Flatland Immanence
Standing on the beach in Rottingdean on the East Sussex coast the line of the sea’s horizon resides at eye level, smack dab in the middle of my visual field. If I climb Beacon Hill behind me, a broad treeless promontory, bird sanctuary and ancient funeral ground and that rises to some two hundred feet above the plane of the sea, I am startled to find that the sea has risen with me so that even from this height, the horizon is still there crossing the middle of my eyes. In this same hill are buried long-mound tombs that date from 3600 BCE, and which likewise boondoggles me so that I cast my mind backwards in a cinematic fantasy of what human life was like in the South Downs 5600 years ago…
While down on the beach the visible limit of the sea is three miles, here on this hill top the sea has unrolled, or unfurled out and up so that, as geometry tells me, the horizon of the sea is now seventeen miles distant. The wind turbines, standing in the sea in neat rows there at the end of the world, also seem level, as they advance out into the invisible sea towards France. I look towards the wind turbines with my nephew’s toy telescope, that he had brought along that day, and can see a kayaker there, as in some surrealist movie, paddling through all that glittering diamond light in among the wind towers, appearing as if he were kayaking right at the very edge of the visible world.
The flat-earth movement, still very much in vogue these days, regards this visible limit, the flat and consistent horizon, as proof of the ultimate conspiratorial secret. And which makes sense, to me (who is no flat-earther, mind you) because it is obvious that the given world, as wide as its visible limits, tends to be the world. The actual planet possesses a scale past my reckoning, quite beyond my ability to comprehend it. The flat-earther runs up to this epistemological limit and refuses to go any further. The spherical earth, impossible to visually perceive, is disavowed. The line of the horizon does in fact drop and curve as one climbs, only the scale of the planet makes this change nearly imperceptible to the naked eye; the sphere of the planet resides on a scale outside of our basic perceptual apparatus.
The astronomer, finding no better astronomical object to study than the one we happen to live on, has imagined a spherical earth, and then used geometry to prove the case. This makes the fact of the earth as an oblate spheroid object an article of faith, although one now upheld by a great deal of scientific evidence. The deduction that the earth is round is an act of imagination, psychedelic in its reach, that must first deny the apparently flat plane of sea. This puts me in mind of Gilles Deleuze’s so-called Plane of Immanence, which is a kind of unconditional ground of all being; devoid of transcendence and yet remaining an “image of thought,” it always reminded me of a pancake: the Pancake of Immanence. In that regard it is probably more closely related to the flat earth conspiracy than Deleuze would ever admit. The implications being that, due to the narrowing limits of knowledge, the modern world is flat—as Thomas Friedman said, back in 2007.
Or more like that now classic allegory of epistemic limits, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), by Edwin Abbott Abbott, regarding the story of how a resident of a two-dimensional world has his mind blown when he is taken on a journey into a world made of three dimensions…
The world may be flat, but never the planet.
We flew from London Gatwick to Bordeaux on route to Biarritz. When one is in the south of England on the sea, one feels as if there were an entire world over there across the channel. When one is in France, one feels like France is the world. From the plane window I could see the winding coast of sussex with its pearlescent rivers and silver-yellow sea. The wind turbines were now arrayed in a rough grid, their towering scale reduced to matchsticks from above. It is a view the Greeks called katascopos, privileged vision of mountaineers, birds and the gods. But even here the horizon hangs at eye level, only now the visible disc of the earth has increased to several hundred miles so that I could see all the way to Paris if it weren’t for the haze. But the earth still looks flat.
Only above 35,000 feet does the line of horizon begin to drop and to curve. Seeing the earth curve towards a sphere must be one of those rare moments of epistemic shock, where what had once been the very plane of immanence begins to warp and shrink. The void rises up to pull the ground into a ball; the ball itself plunges down its chasm, falling continuously around its little star that is itself falling down the galaxy. What we thought was immanent is betrayed by a greater immanence barely fathomable in our myopic state, except in rare flashes of stupefaction, transgressions beyond the limit—in this case, just above commercial flight.
