If I'm walking down a highway and the mountain in the distance never shifts perspective, how can I know I'm really moving?
If I'm living in the bowels of the earth and never climb out to see the light of day, how can I know when I'm awake and when I'm asleep?
We are each a knot of perceptions traveling through time and space. Without something to perceive, how would we know we exist at all?
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FORMERLY FOOTNOTES
FOOTNOTE ONE
Here’s where secondary source material used to be placed: at the bottom of each page. On a manual typewriter, students would have to guess ahead of time how many citations might appear and stop the essay before using up all their paper. Bi-polar multitasking was born, as well as the invention of White-Out.
FOOTNOTE TWO
Here’s where a qualification of the argument could be presented, so that, instead of rewriting the entire paper, the presenter could address any quibble that arose from the Conference audience or from the teacher on the Evaluation Committee. Esoteric splitting of hairs into nuances clustered beneath an appearance of irrefutable solidarity.
FOOTNOTE THREE
Instead of using a parenthetical aside within the main text, the researcher placed ad hominem bargaining here. After all that mainframe objectivity, these heroic couplets became succinct love letters to the skeptical reader. “Climb into bed with me,” they argued, “life is too short to quarrel.” Such conciseness became a precursor of Twitter.
FOOTNOTE FOUR
Using Ibid., or Op. Cit., essayists advised everyone to leapfrog back one or two footnotes for the source of all confusion. Inevitably they would have to double-check that the lily pad upon which the toad landed was the right one.
FOOTNOTE FIVE
Denial bred paranoia, cross-referencing each citation, examining with failing eyesight periods, parentheses, and quotes within quotes, armed with another bottle of White-Out to censure any obtuse conundrum, until oblivion seemed the better part of valor and streams of wordy baggage were excised. Break just enough nails and you might hit a bull’s-eye.
FOOTNOTE SIX
See Also seesaws on its metaphorical pyramid, etching associations where no man has gone before. Science aligns fireflies to light the way through such darkness. Unreal numbers flicker in their pie charts back in archives of Appendices. Networking before the internet, these were links to additional resources metaphysically the answer to everything.
FOOTNOTE SEVEN
This clue unlocks a door. All the particulars come together. Moonbeams, stalwart pillars, uphold the roof. Everything finally looks reasonable. The sacrifice of thought is now complete.
[Disposable Prose February 24, 2010]
Dr, Mike
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