Curving the Plane of Immanence
At sea level the horizon remains at eye level, whether you are lying down or standing, or high up on a ladder. In fact the horizon will follow your eye up, no matter how high you ascend from the terrestrial plane, so that the limit of the visible ocean snaps to your level gaze. The ground under foot and the persistent horizon line no doubt make up the functional plane of immanence, or even what had at one point been the aptly named unconditional ground of all conditions.
It is the imaginative power of certain astronomers to have been able to transform what appears to be a flat disc into a spherical earth, hanging in the night sky like a dust mote. The flat-earther, lacks, or disavows this imagination and, clinging to their sense-impressions, regards the 6 mile wide disc of visible horizon as the totality of the earth. So the spherical earth had to have been imagined long before math and telemetry could produce this sphere as an arial map. And it’s no wonder that the church liked to burn these same dreamers at the stake, for their zonked-out astro-vision put the very ground in question—which is not the literal ground (the literal ground is cursed) but rather the idea of ground—a transcendental ground—a fundamental dogma without which the church has no authority. The condito sine qua non of medieval church doctrine is an article of faith, but one supported by the very earth and its dogged horizon. For the bible says that the sun rises. Instead, and after Copernicus, the condition without which nothing becomes merely one finite condition among an array of astronomical conditions; the ground becomes a rock falling through the void and the void is endless.
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 on of those rare moments of epistemic shock (the vision of the mortal earth), 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 through the galaxy. What we thought was so immanent is betrayed by a greater immanence barely fathomable in our myopic state, except in rare flashes of stupefaction, transgressions beyond the limit, like at 35,000 feet, just above commercial flight.
