The Axial Tilt
“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this…Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what’s underneath the skin.” – Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.
What are the perimeters of human existence?
Are we thinking about utopian possibilities laterally, only expanding in circumferences? Is the only way to broach new frontiers, new edges of knowledge? How are we course plotting? Are we sailing to an eventual drop of the flat earth, the flat utopia? Will we drop off the edge to the end? The unknown? The utopia? Could utopia be thought of as round? A round earth with an axial tilt? If both the diameter and the axial tilt are real, what are the shifts between existing in this world and the other?
What changes when we think of utopia spinning, being tilted on an axis? Will the social centre and hence shift the margins? If utopianism were to revolve on an axis, what gravitates/ tethers is to its identified axis? Why the tilt? Does it provide a new orientation, one that questions the centre-margin dynamic? Could the axial tilt be Possibility? Is it here where existence is at its utmost possible, projecting forward to its potentiality? What happens on the axis that does not happen at the diameter? What is present? More importantly, what is absent?
What is under the skin of the axial tilt? If the tilt on the axis introduces gravity, what is the force that draws entities towards the utopian centre? What produces this ‘gravity’ on this plane of existence? If the tilt gives us the ability to measure time where in its absence every day and place would be the same, does the tilt enable the physical and metaphysical flux? Is possibility given or produced?
Where are we located in our engagement with utopia and utopian theorising and living? Where does the truth exist? Which is the right side up? Do we have the courage to go to the right side? Do we have to leave the world to enter back into it? What is the interface of the transition? What are the fissures or doors between the worlds that allow us to move to the axis? How do we find it? Does the sidewalk end at the axis? Is it possible that the axis is the shadow world? Can we just flirt with the axis or do we have to commit to it?
What does the voyage of possible look like from being suspended in an in-between state, between yet and not yet? How does one's existence shift in these spaces? Or more importantly, how does one’s ability to be possible become in this liminal space? What are the utterances of the possible? What are its coordinates? What are its moods? What are its horizons? Does its horizon of thought change against the horizon of time? What are the boundaries of concrete utopianism, the concrete possible? Is possibility free or is it hindered? What does it mean to demonstrate freedom and constraint, and disobey the diameter? Is possibility pathologized? Is it madness? Is it lacking?
What is the quiet power of the possible?