I cannot live without windows. Who could? But for me I think they have a special significance. I seem to notice them, sometimes more than other people. A throwback perhaps to my years spent in prison where the day was often elusive. I would occasionally come out of the prison and someone would remark on what a beautiful day it had been. Only then would I realise that I had almost no knowledge of the day outside, beautiful or otherwise – that I had instead been consumed by the interior world of the institution and both it’s physical and metaphorical darkness.
In our beautiful house in Agde (where incidentally, ironically some might say, there are bars at the downstairs windows) the southern light falls from windows of varying shapes and sizes. Some are oddly placed but all are set in the deep stone walls, under wide lintels. Many belong to homes that no longer exist and have become part of new structures, the ever changing arrangement of houses and streets in the old town, where behind its windows, time hangs in layers of stone and lace waiting to be revealed.
All windows are here: there is no uniformity, but there are long shutters, both open and closed, peeling pastel paint, balconies and iron balustrades, geraniums in pots, washing hanging out to dry, children looking down on the street below, men in vests… another list is growing…notes to myself, rather like the photgraphs I’m taking – all briefing notes for future writing and poems.
Writing about windows had made me think – ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say ?’ (E M Forster via http://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/ My thinking tells me that my love of windows is about much more than being starved of light ,all those years in the prison. It is about the need to always see the world out there – to let it call and entice, to let it in, full of its possibilities, new places, new journeys – one of which I am on now…
I think it’s about liberation and not about prison at all and I notice my Private Investigator in my new novel feels the same as me!
…Beck faced the windows. They were the best things about the place; tall sashes with decent wood slatted blinds that overlooked the street below. Perhaps he would move things around so that he faced the windows. So he could look out not in. He would prefer that. He hated the windowless rooms he’d inhabited in various prisons, the migraine inducing, airless, offices without light…
what a thought provoking post. I find after reading it I have become so much more aware of windows especially curtained ones. Net curtains, dense, sheer, shutters, blinds …. I have become fascinated. I find myself likening them to dorrways and feel that they somehow represent a rite of passage; the opening and closing of curtains, or doors suggests to me that something has happened, perhaps it is sometimes insignificant, but it has happened nonetheless. And what a beautiful contrast you evoke when describing the window panes of the house in Agde set amongst the thick tone walls. I feel that somehow this reresents lightness overpowerng the dark and gives me a strage sense of hope. Keep posting ….
Kate x
Thank you for the beautiful photographs. For us here, at least for myself, they are an invitation to explore and imagine the world beyond my own window. Interestingly, Lacan has a lot to say about windows, rebirth, reinvention and possibility. They are for me an enticing call to claw at the novel and unfamiliar. I suppose again, I’m back to enthusiams. The unknown offering a morsel of possibility, the fantastic and exciting dangling like silver wind chimes reflecting and glistening light: windows.
Hi Warren, I am going to look Lacan up (French philospher? Am I right?) sounds really interesting – in between the writing of course which is still hot!
What a thoughtful, inspiring and beautiful post. I loved the extract from the novel which shows the connection between what we think, what we write and what we create. Seamless, beautiful.
Another treat.
wx
Jacques Lacan was a leading exponent on psychoanalitical theory.
Like Marx and Freud he is largely out moded, but an interesting read, and French!
enjoy x