Yesterday I was thinking about texture. It began when I noticed the sunlit bark of a tree. I said at the end of yesterday’s post, how I was hoping for a textural year in 2015. Texture has a range, just like tonal values of photographs and paintings. Texture is a multimodal concept. There is texture in sound, visual texture as well as textures to feel with one’s fingers.

Perhaps the concept of a textural period of time (which just occurred to me yesterday) is more evident when one is older. Although, when I think about it, everyone has a ‘rough’ time now and then, and times that are ‘smooth’. Are there other textures for short periods of time?

In my younger days, time was more event driven. Looking back, I get a better sense of the overall texture of the time I spent living. Individual events average together creating a sense of my life, a tune, random frequencies that resonate every now and then. It is like an aerial view of a glaciers, rivers and white water rapids.

Below is a self portrait that I took many years ago. I wrote about it before in this blog (Evaporating Self Portrait), but it was in the context of trying to communicate with my nonverbal, low-functioning autistic brother, Michael, whom I imagined as being in some other dimension. In looking at this photograph now, I see myself dissolving – on a physical plane – into the texture of my surroundings.