IN THE BELLY OF THE COOL BREATH'D EARTH

One of the benefits of living so high off the ground is the ability not just to include the weather's more subtle movements within our own wanderings (mental and physical) but for the weather to include us within it. This, of course, is a matter of truth that is normally relegated to the domain of small talk, but is really deserving of a much larger arena. How the weather affects us, our moods, our behaviour, our mental processes, is never really in doubt when living on the 17th floor. You can feel the weather inside you as it plays out before you. One becomes, necessarily, by virtue of this idiosyncratic skyscape in front of you, more attuned to it.

This becomes all the more immediate when the occasional fog envelops the high-rise. An aura of blueness may surround the building, yet it penetrates to the very core of the body. The body breathes from within this cloud. The fog becomes part of you. There is movement, and moisture, and cohesion.




The Fog from the 24th floor.

HORIZON

A living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself, and at the same time too self-centred to enclose its own view within that of another, it will pine away slowly or hasten to its timely end.

Friedrich Nietzsche 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life'.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked of hills that surround a city:

The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants.

Coleridge knew that the horizon needn't be so shallow, so 'egocentric', so singularly encapsulated within itself. Phenomenologically, the perceptual field or landscape (and you'll know what I'm talking about if you live in a high-rise or a house on a hill) has numerous 'internal horizons' as well as the external one that envelops it. Essentially, the horizon is limitless, and without boundary. It needn't be confined to the curvature of the Earth. It is a matter of depth, of expansiveness, facilitated to a large extent by vision rather than weather.

As David Abram says in his essay 'Merleau Ponty and the Voice of the Earth':

The experience of depth is the experience of a world that both includes one's own body and yet spreads into the distance, a world where things hide themselves not just beyond the horizon but behind other things, a world indeed where no thing can be seen all at once, in which objects offer themselves to the gaze only by withholding some aspect of themselves - their other side, or their interior depths - for further exploration.

Essentially, it is this 'further exploration' that interests me. And of course, this babushka principle of body within body. As Abram later asserts,

A renewed attentiveness to bodily experience, however, enables us to recognize and affirm our inevitable involvement in that which we observe, our corporeal immersion in the depths of a breathing Body much larger than our own. [...] Examining the contours of this world not as an immaterial mind but as a sentient body, I come to recognize my thorough inclusion within this world in a far more profound manner than our current language usually allows.

For this complexity and complicity, there is poetry. Kenneth White, the Glasgow born poet and traveller, refers to this 'horizon' and 'body' a great deal in his work. From his poem 'Walking the Coast' he writes,

Knowing now
that the life at which I aim
is a circumference
continually expanding
through sympathy and
understanding
rather than an exclusive centre
of pure self – feeling
the whole I seek
is centre plus circumference
and now
the struggle at the centre is over
the circumference
beckons from everywhere

Getting beyond the ego, into the geo, mapping the self back into the world, this is the beauty of the high-rise: it allows for these horizons to be seen, to come forth; it ventures the eye and the mind into the world - it enlarges and enriches 'identity'. The flesh of the body is reconnected with the flesh of the world. The struggle at the centre is over.

'The Horizon Hitherto' - Bellahouston Hill from the 17th Floor



'Layered Horizons'

With such a widescreen on the world (and there's a lot of worlding in front of these 17th floor windows), there is a real cartography at work, in front of you, that reveals a multiplicty, a multiformity, and a largeness that, inexorably, draws the mind in. It is only a matter of time before the body follows.