Exteriors

On Friday I had one of those very welcome moments when I could recognize one of my own insufficient models of reality, an overly simplistic thought, for what it was. I am still wondering about this unveiling that ocured while walking in Prospect Park. I could see the unconscious concept in question had as little in common with its object as a toy trash truck does with an actual DEP vehicle or a sheet of vinyl has with human skin.

Reflections on bird feathers, a slow realization that each feather on a bird's body is differently shaped by the predicates of being and natural law into a perfect facet of featherness on the gem of a bird's body, grew into a reassessment of human skin. Feathers are one more demonstration of nature's unmatchable intelligence, logic spoken as matter becoming the fact of both life and flight. And human skin, not one homogeneous sheet upholstered to the human body. What encloses the soles of the feet differs vastly from that delicate skin under the arms, on the face, the lips, the inner ear, the palms. Each segment speaks differently with the elements and engineers different possibilities.

I suspect many have more eloquent things to say about interiors and exteriors, but I am left feeling that skin, the border between the perceived interior and exterior, belongs to neither exclusively, is as much shaped by the world as it is by what it encloses, to the extent that it presents no real boundary or isolating event, just a conversation of unmatchable syncopation within an unending sea of infinitely variegated familiars dreaming tangents of flight, warmth, softness, claw.