High-Rise

ELEVATOR

Living on the 17th floor necessarily implies an intimate relationship with that metal box of vertical motion otherwise known as 'the lift'. Lifts in high-rises do not differ much in shape and size (they tend to be the standard 8 person, 600kg, type), yet what they lack in physical variation they more than make up for in personality. Granted, this 'personality' may not be to everyone's liking, but it makes 'elevating' an experience that one tends not to forget in a hurry.

The psychosocial dynamics of vertical transportation are worthy of a thesis. Depending on your point of view, elevating can be an 'ascent' or a 'descent' - rarely is the traveller indifferent to the experience. The spatial configuration of the lift engenders all sorts of nervous interaction - it gets real animal in here at times.

Yesterday morning, a wee fat wumin and her wee fat dug got in on the 14th floor as we were descending. Smiles were exchanged but no words. She seemed a nice soul. The dug gave me the once over and ventured to smell my legs before being corrected and gathered up by the wee wumin. The ground floor approaches and the door opens. The dog bolts from the arms of the wumin and hightails it past the two elderly ladies waiting in the lobby.

"No dogs allowed in the lift," one of them says to the wee fat wumin.

By the time this imperative has been uttered the wee fat wumin is halfway to the front door. She yells back fairly forcefully, " Awww, shut up!!" And then a step or two after, a large sigh and, "Every fuckin' day!"

The two elderly ladies, as I negotiate my bike out past them, are not impressed.

"Would you listen to that mouth?!" one of them whispers to the other.

preamble

High-rise flats and tower blocks, of which Glasgow has its fair share, offer experiences not to be taken lightly. Being detached from the earth 17 floors up may resonate unkindly with one's 'terra interna' but in terms of affording us aspects on the greater wider city and its seamless connections with country and sea, it is a price worth paying. It comes as no surprise then to learn that many of Knightswood's high-rises (an area in west Glasgow) are named after mountains in the Highland range. Even Walt Whitman knew of the benefits of living in the sky when he wrote his View from the Seventh Floor. Yet, it's not just the views. The high-rise is a virtual microcosm of bizarre and colourful happenings. Whether looking out or looking in, the monolithic high-rise offers much to provoke the mind.

The header photo, above, is looking north-east from the top floor (24th) of Kirkton Flats towards Lincoln Flats and the Campsie Fells in the background.

song from the 17th floor

Quiconque habite dans un tour est un touriste. Erik Satie

True tourism begins in a tower
Looking out
To the region of being -

Earth-movement, meteo-morphosis
Draw out the beginnings of seeing
Paint the eye with cloud, dawn and dusk.

Even sealed, seventeen floors high, there’s the possibility of an education,
that leads the eye
out and up -

Diffractions, refractions,
reflections and deflections,
One learns of flex and flux -

What modern man wants is a room, well-lit and heated, with a corner from which he can watch the stars.

Sky birds, residents and errants
shoal through with a little wingwork,
light the sky with their passing cries.

Then, on a clear night,
From the lookout tower,
Noctilucent,
Physics, metaphysics,
Stellar tours
Oceanography,
Cruising across the cosmos
From the seventeenth floor,
the tourist,
gleaning the universe city,
the free, all-inclusive deal -

CLARITY NOT CLUTTER

The practice of 'Philosophy' in Japanese culture simply denotes the study of clarity. What better place to start, then, than 17 floors up, in the sky, gazing across the city. Courses can then be plot through the city and beyond. The eye of the high-rise window is the pathfinder par excellence. Here, the map is most definitely the territory. This is a sort of intimate version of 'google earth', or 'sat-nav', de-technologized, elemental, illumined by all the variagations of Scottish west-coast weather. Here, the eyes are the satellites, navigating the city, orbiting the brain.

from the 11th floor to the basement

Level eleven of Glasgow University Library (on Gilmorehill) is a high-rise and outlook tower par excellence. It is no wonder this is where the philosophy section is located. Any librarian will tell you that the arrangement of books in the layout of a library is a factor of some significant import. This reminds me of the instance when the Borders bookshop in Buchanan Street did a little re-arranging of its biblic tenants and in so doing relegated its philosophic section not only to the furthest reaches of a windowless basement (from an airy, enlightened second floor) but to that unbecoming corner adjacent to the toilets. I remember thinking at the time how symbolic this was. Where, at the bright and breezy entrance fluttered the myriad pages of all the populist 'shit-lit', the stuff of real quality was nowhere to be seen. The philosophy section was now a token slot in an otherwise 'bestseller bazaar'.

In one of the benighted philosophy books down in that boggy dungeon corner, there is an epigram that reads:

It is philosophy that makes man understandable to man, explains human nobility and shows man the proper road. The first defect appearing in any nation that is headed toward decline is in the philosophic spirit. After that deficiencies spread into the other sciences, arts, and associations.

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani

High-Rise

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song from the 17th floor

CLARITY NOT CLUTTER

from the 11th floor to the basement

the wind