Everyone always wonders what it would be like to go off the edge of the world, but no one ever asks what's on the other side. Younger heads than mine, (stuffed full of newer, scientific knowledge), will protest that there is no edge of the world: that the world is round. And if you try going off the edge enough times, you will just end up right back where you started. You younger heads are right, of course, the world is round: charted, classified and categorized. However, when young heads acquire a new piece of knowledge, you tend to think it solid, immutable. Little do you know that everything you learn is plucked from the chaotic, disordered soup which fills older heads. In fact, telling a fact that it is solid, real and finite is like telling a runny jello to barricade a stampede of wild bulls. Knowledge passes from one sloppy mire of a brain to another, reshaping to fit it’s allotted mental space like honey reshapes to fill a teddy bear squeezy bottle. Anyone who tells you that they know something, for absolutely certain, definitely and undeniably, is full of honey.
Some people, (generally those who write poetry in cafes at 2am), might think that this is a sad realization. That if nothing can be known for certain, why bother knowing anything at all? Well, what they don’t know and perhaps you’ve already guessed, is that the fabric of the universe is just as squishy as fact; and every time we insist we know something about it, we form a brand new bottle into which we unceremoniously stuff reality. So when you say that the world is round, you are not wrong. But when I say the world is flat and has edges, I wasn’t always wrong. I’ve only been wrong for 600 years. Indeed, I was right for much longer than that. And when I was right, a whole different world lay just underneath of our feet, like a reflection in a pond. Lewis Caroll thought he was being clever when he invented a world in a looking glass, but really he was pulling memories out of the past and stuffing them into his own peculiarly shaped bottle.
Here is mine...