Disintegrating Distance, Embodying Space

 Meditate upon space as the highest reality. The Upanishads


The Italian architect and critical theorist Franco La Cecla, after his epiphany on an airplane from New York to San Francisco, appeared to understand the disintegrating capability that covering distance mechanically (and not organically) could have on the self:

The true problem with speed, he writes in Against Architecture, is that today one no longer occupies space in it. One obstacle to narrativity is that space has become discrete: in order to fly from New York to San Francisco one has to ignore everything that is in the middle, that took the pioneers three hundred days or more to cross or eighty days for those who preferred to navigate the way around.

...space has become discrete...

When space becomes unnoticeable, as in the disintegration of distance and the use of mechanical conveyance devices, and time becomes correspondingly so paramount, there is a clear breach in what might be called the quantum continuum. Time has become everything, space nothing.

Conversely, by integrating distance, by covering distance ourselves in the flesh, we thus 'absorb distance' and embody space. We walk it, we cycle it, we dance with it whichever we way can. Space becomes us as we become it. We are tuned in. Timed in. The world passes through us as we pass through it. It should come as no surprise then that this way of moving (or being moved), of negotiating the world - between an enactive self-organising on the one hand and a passive self-being-organised on the other - has a fundamental effect on how we see, and thus correspond with, the world.

In the final analysis, the spontaneous capacity to move oneself through space, to integrate distance and embody space, cannot be underestimated for its power to harmonize man and world.