Earth Proof

It's any wonder we can feel anything with the fancy clobber that we sport nowadays, any wonder that we are not so proofed up against the elements and each other, that we know who or where we are.

But of course, we don't know who we are, or where we are. Ask anyone. 

Start by asking them how to get to a local natural site, not by car, but on foot. Ask them to name half a dozen local plants or trees, or birds. Be prepared for some funny looks. You'll be amazed at how many people do not even know what lies at the end of their street. Then, ask them who they are, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they will reply with the name they were given at birth.

This is what happens when you cover your self up, and allow it to be covered up by others. You become separate... cleaved... alone.

The great existential conspiracy starts with one's gradual removal from the local. This, in turn, encompasses the global (not the other way around) and the planetary, which in their turn, encompass the solar system and so on and so forth. When one is thus divested of the greater body that enables you, feeling (as compassion and empathy), and wide-angled thinking, are the first casualties. One's own body as well begins to suffer, for we have concreted it over.

In the bible (James 4:6), there is saying that 'God resisteth the proud but shows grace for the humble'.

Naturally translated, we can see that our chance for Grace (the beauty of form under the influence of freedom) is curtailed by our desire for clothing that sports the ego. I am well aware of the vanities and superfluities of unnatural apparel (most of your clothing is made from non-biodegradable materials which damage the earth when they are finally disposed of), having grown up in a system of living that seems to think appearances are more important than what lies beneath. Our superficial society positively seeks to cover us up more and more whether with information (that comes from the outside and which does not inform) or with 'stuff' that most young people nowadays toil for days on end in order to buy.

This is how one becomes 'Earth-Proof': by divesting your self of its vital energies, by covering it up and removing it from the breathings of the planet (the weather, the rain, the heat, the cold), by allowing your awareness to wane (the more you cover up your body the less opportunity it has of thinking), and by allowing machines to carry you.

'Man', not as Homo sapiens but simply as Homo, in his complacency and corpulence, almost constitutes a new species.

The trick then becomes one of un-proofing the self, of getting rid of your clothes, at the very least whittling them down to 2 basic 'uniforms', one for outside, and one for indoors. 'Always wear the same clothes,' the Dumbarton-born David Byrne says on the inlay sleeve of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense. 'People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.' Feel the weather. Invest yourself not in clothes but in soil and air. Clothe yourself in the rain and the mist, feel that smirr gently penetrate your outer layers of skin. The weather adds something to you. It does not take away. One is seasoned by the unclothing of the self. One is ventilated and enlightened. 

As the Scottish apostle for simple living, Dugald Semple, once wrote: clothes are just another form of distancing from the sun. (Or, equally, from being enlightened).

All this you realise when you get the body moving. That the body itself thinks. That the body itself feels (not the brain). Cover it up and seal it off, and you cover up and seal off the wider possibilities of thought. No wonder people are so stupid. The stupor has facilitated the fashioning of the ego. And the ego in turn has decided that 'it' is the real entity. Which of course it's not.

All the while, we are becoming more and more earth-proofed (great news for capitalists). We care little of what happens to our planet (judging by the carbon footprint most westernized people have and their eagerness to abandon their own locomotive force). The war of capitalism has claimed our locomotion, our local, and now with an over-technologized society, our wits and werwithal and our powers of locating. This is the Trinity that leads you to 'God' - the locus of the local, the locating and the locomoting - and when the Trinity is corrupted, then you are without 'God': in other words, you have been cleaved apart from all that is, and in spite of the crowds of people you surround yourself with, you are entirely alone.

Here we have the paradox, that the solitary wanderer, at one with the earth, the elements, awareness, his own vital moving, is 'together' (gathered with everything else), and that the throngs who need each other are in truth so alone that they have to seek each other out. The godless are in truth the earth-less, the rain-less and the flower-less. They have, like the prophecies foretold, become like the inert machines that carry them: life-less.

So, tear off the duvets, rip off the colourful panels that decorate your quilted cell.... Let your skin and your brain breathe! The word 'brain' after all contains air and rain.

And if you have to cover up some bits, then do so like Tarzan, sparingly and athletically...

Taps aff!

Short Circuits that Short Circuit

There's no better circuit than the short circuit, no better route than that which roots, no better way to move than under one's own steam, with the whole power of the cosmos behind you...

Whenever I lived abroad - in 13 countries thus far - as a teacher of English (at least that's what they thought I was teaching!), I always started off (when I settled in to my accommodations) by making a route for jogging, or several routes in and around where I lived. I recall in Warsaw, jogging through pine groves and allotment gardens, the great Russian Cemetery and beneath massive rookeries. I always the best thing for any creature when finally wrested from their slumber was, not a cup of coffee (such headshots first thing in the morning surely bode no good) but a little vigorous exercise. To be sure, I love my coffee, but I also love the natural 'coffee' of one's own vital engines. 

Here, in Glasgow, those engines are in constant use, and the routes I have uncovered here around the shires and the valley over the past decade or so, are worth their weight in gold. Indeed, the other day I looked at one of my maps on which I had scored some of those routes, and it resembled a pot-bound plant, albeit in two dimensions. It's then I realized that these 'routes' (under one's own steam) are actually roots (sometimes the English language delights in delighting you with its happy coincidences), that embed you deeper and more intimately into place, and by extension, into the planet as a whole.

At any rate, I was curious as to the coincidence between the short circuit (route) and the electrical variety that is defined as....

 a connection between two nodes that forces them to be at the same voltage. In an 'ideal' short circuit, this means there is no resistance and thus no voltage drop across the connection. In real circuits, the result is a connection with almost no resistance. In such a case, the current is limited only by the resistance of the rest of the circuit.

And then there is Zizek's take:

A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network– faulty, of course, from the stanpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading?

He continues:

Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions.

By using the (minor) lens of Nature to short circuit the reading of civilization and society, I can learn to breathe and be naturally. I can also begin to see the system, as I analyze and contemplate the whole. Indeed, this may well be the most accurate way of describing the essence of my hill-walking-cycling of the past decade: short-circuiting the circuit (the circuit being the circus of civilization).

Oh, how I have learned to breathe as a result!

So, next time you're thinking of going to the hamster-mill, take a look outside, around you, at the nature, the ponds and parks and quiet little groves.... Take a vigorous walk, or even stumble into a jog, but feel free to pause (fluency is all about the pausing) and inhale the scenery, maybe even talk to the squirrels and starlings....

Cycling with Saint Patrick

Here, you can see the shortish circuit that is this particular route (routes, if you have enough of them, are roots!). I cycled and walked this one, but you needn't take the bike at all.

In Belden Lane's Backpacking with the Saints, he remarks in the chapter on solitude, that the life of the soul thrives in community, but it begins with a radical aloneness.... The only true self we have to give is one that is grounded in a solitary life.

I'm not quite sure  how radical your aloneness is when you've got a dog yapping at your heels (sorry Belden, but you asked for that one), but up here, away from all the pseudo-tech, and pseudo-humans, we have both the radical as a rooting and a recollecting, and community, as in the communities of insects, plants, and birds...

But it's true that without the solitude to attune... the radical would soon disappear.

Remember, these hills are where Patrick made his cell, beneath the stars, up there in the desertic moors of heather, listening to his self. It is why I come up here - to Listen. Not to anything in particular, but to the universe as a whole.

Indeed, listening may well be the 'principal sense' for attunement. The tune after all is not something we see or touch. When you come into the hills, alone (really alone, no dog, no tech, no BFF), and as often as I do (I am spoiled for choice living where I do in the middle of a strath), you soon tap into your deeper, wiser, self... This is where your listening comes in, as this oracle talks to you. I find myself having conversations in mid-air that are not entirely pronounced by 'me'. Indeed, it is the locomotive force, it is the land's curves themselves as I walk steadily across and through them, it is the water falling from the jutting braes, it is the new ten foot deer fence the farmers have just slung up, it is the stonechat who has just come to inspect me after checking me out for the last hour sitting quietly on a dry stonewall. All this is listening, or as Heidegger liked to say, hearkening, as in a powerful attentive hearing. 

I find that in order to hearken which is not simply listening, one needs to sweep clean the mind of any possible intrusions, no matter how slight. But you cannot do this by thinking it. This is where your locomotive force and ascending come in. They stop you thinking. They bring along a new kind of 'thinking' that is more bodily than heady.

By bodying forth through nature, alone, and without the possibility of another person crossing your path (it is quite surreal at times at just how people-empty these peripheral hill ranges are considering how near the city of Glasgow is), your senses come alive, become attuned to Nature (beyond 'world' and into cosmos, the beautiful whole) and Self. The athleticism of the body gives way to an athleticism of mind. One actually enters into a greater Mind once the exit threshold of the ego has been passed. One begins to commune, quietly, with everything. One's mind becomes areated, ventilated, fresh and lively. Just like one's body. One begins to hear as if for the very first time.

 It is amazing how eloquent the earth can be when your ears are awake.

 With the city of Glasgow in the background, and the gentle valley.

 Nothing to see. No thing. All circumcess.

 Wheels are wings, they expand and extend my home range.

The dry stone walls up here are things of beauty, and all manner of life. Organic architecture at its finest.