Glasgow With Stile

It just occurred to me stood up here inhaling the strath that this is my sort of Glasgow, not Glasgow With Style, since all style is an aberration of the One and ultimate perfection, but Glasgow With Stile as in 'up above the streets and houses and all that noise'. In other words, Glasgow from the hills. This is the only (onely) way to see Glasgow in all her beautiful entirety, from her edges and braes... and stiles. Otherwise, all you're going to see is anthropo-centric 'noise' that purports to be Glasgow. But the real Glasgow - the real anything - is that which has had its thick film of noise removed from it. That means Nature unmediated, and that means glas chu and the grey-green hollow without people present (since people now, with all their add-ons and accessories, have given up their presence). It also means, if like me you live in the city, getting out of the city, galvanizing the bodymind in doing so, and revelling in the revelations that Glasgow's peripheral hills provide.

 

 

Glasgow with stile, tree, and cairn...

I'm (Sleep) Walking Here!

It's one of my favourite moments in cinema, Dustin Hoffman's wiry little Ratso Rizzo slamming the hood of an oncoming car and giving a car driver what for for almost knocking him down as he crosses the road at a busy New York crosswalk. I like it so much that I almost considered Rizzo's retort as the title for this book. After all, I am walking here, and I do not prioritize pollutants over natural aboriginal self-cleansing technology. At any rate, I actually used the phrase today, not at some errant cab driver in the busy city, but at two middle-aged mountain bikers in the empty hills who were piling down a narrow path that I was walking in the Kilpatrick Hills. I heard them behind me and turned around to acknowledge them but did not give way to them. This didn't stop both of them piling down the steep and dangerous rocky slip that I was currently negotiating. As I dodged to one side almost straight into a gorse bush, I shouted Rizzo's refrain. I also added that they, along with their mountain biking brethren who enjoy tearing up hills with their overpriced tricycles and flashy clownsuits, should show some respect not just to walkers but to the hills themselves. They both looked perplexed as if I had just spoken to them in Greek. 'But we're allowed to cycle here', the fat bearded one replied. And that meant they got the standard riposte: 'Just because some moron says you can rape the Earth with impunity doesn't mean you should'. Before shooing them away like the sleepwalking (sleepcycling) violators that they are.

 

 

 

A Bottle Of Vodka A Day

Every morning, well, let's say every other morning in winter and more or less every morning for the rest of the year, I drink a bottle of vodka (500ml). This isn't any ordinary vodka but perhaps the finest vodka the Earth has to offer (and that's saying something coming from someone who spent three years in Poland, a year in Kazakhstan, and six months in Belarus). This vodka compared to the industrial and even home-brewed kind is 100% natural with no artificial ingredients. It is also distilled through volcanic rock and the Earth herself to give this vodka a purity of punch that no other vodka can match. This Earth vodka, compared to the supermarket kind which gets you 'pissed', will emphatically get you 'unpissed' as in awake. Of course my vodka is, as the name (voda being Polish for water, and the suffix -ka expressing a diminutive) suggests, the 'little water' that tumbles down from the braes and from the heavens. I collect it at various falls, burns and pools, along my routes through the hills - always know your pure watering holes especially in drookit climates - and fill my bottle with it. To be sure, on occasion it has a slightly greenish tint to it as in today but this only means goodness and the fact that it has been distilled multiple times through the ancient bedrock of this fine land. What with this 'elixir', the purity of the air, and the primal space, solitude, and silence, these braes and hills have to offer, you come down from the hills not just Awake (with a capital A) but Alive too. And it's all due to (going and gathering) a bottle of vodka a day, (or every other day in winter).

 

 

 

Another World

It's on days like today that you see almost too clearly the two worlds that exist on this planet. Why a day like today you may ask. Because it was freezing overnight and now the sun has come out creating what meteorologists and amateur sky watchers call an 'inversion'. This inversion just like the blockbuster cinematic one we had earlier this year is fascinating, except this one is completely natural and did not cost upwards of $200m. Moreover, this one can only be seen when you're outdoors (as Nature intended) and not sealed up in some darkened auditorium breathing in other people's body odour. And this inversion is free too. These are in fact the two worlds: the world beneath the cloud which is dark, artificial, pretend, filthy, and costly; and the world above the cloud which is light, airy, spacious, pure, and free. The inversion down there in the man-world is really a per-version, having forced Nature through the meat-grinder of capitalism and progressive ideologies And up here, it is the real version, the only version... the onely version... the uni-version... 

 

God

For the creature who has had his natural development arrested through the imposition of the mechanic, the scientific, and the anti-natural, who has been rendered ecologically and existentially 'infantile' through a process of removal, outsorcery, possessing, and fakery, God, surely, is simply the parent in absentia.

 

 

 

The Peyote Hunt

At the beginning of her book, The Peyote Hunt, Barbara Meyerhoff writes of the Huichol (the aboriginal people of the Sierra Madre range in north-west Mexico):

There is no distinction between sacred and profane... the good life is the religious life, the good day's work is sacred. That what is beautiful is beautiful because it is moral. An evil man is not truly Huichol, for to be Huichol is to live in the proper manner. In other words, to be Huichol is to be sacred, and this applies to all objects, behaviour, and ideas, that make up the culture. That which is non-indigenous, not correct or unacceptable, is not merely secular or even profane. It is outside the state of being Huichol.

Is there any difference here between Huichol and Human? Are not aborigines aborigines wherever they are irrespective of the names they confer upon themselves? 

If you replace Huichol with Human you will notice that 'man' (his behaviour, objects, and ideas) are increasingly outside the state of being human. Man, rather, is a perversion of the human (or if you will, the Huichol), a version that has been twisted (per + vertere, to turn through) and mediated through a system of economy predicated upon lies, falsehood, and a technology that is not Nature but that which exploits and contaminates Nature. Man, in other words, just like the evil man above, is not Human, for his behaviour does not coincide with that which is human and 'of the Earth'. If a cat behaves like a dog it's more that likely that it's actually a dog and not a cat. In short, the human has not evolved into man but rather, through the arduous process of overlaying his self with nature-hating technologies, has been made into man. 

The hunt then becomes not for peyote per se but for the human hidden beneath all that nature-hating tech.

 

 Homegrown peyote (six months old)...

 

The Buzz of Aboriginality

The Huichol would be proud of my foraging techniques, the crows too. In fact, I often feel like a large crow when I'm foraging in the 'golden field' for mushrooms. The secret to successful foraging like this and spotting the elusive liberty cap (magic mushroom) especially after a dew laden night is to get down on one knee. It is a religious event (insofar as you are at one with Nature and your animal body) and this is perhaps where the idea of genuflecting came from: foraging for wild mushrooms. Once you are closer to the grass your eyes can scan the grassline with ease, and it is here where those very eyes will 'lock on' to a cluster. Whilst picking that cluster the eyes are still roving. Soon, you find yourself in that joyful situation of continually picking mushroom after mushroom once the eyes have become accustomed to their new way of looking. These are your crow eyes, eyes that see subtlety within subtlety, eyes that can pick out a two centimetre tall camouflaged liberty cap at fifty feet. These crow eyes can now be added to your jaguar legs and your owl ears, so that soon you will have earned the respect of all the wild. And you feel that buzz of aboriginality.