Routes that Root: Expanding the Rhizosphere

When you are rooted in the reed-bed of Reality, knowing what to be and to do comes naturally...

Belden Lane

 

I made a mention the other day that these routes around the strath are actually roots. They root you in the reed-bed of Reality. And, as such, knowing what to be and to do is a piece of cake.

I am a flower. Who grows out of the strath. Who flows and flies, and, occasionally, flowers...

The Reality here is Nature. There is no other reality. The wind, the land, the mind. All together.

Inhaling. Exhaling. Hale.

The other context that people think is reality, the workaday world and the world of entertainment and technology, is really a curtain pulled over your eyes and over Nature. It is, as Kenneth White was apt to say, a 'diminished context', and one that destroys and destructures the natural world. It is a world of conveyance and machines, and pollution. Conversely, the natural world is a sphere of locomotion, flesh, and self-cleansing. It is a world that grows you, and which receives that growth for itself.

The routes that I have plied over the past decade in and around the strath have rooted me like no other in this vast natural sphere. My epiphany of 2007 in a forest in north-eastern Poland (the map is not the territory, I am) has continued to grow inside me and shed all kinds of blossom along the way. I knew that the only way I could uncover myself from beneath all that capitalist 'education' (I was actually educated by the Jesuits!) was by uncovering and undressing the strath, by clearing away the obstructions that prevented my roots from making radical contact with the Earth and with Reality. Not once in my ten year tenure at St. Aloysius as a boy did my teachers ever take me into Nature as part of my education, in spite of the fact that the grounds of my preparatory school in Langside had its own bucolic woods. Not once did my art teacher point out of the classroom window in Hill Street (in Garnethill) towards the great bank of fells to the north, and say... There is your education! No art can touch it!

It was only when I had faith in myself, when I took that leap not to be rich on the outside, upon disabling the ego and realizing my fundamental animality, that I began in earnest to cycle and communicate with the strath as a whole. Consequently, the root zone - a natural parliament of communication - expanded. 

We are as plants after all - it is plant-life that gave birth to us - and we would do well to pay them more love. When plants and not people become your teachers you learn more deeply, and more rhizomatically. Your thinking moves. It feels its way through Mind as a root finds its way through soil. Your brain is a fertile field ready to be sown with seminal ideas.If you tend to them and water them well, these ideas will grow into trees, and maybe you yourself will become a hillside, or a stream.

The systems in nature (there are no things) refer us back to the systems that encompass our very selves. They point us back, as Lane writes, to the reed-bed of a common connectedness. 

'We've been separated from the source of our identity and have to fall in love with it all over again.'

This is the reason why so many chase after Love. Because they have been removed from it. To be 'in love' is to be in communication with the matricial Earth and your myriad relatives. It is to be 'in Mind'. To flow, to breathe, to stand under...

Identity is not what you put on, nor is it what others graft onto you.

Identity is what you take off. It is what is left behind when there is nothing left.

Except roots that move.

Me & the Red Kite on the Campsie Dene Trail...

Twin Peaks (just north of Blanefield)

The original Twin Peaks that actually inspired Lynch's own program...are here just to the north of Glasgow. They are Dumgoyne and Dumfoyne at the western end of the Campsie Fells. Blanefield, the little village that lies at their feet, is no other than Twin Peaks itself... 

All joking aside, this is a great wee route coming up from the train station at Milngavie. I tend to take the road up through Mugdock and down through Strathblane on the way there, and take the Blanefield road and through Mugdock Wood on the way back. But either way is good. Once onto the trail, I cycle along to the oddly-named Cantywheery where I chain the bicycle up and continue on foot. From here, it's about twenty minutes to the foot of Dumgoyne, and probably another hour and a half up and down the side and onto the faint path that runs along the base of Dumfoyne. And which will take us back to the bicycle.

Down the Old Mugdock Road to Strathblane....

The lumpy Conic Hill highlit in the distance...

The twin peaks...

'Multiple Peaks' just doesn't have the same ring to it....

From the summit of Dumgoyne (427m) looking north to the Highlands and Loch Lomond.

The great sweep of land coming down from the Campsie Fells' highest point Earl's Seat (553m).

Looking at Dumfoyne from Dumgoyne's south face.

Earth Proof

It's any wonder we can feel anything with the fancy clobber that we sport nowadays, any wonder that we are not so proofed up against the elements and each other, that we know who or where we are.

But of course, we don't know who we are, or where we are. Ask anyone. 

Start by asking them how to get to a local natural site, not by car, but on foot. Ask them to name half a dozen local plants or trees, or birds. Be prepared for some funny looks. You'll be amazed at how many people do not even know what lies at the end of their street. Then, ask them who they are, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they will reply with the name they were given at birth.

This is what happens when you cover your self up, and allow it to be covered up by others. You become separate... cleaved... alone.

The great existential conspiracy starts with one's gradual removal from the local. This, in turn, encompasses the global (not the other way around) and the planetary, which in their turn, encompass the solar system and so on and so forth. When one is thus divested of the greater body that enables you, feeling (as compassion and empathy), and wide-angled thinking, are the first casualties. One's own body as well begins to suffer, for we have concreted it over.

In the bible (James 4:6), there is saying that 'God resisteth the proud but shows grace for the humble'.

Naturally translated, we can see that our chance for Grace (the beauty of form under the influence of freedom) is curtailed by our desire for clothing that sports the ego. I am well aware of the vanities and superfluities of unnatural apparel (most of your clothing is made from non-biodegradable materials which damage the earth when they are finally disposed of), having grown up in a system of living that seems to think appearances are more important than what lies beneath. Our superficial society positively seeks to cover us up more and more whether with information (that comes from the outside and which does not inform) or with 'stuff' that most young people nowadays toil for days on end in order to buy.

This is how one becomes 'Earth-Proof': by divesting your self of its vital energies, by covering it up and removing it from the breathings of the planet (the weather, the rain, the heat, the cold), by allowing your awareness to wane (the more you cover up your body the less opportunity it has of thinking), and by allowing machines to carry you.

'Man', not as Homo sapiens but simply as Homo, in his complacency and corpulence, almost constitutes a new species.

The trick then becomes one of un-proofing the self, of getting rid of your clothes, at the very least whittling them down to 2 basic 'uniforms', one for outside, and one for indoors. 'Always wear the same clothes,' the Dumbarton-born David Byrne says on the inlay sleeve of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense. 'People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.' Feel the weather. Invest yourself not in clothes but in soil and air. Clothe yourself in the rain and the mist, feel that smirr gently penetrate your outer layers of skin. The weather adds something to you. It does not take away. One is seasoned by the unclothing of the self. One is ventilated and enlightened. 

As the Scottish apostle for simple living, Dugald Semple, once wrote: clothes are just another form of distancing from the sun. (Or, equally, from being enlightened).

All this you realise when you get the body moving. That the body itself thinks. That the body itself feels (not the brain). Cover it up and seal it off, and you cover up and seal off the wider possibilities of thought. No wonder people are so stupid. The stupor has facilitated the fashioning of the ego. And the ego in turn has decided that 'it' is the real entity. Which of course it's not.

All the while, we are becoming more and more earth-proofed (great news for capitalists). We care little of what happens to our planet (judging by the carbon footprint most westernized people have and their eagerness to abandon their own locomotive force). The war of capitalism has claimed our locomotion, our local, and now with an over-technologized society, our wits and werwithal and our powers of locating. This is the Trinity that leads you to 'God' - the locus of the local, the locating and the locomoting - and when the Trinity is corrupted, then you are without 'God': in other words, you have been cleaved apart from all that is, and in spite of the crowds of people you surround yourself with, you are entirely alone.

Here we have the paradox, that the solitary wanderer, at one with the earth, the elements, awareness, his own vital moving, is 'together' (gathered with everything else), and that the throngs who need each other are in truth so alone that they have to seek each other out. The godless are in truth the earth-less, the rain-less and the flower-less. They have, like the prophecies foretold, become like the inert machines that carry them: life-less.

So, tear off the duvets, rip off the colourful panels that decorate your quilted cell.... Let your skin and your brain breathe! The word 'brain' after all contains air and rain.

And if you have to cover up some bits, then do so like Tarzan, sparingly and athletically...

Taps aff!

Short Circuits that Short Circuit

There's no better circuit than the short circuit, no better route than that which roots, no better way to move than under one's own steam, with the whole power of the cosmos behind you...

Whenever I lived abroad - in 13 countries thus far - as a teacher of English (at least that's what they thought I was teaching!), I always started off (when I settled in to my accommodations) by making a route for jogging, or several routes in and around where I lived. I recall in Warsaw, jogging through pine groves and allotment gardens, the great Russian Cemetery and beneath massive rookeries. I always the best thing for any creature when finally wrested from their slumber was, not a cup of coffee (such headshots first thing in the morning surely bode no good) but a little vigorous exercise. To be sure, I love my coffee, but I also love the natural 'coffee' of one's own vital engines. 

Here, in Glasgow, those engines are in constant use, and the routes I have uncovered here around the shires and the valley over the past decade or so, are worth their weight in gold. Indeed, the other day I looked at one of my maps on which I had scored some of those routes, and it resembled a pot-bound plant, albeit in two dimensions. It's then I realized that these 'routes' (under one's own steam) are actually roots (sometimes the English language delights in delighting you with its happy coincidences), that embed you deeper and more intimately into place, and by extension, into the planet as a whole.

At any rate, I was curious as to the coincidence between the short circuit (route) and the electrical variety that is defined as....

 a connection between two nodes that forces them to be at the same voltage. In an 'ideal' short circuit, this means there is no resistance and thus no voltage drop across the connection. In real circuits, the result is a connection with almost no resistance. In such a case, the current is limited only by the resistance of the rest of the circuit.

And then there is Zizek's take:

A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network– faulty, of course, from the stanpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading?

He continues:

Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions.

By using the (minor) lens of Nature to short circuit the reading of civilization and society, I can learn to breathe and be naturally. I can also begin to see the system, as I analyze and contemplate the whole. Indeed, this may well be the most accurate way of describing the essence of my hill-walking-cycling of the past decade: short-circuiting the circuit (the circuit being the circus of civilization).

Oh, how I have learned to breathe as a result!

So, next time you're thinking of going to the hamster-mill, take a look outside, around you, at the nature, the ponds and parks and quiet little groves.... Take a vigorous walk, or even stumble into a jog, but feel free to pause (fluency is all about the pausing) and inhale the scenery, maybe even talk to the squirrels and starlings....

Cycling with Saint Patrick

Here, you can see the shortish circuit that is this particular route (routes, if you have enough of them, are roots!). I cycled and walked this one, but you needn't take the bike at all.

In Belden Lane's Backpacking with the Saints, he remarks in the chapter on solitude, that the life of the soul thrives in community, but it begins with a radical aloneness.... The only true self we have to give is one that is grounded in a solitary life.

I'm not quite sure  how radical your aloneness is when you've got a dog yapping at your heels (sorry Belden, but you asked for that one), but up here, away from all the pseudo-tech, and pseudo-humans, we have both the radical as a rooting and a recollecting, and community, as in the communities of insects, plants, and birds...

But it's true that without the solitude to attune... the radical would soon disappear.

Remember, these hills are where Patrick made his cell, beneath the stars, up there in the desertic moors of heather, listening to his self. It is why I come up here - to Listen. Not to anything in particular, but to the universe as a whole.

Indeed, listening may well be the 'principal sense' for attunement. The tune after all is not something we see or touch. When you come into the hills, alone (really alone, no dog, no tech, no BFF), and as often as I do (I am spoiled for choice living where I do in the middle of a strath), you soon tap into your deeper, wiser, self... This is where your listening comes in, as this oracle talks to you. I find myself having conversations in mid-air that are not entirely pronounced by 'me'. Indeed, it is the locomotive force, it is the land's curves themselves as I walk steadily across and through them, it is the water falling from the jutting braes, it is the new ten foot deer fence the farmers have just slung up, it is the stonechat who has just come to inspect me after checking me out for the last hour sitting quietly on a dry stonewall. All this is listening, or as Heidegger liked to say, hearkening, as in a powerful attentive hearing. 

I find that in order to hearken which is not simply listening, one needs to sweep clean the mind of any possible intrusions, no matter how slight. But you cannot do this by thinking it. This is where your locomotive force and ascending come in. They stop you thinking. They bring along a new kind of 'thinking' that is more bodily than heady.

By bodying forth through nature, alone, and without the possibility of another person crossing your path (it is quite surreal at times at just how people-empty these peripheral hill ranges are considering how near the city of Glasgow is), your senses come alive, become attuned to Nature (beyond 'world' and into cosmos, the beautiful whole) and Self. The athleticism of the body gives way to an athleticism of mind. One actually enters into a greater Mind once the exit threshold of the ego has been passed. One begins to commune, quietly, with everything. One's mind becomes areated, ventilated, fresh and lively. Just like one's body. One begins to hear as if for the very first time.

 It is amazing how eloquent the earth can be when your ears are awake.

 With the city of Glasgow in the background, and the gentle valley.

 Nothing to see. No thing. All circumcess.

 Wheels are wings, they expand and extend my home range.

The dry stone walls up here are things of beauty, and all manner of life. Organic architecture at its finest.

Traversing the Cosmos on a Bicycle

4 hours, and it feels as if I've crossed the cosmos... and in a way, I have. Yet, I've only cycled from Barrhead up into the hills behind Neilston and returned via Pollok Country Park.

And yet, the wonders I have beheld en route....

It's amazing how a little locomotive force, a little flying and soaring (did you think cycling was something else?), through car-free (care-free) back country lanes with views over the whole strath, can transform and transfigure. 

Taking a step back is essential in order to see the whole. And if one steps back 'far' enough, one might even see oneself, as perhaps the land and the animals see us. Coming up here, then, to the rim that encircles this grey-green bowl, is far enough to envision our Self, space and peace enough to begin communicating beyond our own kind. When you live in the city, such communicating is nigh on impossible. All we have is pets and people, no real animals. Existentially petrified and pet-ified, their lives revolve around a fabrication called the 'ego', a non-natural construct that has emerged out of the unnatural (anti-Nature) society that predicates itself upon the destruction of habitat (what did you think 'construction' was if not the flip-side of destruction?) in order to propagate its own kind beyond natural limits. 'Home' has been corrupted in the most heinous way, by boxing us in, in apartments (being apart), or detached (not together) houses. We can already see through language, in the detached and the apart, the corruption of the whole - the together - of the communing and communicating. Indeed, this fragmentation is only spurred on by false technology which sees people (especially youngsters who clearly do not want or know how to respond to their environment) being ferried about, with their ears plugged in and eyes nailed down, as if in pressure suits. 

The long and short of it is that people are in a stupor. Stupidity emerges. Obesity rears its ugly face. 

The body-mind is corrupted.

Cycling round the strath, pausing plenty to take in those views, inhale that air, and maybe even write down some wayward thoughts that I have encountered en route, gets rid of that stupor and its resultant contagions. We emerge out of the abberation called the city, and soon find ourselves emerging too out of its alienated correspondant, the citizen. In our coming out of the city to its peripheral hills, we start to be-come something else, indeed something that is not 'a thing'. The thing (as well as being the third greatest horror film ever made) is a construct of man's unnatural world. There are no things in Nature, only systems in touch with other systems, only relations and relatives.

Family then, in its widest possible sense, begins to appear on the horizons. It may be brother sun or sister moon (another great film, Zeffirelli's Brother Sun Sister Moon about the life of Francis of Assisi), or your animal brethren. It may be the soil itself, the hills, the streams, the flowing sky. And what of the plants and grasses. They are all your relatives without whom your life would be a lot less vibrant. Surely, by now, with all our cleverness, we know of the transubstantiation of grass into flesh.

I've never understood why you would want to diminish such a glorious context, and reduce it down to two screaming weans and a wife that wants to kill you by nagging. And I haven't learned from my own mistakes. I've learned from other people's.

There is a heft (for those who have insight) that comes with living in society and being part of what they call 'civilization'. Our comfort is built upon the suffering of others, whether that suffering is of the land itself and its soils, or of animals that have been unceremoniously evicted from their habitat because we need to build more pokey housing schemes and motorways. Cycling the back-roads of the Glasgow strath has enopened me to animality and the land - in short, Nature - in a way that I could not have imagined ten years ago. 

I have begun to see family in a wider sense,  in the shape of the cosmos. I no longer feel confined to my own kind or my own planet. I am a universal life-form who has shed his skin through his own systemic forces, who has re-moved his construct through the simple act of moving.

Yet, the construct is as sturdy as a house, and it will take much effort and time to dismantle and demolish it. It will take even more time to allow the bare ground left behind to flourish once again. But it will. All you need is faith. In Nature. In your Self.

And most importantly, in the brakes on your bicycle!

27 Locks: Anniesland to Bowling

 Approaching Bowling...

Looking down towards Port Glasgow, past Dunglass Castle and the Henry Bell obelisk memorial.

At Dumbarton Castle, ready for the train back up the road...