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...