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....