The eye of the storm: visual perception and the weather

Much has been written on how we see landscape; virtually nothing on the relation between visual perception and the weather. This essay is an attempt to take the study of vision out of doors. I argue that weather enters visual awareness not as a scenic panorama but as an experience of light. Rather than placing sight and light on opposite sides of a boundary between the mind and the physical world, I follow Merleau‐Ponty in claiming that light is fundamentally an experience of being in the world that is ontologically prior to the sight of things. Though we do not see light, we do see in light. Drawing on James Gibson's tripartite division of the inhabited world into medium, substances and surfaces, I link the relation between landscape and weather to that between surfaces and medium. Since weather, as a phenomenon of the medium, is an experience of light, to see in the light is to see in the weather. In the canons of western thought, however, the surfaces of the landscape are identified with the limits of materiality. This, in turn, renders immaterial the medium through which persons and organisms move in perception and action. Thus while the landscape appears to be real, the weather can only be imagined. Overturning this ontology, I show that in the perception of the weather‐world, earth and sky are not opposed as real to immaterial, but inextricably linked within one indivisible field.