pole positions

“All these thoughts about the poles make my head spin.” So writes one contributor, who has watched the video based on one of the NTU artists' trips to the Arctic and the Antarctic. Here come more local animals: arktus is ursus; the poles are urs and not-urs, the bear and the anti-bear. But as the video suggests, we can think of poles of some sort as being everywhere: every point on the surface of the planet has its counterpart on the other side. We are so used in thinking in terms of opposing pairs - binaries such as male and female, black and white, solid and fluid - that we can’t help seeing the world itself in terms of up and down, too and bottom, north and south. Maybe one day we will really learn what we think we know already: that the earth is round.