The ground beneath my feet is currently in the North East corner of an area labelled Scotland. The ephemerality and persistence of the concept of the ground beneath our feet is explored in more detail in Twilt. Not only to individual consciousnesses move in space over time but rock shifts in three dimensions in the inexorable process of tectonic movement and ground evolves through processes of weathering, organic action and, in recent centuries, anthropogenic projects.
My current environment is rural – shaped by agricultural industry and property relations reaching back thousands of years. Its topology is primarily shaped by glaciation in the Pliestocene and the tectonic episode of Grampian Orogeny 600 million years ago.
I am a rentier, living off of saved earnings. I identify as male. I was born and raised in Scotland – a component of English empire designated as part of a United Kingdom. I am, therefore, nominally native and a citizen of this jurisdiction.
My geospatial location is cocooned within a Russian-doll of cultural/historical contexts – patriarchy, nativism, imperialism, extractivism, scientific rationalism, neo-liberal capitalism.
These frames blinker me. ‘I’ start with the usual glib presumptions – the cognitive frames that allow me to ignore most of what is going on around me and to narrow down my focus to whatever I’ve learned to focus on. In words, I am:
- old,
- white,
- straight,
- cis,
- male,
- working-class,
- middle-class
- privileged,
- top 10%[5],
- Scots-Irish,
- lapsed catholic,
- alcoholic,
- father of four,
- a rentier
- a writer
- a [reluctant] British citizen.
These reference points in a Trafalmadorean primary component analysis are nouns and adjectives. Not work-in-progress verbs: writing, loving, learning, dying etcetera.
They say, “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him!” And (yes!) “We are all foam upon a wave.”[6]
But each journey must commence from somewhere.