Texture

The cold mornings remind us that the season is changing, and that it’s time to break out that warm winter coat, or turn on the central heating. My various hotels and workspaces this week have all been out of kilter with reality: too hot, as they overcompensated, or too cold, as they failed to turn it up. It is with the changing of the seasons that the texture of the weather is most keenly felt. The first warmth of the springtime sun, the first summer thunderstorms, the first frosts of winter, or the closing in of the last light of day.

I’m interested in the idea of ‘textures’ at the moment. The ways that our urban environments civilise them: smoothing them out, laminating them with tarmac and cement, glazing over them. The idea that ‘voice’ can carry texture, that stories can be ‘textured’. In the Planetary Philosophy work I argue that our separation and distance from the textures of the natural world impoverish us. That the roughness, the coldness, the feel, is an important part of our being. The tactile is an important and grounded aspect of our experience.

There’s also something about how texture changes: if we keep touching something, it wears smooth, then as it decays, it breaks apart. Cycles of creation and fragmentation, the rough and the smooth.

Also the ways that our language, and metaphors, may equate ‘smooth’ with good, and ‘rough’ as bad, reinforcing how civilised technologies that distance us from the planetary ‘smooth’ the way, or iron out the bumps’ of our experiences of communication and travel.

When Meadow was a tiny baby I would carry her on my chest, and when it rained I would try to shelter her, but she loved to push her head back, to feel the rain on her face. She still does. Perhaps she had something to remind me of: that our connection to the textures of the natural world are something to cherish, not simply insulate ourselves from.