Flow-er

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous

If everyone cycled everywhere instead of being driven, the world’s problems - existential, economic, ecologic - though they might not be solved overnight could nevertheless be solved very quickly through the simple act of inducting one’s self into a fundamental solidarity not just with one’s own kind, but with all living creatures, the elements, and the planets.

It is this change in how we move (doing it ourselves as opposed to having it done for us) that ostensibly effects a change in our day to day state of consciousness, our perspective, and by extension, our world-self outlook. The car is an indictment of a civilization that is no longer civil at a distance, and only civil on the surface. It is an indictment on an economy that is not economic, and a human that is no longer human but approaching the demented robotic.

David Abrams once wrote that we are only human in our co-sanguinity with other creatures. The movement of the blood is all important here. This is the triumph of the cyclist: his ability to flow fully under his own steam in spite of the sirenic wailing of the automobile. The cyclist realises (as does the walker) that the automobile is the autonomous individual who is mobile of his own accord, and not some machine that carries him often at great cost to his self and to the environment he inhabits. This tin machine like some dastardly pesticide sprayed by politicians and social conventions kills the flower within us, or at the very least diminishes its natural blossoming.

It is thus that the cyclist, in this open-flowing state, and in this metanoia of mind inculcated by such a state of being with the world, becomes ‘flower’ and begins to flourish.

The Profundity of the Facade

All these shop fronts (here and in earlier posts this month) are not only a celebration of the creative spirit of the local entrepreneur, but are representative of some deeper essence of Nature at large: self-cleaning, self-energizing, D.I.Y., diversity, brewing/distilling, wayfaring, flowing, growing, expressing, flourishing…. so that through regarding these facades and meditating upon them, one should penetrate one’s Self more deeply and radically.

The bicycle represents this Nature at large, the façade you.

Handmade Photography

I often thought my photos were pretty good until I started drawing them. And then I realized that, in most cases, my drawings were much more evocative than the photographs. Not only could I highlight certain areas of the photograph, and bring certain objects forward into view, but just the general patina of ink on paper made by the hand, was enough to convince me that my photography up until this point was not photography at all but just a collection of pictures waiting for a more gentle hand.

Pavement Propoganda

Its amazing the amount of pavement propaganda you encounter during a routine morning cycle through the city. Everything is trying to capture your attention, with the hope of eventually enslaving it.

The propaganda normally comes in the form of a partial truth: a fact, a date, an action. Juxtaposing this partial truth next to a whole truth (like a bicycle) has the uncanny habit of subverting what is being presented, on occasion actually inverting what is being said, to the point where we see the spurious nature of the propaganda.

The conclusion here is rather simple: put a bicycle next to anything and you already improve the picture.

In Praise of Saddles

Upon recently watching the saccharine and mawkish movie The Intern, a movie not so much about an intern as about the fruits and effects of pride that discover themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel, I came across the phrase: sitting is the new smoking.

And I thought: not if you’re in a saddle it ain’t.

And then I got to thinking about the chair, the modern comfortable chair which has been ergonomically designed to have you in it for inordinate amounts of time. I thought back to my time in Warsaw where my furnished apartment came with a standard ‘communist armchair’ whose filling was so out of sorts (deliberately) that you could only sit in it for a very short period of time before developing numb-bum syndrome. My then Polish girlfriend had told me that this was part of the design process, that it wasn’t a flaw as I had initially presumed but a perfection. I kinda liked it too, that here was a chair, which was comfortable up to a point, but which would not allow you to fall asleep in it, or to remain in it for any considerable period of time. It was as if this simple armchair had been fitted with its very own ejector seat, an ejector seat that was silently telling you, ‘This sitting for hours on end is not natural!’ And it isn’t.

The difference between the cyclist’s sitting and an office worker’s sitting should be obvious, that the cyclist is pedalling as he is sitting, the cyclist is working - he is powering his own seat - and has thus de-served it. The same cannot be said for those sitting in offices. Quite the opposite in fact.

And so I thought of the chair and its history and how far it had come from its days of royalty and dignity to evolve into that perfunctory pinnacle of ergonomic perfection the Lazyboy, or its corporate equivalent, the tremendously engineered Sport Seat.

Once a symbol of the chosen few, the chair, overtaking the chest, bench and stool, has now become the ubiquitous vestige of everyone, and for good reason. Not because they have suddenly been granted some higher authority as the word ‘chair-man’ might suggest, but so they can sit for longer periods of time in the same position, presumably carrying out work that is so mind-numbingly awful that they need the comfort of the chair in order to offset the existential unease caused by the work itself.

In fact it wasn’t until the 16th century that the chair eventually became common, and the chest, the bench and the stool were relegated to the second division. It’s no surprise then to learn that this was about the same time that the notion of work began to shift from being part of a holistic life-view (making your own clothes, growing your own food, building your own dwellings, the operative word being ‘own’) to a dissociated world-view where one’s life gradually became more and more separate from one’s work, and thus the world.

Indeed, we have now reached the zenith of absurdity when one states (simultaneously absolving oneself of the causes and effects of that work), that ‘I am not my work’, and ‘my work does NOT define who I am’. The implication being that work is no longer a medium for the nourishment and the growth of the human, but simply a means to making money.

But such statements are the result of a society that does not think anymore… that does not want to think, that is in effect anti-contemplative, and obsessed with being in an almost permanent state of busyness.

    ‘...the contemplative will have a totally different attitude to work’, writes Raimond Pannikaar in Invisible Harmony. ‘The primacy will not be given to work but to working, i.e., to the act itself (the finis operationis of the Scholastics) so that every work will have to yield its own justification, or rather its own meaning. If an act is not meaningful in itself, it will simply not be done’.

Dugald Semple, whose education was nothing more than ‘a form of conscription in preparation for our soulless and war-like commercialism’, wrote in his autobiography A Joy in Living, clearly anticipating my own sentiments, ‘Perhaps this is why I am one of the happy unemployed, and am trying to make up for the human race working too hard.’

Through the Round Window

Earlier this year, inspired by various people, children mostly (but also a few grown ups too), I started drawing. Within a few weeks I realised how much I enjoyed it, and perhaps more importantly how much it en-joyed me! I also began thinking of using the bicycle and the lamppost as a sort of prism through which to view the city of Glasgow. I had always admired certain buildings and areas of the city for their aesthetics, and have always been fascinated by signs and symbols which in these instances have a sort of metaphoric depth to them. I soon developed a key, unconsciously, of using these emblems in my drawings, and of ommitting certain others (no bike chains or locks, spare use of rendering, natural unstaged settings, and of course the ubiquitous bike rack or lamppost). 

I was also fascinated with fascia boards and shop fronts, (inspired by 3 years living in Warsaw and the wonderful examples I saw there), and how they could lead you into a more symbolic setting when combined with the bicycle. The laundrette would come to signify a self-cleansing through energizing one's own self, the cafe or 'espresso' bar the self-expression of the organic human being, the church as religion (as re + ligare, meaning restraint) insofar as avoiding the temptation of being transported and faring the way oneself, etc, etc.)

I began then to couple each picture to a text I had written about the value of cycling, much of these already being in this blog already. And so it was that I began to draw in earnest, and I wondered if I could draw the whole city... in the same way that I had walked it. For drawing itself is a type of wayfaring and discovery...

These are just a few of the dozens I have so far drawn, but I have been amazed at the artistic quality of so many shop fronts in Glasgow, from Dennistoun to Finnieston, from Govanhill to Broomhill, from my own humble Govan to the length and breadth of the Great Western Road... I imagined if I could draw people's attention to my writing (which is the most important thing) via these drawings (which have a much more immediate impact on the viewer/reader then I would have succeeded in my task). Time will tell....

 

Daredevil: The Heretic & the Hero

Dare to leap into the origin. Asvaghosa


The real daredevil, the real daring heretic, is the hero-human-being who chooses his own way, who devises his own route, through the landscape called life.

The daredevil questions and investigates from the outset societal conventions and ways of being not so much in the world but with the world. In the words of one such courageous and daring Scot, Dugald Semple, (who appears to have been largely forgotten in these times of excess and entertainment), it is necessary to conform little and reform much. Or in the words of his trans-Atlantic predecessor Henry Thoreau, to confront the essential facts of life.

Cycling is part of this reform, part of this essential fronting process - with Body, with Mind, with Nature, that can reconnect us to our greater selves. Start with this. The rest will soon follow.

The daredevil dares to not work at the behest of a system that is predicated upon profit, upon the exploitation and destructuring of our fellow beings and the land that shelters us. The daredevil dares to use his own engines, his brain, his heart, to reach the origin. He dares to become an outsider, to become egregiously autonomous, whilst leaving the comfort and security (and the oblivion) of the herd. He understands that lonelinless is a construct devised by men to explain their ignorance of the aliveness of the world. He dares, this daredevil, to have faith in his higher self, this self that man has outsourced and sought to call ‘God’.

The daredevil dares to cycle, to flow and flourish, and to radiate outwards. He dares to re-insert his self back into his environment from which he has been unnaturlly wrenched.

He dares to know, not through some spurious scientific enterprise, but, conscientiously, through the body, through the mind, through the heart.

The daredevil dares to belong, and, beyond the familial and familiar, question the deeper essence of ‘Family’, for our relations and relatives do not suddenly stop with our own kind.

Living in the Presence of Air

..
so there they go
through the wind, the rain, the snow

wild spirits
knowing what they know...

Kenneth White, Late August on the Coast

That's the definition of the word 'aerobic': living in the presence of air. It reminds me of a phrase I read recently in Tim Ingold's book Being Alive to describe the person who moves beneath their own steam, who, in effect, wayfares : Engaged in the currents of the life-world. This, I guess, stands in stark opposition to those who do not wayfare, who rely instead on someone else or something else to fare the way for them, to those who have been disengaged and disconnected from their greater matrix of aliveness: that is, embroiled in the stasis of the workaday world. Where the former is aliveness, the latter is deadness. 

Aerobics, though we may all be acquanited with the word and the organised aerobics of gymnasiums and morning television, is a way of life, and a way of being-in-the-world that is conducive to understanding that world as a natural self-organising phenomenon (into which we are rooted and out of which we flower). Aerobic living gives way to an understanding in the flesh of what the Jains of India and the Celts of Europe (as well as many other intelligent-sensitive beings) called inter-dependent co-arising, the dependence of all things on other things in order to grow and cycle. In the modern-day West however, atomised and segregated beyond repair in some cases, we have lost touch with this inter-dependence and collaboration. There have been many causes of this: beginning some say in the 1600s with the dawn of modern science and Cartesian dualism, swiftly continuing with Newton's mechanistic view of the universe and the triumph of reason and logic over other ways of knowing, and the prevailing propaganda put forward by an overly scientistic society which no longer believes in God (because it no longer has the time nor the inclination to work out what 'god' actually stands for). Any sensitive, conscientious scientists that have come along - Goethe, Schauberger, Schwenk, Sheldrake, Capra, who refuse to accept the possibility of separating the observed from the observer, and put forward corresponding theories, are either dismissed entirely as crackpots, or lauded and then quickly forgotten about. As the wandering Scot Kenneth White states in his essay The Crisis of Reason:

If this modernity has know triumphs it has now reached a stage where, for example, scientists are no longer philosophers, but mere laboratory artisans (hence a science with very little living sense to say to people), where philosophy has degenerated into the mere history of philosophy as a succession of 'schools' one plods through before giving it all up to become a logical positivist, and where psychological distress, based ultimately on the loss of world, is rife and rampant.

Science is all about separation after all, con-science about recognising the connections.

At any rate, getting out into the air, on the air, on a bicycle is a fine way to learn of physics and metaphysics, of science and conscience. Science without conscience is as Rabelais states in Gargantua, the soul's perdition. But of course, scientists have never bothered to work out what soul means. The lack of meditative-contemplative thinking leads one away from the great questions, and the great 'abstracts' like god, soul, love, and leads one instead into the domain of fantastical thinking and fantasy. Cycling aimlessly in the countryside, up to the tops of hills, and along the shores by the sea, emphatically not across the earth but in and through her, is itself an act of intercourse that is not entirely dissimilar to making love. There is union, there is intimacy, there is penetration.

As Henryk Skolimowski writes in Living Philosophy: 'Human beings are just like plants; they can only grow well by working the elements of life into their beings'. Whilst, presumably, at the same time, working out the nonsense.

In a world that is increasingly becoming obsessed with its own narcissitic meanderings, and its own outsorcery, where the pandemics of obesity and stupidity can be easily prevented through a more sensitive and intelligent nurturing and education, where war is a constant headline wherever you look, where security is the buzzword of nations with enemies, maybe living in the presence of air and lifting the lid off our self-made tombs, 'making love' (not war) by riding your bicycle, is not such a bad idea.

The Choreographer: Cycling and the Dance

Cycling is a sort of dancing. Indeed, any form of auto-mobility is a form of dance. The cyclist, like the walker, by virtue of his openness to his environment is attuned to the sounds of where he is, whether it be open country, high plateau or busy city. I find it somewhat alarming the amount of people these days who choose to barricade their senses from their surroundings via headphones and those infernal mobile devices. It is perhaps an indictment not so much of their appreciation of music but their lack of appreciation of where they are, or, perhaps, as the case may be for those city workers (heads down, ears plugged in) heading off to for another day in the office-coffin, a precise understanding of where they are. There is no apparent dance in these crowds of commuters, only hustle and bustle. They have been removed from their larger selves, and forced to sell their days for gold.

When I lived in Warsaw, I initially took the underground the few stops to work every day. When, eventually, I had my bicycle sent over, I began cycling to work, and quickly realised in a series of marvellous epiphanies how much quicker it was, how healthier it was not being squeezed up against some flu-bearing commuter sneezing all over you, how much cheaper it was (although in Warsaw, public transport was remarkably reasonable in price), and how much fresher I was arriving at work having energised my bodymind in that idyllic 20 minute cycle through parks into the city centre. From that day on, I never looked back, and always looked at those passing crowded trams with a smile from then on in. Not only that, but I was privy to great flocks of jackdaws every so often lighting up the night sky. I always wandered why at the age of 37 it had taken me so long to start doing this. Now, at 45, I thank myself for having done it when I did. Now, I cycle everywhere. Even in a supposedly wet environment like Strathclyde which of course is not as wet as people like to make out.

In becoming attuned to the environment, the cyclist soon becomes attuned to the weather, the prevailing winds, the various species of rain, the greys and the movement of clouds, not to mention the dance of the seasonal cycles themselves. A car driver needn’t bother with such ‘trivial’ things. Indeed, now, with the onset of modernity, man has not just sealed his self behind screens and speed, but emphatically behind ‘proofs’ (water, wind, sun, cold…) whose sole purpose is to deliberately prevent the environment from ‘getting in’. If ever there were an indictment then on man’s estrangement from his greater self, from not so much the environment but the domain of entanglement in which he is inextricably involved, it is his eagerness to clothe himself (often at great expense) and ‘create himself’ through the fashioning of a cloth identity, a fatuous and obviously false identity (more like a brand) that is removed from the greater context that allows it.

Admittedly, cycling has suffered too from this crass clothing boom, seeking to doll up cyclists in the latest proofs and sealskin gear. But this is not what I am about. To be sure, a good pair of padded shorts goes a long way, but if I have learned anything about cycling it is that you can cycle in just about anything. The eagerness to doll yourself up is simply another part of the capitalist machine at work, that seeks to convince you that you need, that with this product you will be a better person. Capitalism gets its claws into everything, even (and especially now) into Poetry.

The polka-dot cycling population are victims then of low self-esteem, and gullibility. Victims of the industry that cycling has become the world over. But it is not the industrial that I am interested in, it is the incantational… and the capacity of cycling to enchant and, by virtue of this, to cause to dance…

Cycling & Simplicity

In terms of simplicity, the bicycle is hard to beat. Its modest form is not entirely unlike the human form, with its handlebars, frame, and two wheels. The head of the bike is the head of its rider, and so here we have some kind of union of forms, almost one might say an erotic coupling, where the erotic refers to the passion out of which beauty and creativity flow. The bicycle and the bicyclist meld together in such a profound way as to reveal to any cyclist given over to actually cycling and not racing one of the deeper existential truths: that we are always travelling with, that we are never truly on our own. The frequencies and the energies that a cyclist encounters, together with the synergies he enables through his own bodying forth, reveal this insight in such a matter of fact way that most people do not even give it a second thought. But this is the beauty of cycling: its simplicity. And simplicity is a lot more complex than it appears at first sight. 

To be sure, nowadays, the market has taken this simple form and accessorized it as the capitalist machine is wont to do, making it more finnicky, more cumbersome, more pricy, and more attractive to all those capitalistically brainwashed minds who believe that identity is not what you take off but what you put on.

Of course, the truth of identity is where we are going by riding the bicycle. The truth of synergetic enterprise, of travelling with, of spontaneous and inter-dependent co-arising. Its amazing how open the cyclist is to these forces as opposed to say the hermetically sealed car driver, or passenger. 

In a recent talk during National Bike Week, Clive Cazeaux, Professor of Aesthetics at Cardiff School of Art and Design, noted that:

‘Cycling’ in actual fact encompasses an extremely large number of ways of life and forms of being. This in itself is philosophically interesting, suggesting that if cycling is any one thing, it is perhaps first and foremost a set of questions that asks us to reflect on identity and the commitments we make in life.

This reflection on identity is what makes the bicycle so great, what makes the human bodymind so great. A car can never give us this opportunity. Indeed, any technology that usurps our own hyper-organic energy whilst limitting the quality of our world, does exactly the opposite: it imposes identity upon us, some fractious and fatuous identity that is at complete odds with the reality of our being not just in the world but of our being connected with everything else in it.

Simple! But, since the whole remit of our economic model (not to mention our over-reliance on scientism) appears to be to complicate matters beyond their essence, this simplicity is concealed behind a whole swathe of nonsense. It's only by getting on your bike religiously that you will come to reconnect with this simplicity and declutter the self from any falseness in the process.

Moreover, as someone who believes not just in the bicycle and the body to reveal those deeper truths (that we have chosen to bury beneath our eagerness for convenience and ease) but in language, it is perhaps necessary to look at the word 'simple' itself for some clues into its essence.

 simple (adj.)

"characterized by a single part," 1590s, from Latin simplex "single, simple, plain, unmixed, uncompounded," literally "onefold," from Proto-Indo-European compound of *sem- (1) "one, as one, together with" (cognates: Latin semper "always," literally "once for all;" Sanskrit sam "together;" see 'same').

Here, we can see the parallels between 'simple' and 'same': Same as a 'once for all'; same as an immanant withness. I mean how much more profound do you need to get?

Gradually, through a lifetime of cycling, this revelation embodies itself within you, to encompass  and elaborate a compassionate response to all those other creatures and energies that are not separate from you but an integral part of you. It is only by cycling (in other words, bodying forth under your own steam outwith the remit of a man-world that seeks to steal that energy from you) that one can come closer to this fundamental understanding of who you are, and what you are actually doing here.

Simplicity is the key to identity. Nakedness (as unadornedness) the key to being with.

 

'The Art of Parking'  

[When they built the Reid Building for the Glasgow School of Art, spending some 30 million pounds doing so, they (Steven Holl, the architect), typically, forgot to put in a bicycle rack. Consequently, and in spite of signs advising students not to, bicycles are parked on the neighbouring building's railings. You try doing that with a car].

Freedom on Custom House Quay

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Frank Herbert, Dune

It's a wonderful monument, La Pasionaria - an aria of passion - on Custom House Quay, just by the river, dedicated to all those who 'fought and died for freedom' in Spain during the reign of Franco. As I cycled past it the other day I got to imagining that she was holding up a bicycle in her outstretched arms, and I guess she might well have been, for freedom begins with the body. Body, after all, is everything, just as Mind is everything. It's for the neglect that we dish out to our bodies that makes us suffer so. The human who recognizes his own body as the power source and not just as a plug that he can connect to that source and switch on or off (or simply, as he is apt to do, casually leave on stand-by) is the body who recognizes all things as that self. We might go so far as to call this 'freedom'.

The cyclist fights for freedom simply by cycling. His motion and momentum is itself a monument to liberty, and a monument to moment. The cyclist (by 'cyclist' I mean the human being who eschews all forms of techno-mechanical transportation in favor of faring the way himself). Let's be clear here: the bicycle is not a form of transport like the car or the bus, it is a means with which to move oneself and an accessory through which one can energize oneself and fly. By contrast, transportation divests the self of its own internal engine, and leaves the body wanting. The path of least resistance, with the onset of technologies and machines, has reached new rock-bottom levels. But it still keeps on plumbing. 

But where does this plumbing end? With the human race intravenously hooked up to all manner of devices that instead of revitalising you, literally suck the life right out of you, until there comes a point where you can't think or move for yourself without the aid of techno-crutches or some kind of cyber-zimmer frame. It's all rather pathetic and pitiful, which might explain why the world still believes in God as some sort of external entity. But God is not some thing out there. Do not allow your intellect to outrun your intuition. It is you, the cyclist, connected to every earth capillary, moving under your own steam, open to the elements and each other, faring your own way, questioning the conventions and the paths that have been laid down for you. It's that simple.

And so here we have it, Freedom as the domain of entanglement, as the dawning realization that, in spite of the limits imposed by society on your vision, there is no point where the self can be said to start or finish. Where cycling as a way of living, as a way of moving, helps us reach that realization, our increasing reliance on being transported (physically and mentally) stifles it.

As the words on this statue to liberty reveal: Better to die on your feet, than to live forever on your knees.

Numb vs. Alive : Cycling as part of the National Curriculum

 Don't move, don't talk out of time, don't think, don't worry, everything's just fine... U2 Numb

There have been arguments in the recent overhaul of the national curriculum in favour of introducing Bikeability for schoolchildren (5-14) so that by the age of fourteen, children have an essential life skill at hand as well as the habit of daily exercise.

Cycling, one could argue, is already part of the curriculum insofar as the word 'curriculum' derives from the Latin word to run. This, as wayfaring and moving under your own steam, as opposed to being transported, is as vital as it gets, but judging from the looks and ideas of our nation, vitality is not at the top of the list, so much as making money, being busy, and actively conforming to existing social and economic conventions. Conventions that emphasise the importance of cars, technology and machines to dull your state of aliveness into one of numbness. Indeed, numbness as a deprivation of motion and feeling - an absence of vitality - appears to be the ruling order under which one labours in the modern workaday world; civilization being the art of looking away and of ignoring the degrees of separation that connect you and your spurious actions to the conflicts and crises that rage around the world on any given day.

Cycling not only helps to counteract this numbness, but it opens the self up to the practice of making one's own way through the world without too much dictation from others. Cycling sharpens the wits, the wits being a large part of one's overall intelligence and responsiveness; cycling also improves one's ability to respond, thus enhancing one's sense of responsibility. It builds confidence, enables assertiveness, engages peripheral vision like no other activity I know of; cycling enriches one's sense of space, and concordingly one's sense of time to the point where space and time, relieved of their stasis, become verbs. Life is a verb after all, is it not?

Cycling helps one to see, to really see, not just with the eyes but with the whole enactive and engaged body. In a nation that is slowly succumbing to the mechanization and technologization of the human, being able to move across the land under your own steam, and at your own pace, cannot be underestimated for its power to open one's eyes to the deeper underlying realities that enfold you. 

Moreover, in purely physical terms, cycling speaks for itself as a way of reigniting the body's own internal engines, engines that are perfectly natural, that do not pollute and instigate wars, and that bring being back into its original fabric of aliveness.

The difference could not be more simple. Engendering a culture of cycling at an early age is a matter of allowing a certain 'free-range' quality amongst the future generation, a quality that will pay dividends in terms of aliveness not just for people but for the planet as a whole. By contrast, by not including cycling as part of the curriculum, and by tacitly encouraging our children to drive and engage in a self-destructing techno-culture (where car and computer are kings), we are preparing our selves for a future just like our present - full of conflict, crisis and confusion. All this will slowly evaporate however with the clarity that comes from a vitally engaged body-mind.

Inversion

As a teacher (now and then) I recall a book by Neil Postman called Teaching as a Subversive Activity in which he laid out the ground rules for going against the conventional teaching grain. To be sure, to swim against the tide in today's day and age is an arduous task, but for some of us who cannot and will not partake in a system that whittles away the soul by degrees (through its culture of outsourcing internal energies to machines and desecrating our land) it is a necessary and essential one.

Indeed, in a world that is so upside-down and topsy-turvy (precisely because of this manufactured culture of outsourcing), that has inverted itself and turned it's self inside out, cycling, as a way of cultivating the bodymind and as a way of overturning this backwardness (it's not the peasant or tribal societies that are backward in this world but the advanced and so-called civilized ones), is not just a subversive act but an essential one. 'By way of inversion', writes the the anthropologist Tim Ingold in Being Alive, 'beings originally open to the world are closed in upon themselves, sealed by an outer boundary or shell that protects their inner constitution from the traffic of interactions with their surroundings'. Ingold's purpose (as is my own) is to shift this logic into reverse, and to subvert the inversion, and right the capsized (not quite shipwrecked) boat of the world.

There is no more pressing issue.

The bodymind is where it starts and ends. Frugality is the means.




INVERSION: From Elizabeth Street to the Kilpatrick Hills by Bicycle one misty October Morning.

Electrically and chemically, the world moves right through us as though we were made of mist. 
John Bliebtreu, The Parable of the Beast

Elizabeth Street complete with trees, mist, and the spectral silhouette of former Bellahouston Academy.


First of October,
edging out from the city
through a cloak of mist:

From Govan Road
the monoliths of modernity
of industry
of busyness:

Pacific Quay and the BBC,
but the key to the pacific lies not in media..

The Science Centre and the Waverley:
but the key to the human lies in con-science not science,
in one's own steam, not another's.

The Jobcentre at Govan Cross:
All those lost souls looking
for work,
yet never underestimate the power
and the poetry
of wilful self-unemployment.

The Fairfields shipyards -
Once fair fields, now fair game…
The new Southern General -
A death star for the modern era…

At Braehead, Ikea…
And the spectral outlines of abandoned cranes…
But already the head is part of the horizon…
Already the heart part of the hill…






























Sea smells.
Hill curves.
The braes from the boardwalk…
Beautiful!





























On the mud-thick banks,
crows and shopping trolleys, and the skeletal housing
for the shipyards at Scotstoun
in the process of being dismantled….

With all this thick mist, those high-rise towers in the background,
it could be Russia, could be China…

The whole practice of civilization, of ‘culture’,
needs to be dismantled…
needs to be reabsorbed into the bloodstream
of consciousness.

All I know is I can smell the hills,
hear the ferryman….
Already the heart is part of the horizon…





























The fifty three seconds it takes to cross the river
Is timeless, ethereal…
An ephemeral glide
drifting through mist,
the calm glacial surface belying
the enormous currents underneath…

At Clydebank
a desolate shopping centre yet to wake up;
a canal with a family of swans
always awake even when sleeping.


Dalmuir - the great bog no longer
but a fine canal, a fine little wood,
an even finer walk into the hills.

The closer we get the more human we become;
Man is short for ‘maniac’.
Remember that!
Human, a sign of the hill within…

Lusset Glen,
the glen of herbs
beneath an eight lane motorway, yet utterly silent…
a womb within a womb…
All who pass through her are born again…

Even though I can’t see them yet
the braes of Kilpatrick
behind the mist
rise up.

I enter and climb.
Into the arena of the above,
or is it the beyond?

Personally,
which, by now,
is not limited to a single fragmented persona,
I believe it is neither above nor beyond.
But inside.

All is inside. There is no out.

At forty metres, the city appears as a sea of mist.
Forty metres is all you need for parallax and perspective,
maybe even four metres. Do not confuse smallness for a lack of greatness.
Do not be fooled by an excess of height.









From up here,
from in here,
the valley lies concealed by mist
as a bath tub is by foam.
Scientists call it ‘inversion’:
The white field, oceanic, fills the valley.

The Cycling Meditant

To art (art is a verb after all not a noun) is as much to cycle or walk meditatively (with a vague outline of the way ahead) as it is to draw or to sketch. Both are deeply meditative enterprises which do you the world of good. I have only recently discovered the joys of drawing, having come to it by my own hand so to speak and by the inspiration of certain others. Two books this year that reinforced my feeling towards drawing were Tim Ingold's Being Alive in which he looks at drawing as a type of wayfaring and Andrew Marr's A  Short Book About Drawing which contained some very decent sketches and some equally decent text.

I also came across another Glaswegian drawer, Muirhead Bone, whose drypoint sketches of fin de siecle Glasgow are something else. And so, I decided that I should at least try to sketch or draw.... as a way not only of wayfaring and finding my own way into something, but of contemplating more deeply the reality that had caused me to sketch it in the first place. Previously, it had been text and my writings that had helped express this deep reality, but now, maybe it's age, I find the image, and colour, more evocative... for the moment. Indeed, I am putting together an emblem book of both: sketches and text, which might collude to evoke the strength of this reality. This is what I enjoyed about Marr's book, the conjoing of the two media. But the emblem book from its heyday in the 16th century, or the vade mecum pocket prayer book from earlier on, has lost its value beneath all the commerical crap out there. There's something loving about an emblem book though, of which there is only one original version, hand-made, lovingly put together without a care for profit or money or commerce. It is born out of love, out of sheer spontaneity, and the vital force that lives within the meditative cyclist. The book is an outpouring - an overflow - of all the beauty that the cyclist has collected along the way....

And so here, a few sketches with bicycle....