I've been reading this thread on and off for a while. And seeing IB's post back there really made me consider what the broader implications of my own 'personal cultural heritage' may mean. It is, as he rightly suggested, a cultural heritage - which although quite clearly *embedded within* and *filtered through* the context of my temporal location, country and region, ethnicity, genetics, immediate ancestry, economic and class backdrop, and so-on - is equally one which ranges very broadly away from direct associations to that web of immediate contextual foundations.

Some of the influences which I think of as my 'cultural heritage', in no particular order, other than the one my brain-context suggests them to me right now:

Nietzsche, Enid Blyton, Franz Kafka, Marx and Engels, The Brothers Grimm, C.G.Jung, Frued, Seamus Heaney, Morrissey, Chevy Chase, Frank Zappa, Andy Goldsworthy, Louise Bourgiouse, Marie Louise Von Franz, Wainwright, The Mighty Boosh, Joseph Campell, Erikson, Radiohead, Paul Celan, Liz Greene, Cicely M Barker, John Bunyan, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, Dostoyevsky, William Butler Yeats, Ursula Le Guin, Marc Chagal, Christian Rosenkreutz, Rumi, Olivier Messiaen, Billy Bragg, Gorky, Charles Kingsley, Vic and Bob, John Peel, Meister Eckhart, John Lennon, Max Ernst, Marsillio Ficino, Kandinsky, Andre Gide, William Blake, Christopher Marlowe... And on.

It's a thought provoking exercise, and makes one think. I don't think I've tried it before, but doing it really demonstrates just how magpie like the individual human mind is, in terms of what it seeks out or defines as meaningful and important to it.