walking and talking

This is a simple snippet concerning a little piece of of wandering talking. By that I mean just letting the talk lead the way into what ever direction the talking wishes to to take. The conversation came around to walking through the High Lands and I was asked a question. Do I like talking when I'm walking?? And to be honest I haven't a clue. This is the sort of question with multiple possibilities. Does it matter?? Let me think and I will got back latter.

walking before returning

I'm trying to dig deep into a very tired mind, the past week have been "messy". Times are changing, modernity led us to believe we lived in a time of progress, a path towards the mythical Utopia. One of the more demanding pleasures in walking comes about when we revisited aspects of our historical selves caught in a fleeting shadow. We see what we thought we must have known only to discover a surge of disorientation,intoxication and loss of identity.
I walk along the same path in the knowledge of rediscovering what was, and is lost. We only ever go back in time in our minds. The experience of times past can transform into a lust for nostalgia.
We live in backward times in a space where what was thought buried is back with us.Politically this should become the age of resistance. When I walk I DREAM and seek the answers to questions I never thought I would believed I would need to seek. Nothing integrates on these walks. The sense of alienation only heightens what in reality I already understood. We don't have control over the external madness embedded in a system called Capitalism. There is something of a negation in the role of Capitalism with our physic.... I need to think my mind is tired. Be back very soon.

the eye begins to see

It was looking at me all the time and I simply failed to connect with a fundamental reality. There I was looking across the River Thames towards St Paul's Cathedral, not only was I looking but a whole lot of other people where looking at the same object as me. My experience of St Paul's is informed by my childhood when I would play amongst the ruins left standing after the second world war. I was looking at part of my history. Not history in the "logical"understanding rather history in the sense of lived experience. What I was experiencing at that time was different from what other people where experiencing,even though we were gazing at the same object. For that one moment in time I realised I was different from "others". And they were different from each other. Each person gazed on the "same" but each individual came from a personal experience. We are alienated from the world by our individual lives. what we see is our truth.,not the others truth. I'm coming to the conclusion that the SOUL is the personal quest in our search for the self.

the eye begins to see

Walking will take a back seat for a day or two whilst I explore another of my wanders in the minds eye. What is the SOUL? Indeed does it exist or is it simply a poetic invention which helps us understand some deeper romantic attachment to an even great quest that elusive "truth".
Let me start by quoting from RD Laing's THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE.
" Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence, an empty white sheet of paper, are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social "reality". Around us are pseudo-events,to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now in less in what things are than in what they are not.Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
What is to be done?We who are still half alive,living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism-can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?
The requirement of the present, the failure of the past,is the same: to provide a thoroughly self conscious and self critical human account of man.
No one can begin to think, to feel or act now except from a starting point of his or he own alienation.
We are all murderers and prostitutes-no matter to what culture,class,society,nation one belongs, how normal, moral or mature one takes oneself to be.
Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities. This basic vision prevents us from taking any unequivocal view of the sanity of common sense,or of the madness of the so called madman.However,what is required is the more than a passionate outcry of outraged humanity
Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection of the present inter -human life. Viewed from different perspectives,construed in different idioms, this realisation unites men as diverse as Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,Freud, Heidegger, Tillich and Sartre.
We aer bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world.-mad even, from, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved by outrageous violence perpetuated by human beings on human beings" 1967/84/90

rush hour in the sun

The pleasure in walking against the rush is a rare excitement.Rush hour and excitement surely this cant be right, but if you walk and take your time simply observing and listening you discover little gems of human behaviour and a surprising amount of good humour. The rush hour comes along twice a day morning and evening. Its a totally new human phenomenon. Humans didn't always have to cope with the rush hour,it came about with the advent of modernity coupled with the need to reach a place of work on time. We are obeying some kind of unwritten rule. The rush hour must be obeyed. So we conform to the unwritten rule and join in the strange migration into the crowd and we follow the same routine. Underground over ground a clockwork tapestry of sameness and the strange thing is we do it even though we dislike it. Its a must do exercises in community dislike. But on the whole people go about this daily routine without much hassle and this is where a good sense of the ridiculous comes. Join the rush and open the mind to the sounds of the rush hour . Don't become some arrogant individual by attempting to be above the crowd. The rush is a form of community gathering signifying we are all in this together. Some how it works.
A whole set of industries we take for grant age have grown up around the need of the rush hour. Sandwich bars ans coffee shops, news paper stores, I'm thinking of mega stores like WH Smiths.
The rush should be taken as a different hobby in relaxing and combating those dreary periods when the day starts in a drab monotone dreariness. I will spend the next few blogs talking about the unusual pleasures to be found in the rush.

long time

Plans keep changing along with the times. Iv seem to have lost my other blog,so what I'm going to be attempting is a blog which mixes different ideas and challenges This is going to centre around the idea of walking with depression and imaging a different landscape from the one we exist with at present.Starts tomorrow.