The Great Escape: Sedgwick the Cyclist

Following another watching of The Great Escape I can safely say that James Coburn's antics with a bicycle have had a marked effect on how I have turned out.

I can recall as a child (who can't?) watching the film at Christmas and thinking how few of them actually escaped. So much so that I wondered what the 'great' in the title really meant. I now realize that it meant James Coburn escaping by bicycle and on foot through the countryside, over the hills, and through the mountains.... and the 'tunnel kings', Danny & Willy, escaping by row-boat, presumably along the rivers and canals of high Germany towards the Baltic Sea. For me, then, it was the slowness of these escapes that stayed with me, the composure that they maintained, like the bank robber who steps into his getaway car and gently moves away, stopping at the lights, behaving as if nothing is wrong. Who would stop two men in a row-boat, or a man on a bicycle? But these guys in their monkey-suits with their travel documents and stamped faces.... now there's a motley crue if ever I saw one. And then there's poor Steve... the cooler king... who allows a motorbike engine to usurp his own vital movement, and of course gets caught. He is also, outside the world of cinema, one of the first actors to die in real life because of his penchant for racing (he stupidly wore helmets laced with asbestos which caused his cancer and ultimate death at age 50).

So, as a young impressionable boy, watching the antics of Hendley the Scrounger, Blythe the Forger, and Sedgwick the Cyclist (he was actually the 'manufacturer'), I got to thinking about using your own steam to move, about composure and slowness, about that scene near the end where the French guides drop Sedgwick off near the Spanish border and he continues onwards with a new Spanish guide into the pastoral surrounds of freedom through the Pyrenees. 

As I look at myself now, I am Sedgwick, a little shorter to be sure, and with a bicycle that does not shake the bones so much... I am that creature heading into the hills, guided only by my nose and my interest in Being, pedalling slowly and calmly into the pastoral surrounds of freedom....

Always remembering that the flipside of an escape is an entrance....

Il Deserto Rosso

It's not the 'peace'...

it's the space.

Even noise here cannot sustain itself.

The Red Desert. Looking north-west from Blairskaith Muir trig. point.

A Freudian Slip of the Glove

Whilst maintaining a ritual of monday mornings in the hills - what better way to start the week! - I headed up to the holy rock of Duncarnock Mount. And man was it windy! Yet, this is how you develop your relationship with the elements, with the animals, with the land and the sky. By simply being with them.

I have many 'lovers' so to speak, none of them actually human. I spend time with them, these non-human amateurs, I listen to them, I rest and play with them. Occasionally, I will also talk to them. 

Man, by and large, has lost these relationships to the elements and to the land. He is involved now in a coagulated and incestuous set of relationships with his own domesticated kind (I also include dogs and pets here, and any kind of de-wilded creature exploited for its companionship) that does nothing for his expansive self, his telluric self which has grown out of the earth herself. 

As such, the human has amputated his self and become -man. Yet, as David Abrams suggest in The Spell of the Sensuous, we are only human in contact and conviviality with what is not human. Without the soils and skies we are nothing. And yet we treat them with disdain with our boxed-in-ness and our non-thinking. It is only by coming into the elements, getting away from the noise and your own mutilated kind, that you will have any chance of hearing the voices that speak to you from afar. That you will have any chance of truly thinking. A thinking that is as much space as it is thought. 

It is only by living openly, that you will begin to welcome space into your brain. It is this sort of thing that led Ortega Y Gassett to proclaim:

I live therefore I think.

One of those purely unintentional 'hanging-your-wet-gloves-on-the-nearest-plant' moments atop the blessed Duncarnock Mount.

Wits and Werwithal: Rooting your Brain into the Land

The faster we go... the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything.

Wendell Berry, An Entrance to the Woods


Show me where you live and and I will tell you who you are.

Ortega Y Gasset

Yesterday, whilst negotiating the landscapes of greater Glasgow I quickly realized that this is how your brain becomes rooted, how you become the land, how your tendrils and filaments eke out invisibly into places and spaces. In negotiating the land at a bodily level, and at a locomotive level, the land insinuates itself into you. Indeed, it is a reciprocal circum-cess: as you groove your self into the land, the land grooves itself into you. Until such a time as to fuse the two inextricably together.

Crossing country by bicycle or on foot requires the attention to detail that a city does not require. To be sure, a city is full of deadly hazards, but we have become so inured to them, that it is not really a matter of life and death at all. Walking alone in the countryside could not be more different. There is an element of danger simply by being on your own and in a space where no-one else is. Add to this, the uneven footing, the various types of land being crossed, from heath to bog to rock, and you have a brain that is working full steam ahead in figuring out the best way forward (or backward as the case may be). In a city, by contrast, one's brain atrophies with its fully standardized settings and homogenized spaces.

How man has learned to breathe in hell...

But man does not breathe, nor does he move. His breathing is done for him. It's called 'non-invasive ventilation'. He is hooked up to all manner of apparatuses that one might call 'life-support'. Tethered to all sorts of guy ropes and anchors - media networks and webs that do not connect but rather embed him incestuously within his own kind - man floats off, ungrounded and perverted, into the realm of fantasy.

Which only compounds a further reliance on science and technology to do it for him.

But as we all know, being hooked up to a machine that breathes for you is no kind of living.

The stupidity of modern man (a function of the stupor that glitzy modernity confers upon him) can in some part be put down to this loss of land-interaction and respiratorial transaction. The era of conveyance is a lot more dangerous than we think. It is in the words of the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, the road to metaphysical exile. In allowing his self to be transported man has lost his wits and werwithal, those parts of the mind that mix in intuition and instinct to render one fully animated and aware. Wendell Berry once wrote that people cannot change places as fast as their bodies can be transported. This ties in nicely with the old Arab saying that the soul can only go as fast as the pace of a trotting camel. There is a metaphysical disconnect in the act of being conveyed, which of course is a physical disconnect too. This is multiplied whenever we are carried to far-flung places. But this is the deviousness of capitalism, and of tourism: that the familiar is uninteresting, that one's place of nativity is by definition boring... and unlikely to instil within you the excitement and exoticism of an island in the Mediterranean.

A renewed openness to our customary places is required in order to see just how unfamiliar we are with those places. However, as long as we remain tethered to these incestuous life-denying networks, as long as we remain hermetically sealed behind screen and speed, and technology, our openness to place and space is simply not there.

'To be on the lookout' the French philosophe Gilles Deleuze once said is the mark of every animal, the measure of every philosopher and thinker. If you are not 'on the lookout' then you are not animated. And if you are not animated, then you are either in a state of cryogenic suspension, or in some sort of zombie-like stage of man's cocoon-like de-evolution.

Man, as Kant once wrote, is the only animal that has to work. He is also, as Berry implies in Life is a Miracle, the only animal that doesn't know where he is.

The beast of Duncarnock Mount. Try getting up its scrambly north-west face without paying severe attention to where you actually are. Then there's the whole human history attached to this once prestige stone age homestead to unravel.

The physical and the metaphysical meet atop Duncarnock Mount...

Mister Glasgow

I live therefore I think. 

Ortega Y Gasset



Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are.

Ortega Y Gasset

One of the most profound insights I ever had was cycling through the wonderful forests of north-east Poland one fine spring sun-dappled morning. As a butterfly sat on the earthen path in front of me gathering a ray of light which had penetrated the thick forest canopy I vanished.

I wrote about this 'vanishing' extensively and it is featured here as The Map is not the Territory in one of this blog's earlier posts. The insight of course was that the forest and the organism were not separate. To see them as separate - the forest, the butterfly, the sun - was to see a corrupted reality. To see them as one was to see everything.

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset proposed that philosophy had to overcome the limitations of both idealism (in which reality is centered around the ego) and ancient-medieval realism / classical scientific methodology (in which reality is outside the subject) to focus on the only truthful reality: "my life"—the life of each individual. 

 Gasset suggested that there was no 'me' without things, and things were nothing without me: "I" (human being) cannot be detached from "my circumstance" (world). This led Ortega y Gasset to pronounce his famous maxim "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" (I am I and my circumstance) (Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914) which he always put at the core of his philosophy.  

This led him to such statements as the one that opens this post, that the organism's environment is the organism. That, as the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzbyski used to say, the map is not the territory... You are!

When I stand on any number of Glasgow's peripheral hills and look down into the strath, I get a strange feeling now that I am somehow looking into a great mirror. It is a curious experience no doubt but also an experience that 'enlarges' and expands, until it comes to align this human body with its matricial environment. The result is a vanishing of the small ego-infatuated self. 

It appears odd at first that the word circumstance actually means to stand around. If I have learned anything as an amateur linguist of some thirty odd years it's never to take for granted prefixes like circum- . Indeed, as a matter of interest, it may be useful to suggest that instead of understanding - one can come to circum-stand, in comprehending the circular (helical) nature of the circumstances that make up 'you'.

This 'you' may then be the result of unnatural materials, unnatural spaces, synthetic light and chemically treated food etc. Or it could be the consequence of great draughts of space, natural light and air-conditioning, and a general openness to all involved.

In the former, the modern workaday slave world that so many have to deal with, Mister and Missus Closet emerge, a closed and ego-filled entity that is both narcissistic and nihilistic.

In the latter, Mister (or Missus) Glasgow emerges... an organism that feels the strath within, that is the landscape that accomodates and nourishes it; that is alive. That sees... now without the blindspot of this modern-day veil, everything...

You Are How You Move

That is better which is inherent in things better or prior or more honourable: thus health is better than strength and beauty. Aristotle

You soon realize when you get the body moving that Mind is not separate. Mind starts moving too.

You are how you move, and if you don't move (if you allow machines to convey and carry you), then you are not.

All the great philosophers from Aristotle to Rousseau knew of the powers of the peripatetic. Knew that the body itself did the thinking through its moving...

To give up locomotive force is to die... not in the conventional sense (chance would be a fine thing) but in a much more languidly torturous sense, as in the zombification-obesification of the human.

Since eating is largely a function of moving, of how much energy you have spent and need to replenish, it is more accurate to say that You are how you move before You are what you eat.

In every school a gymnasium, or place for physical exercise, should be established for the children. This much-neglected provision is, in my opinion, the most important part of education, not only for the purpose of forming robust and healthy physiques, but even more for moral purposes, which are either neglected or else sought only through a mass of vain and pedantic precepts which are simply a waste of breath.

(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move my thoughts begin to flow...A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain…Only while we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical wooden dull to read. 

(Henry Thoreau)

Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded. A person not sick will not be injured by getting wet. It is but taking a cold bath, which never gives a cold to any one. Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed. The recipe of those two descriptions of beings is simple diet, exercise and the open air, be it's state what it will; and we may venture to say that this recipe will give health and vigor to every other description.

(Thomas Jefferson)

Philosophers have long recognized the curious way that man builds extensions of himself and thus detaches himself from his natural state. Like it or not, technology carries within itself the danger of immobilization.

When I was out jogging this morning (never trust a fat philosopher!) through the lovely little Festival Park I stopped to stretch beside the small wooden bridge over the stream. I looked at my leg, the one I had up on the banister, and marvelled at its beauty. Its musculature and integrity was down to 40 odd years of movement and work. A work that was, at its root, primal, or one might say, radical, for its concentrating on Health.

Health after all is that which accommodates everything; it is the root upon which everything rests in its place. When Health is ignored things lose their place, and become confused. Technology then becomes, in this confusion, not this leg that I am marveling at, its sinews and cartilage, its veins and arteries, and the blood pumping through, and its relation to its environment (I walk and cycle, I do not drive), but some thing else, some thing apart from the body, that digs into the bodymind parasitically, infecting it with a form of socio-economic (when it isn't eco-existential) vampirism.

Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. And the poiesis of the fine arts also was called techne.

(Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p.34)

I have never know a piece of man-made technology that has helped man without harming him overall in the long run.

And we are, in the final meditation, and whether you like it or not, in it for the long run... (or jog, if you prefer).

Glasgow Spaceport

Yesterday morning whilst listening to the radio, I heard someone mentioning 'Glasgow Spaceport' as a potential launch-pad for sub-orbital flights into the Earth's high atmosphere. I immediately baulked at the thought that Glasgow's fine air would be polluted by such enormous fuel combustions without first consulting the people who live there. Indeed, the absolute hubris that imposes these so-called benefits upon a nation without first asking its inhabitants seems to be the done thing within the ambition-laden modern era, ambition being none other than its etymology suggests, a hankering after attention by attention-seekers (in other words, infants who have never matured into responsible human beings). 

Later, upon taking off into the Glennifer Braes, I gazed down over the valley, and for a few minutes the light came to shine upon Glasgow Airport. I got to thinking of 'Spaceports' again, and realized in a flash that this was it...! This brae upon which I was standing and spacing out was itself a 'spaceport', as a place where one departs into space. One really cannot say that with any airport since one is sealed in and pressurized to an enormous extent inside the guts of an airplane as to amputate you from any space. 

The Glennifer Braes like the Kilpatrick Braes and the Campsie Fells to the north, are spaceports of the most natural and beneficial kind. These 'hills' allow us, unlike airplanes and their like, to encounter space first hand, to inhale it and have intercourse with it. Any machine that bottles you up removes these possibilities much to the detriment of the self and ultimately the planet which institutes and constitutes that self. So the next time, you hear of irresponsible scientists wasting more public money on infantile projects like 'space-travel' or 'star-trekking', just come on up here, under your own steam, and breath in the space of the natural world in one fell swoop...

Flight can simply be a matter of standing still and imagining, of spacing out and seeing.

You will be a healthier, and more spacious, creature for it...

 Glasgow Spaceport!