christina maile
risk never coming back. Unless. Unless we bind ourselves, like Odysseus, to the smooth mast of control. Only if our ears are shuttered against the delirious noise of the earth, can we move into its vesperal zones and steal beauty from its fevered surface. Does not the phyllo- taxis of a leaf reveal at last the golden section? Can you now see it, the wondrous catenary in the sway of the vine? If we draw a careful line around this or that clattering region, can you not see that we have exorcised it of its self-possession, brought it into our metaphor of eternal surface? The answer to this question may lie in the tectonic collisions of these two surfaces, the rough and the smooth. From their continuous scraping and explosive folding and unfolding all around us, there rises a morphology which may account for our anguished bicamerality towards the built world.
operation of this surface, the act of opening and closing, moving towards and away, simulta- neity and disjunctiveness; this mobile response to light and shade, this articulation of show and concealment communicates to us the powerful wholeness of the earth’s surface inherent in its fragmentation — a deeply sensuous memory. What we recognize is not only the richly tex- tured interaction of appearance and disappear- ance, but on a deeper level, the cycle of loss and return, and the thick embrace of our embodied senses in the duration between. The actual incorporation of show and con- cealment into the pristine regimen of eternal metaphors then has resulted in a surface mor- phology of the built environment composed of three elements: depiction of shadow, ornamen- tation of shade and possession of the originat- ing process.
The key to this morphology lies in show sur- face shows and conceals. Its force resides in how surface appropriates light and shadow; its power, through the strength of that appropria- tion, is how it turns light and shadow into the substance of vision. The morphological failure of the eternal sur- face is that it reduces light to a mere reflection of material, and removes shadow to an entirely separate region, to only a measurement of an entity’s relationship to the cosmological con- dition. Without shadow the eternal surface, whose perceptual narrative is embedded in the metaphor of the immaculate, becomes silent in its banality It is not just the visual rhythms of shadow and promise of light that imparts coherence to the earth’s surface for us. The rhythm in the very
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