Grace determines not only grade, but intelligence, application, centre of movement, execution of physical form & balance. A grade is a morons summing up of these attributes.So what has climbing become? How is it you make a million monkeys jump up & down, celebrate manically, or embark on vast arrays of ineffectually executed cruelty - by saying a number? Ludicrous. Over the vertical years, I've wondered who's blindly invested in what? Where the bowl of spaghetti starts & ends. How they cope with that investment insanity of nothing more than coinage communication, a common alphabet recital, almost void of any relevant explanation, when there is no poetry or meter. A calculus that when stood back from, appears insane, or detatched, from the beauty of sequencing, existing often as only a tide marker after the sea in it's glory has receded. Even those who have become invested in grades, barely grasp dynamic scales & the logarithmic process between V11 & real V15. Well overall, in the wrong hands, it's a medium corrupt with conceptualizations of one-upmanship, preposterously craned toward a belief that it can represent an individuals standing, or court admiration. Do you represent a life as a series of numbers? 28, 29, 30...56, 57, 58...does that capture your inner self, your essence? Of course not. On the islands, when people come to me in the streets or on the machair, when we sit at the fires & talk of climbing or at the shop on a cold morning amongst earthy supplies, they never say E9, E10 or V15 or V16. They never proudly offer up a number to others in conversations when I'm absent, which should speak volumes. They don't understand it that way, the numbers mean nothing. They call me with a pride in their lungs, a respect & a glint of wit, the dead man walking, or the vertical gymnast, or the king of the Coire or Pól Uí Súileabháin for climbing Toul a' Roigh & the like, for climbing their own myths & legends of fear, & the impossible roofs that have wrecked generations & pushed toward an inland huddle. How do you grade all that?
There is no self-recognition or high notoriety in saying big numbers, only in recognition of achievement. Qomolongma is only VS'ish remember. The arena from where that advancement & offering of recognition originates, is irrelevant on a level of needing to feel good via external sources. If one needs to say a number, make it as precise as possible, but don't be defined by it... that's all.
So, is marriage a contract of paperwork, finance & metal rings stamped in production lines...or a condition of heart, bound inarticulate & filled up long before any peacock parade. I once stared into a sunlit basement window over a decade & a half ago & found her, folders spread on the floor, a mirror door leaning against a wall, a lemon geranium...it goes on - there was never any doubt then & history is a weave of the present, every scent, every moment. She turned a fool into an insatiable conquistador & made jumpers with holes look like a mllion starred cloth. I found my sparkle in the rain & time became adrift. If I could have had a tiny sign she would not be consumed by illness, that we would have a dawn, just for ourselves, it would have been like the sun on my heart for a thousand years. Religion had no say, nor any institution, government or onlooker on the reality & validity of that bond. They never will, not of any relevancy or consequence. When I say time became adrift, life became even more profoundly navigated by events being a process of progression, rather than a clock face marking anything. No event - no progression. Time heals nothing, nor breaks or brings together anything. Simply, people do, by jumping voids, by simple acts. Now she is everywhere I look & nothing is forgotten, & that tattoo is no sorrow nor burden, but a joy to wear & wear it I will, until there is no I, until there is no statement in the dust.
The truth is that the demands of the world are infinite and your time is not. Things will always be left undone. Just make sure they're not the things that matter - Martha Beck
So that question again. Are you, as a climber, detained by those numbers? Slave to an evaluated constriction, climbing within a herd, never to venture outside of those gates. Or do you climb free of those scales, scampering back in quietly after dark, so as to be seen to be conforming? Good on you... & when a system of regulation is heard to say: He is the fastest in the world, or the strongest in the world, have they tested all men? Or does a Maasai shepherd anonymously & unknowingly strip world records for free, crossing dusted plains to carry out daily duties? Systems proclaim kings, through belief that their foundations of mathematics, judgement & reward are beyond contestation...but kings sleep in gutters also, & run like the wind in rags.
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An individual is also allowed to retain control over how prolific, full on or sideline & shyed, his input & investment is within the world of externally based climbing media, prostituting itself daily. I chose the minor path, preferring a feast of friends whereas others have chosen the glitterball & trumpets. Neither are wrong choices per say, but far from the circus, far from the hub-côtière & it's self-ordained judges of worth, Napoleon Bonaparte once observed:
A soldier will fight long & hard for a piece of coloured ribbon.
I have long been aware of a fight for a different, more rewarding kind of wealth & the swelling ranks of the convert. Climbing is maybe losing it's silence & peace, becoming noisier than the wind through the heather, noisier than it's mimicked clank of ships rigging, & it likes the sound of its own voice, yet more & more of us sit silent & warm, amongst the black gap toothed roofs of old crofts, the rainstorm scents & rocks, watching a dancing fool...
Ordinarily it's only ever been about competing with myself, the rock, my own understanding, anger, or complacency, away from the crowds. Grades NEVER appear until there is contact outside of that cell. -ie: the need to communicate using their own common currency- Interesting effect non.... but what will be the overall effect on climbing, as a sport, lifestyle, when the mainstream are taught to achieve grades, rather than achieve sequences hewn out of their own understanding of movement. Recently I hear there is a trend of, when being in front of TV cameras, to spout top end grades of climbs before they've even had a first ascent. That's some remarkable factual engineering in itself...I've never known or been able to say the grade of something before I've climbed it...It almost sounds that come what may, the grade has already been written & the consensus stamped & approved befor any action. It panders toward the caress of self important agendas...but it leaks deceptive qualities on the most subtle level.. Recently I made another first ascent. The 18th of 17 previously unclimbed sea stacks standing defiantly in the raw streak of an awesome & peaceful West coast island chain. I've graded none of these 18 first ascents, except by the experience they tattoo into the soul, preferring only to mark down the path I took through each bastion. Looking over he fence at the mainstream I see a vastly negative investment in progress, far from the peace of the those stacs & the high Coire. One day, it may collapse in on itself, & coming face to face with it's own an ill-informed system, buckle under the weight with which it honoured itself.
Maybe then, an expanded, more knowing mindset will surface in climbing, to once again reclaim the genesis, where the cracked windows of Jacksonville stare out black, across the wild reeks.
The shoulder injury clinic & effortless no-handed Greenlandic rolling, where centre of balance flexibility & grace clumsify brute strength, just as in climbing. Assammik Kingukkut in Inuit.I'll explain more...
I think all I meant to say was, an uncarved block has more potential. That movement should notify the intellect but assail the soul, the core of emotion - that the race in bizarre rhetoric, will often try to think out simplicity, over complicating it, & miss key truths on the path to brilliance.
Now, the shoulder...
What happens to a man of enlightenment after death?
How should I know? the master replied.
Because you are a master...
The master smiled.
Yes that's true -but not a dead one.
Only the spirits of the air know what awaits me behind the mountains, but still I travel onwards - Inuit proverb
From the point of ignition, to the final drive, the point of a journey, is not to arrive - RushThis morning I woke & rolled over in bed. Immediately my shoulders protested in their sockets, becuase without thinking, I used them as counter balance, as pivotal aid, rolling against the downy in a busy assed bid for freedom. Interestingly, they don't grate when rolling the kayak...yet they do on rare occasions when going through morning routines of Qajaasaarnaq in the tall trees beyond my den, which has similar points of stress to intense climbing sessions... Wierder still, walking through the village, unladen, I feel as though my shoulders have been nailed on at the front with pins down into the top bicep. You can't predict how an injury or a change in physiology will effect even the mundane tasks aye...but you can know it was approaching, years back, & as injury became more frequent, more prevalent, only the I in me, would be able to stop my climbing. I knew the preparation had begun when I wrote that piece in Stone Country. As eras end, they also begin - as do these words. This blog has served a purpose, beyond bickering climbing forums, loaded untruths & myth-mongering. These words have allowed me to communicate in a normal service has resumed kind of way & allowed me to stay away from the negative, self perpetuating horseshit parade. I haven't seen a climbing forum rant in over 2 years now, nor been asked to take part in one. I hope their ill-conceived rhetoric of resource abuse, found peace & went out doing, instead of performing blind & unqualified backstreet autopsies on other peoples doings...that's all, apart from that as mediums of communication in climbing the forum is tiny really, hardly worth mentioning beyond the next full stop. All my climbs are recorded safely with an empowered record holder for histories sake & for referencing when repeats are attempted or made. This way they won't accidentally get disappeared when a climbing site or web-database folds, or the next witch-hunt of virtual hoodies goes a' marching. Domhnaill summed it up nicely when he said: Well boy...cha shoirbh triubhas a chur air cat, causing vast ripples of laughter through us all. Those strangers, like virtual hoodies but even more benign, had zero effect & influence in my life charge, my voltage of commitment, but I really do & seriously believe, that with all these accusations, that fly around climbing in general & finger pointing & ranting demands of evidence through media film & stills, inflicted on anyone dedicated to climb hard, they are creating a paranoid generation of climbers that will become sole inheritors of engineered mistrust. The maliciousness directed at me, you'd think would become a contributory factor to retirement from climbing, but like midgies, you either spend the day swatting aimlessly at the tiny nips they take, or ignore them & get on with the task at hand, & just smile at their place within the food chain & like a flick of a switch, you turn them off. Gone, silenced in the powerful streams of life outside a small box of wires. What happened to the Angry Coire days? Once upon a time, there was trust in climbing. Who stood on the summit first? Tenzing? There is a quiet greatness in self confident action or non action, that should only be swayed by your physiology, your mind, your need, or the unified knit of those phenomena. The only way I would stop climbing, would be through the depletion of one of these facets; & this is all that's happened, nothing more. Wether it will heal sufficiently to climb near the top end of my new scale, is for the future to answer, but there has been no outside influence or pressure, as one odd email asked. What makes me smile, is I'm standing on the other side of the doorway that I stepped through when the big world started ranting about my climbing - still able to sit back & say I've out-climbed a good proportion of it. Full circle, back in a place of peaceful commitment like nothing has changed & carrying no baggage, no negative karma, just a slew of conquered boulders & climbs left silent in the hills & sea cliffs - even a few films of some of the hard stuff, for reflections sake, or to play on a white wall with the friends I've made in this vertical life, one day in our more, horizontal years. Furthermore, there is much to do, miles of life ahead. Try to let a raised sensibility steer your course. Try not to be consumed by external influence & come under pressure needlessly. Concentrate with peace, let the noisy minds talk themselves into extinction. Make choices, they are underrated gifts, & invaluable in application. Or, if you're a young wee girl, exercise your right to be a robot when they say you should be an angel.
≈≈₪ That was the river... ₪≈≈
It's gonna be tough, retiring out of any new significant new routing. Giving away cliffs to Finn & the like. Giving away, how absurd is that...'cuase I was really gonna take 300 million tons of gniess & gabbro with me into the grave...but you know what I mean. It's going to be tough, arranging stuff in the new, old black house on Harris. The front door opening onto a short spread of machair scattered wild with rare carpet flowers, white sands arcing away as far as the eye can see & just beyond. Not a bad front garden to have & my Greenlandic sea kayaks as cars & the smell of coffee on the burner in morning, & unslaughtered winds & gales & still days & turqiouse seas & running creels out into the rip & I'll wait of course, for only one smile to cover the hill - & it'll never come, but it won't stop me seeing it - & I will stroll the merry ways & jump the hedges first... Domhnaill is donating me an old black stained & chipped piano. The keys remind me of his teeth. The deal is, when the cement mixer moves out of what will be the main living room, for the last time, I'm to play the piano in the sea wearing wellies until either one of us goes under. All I need is that wee, brilliant raw Amy Winehouse to pop round & throw in her big stone vocals from a 5ft 2" frame. The girl ain't scary, the girl's raw beauty. A dragged, clattered & upright soul, screaming talent, sleeping in rags fighting cat replete, chained & free...intelligent. All other women should stop trying to sing & get some skills laid up.
I'll enjoy watching decay in the sands. I'll enjoy working on the Baidarka frame with the Foo Fighters blasting out, the peace between the rawness, the rawness between the peace. I already feel like a suit of old heavy armour has fallen off my body & revealed a child, a refreshed dancing soul about to embark on an amazing new climb. The collies gonna' love it as well. Ironically, another unrepeatable line & course if you threw it to the scornful mediocrity. I'll still climb, unreported, full circle, replete, at the genesis, without loss, when & if these injuries subside, but it won't be anything of substance, well not in the way the crass & the critical, nursing afflictions of being average at everything, evaluates substance...Maybe I'll work on V13 barefoot or just walk barefoot more often. Maybe I'll run in the Cuillin snows more often, wearing just my Merrels again, like I used to. Never be slightly pregnant.
Brrrrrrrrneeeeeyaaaeehnnnnnnshhhnnhshhnnyeahyeahanannneeeeebabybabybabybrrrrnyaenyae, my common one, with the light in the head - Van Morrison
It's darker in this garden now. The warm night wind has carried the scent of hill farms & wild flowers through the trees to mix with the wine I've had & the wine to come. There is laughter in the valley below but you know yourself, sometimes all it takes is to waken each morning facing the salt sea wind, the sand & sea. So nothing comes into this circle to ease on the sorrow of a simple goodbye & the years attained are no easier than the days strewn out from that moment the cloth tore, when the threads failed across the patchwork of our legends to let ghosts foreshadow your smile & turn your dampened eyes skyward into the silence of healing...&...in those healing years, with only your smile in mind & this nature of damp earth, I have fabled them...these & those, your eyes, our legends, our dreams...only as well as I have done.
x
