Pop-up substance

I had an image yesterday morning that gives me a picture of what flattening space might achieve.  You know those pop-up children’s books that open up to a three-dimensional scene in cardboard cut-outs, lifting up to create a little world when you open the page and folding back when you turn the page to the next scene?  Perhaps that’s a good image for our dimensionalized reality: rigid, fixed configurations whose seeming substantiality cannot move or evolve in time.  Comparing that to the rich depth of what a good book can open up for us–in the “flattened” space of its pages–perhaps gives some hint of what we give up in the “dimensions of substance” lifting off the surface of appearance? — Michael