Mira Heikkilä: Gnomon and Himmeli

At Sea

I am now concluding my year-long residency with SER aboard a cargo ship from Helsinki to Travemünde. This residency was designed to synthesize my independent studies in cultural science with the creation of Himmeli art, culminating in an exhibition that I brought to Karelia, Finland. On a way up to the north, as I traveled through Europe, embarking on a road trip of sorts with my daughter and the exhibition in tow, we covered nearly four thousand kilometers from Prayssas to Ilomantsi, where the exhibition would be displayed. We journeyed along the relatively new Baltic road, passing through the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—regions of Europe that remain surprisingly unfamiliar to many, despite their rich history of great artists, philosophers, and composers.

Now that my exhibition has been installed and is on display in a beautiful house that continues to honor the tradition of the great "poet singers", I am on my way back down to the south. Just before I boarded the ship, due to an inexplicable misunderstanding, a library employee had ordered a book for me on the history of scientific thought, compiled by the philosopher Michel Serres. The book is heavier than the Bible and cannot be carried; instead, I shall sit with it throughout the thirty-hour sea crossing. During my voyage across the Baltic Sea, from the open waters, an invisible horizon, another world emerges through Michel Serres' writing. I bear no resentment for the added weight in my cargo; indeed, what could serve as a more fitting scientific testimony than receiving Serres, the sailor, as a gift to accompany me through the excessively long hours of the sea crossing and to endure those slow knots?

From the first sentences, he surprises me by suggesting that instead of treating something as fluid and changeable as 'thought' as an event occurring on a chronological timeline—one that would have progressively improved due to history—he is ready to embark on a purposeless - yet liberating- sea journey from which we may not emerge quite the same as when we began the voyage.

I recognize his writing style. I know from my own experience the writing process to which he surrenders himself. Serres weaves words together without obvious connections. He allows his spirit to move freely, unburdened by apparent logic. He uses a single word like the rudder of a ship by which, without losing the rhythm of a runner or poet, he directs the entire vessel. Through this writing technique, he opens a non-subjective space, and a collective subject of thought emerges.

I must admit that until this moment on the cargo trip, I never truly understood the meaning of spirituality or transcendence—the way these words are often spoken by humanists. It is not merely that time and space seem to loosen, but that the resulting void is filled with a much broader perspective. My body expresses joy, as if knowing were its sole purpose in life. But what is it about words? What power lies in a single sentence that can brighten our day? What is the deeper significance behind our trust in words—a trust that modern technology seems to have forgotten?

His words reveal to me a map on which I begin to navigate, and the weight of his pen marks the points and lines where I easily start to chart. His writing contains all the words that I am actually meditating on and, through light and shadow, resolves the difficult human problem of the subject of thought. He joins me over the open sea, and through points of convergence and bifurcation of history, the connecting lines are drawn because there is a shared mind. We converse freely and genuinely by our own means, and there is no trace of the Greek scholars, Church councils, or university symposiums claiming a monopoly over the open sea of knowledge. We connect through the roots of language, he in French, I in Finnish. How strange it is, ultimately, the way we come to the meeting point through the virtual world!

“In less than four centuries, Greek thinkers from Thales of Miletus to Euclid of Alexandria, fromrival cities and schools, from rival economies and religions, intent on disputing with each other— sons of the land against lovers of forms, exponents of change versus those who believed in eternity—built between them, albeit unwittingly, in a stunning and unexpected way, a unique and invisible empire whose greatness has survived intact until our times. It is an edifice with no parallel in history, where, over a span of more than two thousand years, their influence still causes us to work in the same way as themselves. Nor have we abandoned it on the pretext that we speak a different language, even if our enmity has increased. Is there any equivalent consensus in the annals of human history? The name of this edifice is mathematics.”

I imagine myself on those Greek islands—Samos, Pathos, Chios—, and I visit the ship’s sauna and jacuzzi as though they were ancient baths. “From this physical and human chasm, active since the beginning of time, emerged science, our religions, history, and most of the traditions that have inspired us until now. Violent struggles continue to this day.”

“The most active period runs from the end of the seventh century to the end of the third century BC and a little later—in other words, more than 300 years, equivalent to the time span between Descartes and ourselves.”

I go back with Serres into the era we know as Antiquity to search for something very specific about our world today—about its logic and behavioral patterns. I am dismayed that in our history classes, we never addressed the stunning survival of Greek language and thought, even though materially, nothing remains—not even one weapon that would have withstood the venomous power of time. Instead, the abstract space was created and it became methodological.

“Who better scorned the battles than this little group of irreconcilable enemies forging a common language? Iranians, Spaniards, French, English, Tamils—we all speak Greek when we say parallelogram, logarithm, or topology.”

When I read these words, I am thrilled. It seems we are searching for the same thing—the elements!

About Reading

But first, let’s discuss reading. Our linear thinking often seems to be the only existing model. We approach a subject that unfolds gradually as we read. This is our expectation when reading a novel or a scientific essay. We seek to understand the subject of the story because, while reading, we are already forming a more compact summary in our minds. When we can express it succinctly, we believe that we have understood. We make the resumé. This same logic guides us as we navigate our daily lives: we move among objects and thoughts, constantly building small summaries throughout the day—brief stories in which we assign meanings and values. The objects we observe and the values and meanings we associate with them form the cargo our bodies carry.

However, this journey is of a different kind. We are not merely stating that this ship will depart from Helsinki and arrive thirty hours later in Travemünde, from where I will drive another sixteen hundred kilometers to reach home. While all that will happen, there is something else unfolding—something difficult to describe because it does not fit within our linear demands. Here, there is no subject, no object. The sea is vast, and the colors of the sky and water are so similar that there is no scene, no spectacle.

Light and Shadow

Gnomon. He writes the word, and it strikes a chord in the back of my mind—the sundial, which no one had been interested in for telling time. Here, I stop reading and lift my gaze to the open horizon. But of course! How is it that "knowing" can sometimes prevent us from seeing? I see sundials everywhere in the south of France where I live, yet I have never looked at them closely because I was told they "told time in ancient times." "The sundial was rarely used for telling time, but rather as an instrument of scientific research in its own right, demonstrating a model of the world. It was more of an observatory than a clock."

What I had missed was the act of truly seeing because the process of reading objects takes over so enthusiastically and so quickly that knowledge follows like a torrent that cannot be silenced. For Serres, the gnomon is what *Himmeli* is for me. I became immersed in the art of Himmeli due to a particular similarity to what Serres describes about the human mind through the example of the gnomon. This issue, inherently human, lies in the mind's inability to perceive.

Serres not only describes how Greek culture remains the most enduring construction because it reflects the structure of our minds; he goes further by highlighting something that our modern education fails to address correctly. Serres points out that scientific action, the verb, begins only when the subject is absent. This is the opposite of what we believe. Serres, true to his style, explains this history succinctly, yet with remarkable economy and generosity.

"Modernity begins when this real-world space is taken as a stage, and this stage, controlled by the director, turns inside out and plunges into the utopia of a knowing, inner, intimate subject," such as the "I" who stands behind the telescope, observing, calculating, and arranging. Serres writes that the Gnomon, though originally developed for mathematical purposes, serves as a model through which the world independently reveals knowledge. I was intrigued to learn for the first time that Greek astronomers practiced moving from shadow to light, and from light to the source—a practice I was already familiar with through my reading of Vedantic literature. This kind of practice acts as an instrument that helps us position the particular "nature" of the mind—the active center of knowledge—firmly outside ourselves. Both the Gnomon and the Himmeli are artifacts that bear witness to the harmony between the seer and the seen, between humanity and the world.

“Gnomon is a thing enabling something to be known, observed, or verified. “

“ … in this thing, through it , in the place it occupies, the world shows knowledge.”

These objects, more precisely statues, created by the ancients, are mnemonic devices, preserving principles that we so easily forget. This oblivion also explains why these early forms of artificial intelligence are today thought to be mere objects that our subjective selves exploit for personal gain, much like clocks, decorative items, pastimes of women.

"Since the inception of science, there have been things or states of affairs that the history of our languages associates with mental activities, as if these artifacts—gnomon, plumb line, ruler, compass, set square—were considered the true subjects of thought."

Serres refers to Socrate who already thunders against the same problème, against Georgia’s selfindulgence: ”You have failed to observe the great power of geometrical equality !”The next time encounter someone who treats Himmeli as merely a decorative object, or as a “cosmetic ornament”, I might refer to Plato and say, "You have failed to observe the great power of geometrical equality! You neglect geometry!"

“Relire le relié”

Today, I am emptying my suitcases and washing my car. I have a list of unfinished tasks in my mind. How could anyone believe that the physical world could in any way satisfy a person? Every book by Michel Serres that I have read this year has brought about a sense of order and cleansing within me, as if I were swimming in clearer waters. But I believe I can read him because I am familiar with the earliest anthropological, scientific texts about human being. My journey has been long—I had to dismantle everything I had learned, even becoming a stranger to my own native language. But now that I have arrived, I can joyfully embrace Serres' last writing and "relire le relié," reread that which connects us.

"Ever since a kind teacher introduced me to the secret of the unknown x and, at the same time, opened my mind to abstraction, ever since he taught me its possible and often incredibly practical applications, I have believed in the existence of a virtual, invisible, formal world, which is also multilayered. I am wrong to say that I believe in it: in fact, I see it, like everyone else, and I have lived in it, immersed in it for part of my life.

I began with mathematics because those unfamiliar with its sublime practice have more difficulty perceiving this virtual universe than those who, grappling with it, experience its resistance, its independent abstraction, and its real utility. For, far from submitting to our laws, we obey its laws, which are discovered rather than invented and, even better, give us access to the laws of the world, miraculously identical to their own.

Would we humans survive without this dual and absent world that shapes our inner selves, ignites our imaginations, sculpts relationships, moves groups, enriches perception, and whose wellknown effectiveness lightens the burdens of existence and work? Can we claim that its presence and conscious use, in all its diversity, distinguish us from our animal brethren? Does the essence or virtue of humanity reside in this virtual realm, deployed as sensitively as a spectrum of shades?"