Stories, old and new...

I am thinking about timelines quite a lot... and the emergence of happenings, stories over time and that quite often what you wish for in the beginning is what you end up with in the end... for me, for this to work, time has to be not linear in nature, but circular. This concept of time being circular is something that i learned, not in school, but when i went to classes on nubian history, led by people of african descent, who like me were trying to reconnect with their ancestry. If our experiences are mapped out on a circular timeline, different experiences are brought closer to one another on that timeline and there is more of an opportunity to learn from the repetitions and you aren't moving on from your past, you are coming back to it - there is always a point of return. I wondered the other week about the stuff we know as part of our ancestral history and how this might be represented in chromosomes which hold genetic links to our ancestors. This is a sidetrack - DNA is one thing - music and dance are another...

In conversation at the Substance P dinner i wondered about this importance of oral storytelling and how increasingly i need to be equipped with stories. I wondered whether the evolution of human memory could be linked to the need to be able to tell and share stories in order to survive and rear young as well as to ensure that what the father knows is passed onto the child.

I feel this missing link... in not knowing my father, i feel there is a gap in the narrative that needs completing. In fact, to tell my own story, and the journey to knowing myself, i increasingly feel that all lines lead back to my mother and my father - the moment they met and from those moments on, my siblings as an integral part of my story and identity. Increasingly i feel a need to somehow capture and retrace these steps. Except this is being trapped in a linear way of thinking... where i envisage that the starting points are photo albums, letters, conversations - i must remember the journey is ongoing and evolving - my brother, for example, who lives in Copenhagen, just had a baby... from a circular perspective, engaging with her might be as good a place to begin... thanks to skype, the timeline from me to her is opened and there is a window onto her world without going anywhere...