Spinning Pins

Speaking of axes:

“A truly subterranean space is not only closed but also has an element of verticality...If we go or imagine going underground, we enter an environment where organic nature is largely absent, but we also retrace a journey that is one of the most enduring and powerful cultural traditions of humankind: a metaphorical journey of discovery through descent below the surface. Even in places that lack caves, such as the Kalahari Desert and the flat landscapes of Siberia, the preliterate inhabitants assumed a vertical cosmos. Nature was assumed to be as deep as it was high. Narratives about journeys to the world below were inherently sacred...

The more I worked with American subterranean stories, the more I realized that they did not fill the same cultural role as in the Old World....American writers typically develop the theme of a technological environment on a horizontal plane...The conditions are entirely different in Europe, where it is much harder to find open land: the vertical journey makes more sense when the horizontal possibilities are much more limited than in the New World.”

~Rosalind Williams, interviewed by Sina Najafi in Cabinet #30

We might have known that every mine is a pin. But this would make every road a tower.