Facing the cross

I write to my supervisor:

I can see now that there will be things I have written in the ‘Discussion’ chapter that should be in ‘Methods’. More importantly, I have not discussed what the cross meant to people who commented on the Log about the animation, Insights.

I began writing about this and for some reason hesitated. It seemed too hard! But these are the moments to push through to further understanding.

I can now see that the cross is at the very heart of the matter. Commentators read the cross to mean the threat to Antarctica from global warming. It’s the cross hairs on the rifle.

In a telephone conversation yesterday, with Indigenous scholar of linguistics, Bryan Fricker, described the gestures and lines in Insights as ‘semantic primitives’, by which he meant ‘irreducible building blocks of all communication, in gestural, visual, and written language’.

He recognised the animation as describing ‘how ancient knowledge flows between people and land’.