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HISTORY: John Burnside - Coggle Diagram
HISTORY: John Burnside
examines the simultaneous and contradictory mutability and immutability of time by counterpointing the geopolitics of momentous history in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 with the small, localised moments in which we live our lives
setting: Scotland - isolated, bleak, peaceful, beach
language
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Leuchars - homophone - a place but sounds like a name, the later mentioned Lucas - people become places and vice versa - a sense of devolving until everything is one
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morning light (sense of the monumental) - homophone - mourning light - death and rebirth images together again/innocence and corruption
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uses multiple pronouns - we and I - suggests our experience on earth is interchangeable whether felt as one or in unity - all part of the same life-force
our lines - defines lines, kite-lines, steam-lines/chem trails?...
a tension between nature and the man-made world - confined by property but what tether us to gravity and light (makes certain our existence) is to do with images of birth, innocence, beginning and possibility of the rose or petrol blue of jellyfish and sea anemone combining with a child's first nakedness
reading from the book of silt and tides - learning about existence through sense observation - a sense of nothing making sense
tentative language avoids confirming events - scarcely apprehend the moment as it happens: shifts of light and weather - every single word here is hesitant/temporary
no line escapes binary oppositions e.g. hung in their own slow-burning transitive gold - with hung suggesting permanence and transitive being fleeting - slow and the intensity of burning
goldfish - value found in the mundane (fish) - sense of liminality in the image of being carried home from a fair - harmful but out of appreciation - the speaker grapples with this: how to be alive in all this gazed-upon and cherished world and do no harm - poor stewards of the earth
nerve and line - having the guts to stomach life's potential futility, and certain fragility
structure
mirrors the tide or a pulse, with rhythmic oscillation/a sense of steady return
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loose connections between lines - drawing attention to the distance of things e.g. dreams, geographical distance...
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