The Heart of the Matter

 From a recent Substack from Paul Kingsnorth:

This way of locating people in space is very ancient. Who are your people? it asks, and what is your place? It’s a way of seeing that is dying now, and would not be found amongst the new urban generations, for whom all places are much the same, all mediated from within the digital non-place we drift amongst. But this old question - where are you from? - is the universal, aboriginal enquiry. It cuts to the heart of the matter. 

So, Andis who are your people?  I don’t know.  The Chinese aren’t my people.  They are as much my people as the people I never talked to in Canada.

I have no people because I have no place.  When I was asked where I was from in Canada, I answered that it was hard to say because I was a base brat and I had moved all over Canada.  In fact I have lived longer in Wuxishire than anywhere else.  Wuxishire is not a place one can think of as having any uniqueness to it.  It has turned into a place with a lot of soulless apartment blocks.