fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

Once upon a time a medieval philosopher told a story about a bird flying from an unknown place of origin through a mead-hall to an unknown destination. The philosopher believed that religion was able to explain the significance of the flight of that bird; the dark from which it came, it’s time in the light of the mead-hall and the dark to which it was returning. The version of the story I heard held that the philosopher was a Christian, telling his story in a pagan mead-hall, and that he succeeded in converting his audience using the metaphor of the bird in flight for the meaning of our life on this earth. I have had my own experience of seeing that bird fly through the mead-hall in which I was sitting, but the religious and scientific philosophers seeking to illuminate the glorious flight of human existence were, to my mind, perched on another cusp of the evolution of knowledge. Religion and philosophy are the explicators of the fact that for humans there is the unknowable; they are

I hope I never learn everything there is to know about my friends. Since I experienced moving to another country and making new friends, then returning home to old friends, I have devoted many hours to understanding the quirk of fate that allows friends to step out of the stream of humanity to walk beside you. In a strange country with no frames of reference, newly acquired friends tend to be those people who connect with you through interests and personality, without reference to shared history and with a sense of a future still to be shaped. Friends from home possess strong shared history, which often blinds you to change in them, and even sometimes their deeper layers and potential. Returning home has allowed me to use the skills learnt from connecting to a new friend to reviving the intimacy of an old friendship. Most importantly, it has been the act of finding new friends here in Perth that has illuminated each individual friendship, allowing me to find extraordinary new depth