Deer-leg through the Gorse: Kilpatrick to Dalmuir via the Golden Hill and Amen Corner

Today's wander through the gorse laden hillside behind Duntocher revealed something of a mystery when I fell upon a severed deer leg in the undergrowth (especially since I had, just last night, downloaded and watched the first two episodes of David Lynch's new season of Twin Peaks - I had yet to watch the third installment which I did this very night in which lo and behold! and severed dog leg is discovered...).

Duntocher could well be Twin Peaks then... ! What an idyllic little village, with some lovely well-crafted bungalows and well-detached local-stone villas! Apart from the odd ponderosa that looks as if its been built by a Saudi with its fake lawn and all the trimmings (you'll know it when you see it!), Duntocher is a lovely little residential quarter with the Kilpatrick Hills for its rather wild back garden.  I've always thought (at least for the past year or so since I first cycled through Duntocher) that, when I have enough cash (which'll probably be never), I should have a little villa in Roman Hill Road (since my surname is Roman and I love hills!). But then you start thinking that maybe I love the hills because of the dialectic of living apart from them, that maybe, if I lived in them, I wouldn't love them as much....

At any rate, from Kilpatrick, it's an easy enough route up through the sloping fields to 'coffee rock' and then down again avoiding the gorse bushes, to the dual carraigeway and across into Dalmuir Wood.

 An impeccable grey wagtail (more yellow than grey!) singing its song from the top of the braes.

Don't build a wall, plant some gorse!  My first recollections of gorse are on the golf course and searching for wayward balls. Not a pleasant experience! But I have managed to come round to gorse, over the years, in a more intimate way, let's say, although getting intimate with a gorse bush is not something I would recommend. The intimacy I speak of is to do with 'a sitting quietly with' and 'an identifying with' that is possible through this quietness. It is only through this kind of intimacy and quietness that you will come to see your self in the gorse and vice versa, to the point where you can exclaim, at least in my case, that 'I am Gorse!' Which is probably well and good since I am pretty thorny at first touch, but radiant with it!

May 23rd, and the Hawthorns are out in force. Some years they trickle by, but this year, maybe due to the dryness that preceded this week, they bloom like nothing else, amd the sides of the hills above Duntocher are afloat with Hawthorn.

A truly bizarre find, a deer-leg in the undergrowth. Blue Velvet indeed! Duntocher is the quiet peaceful village with secrets, apparently...

The golden hills of Duntocher! (More white than gold with all that Hawthorn). Plotting a way through this wall of gorse and brush is vital when you're at the top looking down, because by the time you get down there you can't see anything! (And this stuff can swallow you up whole!).

Through the wonderful Dalmuir Wood into the wonderful Dalmuir Municipal Golf Course. Both empty of people!! I wonder at what everyone is doing, since, in my humble (and humate) opinion, there is no better way to live than to walk the earth.... and allow it to speak through you.

 'The Wee Drap' is one of the most iconic golf holes of the world!! With the beautiful stream coming through, down from the hills from where we ourselves have just tumbled, it is Glasgow's very own Amen Corner, except here, there are no toffs in monkey suits keeping you out. This Amen Corner is open to everyone.... (note the garden party with their 'alky tans' just downstream at the other bridge).

Idyllic! Where would you rather drink? In a stuffy old pub, or by a babbling brook, beneath the sun-dappled shade of an enchanted wood? (In tribute to the 'jakies' who regularly gather here to drink and blether).

A Manifesto for the Moving

There are two types of people in the world - those who divide the world into two types and those who don't. No, seriously... there are.... two types...

Those who move their selves, and those who, like babies unable yet to walk, are carried.

In our overly-spoiled western societies, most of us are of the latter: spoiled children who do not even know they are spoiled, and who rely on being carried everywhere, whether by transport or cars, or by second-hand thoughts, conventional 'wisdom', and super-imposed subroutines. Indeed, the whole conscious configuration of the western mind is in a state of being carried. The paradigm that we labour under, in the affluent and wasteful West: education, job, family, car, mortgage, status, success... is a carrying device. There are few of us that can get beyond this conditioning, into a space where one can see how dangerous and delusional it is for the planet as a whole. But we are so self-contracted as a species that seeing the whole is nigh on impossible for most. It's a crying shame what we have done to ourselves through 'progress', an even bigger shame what we have done to others, the land, the seas, the rivers, the animals...

But of course, those 'others' are us, as our undifferentiated and de-configured selves. What happens to 'them' also happens to 'us'.

Which is why self-moving is so vitally important. Because it helps us see.

When the body moves, the mind moves too, but no just any old moving, preferably moving, solitarily,  in wild and remote places where there are no distractions and plenty of phenomena with which you can 'find a way in' and learn to identify your own self through them. It is also, paradoxically, through self-propulsion and the ignition of one's own engines that one will enter into stillness. It is through this stillness that one will then come into contact with one's Self, that inner oracle that is mostly, though not entirely, kept down by the din and dust of the noisy city.

It's all about the self-moving, and the auto-mobile. Not the devious perversion of it as in the motor-car, but as in ones own heart.

We, Earth,

of the non-carred and the non-prammed,

of bodies that body, and engines that engine;

we, the localized locomotives, whose oil is blood, 

whose legs are roots, 

whose mind a wheel that encircles us, 

that releases us

into the Origin, into that great Engine

the genius within:

We do solemnly vow

along with the animals that have not been tamed,

saddled and bridled,

never to allow ourselves

to be prammed like an infant,

to have our soil spoiled, to be ridden and sat upon

like a beached pony,

so that our blood becomes contaminated,

leeches into the earth, creates machines that move for us,

creates machines that create death...

The Seagull Fetch: Songs from the Tenth Floor

My friend's tenth floor flat on Gilsochill offers views south like no other. There are also plenty of gulls milling about, perfect for a game of 'Seagull Fetch'...! And only the best of bread is used to feed these wonderful winged creatures!!

They love it.

The Inner Circle: The 4 Central Perches

The inner circle refers not to Glasgow toy-train underground but to that series of perches from inside the city limits. I have already made efforts to extol the virtues of the perch for the contemplative human animal, and have noted a few of the outer ones in either this or my other cycling meds. blog. Naturally, the outer perches render a certain remoteness to one's being which is in itself a vital influence. Yet, the inner ones can do this to. I have often skipped up to Ruchill Flagpole from the canal knowing that noone will be up there. The same could be said for the three other inner perches of Queen's Park Flagpole, the Central Necropolis, or indeed, the prow on Bellahouston Park's hill.

Amongst these four compass points, one can garner a panoptic view of the city, without necessarily being in it. It is an experience that everyone needs to do at least once in their lives. Seeing this from different angles, in different lights, from skewed perspectives, is all in the canon of understanding 'Understanding'. 

Seeing is everything, and these perches, whether inner or outer, can helps us get there...



1. Bellahouston Park Hill.

What an absolutely amazing aspect south-west and west from the prow on the west side of Bellahouston hill. You can see the inimitable humps of Neilston Pad, Duncarnock Craigie, the Fereneze hills above Barrhead, Walls Hill Fort behind Johnstone, and then, turning clockwise, the lumps and bumps of the Inverclyde Hills (Laird's Seat, Mistylaw et al.). If we turn a little more clockwise, staring more or less due west, we can see the wonderfully ungainly Barscube Hill (in the third photo just to the left of the two towers, in the distance).

Mask

The mask holds a special place in the communities of indigenous peoples. It confers both identity and disguise. It opens up and encloses...

The transformation mask is a particular mask within the canon of tribal masks, particularly of the Pacific Northwest. It has special powers, naturally. And holds an important place in the life of the community.

The title could also come to represent the masquerade that modern society has become, each person covering their selves up with conventions and fashions, and conditions. The mask could then be the closed in-ness that modern man has come to embrace, his exile from nature at large and from his animal brethren, and from the elements.

The car is the great displacer of our age. It displaces us, disembodies us, dislocates us. It creates the 'global' by destroying the local.

It also has the added accolade of destructor, destructuring our landscapes with its concrete motor-ways, inflicting whip-marks on the Great Body of our Mother Earth. No land it seems is free from these concrete floggings, nor of vampiric siphonings and fracturings, and yet we would idolise the motor car for its speed, its convenience, and its comfort.

It is because of ease and convenience and comfort that we have become demented as a people, removed from the greater Mind that is the planet herself. Turning away from Nature at large we hide our selves within boxes and coded constructs, behind screens and media, and speed. As Telly Savalas' character states in the wonderful film Capricorn One (about masks being pulled over the eyes of the people), we have become a nation of perverts, having per-verted our own Nature through these banal concepts. In Nature, comfort only appears on the back of hardship, convenience on the back of inconvenience, and speed on the back of slowness. Yet, our modern society appears to be ALL ease, ALL comfort, ALL convenience, ignoring and even dismissing as 'negative' their supposed 'opposites'. When you have this lack of balance and equilibrium, this top-heaviness, where the 'positive' takes precedence over the 'negative' to such an extent that it anihilates it, then you are clearly off-balance, and out of kilter with the whole. This is modern society to a T, modern to be sure, but unstable with it, unbalanced and unhealthy (the latter word 'health' derives from the Old Norse hale from where we get 'whole')

We humans however, are animals, and animals are defined by their own locomotive powers, their ability to sense things, and their awareness (anima means 'Mind' in Latin). In abandoning our locomotion to a machine that not only dislocates us from the very fabric of the universe, space, but pollutes the air we need to survive, we have abandoned our animality and the very thing that makes us human, our contact with the earth (the word human comes from the Latin humus, meaning soil).

In order to become whole again, and healthy in the fullest sense, we have to understand the reciprocity of things (the coincidence of opposites) and the circular nature of Nature. When we understand this, we will baulk at the idea of being carried by a 'car'  - a machine that usurps our own auto-mobility and pollutes the air we breathe, and destroys the land we are part of. The only real engines are the natural ones inside us and inside all living forms. We need to tune our engines to hear these other quieter engines, lubricate them by walking and waking. We are listening beings after all. And you can't hear anything when you're stuck behind the wheel of a car.

Ten Kennys

Today, down by the riverside, ten kennys...

Totem Too

I don't hate people. I just feel better when they're not around. Charles Bukowski



Continuing on from Totem, some more existential re-minders on how to behave as a human being and not as some unthinking zombie who has been beaten over the head too many times by the big stick of corporate civilization.

Let no-one read into these totemic verses an expression of inhuman contempt. Let them instead see beyond their corrupted and commercialized selves and feel that great teacher inside called intuition. In the words of the counter-culturalist Theodor Roszak: We have not entirely forgotten that we have forgotten something...