Porous Like Coral
“It has perfect confidence in its weird creative texture.”
I forget where I heard this for the first time. I think maybe it was in Tim Rogers’ epic review of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. Wherever I heard it, it has stuck in my mind ever since as the perfect encapsulation of a lot of my tastes in fiction across mediums:
Some examples off the top of my head:
- The video games of From Software like Dark Souls and Elden Ring: gothic, lore-drenched worlds in which the fabric of time has completely broken down.
- The fiction of Robert Aickman, William Hope Hodgson, Thomas Ligotti, Jon Padgett, Michael T. Cisco, Jean Ray, Gene Wolfe, the Strugatsky Brothers, H.P. Lovecraft, Alfred Kubin, Edgar Allan Poe, Mervyn Peake, Cormac McCarthy, etc.
- The comics of Junji Ito, Kentaro Miura, Hyōryū Kyōshitsu, Graham Ingels, Bernie Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Kevin O’Neill, etc.
- The films of David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Cronenberg, etc.
- Old BBC teleplays like Schalken the Painter, Whisper and I’ll Come To You, Robin Redbreast, Baby, The Woman in Black, etc.
This concept of weird creative texture is one I’ve been thinking about a lot in my own writing lately.
We often teach young writers that texture creates friction, and that friction gets in the way of ‘readability.’ By that, we mean an effortlessly lubricated flume like a Disney World water ride, where the alternative would be a keelhauling. But friction isn’t all barnacles. It can also be as weird and pleasurable as a cat’s tongue. From texture comes the unexpected, like the rumble of static that sizzles under flesh when you stroke a seemingly smooth piece of metal. We encourage too many writers to polish all the friction away, until what is left has no spark. Instead of teaching young artists to be confident in their creative texture (rough as it may still be), we ask them to buff it away until what’s left is just gloss.
James Baldwin once famously wrote: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” It’s great advice. I believe in it. But we should all remember that even the cleanest bone has texture. Look close. It’s weird and porous like coral, with edges to cut yourself on, and crevices in which things can seep and grow.