Joyce Hinterding and David Haines
We would like to believe that we belong to the place where weather places us. No matter how people might isolate themselves amongst concrete, glass, metal and media, they are brought back into a communal experience once immersed in searing heat, syrupy humidity, dense fog, or bone-chilling wind. It influences what we talk about, how we dress, how we move about, whether we move about, where we go and where we are. Cannot a particular clime leach into the deep character structures of an entire people, just as it permits the existence and behaviors of certain species? We would like to believe that weather permeates the condition of the air at any one moment, including the moment of each breath we breathe, enveloping it into our very being. This is the air we share with plants and other animals, thinning out or thickening with altitude, as we are enveloped in an idea of nature. If we are not immersed in air, where are we?
Too much weather, sharp and sudden changes, uproot us. No longer grounded in an identifiable place, we become susceptible to uncertainty, we don't know what to wear, we feel tetchy and adrift. Meteorologists themselves, reassuring us with predictions of highs and lows, troughs and pressure belts, are involved in a daily ritual pitted against the uncanny, for they cannot avoid the fact that the turbulence underlying all weather patterns is still too complex to model, an everpresent excess of noise within which the unexpected can and does happen. The very word meteorology glosses over the unexpected. In the seventeenth century meteorology was defined as ' that part of natural philosophy which entreateth of the aire, and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline