January 8, 2018

Epistemology: the root word clangs, clacks, and bangs against the suffix like the strain of a train’s caboose against the rusty cars it follows. The caboose is long forgotten, perhaps unknown; yet, childhood images deeply shapes my tension-filled understandings of knowledge. With the blistering prairie sun raining down on my white skeletal frame, I shimmered and shook like the sun skimming on the river’s turbulent surface waiting for the rippling sound, the vibration beneath my dirt-encrusted feet, of the train’s approach. High up, so high it teasingly skimmed the shift-shaping clouds, the hurtling train screeched out its looming presence. Without fear, yet with baited trepid breath, I waited for the wonder that would hurtle by so fast I dare not blink, even to soothe my sunburnt eyes: the caboose. In that whisper of a moment, I/me/she/it mattered; as the faceless person gleefully waved from the mountaintop caboose, I was not the village’s impoverished child, I was not Other. Although my white skin was as ravaged as the thirsty, parched ground from the relentless scalding sun, my soul did not feel devastated in these magical flashes. In these briefest of moments, I was confident; I embraced my curiosity and wonders. In these fleeting moments, I was alive in the margins. This scene is always familiar and always new. Oh, to fly to the sky and jump in the caboose! Oh, to live in Fine’s (1994) hyphens!

Is this knowledge? Dare I post this? Does this suffice academically?