A Little Division

It is over a fortnight now since the end of my korean sojourn and the damp return to this blustery little island. The flight home carried me in on a squall of undecipherable feelings, feelings through which I have had ample space but hitherto little time to navigate. Their sudden onslaught matched only by the rapidity of their subsidence within me so that, by the time the rubber had scorched the asphalt of Heathrow, the significance of the tempest had waned in my mind, falling far behind more immediate issues, in this case negotiating the chaos of London and boarding the first available train home. 


The problem with squalls is that you never quite know when they will arise, more than one is the number of occasions since that I have found myself in the clutches of such uncertainty, a mixture of thoughts and emotions, seemingly inseparable their constituent parts, but at times I picture them curdling in my mind and gathering into clumps, with all of the ephemeral solidity of hale they strike and, upon such occasions I find myself vaguely able to give them definition before they melt in my cupped hands and slip away once more through the unsealed spaces between my fingers. Of these concretions there are but few that hold form long enough to muse on, but clearly discernible upon all is the unmistakable lustre of my newly acquired  perspective, which I now apply liberally to every fresh observation of this small corner of the earth in its relationship to what lays beyond. You see, for all the esteem with which this nation holds itself, for all of its allusions to grandeur, her significance stands like vanity, inflated only in the minds of her subjects, a myth bordering on self obsession and based largely on past glories and perpetuated by geographical divisions. 


Britain stands - as it ever will - colloquial and grey, and frustratingly beyond arms length of any meaningful connection with the very continent from which she was hewn. Twenty miles of water are all that divide Dover from Calais, my own home stands just 50 miles from the French port - ten nearer there than to London - but closer in every other respect to the latter, and all for a body of water. Yet The Republic of Korea - from whence I have come - is no less, and perhaps to a far greater degree, an island, isolated not by geography but rather by an ideology far greater in breadth than the English Channel, to Koreans as to Britains, their island is the axis around which the rest of the world revolves, they, like the British, operate under an illusion of independence, preferring to ignore the all encompassing umbrella under which they stand (ask almost any beer swilling Brit and they will have you believe that they alone, saw off the third reich). Of course, the advantages then of a substantial geological division were bought sharply into focus for this Kingdom for it remains as such but for Korea, the very fact that their boundary is created of men brings with it the hope that it may one day be traversed, and one only need visit Berlin to witness first hand how positive such an outcome can be.


It was just such a trip which provided for me, the perfect filter through which to sift the sedimentary mass of my past year, in order that I may take from it - for now at least - a little essence for the vial, or - for a better analogy still - a thread of commonality upon which to affix the experiences of my recent past (Korea), present (The UK), and future (Palestine), that seemingly disparate triptych of environs and associations which otherwise appear as insoluble as the most hardy of concrete walls. And walls themselves are nothing if not the very thread of which I speak, Berlin, in this sense represents something of a happy ending, a place where the banal and the mundane stand daily as miracles to behold, a train, a car, cyclists commuting to and from work across a line which once stood as the very frontier of an ideology, the very edge of life itself for some, and now holds not even the blinking of an eye nor check of stride for those who unconsciously traverse it. 


In contrast there is Palestine, a nation not looking for reunification but independence, their division stands upon religious lines, their wall holds them out of their own land as opposed to keeping them in, although the result is much the same, imprisonment and the loss of freedom. Of course not all divisions are quite so material, or national, and we traverse boundaries daily, be they moral, linguistic or legal there are lines and limits in every aspect of our lives, of course they are often necessary but all of this really is by the by, because usually the choices we make in relation to them are in our hands whereas in some parts of the world people simply are not given the freedom to choose, and are then robbed of any tools which may enable them to do so. This forms the backbone of my motivation for pressing forward in my forthcoming endeavours, it is true that the next six months will not be easy, but if I can push even the tiniest fraction, in the right direction (or even illustrate the wrong), then I will consider my time to have been entirely well spent. ( for news from my time in Palestine visit http://palestinianthings.blogspot.com/ )