18.3.09

everything, in it's right place

I've been really interested in the texture of things recently. But not just physical texture, but more the texture of something that we perceive with our other senses. That sounds odd, but consider: you can predict what something will feel like by looking at it, and whether those two things are the same or diverge, both the visual feel and the physical feel of the object in question are pleasurable to experience. The first day of break it was really warm, and I went on a walk, without any particular destination in mind. I ended up walking to Brewberry's, taking in many things I had not had the time to look at recently: the bark on trees, retaining walls, concrete, leaves, chairs, pants, clothes. All sorts of things. The point is, I didn't always touch them, I just appreciated the visual texture of the objects.

This can also be done with music, although differently. Music has an aural texture, something best seen in bands like Radiohead or other such very layered, very well-mixed offerings. Range has something to do with this, where on the landscape of sound (soundscape for lack of a better term -- just so that we're on the same page, I'm envisioning sort of a cartesian grid overlayed on a topographical map indicating aural qualitites) the song or work stretches, but depth does as well, local and global maxima and minima, but also permutations within a small sub-section of the landscape, the dF of the sound. But there are other senses that interact with music - all of them, actually, through everything from incidental associations of smells to embracing the mood inherent in a piece of music, to literally feeling the texture of that landscape.

I find it incredibly difficult to discuss specific examples, because writing itself removes a stimulus from it's native sense and transfer it into something else -- description, words, a prompt for the reader's own sense of imagination to take flight and form. And when describing this ... Synaesthesia, I'm removing something so far from it's original form that it might be impossible to reconstruct.

I think I'm going to struggle with this for a long while.

And...it's gone

I had something to say when I opened up this tab. I don't anymore. So I'll talk about dry cleaners.

I'm sitting at Dunn's, and there's a Stoltz dry cleaners across the street. I can't read the numbers in "EST ....", but from the name I know that it was probably the first half of the 20th century -- "stolz" is "pride" in German. Every day I walk by it in some fashion, and almost every day I get covered in laundry smell. Laundry smell and I have an off-and-on relationship: sometimes I love it, but sometimes it makes me sick, throws my sinuses into disarray. This makes doing laundry difficult.

Among the list of things that make my sinuses jump: laundry, showers, water, changes in sunlight, kittens, blowing my nose, changes in temperature, summer days. A lot of those are rather nice things that I come across often, which makes me very sad. I think I can trace these issues to my deviated septum, something my mother points out nearly every time I see her. It's not a long or incredibly painful surgery, so I should probably do it. I'm just...human, and resistant to change.

Anyways, I haven't remembered yet what I was going to talk about, so I think that's it. :\ Have a nice day!