Everywhere is Here

The horizon is not the meeting point between the sea and sky. That is the surface. Rather, the horizon is the limit of the eye, be it an ocean, a mountain, a wall, or a window. Its shape is always clearly defined, uniquely dependent upon both the time and geographic location of the observer. At least it was…

…But things are different now. You don’t have to be there anymore to see it. These days you don’t have to look up to take a look around. As a matter of fact you can spend your whole life looking down staring at the little picture frame in your pocket. You know the one that holds a million photographs of faces you don’t know, things you don’t own, and places you’ve never been.

Behold the new horizon.

The answer is always yes. The time is always now. Everywhere is here.

Yet there seems no way to inhabit this expanded sphere without simultaneously disfiguring the self. Everywhere can only be here to a splintered and strewn-about soul. So it is with us. We have become like eyes searching absent a body and bodies aimless absent sight. Not just broken, but fractured. Not just fractured, but scattered. Our substance is still human, but the augmented horizon terminally degrades us into smaller and smaller fractions.

Perhaps the pixels inside of that little picture frame in our pockets are the perfect metaphor for what we’ve been reduced to: tiny disjoint pieces of light that form only a grainy image of the real thing.



© 2023 Colin Heinrich