A metonymy of displacement: clouds and volcanoes
Miguel Leal · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2010
We know from physics that every displacement is relative. It seems there is no such thing as displacement without a point of origin, without a point from where to measure both the direction and the distance of a certain movement from one place to the other. In those terms displacement can only be defined as a relative condition: the actual position (B) being relative to an initial position (A). To be out of place is to be displaced. We obtain the figures of our displacement by measuring the difference between A and B, a difference that implies not only space but also time. The sense of displacement depends on this relation between A and B, there and here, then and now. However, we also know things can be much more complicated. For instance, the kind of measurement we were just describing usually uses as reference a straight line going from A to B from which it is impossible to draw the real path taken during the displacement from one point to the other. Displacement is always an awkward situation based on strange connections between time and space. Displacement is not (only) a matter of measurements. Imagine A and B are not only two but a multiplicity of points, imagine then is now and now is then, imagine there is here and here is there, imagine everything is out of place. How to define displacement from such acomplicated placement of things? Retaining the basic idea that every displacement is relative, we will try to step a little further into this.