RING OF FIRE
written for a self-published catalog
explaining my influences when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area
1994

If you were to unfurl a map of the world, the flat kind, printed on paper, spread out on a table or the wall, the configuration of continents are such that the United States is to the West of Europe. But if you were to trace its placement on a globe, you would discover that it is also to the east, north, and south. Traveling in any of these other directions would take longer, but the inconvenience would not exclude the reality.

Our attitudes that determine what a direction means have to do with human history. They are not physical facts. The only time one way or the other needs a definition is when you consider where you stand, and where you intend to go. A compass points north not because the word north has any inherent value. You could, if you decided, call it south, or lhjfl. It wouldn’t change the phenomenon of magnets. South America is not necessarily beneath North America, and Africa is not necessarily below Europe. To associate south with down is an assumption that is based on a particular cultural bias and has nothing to do with the paradigm of a globe. Any and all points on a sphere have an equal, interconnected and simultaneous relationship to the center. And just because we can only be in one place in one moment does not mean that all places do not exist equally at the same time always.

Two hundred and twenty five million years ago, there was a singular ancestral land mass surrounded by ocean. Gradually, driven by the movement of the tectonic plates, Pangea began to break apart. As the pieces spread, Panthalassa spilled into the gaps, creating the intermittent seas. The first separation was lateral. Then it was down the middle when the Americas broke free of Africa and Eurasia. The Atlantic gushed into the rip. Yet through all this diffusion, there remains an expanse that has forever been an ocean. That expanse is the Pacific, the remnant of ancient Panthalassa, the largest body of water in the world.

Beneath the floor of the Pacific is the only tectonic plate that does not carry a continent. It compiles its greatest pressure at its edges, where water meets land and the original shores of Pangea continue to shift against it. The contour of these primordial forces pressing into one another is called the Pacific Rim. It makes its way along the north eastern lip of Asia, the western shores of North America, Mexico, and encompassing all the Pacific islands. It is also called the “Ring of Fire”, marked by constant earthquakes and young volcanoes.

©Sono Osato

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