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The Holographic Sky

2022, ŠUM Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism

This experimental essay takes off from a methodology as well as a spiritual vision I have developed or resuscitated01 that I call Sky-Earth systems science.02 Sky-Earth systems science is a method for thinking from the Center of the Universe, and only the Center of the Universe, alongside and internal to non-modern myth as much as contemporary science. It provides minimal comparative parameters, the horizontal and vertical axes, within a kind of complex plane or phase space, for superposing the multiplicity of cosmologies within a generic one. These are the animal and the God which cross in the Human at the Center between Sky and Earth. The Sky-Earth system accommodates a variation of cosmologies, while also offering concrete content to start off from. It is a disalienating thought that thinks from the heart of the Universe, as it puts us right in the middle of it, rather than merely considering it from the outside. The goal of Sky-Earth systems is to recompose a Universe 01 I say resuscitated because its premises are probably ancient and widespread.

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A Conformally Compactified Geometry (M. C. Escher)

To compactify the universes and time with it solves the problem of potential and actual infinities, only displaced with Cantor's transfinite sets. The Moderns pride themselves on the incompleteness of a transcendence, of a transitive delay, whether as the endless series of sets or as a waiting for the God at the end of History, never thinking to change the axiom from transitivity to intransitivity. But Sky-Earth systems science does not wait for the God at the end of "metaphysics", but thinks from the God as already here, at the crossing in the Human.

When the time that crosses the universes is compactified within them, the series of skies is infinite and yet complete. We describe it as a nested conformal diagram (conformal diagrams inside conformal diagrams) with infinity meeting at the cardinal points at every scale. Infinity is Housed in a great Longhouse, a Longhouse made out of Longhouses, persons made out of persons, what Roy Wagner calls a fractal person.24 Indeed, it is the crinkling of the boundary that is itself, a half-integer dimension in which it is each of the halves, put together as three-dimensional space. The World Tree branching in it is the tube, the central pole around which the dance of the stars takes place, expanding in and out as the vertical axis or the gourd of the Sky, the long and the round, contained in themselves, without any Russel's Paradox. 25 The mereology of the CCC mirrors the counting system of Omalyce in the Eastern Highlands of Melanesia, a complete person made of complete persons.26 The Anaconda is the conformal rescaling of the animals on its surface, the fractal Animal, a totemic operator, where wholes are reflected in parts.27 Is it not what Butler calls the One as each God, each One, a Henad, and so a fractal God, distributed through the space-time that is its own mask?28 A fractal Human, Animal, and God, fractalizing each other in perfect conformality.

We prefer C-theory, complete conformal cyclic cosmology of the center, to D-theory, the displacing, deviating, dispersal of the center to the periphery, the philosophies of Difference, the ellipse as triumph over the Sphere. We do not reverse Platonism, which makes everyone a Second, but replace the Despotic Pyramid with a Polycentric one, build a Monument in which each is the First and the Last, never Second. Instead of the micro versus the macro, scale-invariance; instead of the pure series of time, intransitive eternity. Instead of the non-Modern nomads of the Earth versus the non-Modern despotics, the generic Ancient, who is everyone, at the Center of the Sky-Earth System.

When Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa describes the Xapiri images of the animal-ancestors as luminescent, ornamental skins and simultaneously as the Center and heart of the animals, he thinks with the holographic principle.29 For it is as if the normal body-surface of the animal is exchanged for the spiritual surface of the Xapiri at the moment the Center is accessed. If it is that play of surface and center that creates the depth of the universe, then the Xapiri will come to rest both within the breast of the shaman and within the chest of the Sky, such that the reduced space of the Center and surface creates the dimensional volume between Sky and Earth, and within the Human, in which the Xapiri can act, or their effects can be registered.

If the chest of the Sky has its own surface, would it not be the Other side of the Sky, the Center of the Xapiri themselves, as the Yarori animal-ancestors? The Xapiri would be a double holography, creating the internal space between Sky and Earth in order to realize the original identity between the Human and the God. There has to be, in a sense, a container within a container, such that the surface is folded back into the Center, a Black Hole inside a Black Hole.30 Omama, who created the Mountains that are both Houses for the Xapiri and pillars between Sky and Earth, would be this container of the container, the vision from the CCC and from the beginning of the Sky-Earth System.

Intersecting Cosmological Horizons

The Universe is a Black Hole: not a time-symmetric Black Hole, but an anti-symmetric and intransitive one, where time both continues and moves backwards at once.31 The Black Holes shed their surface as radiation until it becomes the Universe's conformal surface, a double twist in which they sacrifice themselves to become the Big Bang.32 They are the act of Purusha in the Vedas, or the Moche spider decapitator, or Kuwai of the Northwest Amazon.33 The double twist does not twirl into nowhere, but-exactly as depicted-places an X over the Center, reflects the poles across each other in intransitive supersymmetry.

The Sky is falling.34 The homeostatic equilibrium of the Sky-Earth System is breaking down. Sky-Earth systems science tries to reverse this entropy, to reenter the belly of the Anaconda who sheds his skin so as to live forever. The Human opens the breathing-space between Sky and Earth-neither collapsing the vertical into the horizontal nor debasing the horizontal through it, but learning to live in the Forest of World Trees, the living breathing forest that is everything.35

When the finite limits of the planet are reconciled with the conformal infinity of the Sky, we will see the Earth as a star without leaving it. The orb of the Earth will be reconciled with the animals, and we will see their shapes laid out as the constellations. We will see the God reflected everywhere, in the simplicity of the person and in the pulse of the heart. We will travel in a Snake-Canoe to where the ancients are and have always been, at the Center of the Universe.