Crossing the Border

I'm heading back to Scotland tomorrow, on the train. As ever, I think of crossing the border and some of the turns of phrase in this. from my favourite poet, McCaig:

Crossing the Border
(Rings on a Tree, 1968)

I sit with my back to the engine, watching
the landscape pouring away out of my eyes.
I think I know where I'm going and have
some choice in the matter.

I think, too, that this was a country
of bog-trotters, moss-troopers,
fired ricks and roof-trees in the black night — glinting
on tossed horns and red blades.
I think of lives
bubbling into the harsh grass.

What difference now?
I sit with my back to the future, watching
time pouring away into the past. I sit, being helplessly
lugged backwards
through the Debatable Lands of history, listening
to the execrations, the scattered cries, the
falling of roof-trees
in the lamentable dark.

Anti-syzygy

I got a text from my cousin the other day (a first year undergraduate) simply asking 'What's the difference between ontology and epistemology?' Well, as you can perhaps imagine, I was a wee bit surprised. I managed to spout some waffle about being and knowledge and the difference between continental and analytic methodologies in the reply. I'm not sure it went over all that well via text.

Why would I be so taken by this? Certainly not because of the question's author (a very bright wee thing she is). Neither do I think I'd be so taken aback had I read the question in a book, newspaper, e-mail, or 'blog even. I don't know about you, but the texts I generally send and receive are along the lines of 'fancy a pint?', 'am running late, be there in 5 mins' or some other such pithy banalities.

Texting is a medium I don't use for anything even approaching high-brow, cerebral thought. It's one of the reasons why, when these 'news' programmes ask us to 'txt in with your opinion', or 'send us your pictures' strikes me as undoubted dumbing down. It's what Charlie Brooker calls 'turning on the idiot magnet'. Perhaps that's why this text so challenged me. A shard of light entering a technology I continually associate with the mundane.

Marshall McClune tells us the median is the message, and to a certain extend I agree, but when such a everyday, playful median plays host to something so profound, deep and important, sometimes the oxymoronity (if that's a word, or anti-syzygy, which certainly isn't) can jolt us into thinking about something that wee bit deeper. Maybe like how on Maundy Thursday one can be aware anew of the sheer incongruity that everyday, banal bread can play host to such profound invested meaning.

It's also why I wanted to wirte this 'blog post. Yesterday I saw on the Guaridan webshite, the video recording of the police brutality at the G20 protests in London. Such user content, a mobile 'phone camera, recording abuse of power in supposidly a bastion of freedom, enlightenment, etc. Well, you can see my point before I make it...

If you've read this far, check out these links:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/apr/07/g20-police-assault-video

&

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Tomlinson-Case/

Thoughts

After writing a rather long e-mail just now, I did what I ought to do a lot more often and proofread. I was struck by the number of times I was writing 'I think', rather than 'I believe' or 'I feel'.

Perhaps it is easier to 'think' in text, but I've started to do it far more often when I'm talking to.

Is this proof that the university has finally snared me? Caught me and colonised my language with it's obsession with logical, linear, causal ways of thinking?

I'm not sure there's anything wrong, at heart, with thinking and I certainly value critically wrestling though anything that we unthinkingly accept without question. I guess, I'm just aware that 'thinking' type speech or typed text tends to be very much from memory, what I've read/heard somewhere else, rather than speaking from within me through presence.

I'd far rather cultivate the ability to effectively and creatively communicate what lies below the surface in me. Maybe it says much about my weaknesses that I associate cerebral understanding as the impediment to this.

Story of Stuff

Although I came across this a wee while ago now - I recently had cause to rewatch it. I'm not sure I know of a better, more concise explanation/exploration of these issues: -

http://www.storyofstuff.com/