The Limits of My Legs

To paraphrase the Austrian language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:

The limits of my legs are the limits of my world.

Now you may think that this is not quite true. That many, in our increasingly obesogenic societies, having given up on the body and decided to go full automaton, whilst being ferried here and there by electric carts, cars, planes, and machines in general, still, however, manage to see much of the known world. But do they really? How much can you really see when your own vital energies have been outsourced to a screen or a machine? 

There's nae movement in this warld like your own, writes Hugh MacDiarmid somewhere.

I am my body, writes Gabriel Marcel. And at about the same time, Martin Buber talks of 'bodying forth into the world'. Then there is Alan Watts: the body is the world. And Merleau-Ponty: 'the flesh of the world' and le corps geographique.

All this being based on one's own ingenious self-propulsion.

Then there is the artist Robert Delauney:

Every man distinguishes himself by his personal movement [...] movement which gives birth to decisive moments which permit the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth.

The great ecological crises that beset the planet today can be traced to man's own abandonment of this 'personal movement'. Man no longer moves, rather, he is moved. Technically speaking, an entity that gives up its fundamental life-force, its locomotive... trajective... automobilic... energy, is not really alive. Which might explain the proliferation of the zombi within contemporary (counter) culture.

Enter man. Exit the human.

Disconnected at an essential level of being-in-the-world (with one's vested energy removed), the world now becomes a lumber yard, a distinct standalone commodity and product, un-alive and up for grabs, whereby man cannot realize himself on earth. How can he if he considers his self separate from it?

The human (of which 'world' is an integral and essential part) will only emerge when he re-ignites his self from the essential oblivion he has allowed it to become. The ignition key is the body.

The Dead can't walk (physically, metaphysically); rather, they are conveyed by machines, by media, by technology and conventions. There is nothing 'original' about the 'Dead' meaning that nothing originates within them. Everything is super-imposed from without. Aliveness is the first casualty in those unable to move or think for themselves.

Anyone familiar with Glasgow's petite 'clockwork orange' metro line (two lines in fact, the 'inner' and the 'outer') will immediately notice the logo above. SPT (Strathclyde Passenger Transport) however, leave an unseasonably large space between the 'S' and the 'inner' part. The 'inner', furthermore, is painted in grey as opposed to orange, making it very difficult to spot the obvious (and slightly droll) elision.

The point here, however, is not entirely frivolous. It is to emphasise that transport (other than our own bodies and internal engines), though it may appear handy and helpful, is actually counterproductive. I firmly believe that a large part of man's troubles began when he began outsourcing his own organic engine to that of machines. As Colin Wilson, rather more eloquently states, in Religion & The Rebel:

'It is not original sin which keeps man unaware of his own godhood, but his failure to connect himself with his own powerhouse'. 

So many 'arts' have been lost to technology and to 'progress', especially the art of the body. This powerhouse begins with the body, with the legs, with walking, with cycling. The world reveals itself to those who move across the earth under their own steam. World, furthermore, becomes a verb and not some concrete noun. We begin to waltz and welter, to truly travel by putting the work in ourselves, instead of being toured, being travelled ourselves.

Our legs launch us forth, not just once as we clamber in through the car door, but again and again, and again. Movement gives birth to momentum, and momentum in turn gives birth to moment.

And moment, as we all intuitively know, is everything.

Tak Ma Doon Ma Man: Ode to a Ritual Road

The Tak Ma Doon road is one of the great by-ways of the world. It's not just for its quietness and the effort required to engage it, but for those sledgehammer views all the way up. It is a 'ritual road' for me and many others, ritual in the sense that to walk it or cycle it (engage it under your own steam) is a devotional experience. Prayer, the American poet Wendell Berry says somewhere, is work done in gratitude. This is one of the world's many paths of gratitude: as one ascends it, one becomes less and less, shedding the manufactured ego as one goes, until finally at the summit (a mere 320 metres or so), one is nothing. It is at these moments, fed and nourished by momentum (the mental fed by the elemental), when one realizes the significance of truth, beauty and the good. It's a significance that cannot be put into words, but has to be felt for oneself.

Having lived and worked in many cities around the world, there are not many that can boast ritual roads so near to the city, and yet with that searing remoteness and accompanying serenity that is so vital to one's spacing out. Glasgow, after all, as its name suggests, is a valley, or as I like to refer to it, a galaxy. These roads, then, with their metaphysical attributes, are something of existential wormholes into a whole other quadrant of being. Outer space, and alien life, is only off-world and distant for those who have been battered about the head too much by conventional wisdoms. Many children dream of becoming astronauts, not knowing that the real astronaut is the traveller who works these roads and lands.

Laird's Hill.

You can just spot the 'tombstone' high-rises of the city in the grey distance.

A couple of old-timers nearing the top. The shorts they're wearing tells me it's all go and head down from start to finish: no way to inhale the views or breathe in the setting, or simply just sit at the side of the road, flask in hand and talk to the birds. One of the great imperatives of our times, writes E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful, is to distinguish between ends in themselves and means to ends. In other words, the ritual road is an end in itself, not simply a means to boost one's cardio.

At the top, just past the car park, looking south, some snow and ice (February 21st, 2015).

At the top, looking north towards the Ochil Hills of Stirlingshire. From here to Stirling is another 10 miles or so through the most idyllic (and mostly downhill) landscapes (see 'The Backroad to Bannockburn' elsewhere on this blog for the route guide).

To a Locomotive in Winter

Yesterday, in an anthology of poems in praise of trains, I came across Walt Whitman's paean to the locomotive 'To a Locomotive in Winter'. Yet, I couldn't help thinking that first and foremost, it is I who is the locomotive, who loco-motes under his own steam from place to place. And so, I saw it first, this poem, as a eulogy to the organic and original human being, as all Whitman's poems essentially are, and to the electric body, which is not the black cylindrical tube of some inanimate (and invariably polluting) engine, but to the engine of the body itself, and the underlying life force which drives it.

"It is not original sin which keeps man unaware of his own godhood, but his failure to connect himself with his own powerhouse,' writes Colin Wilson in Religion and the Rebel.

At the foot of the Loch Humphrey path at Kilpatrick.

From up here on the Kilpatrick Braes it's possible to see a whole range of 'locomotives': trains, ships, cars and trucks, tractors, planes.... Indeed, as a vantage point for locomotion the Loch Humphrey path has it all! Never before in the history of the world has there been such a varied view of locomotion. And yet.... I keep thinking that the finest locomotives are not down there but up here, the birds, the animals, the walkers, the cyclists...

 

ALL THESE ENGINES

ALL this transport
All these engines:
Train, plane, automobile,

‘auto’  -  ‘mobile’

All these engines
None so ingenious
As the absolute body.

Shamanic Cycling

Well, it's February and the sun is out. That means cycling, and though there haven't been any real explorative wanders, it's just good to get out on the bike, and go...

I've already made several references in this blog to the similarities between bird and bicyclist, between soaring and freewheeling, between wings and wheels... yet there is a definite (or should that be indefinite?) feeling of flight, and of playfulness that accompanies the cyclist that would seem to compare with that of birds flying and the like.

At a time where obesity and general ill health is afflicting the manic-minded western world, I am convinced not just of the physical health benefits of cycling but of the spiritual and metaphysical aspects too (if not moreso). The breathing of the body as it cycles is at complete odds with the suffocation of the body as it is driven. 

Movement is momentum; momentum is moment; moment is everything.

As Sterling Hayden remarks in the Asphalt Jungle: Age is a matter of arteries not years!