Lying Down: The Horizontal Worldview

by Marco Vassi

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Marco Ferdinand William Vasquez-d'Acugno Vassi (New York City, November 6, 1937 – New York City, January 14, 1989) was an American experimental thinker and author, most noted for his erotica. He wrote fiction and nonfiction, publishing hundreds of short stories, articles, and more than a dozen novels. Many of his works appeared as "Anonymous" in their first printings. He is most often compared to Henry Miller, has been called the greatest erotic writer of his time and "foremost of his generation," and praised by the likes of Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, and Kate Millett.

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Lying down under the sheet, in the dark, alone, the door locked.. in that secret space and then ask, Who am I? and Is there God?" (p 88, punctuation in the original)

This is a mystical tract as well as a very loose outline for a method of inquiry and a manner of being. Yet it's humble somehow. And subversive.

It's also beautiful and timely. You would enjoy it.

Here is the thing. Standing determines consciousness. Vassi has the clarity to show *how* that happens. This is about Standing Up as a way of viewing the world - a world view that predisposes consciousness towards acts of rising up and domination.

And it is also about the contrasting World View of Lying Down. Really most of the book is about the consciousness that arises - no, not arises, but spreads out horizontally from - a supine vision of the world.

There are a lot of nuanced and meaningful experiences to be had through these pages, but it is especially perfect reading in the moment when Trump Tower has come to symbolize the corrupted, rotted-out dominion of the United States. Vassi anticipates this and doesn’t let readers forget that behind the western colonial skyscraper there is a haunting of another western vertical image - that of the nuclear blast.

The writing is both excellent and carefully edited. The research is wide-ranging and the thinking is subtle. They just don’t make books like these very often. This one is a treasure and I’m so glad it fell in to my hands.

CHAPTER 2 is about how lying down changes your thinking. “Lying down is the most nourishing matrix for the emergence of intimacy.” (p 38)

Intimacy for Vassi is "really being with yourself with no division between self and other. Then everything becomes nothing but you. nothing could be more intimate than that." (p 52)

CHAPTER 3 is where Vassi develops the metaphor of verticality and nuclear war - the "vertical ‘column of fire’ that rises to mushroom cloud.” It is a prescient critique of verticality in the form of towering skyscrapers and nuclear bombs. He wonders if the time of writing - in 1983 - is a lull before another storm. He predicts a fall of this sort of hyper-military vertical orientation to the planet

What would a horizontal history be? It would be an ecology.

There’s a great discussion around page 60 on the dematerialization of the art object, and the artistic move from creation to appreciation. As the Tibetans say, the highest art is living an ordinary life in an extraordinary manner. This leads into a great discussion on the shapes and movements of the colonialist thought-space.

From about page 80 there’s what could be a classic discussion of the vertical orientation of dictatorships and other, milder versions of authoritarianism.

Vassi sees guru cults as generally well meaning and potentially beneficial, but also describes them hilariously (pp 81-2) as:

“a lot of people milling about trying to slay their egos, and they have got to be orginazied in to some kind of society so they can feed and shelter themselves… strict rules for not only behavior but inner attitude… no matter how they start out, these groups always end up with the same social order - a hierarchy of concentric circles of power starting at the guru’s feet and radiating downward… practically harmless, although even here one often discerns the ripple of fascist muscle beneath the cloth of ritual compassion… the guru game is the best that the vertical understanding can produce by way of a social order, but it’s just not good enough.” [The anti-guru Jiddu] Krishnamurti for half a century … has traveled the globe doing a shiva’s dance of destruction, razing all the temples and teachings of the past five thousand years. … he leveled all that went before but is incapable of envisioning what might come after… he himself has an extremely vertical character structure…”

The book concludes with humility, both in tone and in its intention for how it may affect a reader. Here are the last 5 lines (p 97):

As Eliot put it, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” And with this comes the final paradox.

For, if the horizon is everywhere and defines everything, when we lie down and enter the horizon, then we are everywhere and define everything. Not by climbing higher or probing deeper, but letting ourselves be absorbed into that which is our very ground. It is in the ironic acceptance of the absurdity of having reality shaped by illusion that we mystically transcend the entire show.

Then there is nothing other than living each day, doing what work we must, loving the best we can, and looking upon all that is with a sense of wonder.

Which makes the new paradigm a very old story after all."