ISSUE 5: IMMEASURABLY SMALL, INCONCEIVABLY IMMENSE

Spring 2025

Edited By: Zahra Safaverdi and Edward Jiaolin Yu

“An aversion to the Underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be “uplifted” is preferable to being “depressed” or “pulled down”. “Catastrophe” literally means a “downwards turn”, “cataclysm” a “downwards violence”. A bias against depth also runs through mainstream conventions of observation and representation. In his book Vertical, Stephen Graham describes the dominance of what he calls the “flat tradition” of geography and cartography, and the “largely horizontal worldview” that has resulted. We find it hard to escape the “resolutely f lat perspectives” to which we have become habituated, Graham argues – and he finds this to be a political failure as well as a perceptual one, for it disinclines us to attend to the sunken networks of extraction, exploitation and disposal that support the surface world.” Robert MacFarlane

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