This End Up...

A short note before we begin: The new Godiva is far too focused on art and peanut butter, and needs to go back to what it does best, which is classic amazing chocolate. Why does my caramel taste slightly of toasted coconut? Further proof of my assessment's validity.

Also: I am thoroughly tired of login pages telling me that my password is wrong. It is not wrong. It is a saved password, and pops up automatically. So why said password should be rejected on the first attempt and accepted--without changes or corrections; same automated password--on the second try is a mystery.

NOW: on with the profundity, which is really just spectacular fecundity of thought.

I was sitting in the Bookstore Cafe today, reading my Sartre like a good little grad student, when I had a thought. Backstory: the Sarte was from Black Orpheus, an assessment of the Negritud poetry movement that effectively made the Black voice a "true" voice by virtue of its removal from worldliness, simultaneously essentializing and primitivizing it, and also Othered the so-called White voice by making it unnatural. The essay did this, not the Negritud movement, which began in the Caribbean and was seen as the first kind of Black poetry, despite the fact that the writers of it were largely of a privileged or criollo background that was itself traditionally racist. But then so were most things in the 20s-50s. Of any century so far.

Anyway, sitting in the Cafe, drinking my mocha and reading when I am thumped on the head by a realization. I always thought that the idea posited in the West Wing first season episode called "The Crackpots and These Women," about Big Block of Cheese Day-- *Note: I looked it up, and it's not actually that episode; it's a second season episode called "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail." But I just couldn't get rid of Big Block of Cheese Day; when am I ever going to be able to write that again? Seriously.*Note 2: I was not wrong! It just happened to be Big Block of Cheese Day: Season II. Yay me. And no more reading Sorkin scripts.

Regardless, in this episode, CJ take a meeting with an organization that wants to flip the map upside-down, so that North is down. I pretty much dismissed it as weird and moved on. But when I was reading this really skewed version of reality and literature by Sartre, the episode came to me again. I never thought that maps, of all things, might be influenced by politics or racial privilege, but here's what I started thinking about in the Bookstore Cafe.

Let's say that the universe is viewed on a horizontal plane, two dimensional. Who's to say which side of that plane is "up?" What if God, wherever He happens to reside, views it from the "other" side? We're just as upside-down from Australia as it is from us, so why is North up? It really only makes sense when you consider who was doing the cartography.*Note: I have since been surfing around on the Internet--between reading West Wing scripts and checking Facebook for outside recognition of my existence--and found "upside-down" maps that dovetail quite well with this idea. Maps from Australia that have it up and the Eastern hemisphere front and center.

Also (this is where it gets a little more harebrained, but at the time I thought it was inspired), if magnetic north is why north is "up," then we have to consider: why would a very large deposit of exceptionally heavy magnetic material be on top of the world, instead of at the bottom of it?

Think about it: in our world, heavy substances are drawn toward the center of the earth, the point around which we rotate. What if the solar system, in terms of the universe as a whole, does the same thing? What if, a hundred or a thousand years from now, we discover the rotational center of the universe? And what if our magnetic north has been drawn toward it this whole time? Doesn't it just make sense that something like a big lump of magnetic material--it seems like it would not be on top of anything, is my point--not acting like some sort of planetary paperweight, but more as ballast, meaning it would be on the bottom of the planet.

I do believe that I have just blown my own mind.

I'd also be willing to bet that I just blew yours, too, if only with the fact that, if you're still reading, you read this whole thing. Why in God's name didn't you do something more productive with that time? Read a West Wing script, have dinner, get blasted out of your skull? You do know you're never going to get that time back, right? But that is what happens here: randomness, from big blocks of cheese to ontological geology and astronomy. Yet another example of how I roll, and how wobbly that trajectory really is.

Poem in progress:

Her Name was Lola

wicked she was--must have been

as any little girl given rubies before her time

little girls in gingham and rubies

on a path of gold to a rich man's house

and such a good witch

whipped white like butter and

frosting--or cotton candy

queen sending a little girl

all gingham and rubies

to an old man's house

that's why, Glinda dear, you too are witch

no fairy or godmother who might

serve up milk, cookies and a home

without clicking heels or ultimatums

not you, not godmother

finding a little lost girl

dust her off, dress her up

on a path paved with gold intentions

To Be Continued (then revised)

Song of the Moment: "New York Minute"~Don Henley