Movement

When you're travelling it sometimes seems that the whole of humanity is also involved in this restless journeying, burdened by luggage and the unpredictability of their arrangements, the regrets and sadness of departure, and the anticipation, or otherwise, of arrival. Dragging their stuff, rushing, waiting, trying to negotiate complex information, dealing with other languages, unknown currencies and the inadequate approximation of translation. This movement of people is a communication - in fact transport systems are often described in this way - and the exchanges that occur as a result of it involve sharing stuff, giving stuff, getting new things as well as loosing or forgetting what is dear to you. The communication of human travel is embodied and materialised. It also takes place across space and time, and this is so eloquently captured in Doreen Massey's essay 'Some Times of Space '. It is similarly comprised of convergence and divergence as well as by the inclusions and exclusions wrought by the distribution of power. And yet, when we return 'home' , what have we got to show for it? Well we may return with something substantial, something we purposefully went to get, but more often than not it is with a small souvenir, or perhaps just a jumble of recollections, the feeling that we've changed in some subtle and indefinable way. The communication was often an end in itself; the subtle change, the intangible was a little like learning, hard to define, difficult to articulate a shadowy form in the mists of memory.