Miniature Corn and the Problem of All-Knowledge

The Crazy Testament is a loose collection of notes I keep in a loose collection of note-keeping areas. Herein, I expand on those ideas which probably should have been forgotten.

I grew up during a time when you couldn’t google the answer to everything (or most everything) and know it. To many who are slightly younger that might seem an impoverished age. In a way it was. But it provoked a certain type of dialogue that we are missing now and a category of thinking which is less practiced.

Miniature corn is something that I started thinking about around 6 am while trying to fall asleep last week. I imagined a miniature corn farm, with tiny animals laboring, and people husbanding the land and resources to grow the crop. Small droplets of sweat fell from the tiny people’s brows, the light bulb sized sun turned the budding cobs golden at the end of day.

Then I thought, are there really miniature corn plants?

This is the kind of question that before, I would have needed to let trouble me into the early hours of the morning and beyond, or until I could ask a friend who might know. No more. I turned over in bed, blinded myself by the blue light of my phone and quickly found out the answer on Wikipedia.

Do I really need to know about miniature corn farming and production? I do not. Here is the issue.

Before the advent of immediate access to information, we talked to each other about what we didn’t know. We tried to figure it out. We might have used reason, our own reason, to come to a conclusion about the likelihood of miniature corn farms.

And we don’t have to anymore.

I think there might be something lacking, a space in conversations that is now void, and possibly a cleft in our minds now that we can “know” all things so quickly. I think there might be a vector for the paucity of imagination in it.

So I have decided to be willfully ignorant of some things; the factoids that make less difference when the answer is found than during the time we ponder them.