Toverview’s next weakest link?

Toverview’s initial mission was to explore ‘new models of rural communication’, centred on the Karoo town of Colesberg. Since then, however, it has taken (adventurous and sometimes unsteady) flight to wider horizons. MAEDER OSLER continues to reflect on what this portends for its mission statement – or, as he puts it, ‘takes another Toverview selfie’.

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So now that we have suggested updating our digital worlds of Toverview selfies in our quest for the weakest link in our missionary chain, it may surprise some of you that I am suggesting the next weakest link could be the supposed key word ‘rural’.

To rub salt into the wound, I suggest that there is no adequate replacement, substitute or synonymn for the word ‘rural’ in our mission statement: the quickest andbest would simply be to exorcise it completely.

This is what our experiences during our half-century of newsletters have nailed to our flagpoles — that the word ‘rural’ can be omitted, and that we all continue to change, irrevocably and continually – in this instance, from variations of ruralities to variations of its supposed polar opposite, namely urbanities.

One of the nice things about taking selfies is that most of the posts we have published are examples of different perceptions of moving aspects of countryside and countrywide livings, mostly mobile stretchables from micro local to macro global, of different forms of what some call rustic and of different sounds of what others hear as bucolic.

True to recent form, we checked out the word ‘rural’ with our special researcher, nowadays known simply to me as DOSG, in my ultra-modern lexicon of emerging languages.

For the moment, however, I am reminded not of two cities and all those sorts of urban-rural dialectics but of two poems translated from the Chinese, which speak directly to me, for one.

On Homecoming

Leaving home young, I now return old,
My accent has not changed, but my temple hair has grayed.
Little village children greet me without recognizing me,
And smiling, ask from where I come.

— He Zhizhang

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Sailing Homeward

Cliffs that rise a thousand feet
Without a break,
Lake that stretches a hundred miles
Without a wave,
Sands that are white through all the year,
Without a stain,
Pine-tree woods, winter and summer
Ever-green,
Streams that for ever flow and flow
Without a pause,
Trees that for twenty thousand years
Your vows have kept,
You have suddenly healed the pain of a traveller’s heart,
And moved his brush to write a new song.

— Chan Fang-shēng

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Our kind researcher simply reported that she could not find much about the word ‘rural’ as it could be used to cover so many factual differences and so many varied perspectives as to become virtually meaningless; both subjectively and objectively, all and nothing. And, as we all know, ‘nothing comes from nothingness’.

So, in short, our selfie suggests that Toverview has moved far beyond the boundaries of a project and is leaving out the largely meaningless self-described word ‘rural’. Instead, while avoiding romanticism and sentimentalism, we could describe our mission as:

… ‘adventurous explorations of models of communication’ …

Of course, this is just our own suggestion. Readers are free to find the next weakest link in the Toverview value chain.