Guided Pathway

And while this dream of universal correspondence and cooperation based on the curative effects of “good” proportion might have eventually collapsed, the image of the microcosmic man, man as the center of the universe, would survive in the modern era. In 1968 the first man landed on the moon. The photograph of the astronaut’s footprint on the lunar surface served as proof that hundreds of years after illustrated manuscripts, such as the one by Hildegard depicting the moon under the human foot linked by an analogical influence, now the same bodies could finally come into direct contact. What previously was an analogy now had become a homology consolidated by the annihilation of distance. It may then seem less surprising that the emblem chosen by NASA’s space program to commemorate this and consequent spacewalks by the EVA (Extra-Vehicular-Activity) patch awarded to astronauts who have stepped out of their spaceship into extraterrestrial space is a Vitruvian figure (allegedly fashioned after Leonardo) not naked but fully covered by a white space suit. Three or five stars that orbit inside the macrocosmic circle do not correspond to planets but commemorate space walks performed by US astronauts in the last decades. Here the stars retrace the movement of humans instead of humans following the orbit of stars. The badge is proof that via the prosthetic extensions of technology, man has succeeded to expand the radius of his bodily circumference to the cosmic periphery of the planets, achieving an identification between his corporeal and ideational contours. Microcosm and macrocosm appear to momentarily converge on a single circle.  Yet by the same identification, the Denkraum or space of thought and analogical speculation predicated on distance is once again (to invoke Warburg’s final words in his Pueblo lecture) “murdered.”