The eco-existential emporium is open! By this, I mean the universe, I mean 'You'. Is this not what an emporium is, the word deriving from Greek emporion 'trading place, market,' from emporos 'traveller,' from en 'in' + poros 'passage,' related to peirein 'to pass through.' Is not the emporium the place that is passed through by the traveller (travel being natural work, natural migration, natural locomotion)? In this sense, this original sense, the emporium can't be anything other than the cosmos, and 'the place that is passed through and travelled' by a multitude of forms, each one you as you dissolve and reconfigure, decompose and transform.
For the moment (and momentum) however, let us consider the emporium as the strath, and the strath as a galaxy whose stars are hills....
Today, we travelled to Saturn, just behind Cambuslang, and known to the locals as Kirkhill Golf Course... Saturn's rings were visible all around, rings of hills, that gently hold this planet in place. Is this not what a cyclist is really: an astronaut without having to leave the Earth... an astronaut who homes with his own body? An astronaut who is not floating off into another world (because he has been so disenchanted with this one), but who is grounding himself into the Earth, and who is uncovering the cosmos (and its enchantment) beneath the paved man-world... and who is landing his 'eagle'?
Yes, that is smoke and not a cloud emanating from the other side of the strath (just above the central high-rise in the foreground. I did spot it pretty quickly, but then thought it might be a cloud forming (which I guess it is only a smoke-cloud). I only discovered it was a fire when I was up the Kilpatricks in early May and I saw a forestry contractor who showed me the crown of Cochno Hill all scarred in black and told me there had been a brush fire there about a month previous. It was then that the penny dropped and I realised I had not just seen it but had filmed it too....
No comments:
Post a Comment