Learning Space & How To Breathe

All that breathes is holy. William Blake

Learning wisdom is learning space, learning space is learning wisdom. Dogen

It's amazing how utterly deaf people are to Nature's voice. For the past several months Nature has been broadcasting the one message loud and clear for everyone to hear: your society is too crowded, your society does not respect space, your society needs to get back in line with Nature's dictates. This is it. That's all she's been saying. And we have listened to a point, but only in order to get back to where we were. This is not good. Nature will not be duped so easily. The changes must be for good not for a few months until the holiday season comes along, or people get bored. But the real holiday as we all should know by now is the holy day and the day that can breathe. But the day can't breathe. It's shrouded in smog and pollution and man's growing nonsense. Only by returning to Nature's ways, the way of space (look at how the animals live) will we return to any modicum of health (and holiness). We must learn space, its' that simple, and the best way to learn space is by going into space, into the hills, into the woods, along the coast, up there on the desolate moors, on your own two feet. This is how we gain vision, by being in space - by Being that has been rendered spacious through the glorious and universal trinity of self-locomoting, self-locating, and self localizing. This vision gives us wisdom, both words deriving from the same root 'vise'. Here, we gather up wisdom, vision, and Nature's 'ad-vising'. This is how we 'see', and breathe. And seeing is everything. Breathing too.

Achromic Lives Matter

Black, white, pink, yellow, blue... Every act of discrimination, even (especially) toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.

The good is that which has been gathered together not that which has been torn apart. There is no black or white or pink or yellow or blue when it comes to living. Being (like water) is colourless.

Be water my friend.

Le Pont D'Art

Le pont d'art and 'The Art Bridge' is a proposal. It proposes that Bell's Bridge be given over to the public as an outdoor and informal art gallery. The bridge has fifteen rectangular pillars and a central column, and a canopy! As I have been stencilling it these past few months I have noticed that it needn't just be me painting the bridge. People are aware of the bridge as a place for foot traffic. On the bridge's wings there are flyers for all sorts of stuff, mostly regarding mental health issues and the like. To be sure, every time I go down there to stencil, I stay for the minimum time because what I am doing is technically illegal, so my proposal would dispose of this illegality just as other cities have done, in order to allow local residents and local community groups to show their work without fear of being arrested. So far, I know of no outdoor space where artists can show their work freely. In a city the size of Glasgow, this is not just wrong but a little embarrassing. This is coming from someone who as an EFL teacher has lived in some fourteen countries and as many cities and seen in almost every one of them some communal space where people can try out and display their creative side. I would propose that there be some kind of list drawn up of all who want to participate and then those names be put in a bag and all the names drawn. This would allocate a two week long residency to each artist who would haver all fifteen pillars and sixty sides to do their stuff on. Or, equally, you could section off parts of the bridge and work out a different program. A photographic album could be made of the bridge's various informal exhibitions, since all the exhibitions would be fairly temporary. It's just a thought, but I reckon a pretty good one. And you might actually be very surprised at what little unknown joe public can do. It would also get rid of the usual scrawls and unsightly daubs that routinely mark the bridge's pillars, and inspire other places perhaps to do the same. Naturally, there would be rules drawn up and anyone flouting those rules would be ejected (into the river).

If the people really and truly make Glasgow, as we are told over and over again, surely to goodness we should give them a chance to display their craft, and to exert their Being through the glorious medium of art. And what better place for a gallery quite frankly than on a pedestrian bridge straddling the great river Clyde.

The Taking of Bell's Bridge

Like Christo I have covered Bell's Bridge in art. Unlike Christo however, the art I have created does not cover over but digs underneath. It is also, unlike Christo's delicate silky leggings, not an attempt to prettify the bridge but to simply reveal why the bridge is perhaps there in the first place. Moreover, the taking of Bell's Bridge as it sounds is an act of civil disobedience insofar as I refuse to jump through hoops in order to publish my work. The 'established channels' are often self-defeating and too narrow to encompass the full range of what is being said. Stencilling is one way to avoid these constrictions and to publish your work yourself. If people are offended by what is being said then so be it: you have a right to be offended. It is also a tactic to toughen people up by showing them how docile and pet-like they have become under the remit of capitalism and a predatory uneconomic economy. People are still, as Laing says, in a state of post-hypnotic trance induced in infancy, and so the infant is gullible, impressionable, and believes anything that you tell them. This is the nature of the infant: it believes everything is the truth (which ordinarily it is under Nature), until man came along and invented a language that did not accord with the body. Thus, modern day man is under the influence and the spell of his fellow man which is, in the infant's world, nothing more than the toddler marvelling at the size of its own shit. The infant does not do civil disobedience then since it believes that the civil is truth. Time then for those who have not been arrested by civilization and mesmerized (stopped and stupefied) by it, for those whose backbones and hearts are still intact, to stand up and shout.

The Existencillist

The existencillist reveals the ugliness of society through his careful application of paint to the medium of wall or in this case pillars. The existencillist does not make any bones about this, in fact this is his raison d'etre: to reveal the truth that lies beneath the wall-papered surface of 'society'. In stencilling this bridge, the E. wants to show people how ugly their society actually is. The last thing the E. wants is to paint over this ugliness and prettify it. This is why the E. has chosen to stencil words (as well as images) on walls (and pillars): because words get to the truth a lot quicker than some unintelligible wash of paint. These words are like pure spirit, having been triple distilled in the barrels of the brain and body beforehand, sometimes for years. The E. does not write these words frivolously, but with a deadly seriousness. The E. does not sign his name because he knows that the decline of Art begins with a signature. The E. knows that the real signature is the sign of Nature which is the ongoing oeuvre. The E. moreover does not wear a mask or compose his stencils undercover of darkness, but paints his words and images in broad daylight in full view of everyone. The E. is not afraid of anything because he knows. This unafraidness manifests itself as 'spirit', and the resulting artwork. No-one can stop the person who knows the truth, not even an army, for the person who has reached the truth and who has (con)figured their own personhood aboriginally and truthfully is all things, even those who attempt to silence him cannot succeed.

The E. is fed up with street art (at least here in Glasgow) not taking the world seriously enough and attempting to escape from it. You cannot defeat the monster by running away from it, especially that monster with the nose of a bloodhound and a taste for flesh. The E. confronts the monster (both inside and out) and destroys it just as David destroyed Goliath, transforming it into a convivial and 'empty' entity whose ego is not monstrous but of a 'correct size'.  The E. knows that it's no use running away, for even in the next life, the monster will still be there trying to devour you. 

Tigerhood and Poodlehood

The tiger is a curious animal. It is a solitary creature that has a huge home range that it explores constantly. It is also a very capable animal having edified itself over aeons and aeons by its actions and its behaviours. Man used to harness similar attributes before he discovered science and industry, and progress. Now, after just a few hundred years, man has abandoned his tigerhood and replaced it with poodlehood, man now being some kind of over-domesticated (enslaved) pet (of the new world order of 'destruction for data').

Naturally, there are those amongst us who have not abandoned their tigerhood or who have, better still, retrieved their tigerhood by recognizing and shedding their poodlehood. And it is these tigers, these naturally abiding creatures (or as naturally abiding as you can within a distorted and man-dominated world), that we should be listening to. When the tiger roars, you should listen... otherwise you run the risk of being devoured by your monster called Progress.

John McFaul's Chinese New Year Tiger on Customs House Quay

James Klinge's Tiger in the same spot...

Spree

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Howard Beale, Network

Has not everybody at some point in their lives thought of spitting on their hands, hoisting the black flag and begin slitting throats?

H.L. Mencken

I'd always thought this kind of stencilling that I am doing on Bell's Bridge as some kind of 'spree'. In America, people who have had enough tend to go on another kind of spree, one which is a lot more bloody and deadly. My spree however is with words and images, not guns and bullets, but it amounts to much the same. I've had enough of the horseshit hidden in plain sight as I've had enough of all the people feeding on it from the trough of ignorance. Society is profoundly sick, and those who have made a success of this are profoundly sick too. Indeed, most success (if not all) is formed out of a sickness that grows in the head of the young child. Yet, success is not about this broken individual 'making it' but about the inter-dependent origination of all things. Success in other words, in Nature, is all about collaboration and community, not about isolated individuals and 'rankings'. At any rate, it pleased me to see that the word spree derives from the French 'esprit' meaning spirit. This is what is at work here: the 'holy spirit' as the whole and healthy unbroken individual who has woken up to the bullshit hidden in plain sight and who, with the strength of this nouveau esprit, sets to work about sharing the wisdom he has gained from this insight. The shooting spree-er 'wakes people up' by killing them, the stencil spree-er wakes people up similarly, but the killing done by art does not kill the body but only the false consciousness that has been implanted and solidified within that body. It is spirit, as essence and attention and tending the essential, that is at work in both cases. In the shooter's case, it is an unholy spirit, in the artist's the holy and wholly spirit. In both cases, the receiver of the spirit is 'awoken', yet if you cannot share that awakeness there's not much use. Hence my spree of the stencil sort.... the spray can being its own form of gun.