The endnote is the smoking room of the text.
I am absolutely fascinated by endnotes. Footnotes too, of course. But endnotes even more so, I think. The footnote is a quick glance, but the endnote demands more physical performance. There is the turning of the pages. First the big chunk to get back to the endnotes in the first place, but also the little flick pages, the ones you have to flick back and forth as you try to find the specific endnote in the whole index of endnotes. Sure, you can keep a bookmark back there, but sometimes you’ll skip a few endnotes and your bookmark won’t be exactly where you need it.
The footnote, however, doesn’t take half the effort. You can rest assured, as a writer, that most everyone will at least check out the footnote, especially if it has any sense of weight to it on the page. The endnote is different. The endnote is for that specific audience that actually reads endnotes. Usually, the information included in the endnote is a little more technical than the average reader needs or wants. And so writers can be a little more loose at the same time as they’re a little more technical. They can be loose with the jargon.
For the really good endnotes, it seems like the writers are more themselves than they are in the main text. As if the main text is their public voice and the endnote is something closer to their private one. The endnote is the smoking room of the text.
There is a whole question to the endnote writing process for me. The answer to that question could answer a dozen of the writing questions that I still have. It won’t answer them all, of course, and it will probably only come with a dozen new questions for me to frustrate myself with, but even so, I think, in the long run, it will help.
It is a question of timing. Is it better for an endnote to be written at the time of the writing of the original sentence, or is it better to write the endnotes almost as their own session of writing?
The answer depends on the thought process, I think. That is, if one is writing a sentence, and in the middle of it, you feel a tangent coming on, is it better to let your mind take the tangent and see where it goes, or is it better to ignore the tangential tug and continue on your way through the original sentence?
Usually, this is a question for almost every sentence, but most tangents aren’t very long, so it’s almost possible to see their ending from the path of the original thought, like walking down a trail, seeing an alternative path, poking your head out a little bit and seeing that it’s only small path. Depending on the ending of the tangent — its look and feel, so to speak — you can decide pretty easily whether to follow it. But some tangents go further than can be immediately seen.
The decision to enter the world of the endnote then must be understood as the decision to follow a tangent and then come back. Getting into an endnote, then, is deciding that wherever the next thought is about to take you, you’ve already committed yourself to returning to your previous thought. Doesn’t this decision characterize itself as a form of cowardice?
The world of the endnote — if written at the time of the original thought — is an unknown. If you choose to enter into it, you are risking something. You are risking the possibility of never returning to your former self, where the former self is the path of the original thought. If you choose to follow the tangent, you have an obligation to say goodbye, in at least some form, to your former self. It seems to me that the goodbye can come in only two forms.
The first one is an acknowledgment of the possibility of, not death, but enlightenment. If the tangent should happen to lead to enlightenment, there is absolutely no guarantee that you will return to the path of your former self. One would hope that enlightenment would allow some sort of ethical relationship with your former self — for example, if the path of your original thought stemmed through something that you were responsible for — but there can be no guarantee. Perhaps enlightenment comes with an unattachment to responsibility.
The second is the ignore-ance of that possibility. It is ignore-ance because it actively chooses to not think about the possibility of enlightenment. It actively chooses to hold on to the level of thought it is now at, rather than risk going any higher.
In writing, I find that one should always be willing to do a little Emeril on the text and bam! kick it up a notch. I also find that sometimes kicking it up a notch means sometimes changing the entire point of the text. This decision to kick it up a notch doesn’t have to happen at the level of the endnote. Sometimes it can happen in the middle of paragraphs. What starts out as a paragraph thought, one that you know you’re going to have deal with in separate chunks, like switch-backs on a mountain, can sometimes transform itself into a whole maze that you have to find your way through. Usually, it’s not too hard, there are plenty of markers for you to utilize, a quick reference for where you are and where you think you might be going, and it’s not that big of a deal. But sometimes the maze just keeps going, and you take a turn by mistake and get all turned around, am I where I thought I was?, but again, you just do your thing and the markers are found, and so you just keep going until you get to where you knew needed to be in the first place.
But to actively promise to come back to the original thought, to actively say “No!” to enlightenment, to me, that is intellectual cowardice. And it is writerly cowardice. It is the unwillingness to throw the text aside. Unless one is under deadline. Like I am now. On another paper. Not this one. Not that this one is an endnote to those and I’m just exploring this tangent, but also…yeah. Do you see why I suspect enlightenment may come with no attachments to responsibility?
But to actively promise to come back to the original thought, this is a promise that must be understood as a commitment. Because, a writer is committed to nothing other than the reader. Could it be that the writer who is not completely committed to the reader is the writer who thinks no one will ever read the writing? Damn. Reading the writings of a postmodern, self-reflective writer then must be like reading the transcript of a god damn psychiatry session. That sucks.
But to actively promise to come back to the original thought is to ignore the unknown world of the endnote. It is to ignore not in the way a hero ignores the unknown possibility of death, since we’re not talking about death, but rather, a text; it is to ignore the possibility of a major revision to one’s position regarding a certain issue that will have a drastic effect on the rest of the text. The commitment to actively return to the original thought is the decision to say, “That’s good enough.” The commitment is a settling for the good enough despite the possibility for a better.
Of course, none of this matters if endnote writing is best done during its own writing session. At that point, the text is so far removed from wherever the writer’s thought is at the beginning of the new session that it almost demands the same respect the writer would give the work of another author.
But if the endnote writing is done at the time of the original sentence, how does one make the decision to make it an endnote?
And if one writes the endnote at the time of the original sentence, how does one honestly feel toward the reader who does not follow the endnote? Isn’t the text that includes the endnote only patronizing the non-endnote reader? Isn’t the entire text saying to the non-endnote reader, you’re not cool enough, smart enough, interesting enough, etc. to hang out in the endnote room? The stuff we talk about here is stuff that doesn’t fly in public. It’s where the theories are discussed. The really nerdy, interesting shit that you, the non-endnote reader, aren’t cool enough, smart enough, and curious enough to have an appreciation for.
Or perhaps, once we all graduate high school, the writer treats the non-endnote reader the way a teacher treats an earnest, but not quite there yet, student. The teacher doesn’t hold back, but at the same time, she doesn’t give it everything she’s got. Not because the student is stupid, but because the student simply isn’t ready for it. The world of the end-note is the world of the peer-review panel. The world of the main text is the world of the classroom.
But really, shouldn’t all peer-review panels take place in the smoking room too? In the high school that is the readership of whatever publication one is writing for, aren’t the peer-review panelists just the cool kids we’re all trying to make an impression on?
This is the world of the endnote. It’s where the cool kids are. As a reader, it’s pretty much where you want to be. As a writer, you’re never quite sure what you’re supposed to do once you get there.
Perhaps you’re just supposed to kick back, light up, and enjoy being in an endnote.