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IN PRAISE OF PLUGS

Dumgoyne - Dunblane - Dumbarton

As the son of an electrical engineer, I've done my fair share of crawling under floorboards and wiring up plugs. These plugs here, however, give a whole new meaning to being 'earthed'. These are only three of the many stratovolcanic 'necks' that exist within the Greater Glasgow area. But they are some three! These rocks and landforms are the physical reminders of Scotland's growth as a country at its most fundamental level. This grounding reveals Scotland's passage not just through time but across the very surface of the planet itself. The land that makes up Scotland has travelled the world and has not always belonged to one single continental landmass. It is, primally, this fiery mobile 'Scottishness' that pulses though my own body/brain and convinces me more and more to wander/wonder. Incidentally, the prefix 'dun' or 'dum', if you haven't guessed already, simply means 'hill' in the Gaelic tongue.

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evidence for a city

Even at the city’s nadir, it is still ‘evident’ that Glasgow lies in a depression. I am hesitant with ‘evident’ for it requires a real particpation to register this subtle undulating topography. There are, all throughout Glasgow’s hilly centre (most notably its north-western part from Pitt Street through to Buchanan Street, that part of the city that I call San Fran Glasgow), gaps through the city’s Hippodamic grid that bestow this wavy outline from a distance, and convey to the viewer the hollow that Glasgow’s centre ekes itself out of.

For the most part however, the average city-goer is involved in the immediacy of his environment. A large part of our capacity for tele-vision is prised from us. But it is still possible to see those snowy hills in the far distance, away in the background.

When this background is finally noticed (evidenced), and pulled forward, thus integrating it into Glasgow’s cityscape, one realises that Glasgow is as much its hills (and the various wild inhabitants therein) as it is her buildings, her rivers or indeed her people.

Remember, if you want to really get into the picture just click on it and it'll expand to a more 'exploratory' size.

A NATURAL NEWS

The best way for the estranged
and the alienated
is to work outside the compass
to get away from all the agitation
all the pollution
the mismatched magnetics
and to enter the mountain region
directionless in its endlessness
where there is no north, no south, no east, no west -
no centre -

There is a fresh news here
of a more natural sort
the sort that Ezra propounded
a news which lasts all life
and not just all day -
refreshing, invigorating, rejuvenating news
where north, east, west and south
are marked instead
with bird, rock, tree and cloud
showing
a sort of natural north
of wind and wing
earth and air
and the surging upthrust of elements
an agitation of an altogether different sort.

FEBRUARY 28 - MARCH 2

Three transparent waydays

(where days become part of the way)

cycling the psycho-path

the flow of being

across round grey stones

Sitting one windy and sunny afternoon at the summit of Kelvingrove Park looking across to the silhouetted outline of the southern Renfrewshire hills you get to realise and re-cognise (whether its these or the Campsies and Kilpatricks to the north and west) that Glasgow (at least its epicentre and source from where it has moved outward) is indeed in the earth and not, like the unfortunate predicament of Warsaw and other 'flat cities', simply on it. It is this immersion in the territory and the weather (and by extension our own implicate immersion in a breathing Body much larger than our own) that lends Glasgow her distinctive appeal, much like a whisky through fermentation in an aged oak barrel acquires its inimitable taste.

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evidence for a city