It's a big world, not a wee one

It's a big world, not a wee one

With its etymological rooting in Latin separatism shares the same se stem as the words segmented and segregation and severance. A segment is something that has been cut away from a larger body thing, i.e. removed unnaturally, cut away, severed. The phenomena of identificationalism is highly reliant on fracturing.

  That the word separatist has become prefixed by ecclesiastical in The Oxford Dictionary Of English Etymology is telling because the ecclesiast by necessity has to be both a blowhard and a blagger because of the nature of the product he is peddling, pie in the sky, granfaloolenery. 

  With its etymological origins in science fiction granfaloon means more or less inverse transcendence. The transition in its case is reliant on a foolish myth (a faloon) and has the effect of closing someone down rather than opening them up, clinging to itself in seclusion rather than letting go and embracing the world at large. 

  There is a poetic contradiction inherent to the nature of embracement, that to hold and be held you have to let yourself go, to hold without holding, all embraces beginning with open arms. 

  There is a book which I consider to be pertinent to how we divide this world up, called Fup by Jim Dodge, in which a boy responds to the death of his mother by building fences, his grandfather saying to him that the more you fence out, the more you end up fencing in. 

  The act of keeping something out has an inwardly coiling effect in which the subject invariably ends up disappearing into a void of self. The act of holding the imagined other at arm's length is at risk of inadvertently holding humanity at arm's length.    

  When I got off of a train in Edinburgh many years ago, the graffiti in the train station read Scottish not British, I remember wondering how far the author wanted to take his distinction, to illustrate; scottish not british, scottish not european, scottish not nothern hemispherical, scottish not occidental, scottish not worldly, scottish not of woman born etc. Scottish not British is a synechdoche of indentitifactionalism at large, the ceaseless subcategorisation of humanity. We have to wonder what gets lost in the gulf between what is scottish and what is british, or whatever something or other not this and that maybe.  

  That there are political benefits to be gained from subcategorising oneself make it an enticing prospect. 

  In his essay What I Believe E.M. Forster writes, 'I hate the idea of causes, and I had to choose between betraying my friend or betraying my country, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' To which I would like to add the appendage, I'm not looking for the easy way out.

  In his book also named What I Believe Bertrand Russell writes, 'The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge', To which I would like to add the appendage, we're all in the same proverbial boat.

  A key part of growing up is looking up out into the timeless sky at night and making the decision to stop being scared of the dark and learning from the flowers that good light and good soil shall help you grow and realising that we should not want the best of both worlds, we should want the best of all worlds and to be a part of that.