Stopping & Stopidity

To stop is to be stupid. To stop is to become a stopper, not a 'gob-stopper', but a 'life-stopper', an 'aliveness-stopper', a 'flow-stopper'. To stop is to be stupid. It's that simple. Look at the words. They're almost the same. And yet.

Etymologically, the word stop derives from vulgar Latin stuppare, to stop or stuff with tow or oakum, from Latin stuppa, 'coarse part of flax, tow'. This tow was used to make plugs that could then be used to seal leaks, to stop up drainage, to close eardrums.

This may explain why car drivers are so dumb, and why (wild) cyclists and walkers by contrast are so ingenious and alive in comparison, because of stopping and not stopping (otherwise known as flowing). The car driver stops where the wild cyclist/walker flows. One is thus cosmic whilst the other is anti-cosmic.

This anti-cosmos manifests itself in a loss of original continuity. To be sure, animals and the wild often come to a standstill - forests have been known to freeze - but they never stop flowing beneath this seeming stasis. Man, on the other hand, because he has aligned his self with the industrial, and with the machine, stops. This is your clue to 'Technology' and what is true techne-logos : the capacity and capability to continue flowing in spite of breakdowns. This is how you find out if your technology is true technology or false technology: true technology never stops, it never breaks down, it never conks out. Sure, it can have the odd mishap, say in the instance of a broken arm or a lost eye, but that mishap begins mending itself and regenerating immediately. If it can't regenerate then other organs will compensate for this. And if it can't compensate it will reconfigure. This is the essence of technology: always going and accordingly, never stopping.

To stop is to be stupid.

Skylark Dial-Up

No, it's not Vaughn Williams' old internet service provider, but the sound of the animal, in this case the skylark, connecting with the universe. If you listen to this wonderful little bird you might think as I did this morning, up atop the Kilpatrick Braes, that it's your old NTL dial-up modem going mental. That, or your ZX Spectrum loading another overworked TDK D-90 cassette. But is that not what this little guy is doing: loading? In the form of downloading, uploading, breathing, and communicating. Is not the skylark, like every other creature on this planet, a 'modem' that facilitates a connection to an 'internet' and a cosmic web? Is not their song then the act of dialing up to the web? Which begs the question: should we not all, humans especially, be learning to sing as these skylarks do, communicating only the essential through our own technology? And dialling up to the great web of Life, skylark-like?

Into the Wilderness

Glasgow is fortunate in many respects in being a valley. This means of course that there are hills on all sides, hills that due to their awkward misshapen nature are difficult to build on. And where there is an absence of buildings there is generally a profusion of Nature and of wilderness. Take this morning for example, jumping with bike onto the 11.14 to Milngavie from Partick. Arriving at Milngavie at 11.30 I head up to Mugdock village a couple of miles away (and, more importantly, a couple of hundred metres up). It's a great start that opens up the valves so by the time you're up in Mugdock you might as well be flying for that ecstatic release that hill-cycing enables. And we are flying because it's all downhill along the Old Mugdock Road down to Strathblane. Here, we avoid the main road and take the path that leads round behind the road beside the Blane Water. To the left we have the precipitous Cuilt Brae and its woods and to the right we have the great mesa of the Campsie Fells and the Strathblane Hills. We are within a valley within a valley. In short, we are in the wilderness if you can excuse the odd visual of Blanefield's housing. Exiting onto the Blanefield Road, we rise with the land up again towards Carbeth where we join the WHW and head towards Mugdock Wood. Down and through the wood we are ejected onto the road we started on. Another five minutes and we're back at the train station. I haven't rushed or hurried at all during my cycle, quite the opposite, I got off two or three times to walk. I feel as if I have been injected with a serum that immunizes me against the horseshit down there in the city. I almost float as I get onto the train. The journey took 70 minutes, the train both ways half an hour. So, there you have it, in the space of a shit film, a trip into the wilderness and back. There ain't many major cities that can boast such sanctifying and savage proximity.

 

 

 

The red dotted path near coffee stain at top of map is the one to take instead of the main roadto Blanefield. When you come down the Old Mugdock Road you will see the Co-op at the bottom. Turn left (not right) at the junction and this will take you onto the red dotted path which will deposit you onto the Blanefield Road without so much as a car in sight.

Buzzkill

I stumbled upon Sylvester Stallone the other day working out isometrically. This means at the age of seventy five he has finally come round to the idea that lifting weights is not entirely a good thing for the bones and joints. Things start seizing up when you get old he says as if we didn't know. At any rate, the Italian stallion is a figure to behold midway through his eighth decade here on Earth. He now works out with rubber bands (by the looks of it on the coast in front of the ocean), stretching his way to fitness and health. 'Boredom is a buzzkill' he says when referring to gyms and the repetitive act of weightlifting or treadmilling. Which is why I cycle round the strath, and gave up gyms about ten years ago. Because when you're out in the open naturally, the exercise never seems like exercise, it never imposes itself upon you like it does in a gym. Wild cycling means you're fluid and always going somewhere in the open which means you never focus on the exercise itself. There are other things that require your attention other than  the size of your biceps. Nature enters the fray, whether it be the spray off the ocean, or that kestrel over there that thinks it can outfly me. The wind, the rain, the cloud cover, the sun, are all also present. Naturally. The variety of topography is also felt as one cycles through it. There is real diversity in the open. The buzzkill thus never enters. Boredom has never reared its head in the forty odd years that I've been on my bicycle. Which means my buzz has never been killed. And the buzz, as all wild animals will tell you, is everything.  

 

 

Ecstasy in the Snow

It doesn't take long to get up into the beyond. About half an hour from where I live in Cessnock with bike and train (to Kilpatrick). And that train is simply wonderful for its emptiness, its comfort, and its rapidity. This morning it was the 11.19 Helensburgh Express which deposited me at Dalmuir some ten minutes later having bulleted through the suburbs without me even noticing them. Ten minutes on a train is just enough to get the flask out and enjoy some of that hot lava java. Passing Clydebank I see a couple of rooftop pigeons flying and fluttering, and I realise (as I do every time I see wild animals) that ecstasy is your natural aboriginal condition. Man, having closetted his consciousness, has relieved his self of that natural ecstasy and has to go in search for it instead. The pigeons by contrast have never sold their selves out therefore they inhabit ecstasy. Man no longer moves but is carried (by machines and ideologies) and is thus de-ecstasized. His consciouness becomes removed from its natural condition, that of ecstasy, because he himself (his body and mind) has been re-moved. The pigeons on the other hand have not been removed from anything least of all their own aboriginal operating system. And so they inhabit ecstasy. And it was this fleeting ecstasy that I saw when I saw these two pigeons at Clydebank. Moreover, about half an hour later, having braved the 'hard to kill hill', I myself became a pigeon.

 

 

 

 

 

Transport as Drug

The act of being carried is more dangerous and devious than you could possibly imagine. It is at the root of all man's problems. Whether ideological or physical the act of being carried is at one and the same time the act of being deported from one's original scene of Being. This 'eco-existential deportation', which is what transportation really ought to be called, removes one from everything local including one's self. The self you see, like the universe, is a local  entity. It is not over there, but emphatically here. Moreover, this self is not just local but immediate too. This means that you are not 'then' or 'hence' but, again, like the universe, emphatically now. The act of transport removes you from this here and now by infecting your bodymind with an absence. This absence is the removal from your own locomotive force which pumps blood around the body and ignites the heart and mind. This removal and absence then removes one from oneself through the simple dismissal of the body. One becomes an apparition, a ghost not so much in the machine but of it. The engine of the body, the heart, is displaced and replaced (and thus weakened and contaminated) by a mechanical engine that transports you. One no longer becomes 'important' as significant and meaningful since your importing quality - the bodymind - has been displaced by a transporting medium. This transporting medium, for its removal of yourself from yourself (effectively a miniaturization of the self), is thus as good as a drug, specifically some kind of anasthaetic that numbs and sedates simply through the sedentary and the non-moving body being moved through space. Moreover, man's Memory (which has emerged through aboriginal orientation and the natural navigation of the land) deteriorates. The narcotic of being carried (psycho-physically) - in this instant by Civilization, Progress, and Science - induces a stupor in the animal, and it this stupor - through the loss of Heart, the loss of Memory, and the resultant loss of Mind - that has railroaded man into a way of life that becomes evermore stupefying, stupid, and addictive.

Excursion to the Edge

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.

Bob Black, The Abolition of Work

The black line from top centre left down to bottom centre. Here the route goes through Queen's Park and up and over Camphill Avenue down to the White Cart Water path and onto Spean Street. (And even though this route is clearly still on the OS map above, it is off the Glasgow A-Z I have. Carmunnock and High Castlemilk obviously not being deemed important enough to make it ;)

 

I did it on April Fools day last year for the first time under the post 'lassooing the horizon', but man am I glad I did it again today. What a route especially when you consider how many built-up areas you pass through. From my gaff it's across the motorway and onto the marvellous Albert Drive, a French boulevard if ever there was one, a boulevard moreover that is devoid of cars and replete with some fine mansions and castellated villas. This is already a great start to our excursion up to the edge, an empty Pollokshields and no cars, and of course that winter light beaming me up and calling my soul to the edge. From Pollokshields it's through Strathbungo, past Queen's Park (remaining on Queen's Drive as there are just too many leashes in the park). Here, we swing past Battlefield and into Cathcart along Holmwood Road (Alternatively, you could head past the Battlefield Rest straight into Sinclair Avenue and then swing round onto the lovely Spean Street which runs alongside the White Cart Water). Just before Cathcart station hang a left up into Old Castle Road to the little park where Mary Queen of Diddies sat on her fat little ass and watched her army get routed on the opposing Camphill a couple of miles yonder in Langside.

 

From here it's up and over Simshill via Shetland Avenue and then we follow the golf course along the empty Drakemire Drive turning left into Lainshaw Drive which will take us onto Carmunnock Road in Castlemilk. From here, follow the road up to the roundabout and turn left towards the big wood and St. Mary's Seat which is about 2km further on. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Up and through the wood (there are a few differet routes) and you should see the big wind turbine. The views across the valley are not far away...! Following a brief inhalation, it was then back down the way we came, alternating here and there with different roads. The way back is bliss after cycling uphill for about 70 minutes, and the sun was still out. Not to mention, this is one of the rare all-road trips I have made, and yet perfectly peaceful (perhaps because there were less cars on the roads, but mostly because I never had to navigate around demented dog-walkers and their nooses). I got back, never rushing, five minutes short of two hours after I had left. Amazing! Less than two hours, at a leisurely pace, mind, body, spirit galvanized... and another New Year blessed with my own renewable and very clean energy. God Bless the bicycle and the body! And the edges!