where do i come from?

Usually when we ask someone where they come from, they would reply by telling you where they were born and brought up. In my case this happens to be Nottingham and since I went to boarding school, I would probably add that I went to boarding schools in Derbyshire. I happen also to have lived in a district named Sherwood in Nottingham and although these days it is some miles from Sherwood Forest, I have always had a certain attraction to the legend of the marginal, trickster, outlaw figure Robin Hood. As I make this association I begin to drift into the dream world, I create an identification with a certain legendary figure and I could begin to ask myself what it is about this figure that attracts me, what pattern he offered that I connect to.

We have many other personal associations with the place where we were born and grew up. For instance Nottingham to me is in the Midlands and I come from a very middle class family where the emphasis was on behaving appropriately – it was in all overt ways very ‘middle’, it was far from all extremities.

People who have been forcibly displaced, or whose ancestors have been forcibly displaced, often feel that their roots and spiritual identity lie not in where they were actually born but in the place from which they were displaced. Refugees, orphans and adopted people may also feel a sense of displacement and find this question less straightforward to answer.
The Palestinian writer Edward Said, in an autobiography he wrote shortly before he died, said that he had always felt ‘out of place’ but that, in his later years, he had come to feel that ‘out of place’ was his place!

However when Gaugin asks the question Where do we come from? The question is clearly pitched at the metaphysical level and can only ever be answered mythically. Today we may think that science is coming closer to the answer with the Big Bang theory, but even this gets us no closer to answering the basic conundrum of all creation and creativity – how can something emerge from nothing? What fuelled the Big Bang? The question is ineffable, it lies beyond our conceptual ability. We can only say that it is nameless, it is the thing that cannot be spoken about, it is in every sense beyond us. The closest we can get to it is that faint background noise of the moment of emergence that still echoes down over the eons of time and can be faintly detected.

What I want to bring out here is that seemingly straight forward everyday questions have many dimensions and levels to them.

Contact details:
David Clark
Email: david@activityzero.com
Mobile: 07711 939 469