🙊 “She would find them, going west (…), toward the moon and the evening star, west against the bright slanting rays of the sun and the turning clock of the earth, until west became east, until sunset became sunrise, until time swallowed its own tail and the day that was ending became a day that was just beginning to dawn.”
– Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993)
🙉 Johnny Cash, “Further On (Up The Road)” (American V: A Hundred Highways, 2006)
🙈 Escher, Another World (1947)
West and East are seemingly antagonistic twins, however precondition and origin of one another, spending their time running after each other, like the Earth runs after both its past and future while revolving around the sun.
I was never good at distinguishing right and left. I do recall very well the day when my primary school teacher tried to teach it to us. She showed the right and the left sides of the board, then she turned around and in front of the classroom declared that her left hand was on the right side and the other on the left side. It got me confused forever.
Everything is a matter of perspective, all the time. We may see death as the end of life, and death as the intrinsic precondition of life. The former does not cancel the latter –it’s all about the angle. Or, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it: “In opposition to positivism, which halts at phenomena and says ‘There are only facts and nothing more’, I would say: No, facts are precisely what is lacking; all that exists consists of interpretations.” (Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885-1887, transl. Oscar Levy 1910). It is sometimes translated as: “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not the truth.”
Later, much later, I would get a tattoo on my forearm of a world map. It was a version only representing continents edges, not nation-states political borders. I have been asked many times why I did it upside-down –the southern hemisphere towards my elbow and the northern hemisphere pointing towards my hand. The map was positioned just fine in my own perspective: in my eyes, meaning when it was me looking at it, North was above and South was below. I would often say that it was one of the only drawings that humans never draw. I had it all wrong.
The common representation of the world’s surface is a planisphere: it is a flattened sphere according to specific geometrical calculations. By far, the most well-known of those projections is that of Mercator –widely taught and used by the large majority of apps who provide numerical cartography. This projection usually puts Europe and Africa in the middle and cut the world in the Pacific. However, Mercator’s projection –whose name comes from the Flemish geographer who drew it in 1569– is a useful map for sailors because of its cylindrical projection and accurate depiction of continents shape but it misrepresents their size area. Thus, as its goes further from the equator, size areas get bigger. Consequently, Europe is hugely oversized, just like Greenland, meanwhile South America and Africa are a lot smaller than they are in “real life”. Notwithstanding the over-representation of this projection, others do exist. Gall-Peters’ for instance acknowledges continents real size but deforms their angles. Despite the example shown below, North is often represented above and South below; and Europe is usually in the center. I could also mention Goode’s “homolosine” projection which maintains the correct proportion of continents although it cuts the ocean(s). Or Cahill’s polyhedral projection which has a nice butterfly shape.
To conclude, I shall mention Fuller’s “dymaxion” projection who displays continents as the big island which they are, or large archipelago. It can be viewed in any direction: the world is not cut by the oceans; North is obviously not above, neither is South below. The United Nations use a version of this projection as part of their logo.
There is no logical reason, neither is there a scientific one that justifies South to be below and North above. It is a convention (= a decision) and a simple matter of point of view. It is easy to locate its origin in the conquering and annihilating volition undertaken by various Europeans towards Africa first and Abya Yala (America) afterwards. Such a practical cartographical outlook is a fabulous domination tool: if North is above, it matches with what’s superior and becomes the obvious location to the possibility of rising that we should all yearn for [sarcasm warning]. We may also analyse this combination of North-superior as it relates to an understanding of the human body according to which the upper part contains the noblest elements such as the brain. Although the brain is often identified as the origin of thinking, it relates more to a feeling due to the position of our eyes than to an actual truth: the human body is entirely ramified by the nervous system. Incidentally, modern occidental thinking (or I should say “Judeo-Christian” perhaps) identifies the lower part of the body with what’s dirty, subjected to infections –like the feet and genitals. This demonstrates a cultural bias in which rising to the skies is prioritised against rooting to the earth. Yet –and this may be a reminiscence of an ancient time where another way of thinking was prevalent–, we do put people in the ground after their death instead of leaving them out and exposed to be devoured by vultures that would however take them closer to the heavenly vault such as it is done in certain areas of Tibet and Nepal.
“That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above (…).” – Emerald Tablet
When it is not about the human body and its specific biomechanics which impose an up-straight position for walking, there is no absolute above and no necessary below. Up and down do not exist as with regards to planet Earth. She turns around an axis but the point of view we chose to adopt on it is specific to each and everyone of us. We are not over, neither we are under, anything –if so, it is the consequence of a decision and nothing else. When the cardinal points are viewed according to an imagined relief, it underlies a specific understanding of human value: greatness is scaled to height not to depth –to the greater proximity to the sun, up to burn one’s wings, rather than to the capacity of becoming ancestors by allowing being deepened. Thus, going beyond up and down would imply learning how to dig in order to be able to rise.