This morning I brought my daughter to school and in the class I saw one of her classmates holding a book on the Moors. In an attempt to stimulate this little boy to read that book I told him about their North-African descent and that they had been to Spain somewhere long ago.

This small event made my mind jump to the tendency of modern day people to just 'google' for just about anything, sometimes even added with the comment: "Why would I memorize anything, if I only know where to find it, that's enough".

When you combine this approach with the 'hyperlinking craze' leading to many websites which are most of the time only scanned superficially, feeding only the short-time memory, the long term memory hardly gets any new interesting input.

I began to wonder about a future where nobody knows much about anything in the future, because why would you remember 'useless' information, like for example some history about the Moors in medieval times?

That's why I want to stimulate the use of my long-term-memory because it enriches my thoughts, my creativity: if you have more information stored in your mind, you can make more combinations.

A small look around the internet made me realize that the designation Moors was not really clear; some refer to the Berbers or the present day Tuaregs (1), others to North-Africans in general. The Moors invaded Spain and Portugal - sometimes referred to as the Iberian peninsula - in the 8th century and beat the Visogoths and stayed in Europe until the 15th century (2).

In a book I have recently read from the renowned Belgian writer Herman Brusselmans (3) in which the main character, Louis Tinner, is keen on telling everybody around him about his endless knowledge, which he has absorbed from reading encyclopedias. I'm not exactly sure if that is something I would like to promote, but when it is combined with personal experiences, this information can be fun to play around with while playfully meditating on some items.

In the YouTubean Libyan Resistance movement there is another Moor active (4), just like yet another Moore showed up to support the OccupyWallStreet Movement (5). Isn't it great to travel from a schoolbook Moor to the Iberian medieval times all the way back to Morris and Moore in their respective fights against Imperialism and Corporate Democracy?


Fussnöter
(1) http://introspectiveinternet.yolasite.com/introspective-internet-articles/tuareg-and-tarragon-s-dragon
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors
(3) Trager dan de Snelheid - http://www.bol.com/nl/p/nederlandse-boeken/trager-dan-de-snelheid/1001004008504303/index.html
(4) I am referring to the Youtube Channel of Morris on http://www.youtube.com/user/108morris108
(5) This is reference to Michael Moore who showed up on 'Liberty Plaza' during the #occupywallstreet protests which started on september 17, 2011. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvRtFBS9LtM for a video I uploaded from Russia Today on Liberty Plaza.