anti-man tract The Silence of Animals, not as one might expect to find it in the philosophy section (or even in the food and nutrition section), but... wait for it... in the Paranormal section of the local library (Hillhead, Glasgow). You might think this unimportant, and it probably is on the surface, but insights don't deal with surfaces. For me, this discovery was as powerful as discovering the absence of a philosophy section in the WH Smith's (Strathclyde Uni's Bookshop) in Cathedral Street, or the placing of the philosophy section of Border's Books in Buchanan Street next to the toilet in the windowless dungeon-like basement. And Gray's book wasn't there by accident. Apparently, so they told me, when I suggested to the staff that perhaps it was in the wrong section, it belongs there.

Hmmm.

You think?

Then, I got to thinking that maybe, just maybe, it does belong there, insofar as speaking out against 'man' and his ascent towards godliness (if he isn't already there), against progress and western civilisation (the art of destruction-construction-corruption), is going against the grain to the point where 'you are not normal', and this is not normal. It's beyond normal. Ok, I'll maybe go along with that. Normal people don't speak of civilization as a disease, of man as a deluded little god, of his behaviour as demented and quite frankly shameful. Normal people just go about their business, inadvertently contributing to the problem in many cases, whilst thinking ahbout nothing in particular. Indeed, many people (living a life of quiet desperation) do not like to think period. They are afraid of what might emerge if they do. So they don't. They distract their selves to the point of dementia. And this is what we call 'normal'.

So, I guess, paranormal is the new philosophy, the new cultural crit. The new metaphysics, and poetry. Everything else is 'normal': the fiction, the travel, the shit-lit, the reams and reams of books about nothing, and about the same old shit. Maybe then, the library should be divided into two sections under which all other sections could then be assumed: Normal, and Paranormal, normal being for the already deluded with no intention of undeluding their selves, and paranormal being for the same deluded but with a view to undeluding their selves. Maybe.

The silence of animals is different from the silence of men. Max Picard

The Root Human

Dare to leap into the origin. Asvaghosa, The Awakening of Faith

Be alert for you do not know which day your Lord is coming. Matthew 24:42

Dare to leap into the origin
into the Glasgow
the greater glasgow
on your own
by your self
riverring here riverring there.

Dare to engineer the origin,
engineering based on the human heart,
dare to move
dare to know
through one’s own organs:

Organise
Originate
Dare
To Engineer
To Navigate
To re-member

To intuit

These are the verbs of being
The existential imperatives!

Do not listen to people,
especially those in power,
decorated with titles and awards. Instead
watch how they live, see how they are, how they behave…
See their soul through their actions,
not through their words.

Their message is their living
not their hollow proclamations.

Be aware, and beware!
as deceivers and predators walk amongst you.
Being on the lookout - alertness and vigilance -
is the sign of every intelligent creature.

Intelligence, the ability to decrypt,
To read between
The sign of every human
being.

Slow down! Open up!
Speed and screens are symptoms of dementia.
Dementia a sign of our separation from Mind.

Engage the engines!
Braincraft, bodycraft…
The art of moving under your own steam
is the art of the origin,
the art of being.
Tool on tool makes the machine.

Beware of those who wish to convey you,
who wish to think and thank you.
For they are devils in disguise. Predators preying
on the weak and the wounded. Not quite the blind leading the blind
as the self-unaware
deceiving and misleading
the impoverished and impressionable.

Do everything yourself! Never give your life-force away for anything.
Be especially aware of the buzzwords of banality:
Comfort, ease, convenience…
View them as eagles view men
with suspicion if not disdain
for they will corrupt you,
get inside you, camouflage your origins,
lay waste to your ingenious treasury
of engines…

Get out into the land; let the local lure you:
Plants, birds, rocks…
Place!
Genius loci.
Crags and coasts.
To know your territory is to know your self.

Learn of the wind from the wind.
Treat birds and plants as your long lost cousins.
Relatives of a much wider - much wiser -
family.

Now,
Reassess the abstracts:

God, Family, Love…

In aboriginal terms,
as they flow out from you,
not as they have been inherited,
as they have been handed
down
to you.

Consider developing the self
before consigning it
to a lifetime of purgatory
behind a desk
enclosed in a pen,
behind an engine
emphatically not yours.

Consider the stars as part of your self:
Consider language the configuration of consciousness.
Consider not languaging, and when you do, consider carefully your words.

Words require work to know who they are.
There are phantonyms in our midst, spectral words
that are not part of the logos,
but which have been corrupted to conform
to a limited corporate objective.

Consider then the body: the corporate and the corpus…
The bodies within bodies, the great body
that encompasses all other bodies.
Consider it carefully.
Do not be a passenger in your own body.

Consider ‘it’ as all.

Then think of religion as a binding back, perhaps even as a binding to,
not of bondage, but of delicate connection, fragile filaments
reaching out into the cosmos as a whole.

Consider the real radical,
Homo radix,
as a ‘root-human’,
as a being dependent on the soil,
dependent on the soul of the whole,
from which he flows and flowers.

Our own roots, our own dendrites,
whether you like it or not,
are inexorably caught up with the roots of trees
with the taproots of stars.

Consider even the planet as human
or the human as planet
wandering-wondering,
poetically,
through the cosmos.

Consider the true, the good, and the beautiful
as an outpouring of the undistorted self.
Kosmos as the beautiful whole
integral to the human.

Then, consider the self as indefinite,
the boundaries of which are not to be found on this planet
perhaps not even on this plane.

Consider the imagination
unlimited by the spatio-temporal
as an aspect of what you call ‘god’.

Then consider ‘god’ as its source suggests
as a gathering together of goodness,
a goodness which includes evil,
as inexorable connectivity
through which the voice of the individual is expressed.

Then consider the individual as indivisible,
not dependent on the eye,
but rather Mind.

Mind, as they say in Glasgow,
here in the grey green hollow,
to remember
to recall
to re-enchant.

Sing your song then.

2.

Dare to explore the source code of words….
Their original states,
their original meanings:
Idiot, human, demon…
And be surprised when you learn how they have been dislodged
from the Word.

If we saw language as sacred
then to abuse it and bludgeon it,
to discriminate against certain word-races,
would be a crime,
and advertisers, politicians, newscasters, and authoritarians,
would be held accountable for war-crimes.

The real terror is desecration. Of language, of land, of love.
The true terrorists those
who by their actions and inactions
allow such desecration to occur:
Unbridled consumption is an obesity of brain.
The man-handling of language, the man-handling of land,
the obsession to decorate
effectively, to deracinate,
a pathology of being.

War is their business,
the commodity is the military;
the troops the over-consuming herds:
Consider civilization as all-out war.

The considering itself is a process of delicate unlearning.

Consider then the nature of business:
The state of being busy,
and its antithesis, stillness.
Be still and know!
Be busy and barren.

Dare to question that little external brain
you carry around in your heavy hands
and lovingly rub
like a magic lamp:

It guides and placates you like a little lost dog
yet the genie, the genius, is the engine inside you.

Dare to examine the nature of memory
the nature of navigating, of manual steering,
the membranes of the brain like an old growth forest.
Depending on technology to do it for you
techno-dependency
akin to withering.

Dare to explore the world of silence…
the world of solitude
that lurks behind every façade.
For they, even before nature, are your true parents.

Consider the state of our domesticity
where home is a noun, and homing
something done by pigeons.
Consider our lack of savagery,
and soul-ecology,
where wildness and wilderness enrich the spirit
and the tamed - the sedentary and sedated -
depletes it.

Consider then the nature of travel, and its perversion, tourism:
Planetary gallivanting and quantity surveying
prostituting place and industrializing culture.

Travel like charity begins at home.
To travel is to travail; to travail to work.
Travelling as an educative enterprise. A pilgrimage.
Tourism as a form of low-end entertainment.

Consider the essential as essential to living,
and the superfluous and extraneous as not.

Do not ever tell me you need anything!

Be on the lookout for those who manufacture ‘needs’
for they are the pushers
and you the users.
Soon those needs will become essential to your life.
Until you realize that life is not living.

Become the carpenter - the craftsman, the joiner -
who hones the wood, unites it, conjoins it,
with other woods.

Consider ‘man’ as a mutation of hu-man,
the creature connected to soil, homo radix,
not the arrogance of homo sapiens.

The crises:
Economic
Ecologic
Existential
are all man-made

And most of all
Consider the nature of being aware:
Be aware of all these considerings:
self-observation - self-excavation - is the key
to the root-human.

Atop the Kilpatrick Plateau.

The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once said God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!"

Bullfinch in the Botanics...

Whilst waiting for the herb-master for a delivery in the herb garden at the Botanic Gardens, a bullfinch, its own little herb-master, gives me the once over as it chows down on dandelion floss...

And whilst on the subject of avian alliteration, that very morning perched in the Kilaptrick Hills I saw my second ever cuckoo, and the first I have been able to photograph....

Cuckoo in the Kilpatricks...

The Tao of Dead Man

What is your name?

My name is Nobody.

Excuse me?

My name is Exaybachay: He who talks loud, say nothing.

[Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch]

Having just watched the phenomenal Dead Man (again) by Jim Jarmusch, an account to all intents of the 'stupid fucking white man' and his (stupid fucking) ways, I cannot refrain from quoting Gary Farmer's native Indian Nobody, and contriving to tie it in with the following passage I read last week in a book called Quiet by Susan Cain:

From fruit flies to house cats to mountain goats, from sunfish to bushbaby primates to Eurasian tit birds, scientists have discovered that approximately 20% of the members of many species are 'slow to warm up' while the other 80% are 'fast' types who venture forth boldly without noticing much of what's going on around them.

If fast and slow animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, 'some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don't get any respect. Slow animals are best described as shy, sensitive types. They don't asserts themselves, but they are observant and notice things that are invisible to the bullies. They are the writers and the artists at the party who have interesting conversations out of earshot of the bullies. They are the inventors who figure out new ways to behave, while the bullies steal their patents by copying their behaviour.

So...

Not only do we have a correlation between fast and loud (slow and quiet) but we also learn that fast types are, by and large, 'bullies'.... We might extrapolate this even further and conclude that the world of business (busy-ness, fastness) is a diminished context populated and driven by coercers and aggressors (preying on and exploiting the weak and the wounded). We could also conclude from this that the fast world is a world devoid of awareness and thus awakeness; that speed (though it may propel us from point A to point B quickly) is a form of sleep. One only has to read the opening preface to Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire to understand this.

In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.

And so we have the equation: Business = Fastness = Loudness = Vacuousness = Dead Man

He who talks loud say nothing. And he who rushes around like a headless chicken see nothing.

But of course, the converse is also true:

Stillness = Slowness = Quietness = Plenitude = Alive Human

Those who know do not speak...