The horizon is a great thing. Below, all earth, all thick, mute and pregnant history. Above, all surface, babbling and bumbling, webs being woven out in endless constellations. Perhaps the most on-brand thing homo-sapien ever did was connect the dots of the fixed stars and come up with endless systems of constellations. A series of points, and then a name. A name that speaks. No one ever seemed to have the same idea for the same endeavor looking downward, at all the grains of sand on a beach, for example. Parts of the earth are named only where they are firm and stable, almost as firm and stable maybe as the stars.
But nothing interesting ever happened in one of these halves alone. The Earth and the Heavens are eventless spaces, silent depths. The only ever thing that happens is when one becomes linked to the other – in the horizon, sure, but also in those moments where webs of language quilt their points haphazardly upon the grainy depths of a mute, historical geology. “It is raining.” Heaven is descending, nurturing the Earth, from which, meekly, sprouts rush to the skies. “It is growing.” The apples, ripened, are gifts from Heaven. The stars, all named and moulded into eternal forms, were named and moulded only in order to bring something eternal down to earth: the calendar as the cycle of the universe, fixed points of reference for the navigator. And the grains of sand on the beach, are they not so thick and volatile because the waves, driven by the moon, keep shoveling new grains of sand to the shore, while the old ones disappear, sedimenting.
If the horizon is a great thing, it is because it is precisely the limit where Heaven and Earth switch, like a binary code, from 1 to 0, from yang to yin. In such switchovers, change happens. It is not necessary to mystify such “leaps” between binary choices; after all, our machines are easily capable of effectuating an immense series of binary choices in an impressively short time. And yet, when Heaven descends and nurtures the Earth that becomes pregnant mud, when the plants hurry towards Heaven, is this not also the opening up of a new horizon? The horizons of an organic boundary, or the surface tension of a rain drop. For only when our earth is nurtured by our heavens can we hope for something like a future.