Towpathing it to Croy from Gilsochill
This path is meditative.... it has a quality to it that I imagine most people have recognised when they come up here, and which is key to the ecstatic act of 'spacing out': no distractions!
In spite of there being some fascinating stops along the way, the ten miles or so to Croy along the Forth & Clyde canal towpath from Gilsochill is remarkably quiet and hypnotic. The initial glimpses of the Campsie bank on the horizon is enough to drawn any live creature towards it. There is a magnetism here that I have only felt in a few other spots in the strath.
Just past Lambhill, the Western Necropolis is a quiet space with some fine stones and statues.
The attractive tomb of De Cecco (the pasta magnate?) in the Italian quandrant...
Just across the Balmore Road from the cemetery and accessible from the canal towpath just past Milton is the Scottish Wildlife Reserve of Possil Marsh where, amongst other things, you will find the Possil Meteorite (pictured). I believe the real thing was lifted from its original site (above) and placed in the Hunterian Museum (if memory serves me).
Approaching Twechar, the vast landscape of the Kelvin Valley opens up.
Auchinstarry Basin
5 minutes up the road and you're at the train station of Croy which will whisk you back to Glasgow in a mere 12 minutes...
Perfect!
Thalatta ! Thalatta !
The sea, like the hills and the sun, has pulling power. It draws the naturally sensitive amongst us out. I no longer go. I am pulled.
Today, I took the wee back train to Paisley Canal and set off on the lovely Sustrans path down to Gourock via some idyllic scenes and far-reaching views. This is your real tele-vision - these far-reaching vistas - this seeing into the horizon... into the vertical. The vertical dimension of Being is one which we have ignored for too long. It is here, on these short 'quests' that one can re-establish it within.
Fifty Minutes of Forever: A Short Cycle Through Now
Take train to Barrhead station (red dot with blue circle), cycle up Gateside Road for a few hundred metres, before veering right up the very steep Hillside Road (look out for the massive monkey puzzle trees). Up to golf course, and green dotted line is the way back down through the course to clubhouse, station. An hour is all you need, before hopping back onto the train a new (wo)man.
It's not too often that you find the strath covered in snow. Last time I remember this amount of snow was 2009-10 winter but even then it wasn't that much. I have to go back to my Glasgow childhood (or when I lived in Poland between 2006-9) for this much snow. At any rate, it's a magical thing, snow. The sound of it underfoot (assuming you're not equipped with snow-shoes), the feel of it on the face and the skin, the look of snow, it's purity, its sea-like flatness deftly concealing the lumpy topography beneath, and its sheer whiteness making it almost impossible to look at it straight on for any length of time. maybe it's this last 'quality' that confers a god-like characteristic upon snow. Or the fact that the word itself contains the word 'now'.
The flask of hot lava java... never leave home without it!
The sun trying its best to break through....
Cycling-ploughing down the 15th...
And just as there is no feeling quite like walking through snow, so too is there no feeling quite like cycling through it. I had my first snow-cycle in Warsaw, particularly the Russian Cemetery in Mokotow near where I lived, and I recall being overwhelmed at the joy of it. To be sure, there is the oscillation of getting off and on when the snow becomes too deep, or at the sight of a slight incline, but there is a definite play quality to snow-cycling that trumps ordinary cycling. It's the snow itself, I think, it renders an unpure world pure again. It covers over the cracks of civilization with a veil of forgiveness, and makes the world virgin again. It's as if the waters of the world have decided to warn man of the impending flood that will come if he continues to crowd the earth with his machinery and his own kind. It's the emptiness that the snow-world brings that calms me, the armageddon-like quietness and depopulation. It is also as Thoreau writes in A Winter Walk as if all creatures out here are in the original frame of the universe. It is this quietly cosmic quality that renders a short cycle through Now (or even snow) a journey of unforgettable proportions. The sort of journey that re-members and re-calls you (into the eternal here and now) and not the other way around.
The Quixotic Quest: Travels through Strathclyde
Today, however, we know that the destruction of experience no longer necessitates a catastrophe, and that humdrum daily life in any city will suffice. For modern man's average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam. Neither the journey through the netherworld of the subway, nor the demonstration that suddenly blocks the street... nor those eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses. Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History
It is a quest these cycle journeys, these days of locomotion, around the bucolic shires, with my ever faithful 'Rocinante' (the foremost of modern day steeds, the bicycle), the quest being part of the overall question: Who-Where-How am I? The who, let's not forget, is a function of the how and where.
For there is no more pressing question, no more urgent work to be done, than discovering and uncovering who-where-how you really are. And so the quest begins by acknowledging that 'You' is comprised of all that enabled your bodymind to emerge out of this earth and to be alive. 'You' in other words is not just the body, but all that made that body in the first place: the weather, the geology, the fields...
All culture begins with the wind...
In today's day and age it's all too easy to get lost in the solipsistic narcissism of a whittled down aliveness and to see our 'parents' and origins in such small-minded ways. In the society of the spectacle, it's all too easy to think that I means me. But this me is not you, not even close. It is instead an aberration, this construct of 'me', and a straying away from the natural-healthy path of living. It is this 'me' that is swept away when you re-enter Nature as Nature intended, that is, solitarily, locomotively, and with a heightened sense of awareness. One begins through the quest to question everything. One sees another world when one walks or cycles. One's perspective 'slows down' to an almost full stop to allow you to inhale the scene, and to allow you to co-breathe with everything else. One then feels the land breathing, as the animals breathe, the sky breathing as the rivers and streams breathe, the trees breathing as their flower and fruit breathe.
This is the quest then: to Breathe (and See) with a capital B.
While scientific experiment is indeed the construction of a sure road (of a methodos, a path) to knowledge, the quest, instead, is the recognition that the absence of a road (the aporia) is the only experience possible for man. But, by the same token, the quest is also the opposite of adventure which in the modern age emerges as the final refuge of experience. For the adventure presupposes that there is a road to experience, and that this road goes by way of the extraordinary and the exotic (in opposition to the familiar and the commonplace). Instead, in the universe of the quest the exotic and the extraordinary are only the sum of the essential aporia of everyday experience. Thus Don Quixote, who lives the everyday and the familiar (the landscape of La Mancha and its inhabitants) as extraordinary, is the subject of a quest that is a perfect counterpart of the medieval ones.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History
This is how I feel when I cycle through the shires. The ordinary becomes somehow extra-ordinary. The routes I have plied for years, though familiar, are never the same. They have a patina that modernity shies away from. That patina is Nature, is Space-Time, is cosmic. The result of this is 'grace' (as the beauty of form under the influence of freedom) and 'experience' (as the aliveness and essence of action). And you quickly realize why all this is so invigorating, why after each cycle trip I feel as if I have uncovered a new world, it is because of the natural nexus out of which this aliveness emanates. In this way, every cycle trip is the discovery of a new world.
In losing touch with our origins we have lost touch too with the originary and that which 'gives rise to'. It is quite possibly the biggest mistake we can make as existential entities: forgetting the past, forgetting how we have come to be how we are. To extemporize and abandon ourselves in this way means that we become more easily manipulated, more easily thrown about by false winds, because we have let go of our aboriginal anchor.
Our complete capitulation to the forces of libidinal destruction... what Agamben calls 'the apparatus' (anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses or living beings: the nemesis of the animal that we essentially are)... and others have called 'hyper-synchronization' (the industrial destruction of time and the production of technologies that hinder our potential as existential beings), has led us down the garden path into domestication and domination, and into the brainless and the spineless. We have become straightened and polished, and coiffeured. Furthermore, we have done our best to straighten and polish Nature too, to topiarize it into some thing that can mirror our own manicured state. For Agamben then, as with all astute seers, the current human population attached to the apparatus is the most 'docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history'.
So, next time you're out on the bike, try a new route (root)... off-road, bike and hike, cross-country... and leave the electronic accoutrements behind (no GPS, no gadgets and gizmos, no bloody smartphone or walkman, maybe just a map and a flask of java). To be sure, there is an anxiety that comes when the security of the road and the signs vanish, and 'The Quest' begins. But that is part of your new-found aliveness, and the re-emergence of experience. At first, it can be quite unsettling. Yet, there are signs here too, natural signs, tracts and tracks, that you can come to identify; landmarks that are the land itself. It is here where we become most awake: alone (and all one) in the wild, learning to identify our very selves through Nature, and gazing into 'The Great Existential Mirror' that does not reflect back your own sur-face but reveals, originarily, what lies deep beneath it.
Doing the Hammerhead: A New Year's Day Cycle
What better way to start a new year than a short cycle around the valley? Today, being New Year's Day and all, I thought of a route where I didn't require a train to catapult me out, or ferry my tired bones back. 2017 was all about train + bike (Glasgow having the most extensive urban rail network outside of London) and extending the home range locomotively. As such I have relied on trains to the point where I kinda miss a day without being on one. Yet...
The (misshapen) hammerhead can be seen in gold. I started in Govan heading westwards into the wind. But what a delightful route with plenty of thought-provoking scenes along the way. Took me two and half hours to complete with a few short breaks en route to inhale the views and some of that hot lava java in my bag.
From Govan, the route follows past Fairfields towards the boardwalk of Braehead. The route could be shortened significantly by taking the little Renfrew-Yoker raft, but since it's New Year's Day even rafts require a break. The route, at any rate, from here is lovely following around the back of the scrapyard and Renfrew Golf Course (a bona fide path), up the White Cart Water until the Normandy Hotel (looking like it needs a lick of paint) and the big red bridge at Inchinnan. From there it's onto the Old Greenock Road, past the airplane spotters, and up and through Inchinnan. The worst bit is the road from after Inchinnan to the Erskine Bridge which is dual carraigeway with a sliver of path for cyclists. I think there may be an alternative route so check it out. Avoid dual carraigeways whenever possible. A few minutes later, passing the Erskine Hotel (or is it the Overlook?), we are at the Erskine Bridge (opened in the month of my birth) and a choice of west or east side to cycle across. One side looks towards the oceanic vastness of hills and mountains and the ever-widening estuary, the other towards the smokestacks of the city and its tombstones. Which side are you?
I almost ended up in the scrapheap. Thankfully, they were closed. The route is just a few metres behind me to the left, ducking behind the scrapyard and onto the peripheral riverside path around Renfrew Golf Course.
I stupidly took the east side before I realised my mistake and headed over to the other side. Which may explain why I have posted photos from both sides...
What an inhalation to start the year!!!
When I got back, the Kilpatrick Hills just to the north of the Erskine Bridge are lit up with sunshine. Half an hour ago they were barely visible behind a thick veil of cloud. This is the beauty of valley-cycling, the variety, the diversity.... the existential spice!
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