South of the Border
If a country from the Southern hemisphere, say Australia, had been the dominant colonizing force over the last five hundred years, rather than having been settled by the English from the North–
–would down be up?
I daresay it would be. Who wants to live at the bottom?
It’d be absurdly sweet: Penguins would live on the world’s highest perch, and Santa Claus would be bringing up the rear, along with Superman in his nearby Fortress of Solitude.
Did you know that all the planets revolve around the earth in the same direction? And, from a Northern-centric view of things, that direction is counter-clockwise?
What if what Northerners think is “up” isn’t “up” at all, but…sideways? What if our entire solar system is actually set up perpendicularly to our current mental model? Then Uranus’ rings (never to say the rings around Uranus) would finally be arranged “normal”ly, and it’d feel right for a change. Or would it? Can planets feel?
My comments today are obviously more interrogative than declarative. Sometimes it’s beautifully humbling to think that maybe you’re the one who’s walking upside down – and that that’s a good thing, because nothing at all in the world has changed but your perception of it and of yourself. And then you realize that from the point of view at the center of things, everyone’s got his feet on the ground with his head towards the sky.
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