Viper's Bugloss

I first uncovered Viper's bugloss (Echium vulgare) a few years back (sad isn't it?) by accident when I saw this marvellous blue thing on the grass verge beside the cycle path I was plying. I stopped and got down on my knees for a closer look (a behaviour encouraged by my botanist friend not by my school teachers or parents). I was amazed at how vibrant it was (and hairy) and how the insects loved it. Everytime I passed this little guy (all on his own in spite of being an 'invasive weed') I would stop and 'converse' in silence for a few minutes while I ate my blueberries and drank some water. And I soon formed a map of the strath that was informed by flowers and flowing. You had Viper's bugloss over here, Hellborine orchids over there, wild cornflowers in there. I realised as a cyclist and walker and someone who now eschews transport and the act of being carried (as if I were dead) that I too was one of them: a flower who flows according to the dictates not of man and his filthy earth-destroying machines but of the uni-verse and of the 'one who pours'. People have just forgotten how to be flowers having been waylaid by the machine, its toxins, and the brain-damage that comes with it. So, by all mean, get back on your own two feet (and into your own two hemispheres), and become the flower, Viper's bugloss or other.

The Seagull Mafia

Seagulls are terrific! They have a terrifying capacity to them that we know all too well when they're hungry or when their new borns are hungry. I have had a couple of seagulls nesting on the rooftop opposite my desk for almost a decade now so I am familiar with their behaviour. At any rate, seagulls are quite territorial and like to return to the same nesting site year in year out. Which brings me to my point. Yesterday, at Old Kilpatrick a seagull could be seen nesting on the chimney top of the old station house. So what, you ask. Well, this particularly chimney top is home to a family of kafkas (jackdaws to you and me) who have been living there for a long time. This morning the kafkas (seven of them) were foraging as usual around and about their home but they did seem a little put off. And I started wondering if the gulls had muscled the kafkas out of their home forcibly. It's difficult to say, but I would be surprised if the jackdaws had given up their home to these seagulls voluntarily. I will pop back later in the week to see if the gulls are still there. But I'm guessing they won't be, that a barney will have broken out between the jackdaws and the gulls, and that will be that. Seven against two (no matter how big you are) is always a question of arithmetic. Watch this space!

The Tantrum Thrower

Alas! Some people are just a menace to street artists. Like a demented canine they cannot let it go. They've taken my art too personally and forgotten that it's art. Like this twat who accosted me as I started painting today, threatening me with the police and then asking me what I am protesting about. It was this latter point that irked me. I asked him if he was blind and/or illiterate, or if he was perhaps retarded. He didn't take it well. I told him to stay back because twice he dismounted from his bicycle as if he wanted to physically attack me and/or perform a citizen's arrest. I told him that if he approached within a metre of my body I would defend myself, which, I added, would invariably mean hurting him and/or dowsing him with shock red spray paint. He got back on his bike and waddled off. I could see him at the other end of the bridge trying to convince the security guards of the Hydro precinct (where Cop 26 will be held) to stop me. Meanwhile, a family of three of their bicycles on their way to Pollok Park stopped to commend me on my work. In fact, in the time the trantrum thrower took to get his mummy and daddy to tell me off half a dozen or so people had stopped to offer their thanks for the 'education and entertainment'. This I told to the two police women (girls really) who arrived at the behest of the tantrum thrower who had evidently phoned them as he had promised. I had a very pleasant conversation with the police officers who seemed to enjoy the art I had just put up. They reminded me that it was public property and that it was illegal to deface it, but they did this in such a diplomatic and sensitive way that it never even seemed like a reprimand. Indeed, they seemed more interested in the tantrum thrower who was still throwing tantrums as I cycled off into the sunset thanking the police officers for their 'undertstanding' and promising (ahem) not to do it again... Alas! Some people are just a menace to street artists.

Cattle-ism

 

The word 'Cattle' in fact derives from the Latin capita where we get 'capitalism'. Here, cattle refers to 'heads'. But then, so does capitalism, does it not?

Do not be cattle. Refuse. Re-fuse. You are not a machine to be used and exploited and fattened up for the kill. Under capitalism you are simply a statistic that fuels your runaway economy. Under Nature, under God, you are Nature, you are God.

Do not be cattle.

The Number of the Beast

Gambling outlets are a disease of our monstrous economy. Indeed, you might say that it's the economy that is the real disease, manifested by its unease with Nature and natural ways of working. Man's westernized economy has been specifically engineered to avoid the moral dilemma. Indeed, man's economy is immoral. Look at what it has done to the Earth, to its animals, to its peoples. The next pillar will elucidate upon this with a quote I took from Barbara Meyerhof's The Peyote Hunt which follows the indigenous Huichol of Mexico's Sierra Madre region. For them, as with all indigenous peoples, work is sacred, work is essential, and work is moral. If it isn't, it simply will not get done. With man, in  an effort to keep placating the monster he has made, he does away with such things as 'morals' for they limit the revenue of an immoral economy. Immoral insofar as you prey upon the weak and the wounded, just so you can buy more crass shit you do not need and call yourself rich. But the real wealth is health. And as the Huichol know all too well, health is wholeness and morality. Health is convivial not scientific, and as long as our economy kowtows to the latter, it will also kowtow to immorality. To which I say, 'Fuck off'.

My Work

I have 'a work'... or maybe that should be 'a Work' with a capital W. It was a chap today on his bike who stopped and told me 'I like your work'. This had been said to me last year several times by passing admirers. And I started thinking, 'Hmm, I have a work, my work is taking shape. The problem we have today however is that few of us have the time or the headspace to find our work having been sidelined into the sideshow that is man's awful economy. As soon as you stop feeding this economy and stop labouring you liberate yourself from your chains and begin to free yourself into Work. Work that is natural and enlivening. Labour is the opposite of this: it is exploitative and exhausting. As old Bernard (Steigler) says below: Bullshit jobs are everywhere. It is our duty not to kowtow to them. As many a wizard knew, 'tis better to be an unemployed sorceror than a well-paid rapist.

Never labour! 

You may recognise the bespectacled face of the French philosopher (and former armed robber) Bernard Stiegler talking about 'bullshit jobs'. This guy was the man (sadly he passed away last year) and his Technics & Time (both parts) are massive. He, like Ivan Illich, could articulate the exact moments where man went wrong and started to become a monster. With Illich it was tools, the manipulating hand, and power that did not belong to the body, and with Steigler it was transport, the act of being carried, and the act of sharpening the stone. Lately, Steigler lamented the death of capitalism (or at least its spirit) and the fact that most people had shitty little jobs that did nothing for them except deplete and exhaust their vitality (cf. Jennifer Anniston's flipping the bird to her boss in the film Office Space).

Never labour! Better unemployed (and making use of the time-space that unemployment affords) than someone else's little bitch.

Hunchback

I saw a young man today staring into his smartphone and instead of seeing a human being I saw a deformed monstrum that could have been any number of hunchbacks from popular history. This is what a permanent stoop does to the spine, it collapses it until you are literally spineless and hunchbacked. People now waddle (they can't walk anymore) about with downcast eyes as if there were a weight upon their head. So far, the industrial realm and man's backwardness (earned through Progress & Science) has destroyed man's heart & mind. Now it's time for his spine.