Steve_Bamlett_blog

What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

In order to answer this I feel I ought to exclude any searching I do for my blogs, for I do this merely to source links. I used to prefer the term hyperlinks that we once used instead of just ‘links’ because the former showed that the concern was to create truly digital texts with an inbuilt capacity for creating patterns of intertextuality . Excluding the blogs is necessary, I thought, in order to clarify that I want to answer the question by taking ‘search’ seriously as a word relating to lost, forgotten or previously unknown knowledge.

In a hyperlink I know that already for which I search. I am just attempting to service a reader, should any be there, who does not. Should, for instance ‘intertextuality’ be hyperlinked? But as I make this qualification I remember that blogs are what I do to prompt me to real searches, searches precisely aimed at lightening the burdens of my vast areas of ignorance, which seem to grow the older I get, as they did with Socrates, though I do not seek that particular comparison with the truly Great. Blogs do require searches for me because the subjects I choose are always ones where I feel my knowledge, experience and values need extension, sometimes. Hence my last search related to my last blog on a new piece of writing by Derek Owusu in Granta issue 163.

So one moment, his narrator says, as he listens to his Ghanaian origin father and the Uncles of his who were just friends of his father: “The last time we came to the shop I had picked up the word koromfou”.

So I searched koromfou on its own and with the addition of Ghanaian to English to the search trms Bing said to the latter it was not a Ghanaian phrase it knew. Perhaps then it was not Ghanaian, perhaps Ghana used a number of African languages. Here my ignorance was absolute and so it seems was that of Google Translate and Ask Bing.

But maybe I was asking for certainty where it did not ask, asking to be reassured that knowledge is itself and also about fixed entities, whereas, of course, in my heart and mind I knew to be false. And, after all Owusu ‘s point was that languages are registers of fluid apprehensions of fluid and possibly socially constructed ‘realities’. Perhaps word searches on the internet have to remind themselves, and be humble in the self-knowledge, that they are just WORD searches. Knowledge is more than words after all, let alone oft less than what we might mean by truth. And so Owusu again: ‘We’re raised in what would be a body of lies to someone else, truths expressed in a language that sings false to those of a different church, different culture ‘.

Owusu never shared with us the meaning of koromfou. Does anyone know out there?

Love Steve.