The Great Vehicle: The Bicycle, The Cycling, The Cyclist

THE GREAT VEHICLE

1. The bicycle:
Mahayana Buddhism's 'Great Vehicle';
Life & Death:
Two spokes in the wheel of existence;
Cycling
an act of understanding,
of living -

2. Like music,
the spontaneous cyclist
penetrates
the deep reality.

Rage Against the Machine

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. Zack de la Rocha, Killing in the Name

Dare to leap into the origin.  Asvaghosa, The Awakening of Faith

DESPERATE. It’s the one word that immediately springs to mind about this situation: Telling a 4 year old child and her bewildered father that she cannot cycle to school on the ‘footpath’ but instead has to use the road. Seriously? I mean seriously???? And then, if that wasn't bad enough, being warned (threatened more like by idiots with tasers) that if he (the police officer) looks in his rear-view mirror and sees the child still on her bicycle on the footpath he will turn around, come back, and confiscate the child’s bicycle (complete with stabilisers).

You will forgive me if I profess to the world being mad, to the insanity of the rigidness of rules and regulations (the fear & trembling) that prevent people in positions of authority from using the power of discretion (a noble attribute if ever there was one) and the power of independent and critical thinking based upon context. Context, after all, is everything. If you cannot take the context into account and make your decisions accordingly, then you might as well be a zombie. Alas! this is what the masses have become, browbeaten as they are by conventions and media. They act upon superimposed templates that have been handed down to them from nefarious sources, emphatically not their own. And when you start outsourcing your thinking and, by extension your being, to idiots, then you can only expect things like this to occur. Original thinking and original being (that which originates within and not without) are left by the wayside. What remains is mechanical and automatic. Gone is the sensitive and intelligent response. Intelligence after all, as its etymology suggests [from the Latin inter + legere, to read between], presupposes a context in its reading between (the lines).

I find it more than a little ironic that this occurs on the same day (11.03.2015) that a petition is signed to re-instate Jeremy Clarkson (following his dismissal by the BBC for another strop), as it was, according to a spokesman, in the interests of the ‘motor industry’ to keep Top Gear rolling

And so here we have, (reading between the lines as one must necessarily do in an overly deceptive society), an illuminating situation: the effective industrialization of the human. 

Even the zombies can see this - in the dehumanising activities that people call work, jobs whose sole purpose is to sell people stuff they simply do not need; in the modern addiction to sensationalism and media; in the apparent absence of original thinking and original moving; and in the culminating readiness to sell one's vitality to the maker of machines (the irony being that in this 'selling', one actually pays).

And so it is that society is insane. And that I occasionally rage against it.

The health and holiness of the self (based upon its own originary forces) is cast off in favour of something a little more 'instant', something a little more exciting. Yet, if the idea (nevermind the practice) of life itself no longer stimulates you, then there's definitely something wrong somewhere. The sacred (which is of course the upholding of life itself and its inextricable binding to body-mind-world) is sold off like a two-bit condominium to the point where the world (which is actually the self) becomes a mess of conflicts and crises, and nonsenses. Nonsenses like a four year old being threatened by an adult who has been vested with the ultimate boddhisattvic act of looking out for us; nonsenses like an immature and juvenile manchild preaching the effective godhood of a machine that does nothing but strip us of our own vital energies whilst simultaneously polluting our environment (and our vision of it through screen and speed).

A society that is weaned on the idea that the car is somehow inherently ‘good’, and that those who don’t have one are somehow lacking, is a society in existential decline and a society that deceives. A sedentary society is an insane society. But we can see this already, surely, in the new environment that has sprung up around us and which we have labelled 'obesogenic' and 'irreligious'.

As I have said before, and I am not the first, human-ness and vitality begins with one’s capacity to think and move for oneself, for the self-energizing agent within all of us, that binds us (religions us) to the soil and to the earth. When we ignore this fundamental life-force, and worse still, outsource it to a machine or a set of inelastic rules which further cement our ‘fatness’ (of mind and of body) then we are not too far from the edge of the precipice that leads to the abyss.

The only solution is to get rid of the car, and conventions, and start making your own way through the world, start devising your own rules based upon your own automotive energy, your own auto-poetic dynamism. The genius is he who uses his own engines! Who re-cognizes the emergency of being.

Do not allow the machine to usurp your origin. Rage against it! It is your duty, and responsibility.

[Both articles can be found here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31811572
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31832698]

The Mastery of Movement

'Those who have steam need no demons.' Miroslav Holub

It seems coincidental, if not a little ironical, that following a cycling accident last Thursday and an operation yesterday at Gartnavel General for a 'nastily fractured left wrist' I should be talking about the mastery of movement. To be sure, I was going too fast, and having had my vision impaired by two large street-side portakabins, did not see the trailer that was being towed bt the SUV that pulled out of a side street in front of me.

It seems more than a little contradictory that I should also be writing a blog entitled The Slow Flow of Glasgow, when slowness was not exactly a part of this equation. Personally, I blame the wind. Glasgow can be a well windy city at times, and at this time of year, one almost feels like one might take off and end up in Oz. Like Glasgow's seagull population, I pride myself on my knowledge of the prevailing winds, and being able to accommodate them and synergize with them. This is all well and good, if like a seagull you have an ocean of space around you to play in, but Charing X where I had my accident (right outside the Q Club) with its car-filled streets and buildings is not exactly the great Atlantic.

And so perhaps the conclusion is that I have not mastered movement.... at least not yet. But I am on my way, that much is sure, and when at last mastery of movement is accomplished, mastery of everything else falls into place. There is a grace to moving thus, an elegance and natural economy which perhaps I overlooked in my moment of eagerness, in my moment of excessive ventilation. But as I said to the kind nurses who looked after me yesterday, 'I am alive' even though a little broken, which is a lot more than can be said for those who outsource their moving (physical and mental) to machines and screens.

Cycling into the Sea: From Kilwinning to Barassie

What makes this little jaunt special is not so much the Kilwinning to Irvine bit which, let's face it, is a little bit tired and industrial, but the sandy stretch from the point at Irvine to the train station at Barassie.

The path follows the sustrans route as marked on the OS Map through the 'lang grey toon' (as the Kilwinning born Klondike poet Robert Service called it) and past the abbey and onwards to Irvine. It's straightforward enough and as usual, this early March mid-week morning, devoid of people. Once we reach Irvine the salt air opens the mind up. There's nothing quite like the great expanses of sky, sea and sand to pacify the mind. The self is launched into space (quite the opposite effect from the city which always reflects it back onto itself). This assimilation of the self into space, into the elements is a wonderful thing, and the two miles or so cycling along the beach (surprisingly easy, the sand is harder than you think) is a nutritional experience for the mind like no other. Granted, today, we were blessed with a slight jump in temperature and a blazing sun, but no matter the weather, it is always an enormous experience. Incidentally, to get to Kilwinning, I took the 11am train from Glasgow Central (the express whose first stop is Kilwinning) which arrived at 11.25am. A return ticket to Barassie, though not the cheapest in the world at eight pounds, is worth every penny. The journey itself, time-wise, took a relaxing two hours with the train from Barassie at 1.19pm, and so is one of the shortest routes on this blog, but by no means any less for it. Naturally, in the lighter months of spring and summer, you could extend the route to Troon or even Ayr, or equally, start the route at Glengarnock with the hills over Dalry to oxygenate. To be honest, I hadn't planned anything, and so this route was entirely spontaneous (some of the most memorable journeys are). I just found myself in the concourse at Central Station gazing up at the big black board with a flurry of destinations to choose from. 

What'll it be today? I thought to myself. The hills, the coast, the moors, the sea? 

And then:

God bless the trains! and all those who tend to them.

Approaching Irvine...

The Sherlock within tells me that the Americans are running this place.... The Harbourside Hotel in Irvine.

The sea... the sky.... a selfie of an altogether more subtle sort.

The brain blazing at the point....

The snowcapped peaks of Arran in the cloudy distance...

Barassie, with its white-washed villas and manicured greens has a slightly holiday-camp feel to it. Nevertheless, there are some lovely seafront villas with views...