Anima l

One of the great difficulties of being human in an all too human world is realizing your fundamental animality. Within the rush and roar of modern society, it's often very difficult to tap into one's primordial essence. The required ingredients of remoteness, solitude, quietness, and wilderness are all too often too far out of reach from the confines of the city. Yet, it is the responsibility of very human to re-engage their original essence, and their aboriginal aliveness in the form of animal-being.

The key attributes of 'animal' are as its etymology suggests: a highly tuned sense of movement (agility, nimbleness, balance, stillness), and an equally highly tuned sense of consciousness (perception, awareness, wits, wherewithal) ...

This highly tuned nature of these attributes is what distinguishes animals from people. In terms of movement and consciousness, people are rather sluggish in comparison to animals. Their level of animation has been hindered by too much 'progress', and too much outsourcing to technologies that propose to do it for us. Animals on the other hand have never really gone in for this type of outsourcing, have never really given in to the dubious proposition that 'having technology' is better than 'being alive'.

As a result, animals are in constant touch with their environment, for they know that this is what feeds and shelters them, what effectively allows their aliveness. Humans, on the other hand, in their arrogance and egregiousness (in their removal from the flock of all animals), have decided in their infinite wisdom (which isn't wisdom at all but rather disconnected facts) that the domination of nature and their fellow animal kin is no big deal. In this grand perversion of the natural flow, the human animal has almost been extinguished (entirely dammed up), with 'deluded man' (Homo mendax) stepping in to take his place. This Homo mendax, as his title now suggests, is the problem, for he not only deceives others but also his own self. This deception is at the root of the biblical 'devil' or any other demon for that matter. To deceive is to demonise, and to bedevil. And sadly, within a rapacious world of advertising, sensationalist media, and the big sell, deception, in their various guises, is rife.

It is only by re-engaging 'anima' - hyper-critical thinking and hyper-critical moving - that we will have any chance of exorcising these demons from the world, and embracing, not the beast, but the animal within. It is every human's responsibility.

The Clearest Way into the Universe

The clearest way into the universe, Thoreau once wrote, was through a forest wilderness. 

Sadly, for we Scots, most of our forests have long been felled, and what remains of them is surely not a forest but a remnant, and vestigial limbs of a once tree-covered land. Yet, I know what Thoreau means. One of my greatest and most profound epiphanies (see The Map is not the Territory post) occurred whilst wandering through a forest in the Suwalki region of north-eastern Poland. In the forest city of Warsaw, where I lived and wandered freely for three whole years, I had many magical moments in the primeval las and pusczca of Bielanski, Kampinoski, Mazoviecki, Slupecka, and even in the rather regimented Las Kabacki. Indeed, even in the elegantly ornamented Royal Lazieki Park, where the old growth trees encouraged and enabled a greater spread of bird and general wildlife (from deer to boar and foxes), I could recognize, without too  much effort, the universe in front of me. 

It was the entanglement that did it.

This entanglement, though not so readily available in forest format in Scotland, is available in other ways. I, personally, get it from the tops of hills, from being enclosed not by a canopy of trees and their various inhabitants, but from being enveloped (or maybe, embraced) by the biosphere and its elements, the often cloud-laden sky, and those sledgehammer panoramas. I get it through gazing upon the vast landscapes that peel away before me and those bare-faced vistas. To be sure, I still yearn for forests - real forests that are so large that getting lost can often mean getting dead, and not a few trees clumped together as some sort of pitiful monument to the fallen and felled - but so long as I am in Scotland, I will have to make do with the hills, which to my cosmic mind are Poland's wonderfully enchanted forests.

The Polish capital Warsaw from Siekerki Bridge...

The cultural capital of Scotland (where culture is defined in terms of nature and not tourism), Glasgow, from the Kilpatrick Braes (an angle that is just not possible in Warsaw unless you climb the few artificial tells (or the rubbish dump!) that are dotted around the city.

Planet Dialectics: The Search for Selective Slowness

The environmentalist and former chairman of Greenpeace Wolfgang Sachs begins his book, Planet Dialectics, with a look at our planet from space, defining its boundaries and revealing our home as one of finiteness and a limited carrying capacity. This much we know already, surely. But he goes on, in amongst all the statistical critiques of western civilization, to use this idea of limits and boundaries to propose the only real solution to the ills of our species: intelligent self-limitation.

'As the dangers mount,' he writes, 'new products, procedures and programmes are invented to stave off the threatening effects of industrialism and keep the system afloat. Capital, bureaucracy and science - the venerable trinity of western modernization - declare themselves indispensable in the new crisis and promise to prevent the worst through better engineering, integrated planning, and more sophisticated models.'

This is exactly what the more astute members of the human race are saying, because they can see beyond the nonsense and the clutter. Jim Kunstler, in his book The Long Emergency, tells the same story: that the ecological crisis simply demands, not to take care of nature and recognize our limits, but to devise new ways of doing the same thing whilst optimizing the exploitation of nature (our own presumably included). Kunstler riles at such thick-headedness, and states quite unapologetically, that the orgy of excess is over, and that if people en masse do not start toning things down, then there will be blood, lots of it: from the land, the animals, the people.

'Calls for the survival of the planet', writes Sachs, 'are often, upon closer inspection, nothing more than calls for the survival of the industrial system'.

In one of the later chapters entitled 'Speed Limits' Sachs introduces what Aldous Huxley called the only real innovation of the 20th century, speed, and relates how it is 'speed' that has caused many of our ills.

'In the machine age,' writes Sachs , 'neither the body nor the topography defines a natural measure for speed. As a consequence, the modern idea that human motion was set on an infinite path towards ever increasing acceleration was able to take hold.' He understands from this, as I have iterated earlier, that through speed and conveyance, space is bludgeoned, effectively creating a 'new layer of reality' and a new 'perceptual space', one which has the tendency to blur the underlying reality, when it doesn't entirely blind you to it. In other words, we have floated off into a sort of fantasy land where our perceptions of underyling realities have been mutilated by the machine, and as a direct result, our consciousness is hindered and stunted.

'Generally speaking, the ecological crisis can be read as a clash of different timescales: the timescale of modernity collides with the timescales that govern life and the earth'.

Consequently, life (at large) and the earth are being constantly 'reduced' to meet the limited corporate objectives of a mechanically minded and speed-oriented world. 'The imposition of industrial time on natural rhythms', Sachs concludes, 'cannot be achieved without a staggering price.'

'The more speed outdoes natural timescales, the more environmental resources - at a rather exponential rate - have to be expended.'

Speed, Sachs acknowledges, like Keynes before him, has been the great con of the 20th century, promising to free up time that we can use on leisure, but actually doing the reverse: accelerating us into a space that we invariably fill in with more work. The result is a natural disempowering of the self and its connections, and the resulting existential distress that accompanies this.

'It is unlikely that a society that always moves in the fast lane can ever be environmentally or even socially sustainable'.

'The conclusion is inevitable,' writes Sachs: 'Whatever virtues justice might require in the world of today, the search for selective slowness surely figures among them.'

The Gods Must be Crazy

The title refers to the 1980 film by the South African filmmaker Jamie Uys. The film tackles the subject of what happens to a culture when new technology is introduced without the consent of those who are going to use it. The technology here is an empty coca cola bottle dropped from a passing bi-plane onto the Kalahari desert where it is discovered by the indigenous bushmen. They find it a very useful implement for its hardness in pulping large vegetables, and in smoothing snakeskin. They also use it as a wind instrument and a plaything. But it soon becomes clear that it is a disruptive force due to this usefulness, and that it has unsettled the hitherto quiet and peaceful settlement. It's not long before the bottle's hardness is exploited once more, this time in line with modernity, in hitting someone over the noggin with it.

The film is of course a comic allegory about the encounter of two wildly incongruous cultures, and what happens when new technologies are imposed upon a culture. 

In fact, it quite quickly shows us the difference between the two cultures:

The characteristic which really makes  them different from all other races...is that they have  no sense of ownership at all. Where they live,  there's nothing you can own… These Bushmen have never seen  a stone or a rock in their lives. The hardest things they know  are wood and bone. They live in a gentle world, where nothing  is as hard as rock, steel or concrete.

Only 600 miles to the south,  there's a vast city. And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused  to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment  to suit him. So he built cities, roads,  vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines  to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his  surroundings to make life easier...the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to ten to fifteen years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex  and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused  to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt  and re-adapt... every hour of the day  to his self-created environment.

On the one hand, you have a tribe that unites with its environment, recognizes the intrinsic worth of said environment not in terms of money or goods but in terms of life and living. Life and living is work, and vice versa. Life and living is all there is. And it is enough. As such, organism and environment appear to co-exist as a single evolutionary phenomenon, with the necessary mutual respect that this situation merits. On the other hand, you have a tribe which has been so dislocated from its environment that even their word for it appears to connote some 'thing' that surrounds them (and hence, does not enter). This dislocation as well as the artificial 'bush' that modern man has constructed is predicated upon the idea that there has to be more than just life and living, or that somehow man is actually a god who has dominion over Nature and all entities therein. In other words, modern man in his search for more has become pathological. He is a perversion of the tribal man. His life is so complex and stressful, so utterly de-natured, that he simply does not know where he is anymore. His attention to the local, under the mandate of globalisation, is not required. His attention to his own locomotion, under the mandate of progress (of 'making his life easier'), is no longer needed. And as I've already intimated before in this blog, 'knowing where you are' (attention to the local), and 'knowing who you are' (attention to the locomotive), are the keys to being human.

As the forgotten Scot Dugald Semple, a man whose own education was nothing more than 'a form of conscription for our soulless and war-like commercialism', once wrote:

Thoreau too had shown me in his famous Walden that the simple life was no mere dream or theory but a practical solution to the complexity of our social system... I began then in earnest to simplify my life, believing that if the present system was wrong one should live by it as little as possible. That is to say, he must conform a little and reform much... It is noble to die for one's principles but it is much nobler to be able to live for them.

And the principle here in case you missed it is in Living.... with a capital 'L'.... Living in harmony with nature and not out of kilter with her. In the former we have peace and respect and conscience, in the latter we have violence and deception and science.

Gaudiesque: Glasgow on a Staurday Night

I began drawing Gaudi's warrior sculptures inspired in part by the Angel building's angel pediment in Kinning Park that I had drawn the other day, and in part by a postcard that my brother had sent me from Barcelona a few months back which showed these strange looking faces.

As I drew I suddenly began to recognise some of these awful visogs as some of the characters I had, once upon a time, met in my evening strolls through a Glasgow Saturday soiree.

I had always thought them a little scary, the Gaudi sculptures that is, and then, through the process of drawing them, I realised why...

Casing Glasgow

As an EFL teacher by trade, and someone who has had intimate contact with many of the world's languages, I am forever astonished at how my own native language, English (and not Gaelic as perhaps it should have been) continually amazes me with its incongruity and its general strangeness. To be sure, you get so used to English that you often forget all about it, but it is quite a marvellous language, especially if you do as I do and dig up its bones from time to time and perform some 'carbon testing'.

Take the verb 'to case' for example. It's almost always collocated with 'a bank' or 'a joint' (a colloquial term for a 'den') signifying 'to have a look around in order to gain knowledge of a premises (more often than not in reference to crime as in how to gain entry, what is there and how to get away). Its etymology is thought to have come from the arena of gambling and the phrase 'to keep cases' referring to keeping a close eye on your tally (the case being some kind of abacus that kept a record of the score). Indeed, just looking at that word 'score' we could easily get ourselves in deeper and deeper. This is what etymology is, really: depth...

Affording us a glance at the source code...

Anyhoo....

A little sketch in praise of cases.... and that wonderful Manhattan style architecture of lower St. Vincent Street.

Angels in the Architecture

The occasional building/sculpture within Glasgow's ever-changing city scene is an in situ artefact, a moment from a bygone era, like the Angel Building with its golden angel of commerce and industry (or if you prefer, poetics and due diligence) at the Old Toll Cross on Paisley Road West. 

In fact, Glasgow has its fair share of these in situ artefacts: much of its city centre being something of a skansen to Victorian architectonics. The stonework alone on some of these structures is mind-boggling for its diligence and artistry. Which makes this golden angel, whose creator has been forgotten (!!), all the more poignant. Though the architects of the Angel Building itself are known, apparently, there is no record of the sculptor of the angel herself.

Which kind of adds to the mystery and the beauty...