Patrick Melrose

"What's the point of a fucking window if you can't jump out of it?"

Edward St. Aubyn

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wind-swept spirit

In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind.

Matsuo Bashō, ‘The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchelʼ (after The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, edited and translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa)

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the curtain of obscurity

A vast bitterness seemed to inspire these images, images I understood very well as referring to what had begun to play out before my eyes, the curtain of obscurity now lifted--the spectacle that for many nights now he could not observe without sorrow. The studio windows that opened onto the wall perpendicular to his and the rear windows of the building that faced onto the street all lit up almost simultaneously once the sun had passed, although the shred of sky visible from the well was still light. Many of the windows had no curtains, at least, no one bothered to close any. The astonishing variety of life was displayed there. 'An unacceptable waste of gestures, of words, an incoherent mix of differences and similarities, endless complication, a boiler bursting with screams . . .' I don't know which I found more painful: seeing these vague silhouettes behind windows, some furtive, others immobile for long stretches of time (the studios were so small that empty windows were rare), each making its own gestures, imperfect, fragmentary, discordant, mysterious; or hearing that voice, barely audible and once in a while suddenly hard and almost shrill, commenting on the spectacle which, in truth, was no spectacle since these shadows were in all likelihood alive.

Philippe Jaccottet, Obscurity, pg. 25
tr. Tess Lewis

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autumn of the patriarch

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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molloy

In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe. 

Samuel Beckett, Molloy

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a kind of momentary Japanese effect

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Atelierul era îmbibat de mireasma bogată a rozelor şi în clipa în care briza uşoară de vară 

flutură printre crengile copacilor, prin uşa deschisă pătrunse mirosul greu al liliacului şi 

parfumul ceva mai subtil al florilor roz de spin. 

Din colţul divanului învelit în covoraşe persane, unde stătea fumînd ţigară după ţigară, 

după cum îi era obiceiul, lordul Henry Wotton abia zărea strălucirea florilor galbene şi dulci ca 

mierea din salcîmul ale cărui crengi tremurau sub povara propriei frumuseţi intense, ca de 

flacără. Cînd şi cînd umbrele fantastice ale păsărilor în zbor treceau repede de-a lungul 

draperiilor lungi din mătase grea, cafenie, trase peste fereastra imensă, creînd un fel de efect 

japonez, de instantaneu. Acest lucru îl făcea să se gîndească la acei pictori cu chipul palid, de 

jad din Tokio, care printr-o artă, în sine imobilă, încearcă să transmită senzaţia de rapiditate şi 

mişcare. Murmurul albinelor care îşi croiau drumul înghesuindu- se una în alta prin iarba 

înaltă, netunsă, sau mişcîndu-se în cerc, cu o insistenţă monotonă în jurul ţepilor aurii prăfuiţi 

ai tufelor de caprifoi răsfirate, crea o senzaţie de nemişcare şi mai apăsătoare. Zgomotul stins al 

Londrei ajungea acolo asemenea sunetului în surdină al unei orgi depărtate. 

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staring, hypnotized, into the eyes of my reflection

Before they built the apartment blocks across the street, before everything was screened off and suffocating, I used to watch Bucharest through the night from the triple window in my room above Ştefan cel Mare. The window usually reflected the room’s cheap furniture—a bedroom set of yellowed wood, a dresser and mirror, a table with some aloe and asparagus in clay pots, a chandelier with globes of green glass, one of which had been chipped long ago. The reflected yellow space turned even yellower as it deepened into the enormous window, and I, a thin, sickly adolescent in torn pajamas and a stretched-out vest, would spend the long afternoon perched on the small cabinet in the bedstead, staring, hypnotized, into the eyes of my reflection in the transparent glass.

from Mircea Cartarescu's novel The Blinding, tr. Sean Cotter

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a man sits and watches the world

From the window a man watches the world. That's how it always begins. Through this interminable waiting. A man sitting, and watching. For years, maybe centuries. Before even the window and the unmoving body. He is like a pure regard that is embodied each time in the singularity of every new gaze. But, at the same time, what he sees does not reach him. It is as if the dawns and dusks, the seasons slow or fast, nature, things and people glide across the glass, abandoning him to his motionless solitude. Then, leaving the fascinating spectacle, his eye returns to the page where his hands occasionally trace a few more uncertain lines. At that moment he seems to perceive a sudden accord: the one between his fragile human span and the absolute instant of the world. Upon raising his eyes anew, rediscovering the lost vision, the feeling of an irreparable distance — of a tiny wound. A feeling of being there and of not being there. Could that be beauty? he asks himself. And writing, this desire to repair, each time, the imperceptible tear? To regather into a loose weave of words these scattered figures of fate and make of them a single tangible moment. Such that covered, erased by the flow of words, the world would end up being reborn, emerging from this very movement that first annulled it and that, now, offers it this vivacity of which it had just appeared to be deprived. Yes, writing would first be that: sitting to see the world rise within the light of language. And, in an almost mute voice — a breath caused by the words and which bears them — never ceasing to celebrate this beauty, repeating like a silent prayer this simple phrase of Beckett's: "I watch time pass and it is so beautiful."

De la fenêtre un homme regarde le monde. C’est toujours comme ça que cela commence. Par cette attente interminable. Un homme assis, et qui regarde. Depuis des années, des siècles peut-être. Avant même la fenêtre et le corps immobile. Il est comme un pur regarder qui chaque fois s’incarnerait dans la singularité de chaque nouveau regard. Mais, en même temps, ce qu’il voit ne l’atteint pas. C’est comme si les aubes et les crépuscules, les saisons lentes ou rapides, la nature les choses et les hommes glissaient sur la vitre, l’abandonnaient à son immobile solitude. Alors, quittant le fascinant spectacle, ses yeux reviennent à la page où ses mains tracent de temps à autre quelques lignes incertaines. A ce moment il lui semble percevoir comme un accord soudain: celui de sa fragile durée humaine et de l’instant absolu du monde. Avec, dès que ses yeux se lèvent à nouveau, retrouvant la vision perdue, le sentiment d’un irrémédiable écart — d’une infime blessure. Un sentiment d’y être et de n’y être pas. Serait-ce cela la beauté? se demande-t-il. Et écrire, ce désir à chaque fois de réparer l’imperceptible accroc? De recueillir dans un léger tissage des paroles ces figures éparses du devenir et les rendre un instant solidaires. De telle sorte que recouvert, effacé par l’afflux de mots, le monde finirait par venir y renaître, surgissant de ce mouvement même qui d’abord l’a annulé et qui, maintenant, lui offre cette vivacité dont jusque là il paraissait privé. Oui, écrire ce serait d’abord cela: s’asseoir pour voir se lever le monde dans le jour du langage. Et, d’une voix presque muette — d’un souffle engendré par les mots et qui les porte —, ne cesser de célébrer cette beauté, répétant comme une prière muette cette phrase si simple de Beckett : “Je regarde passer le temps et c’est si beau.” 
(lire)

Jacques Ancet

(English translation by Michael Tweed)

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a visionary (i)

A bird falls from the sky
A field is there
for the single bird shot down when no one was around

A scream comes from a window
The world is there
for the single scream shot to death in a room with no one around

The sky is there for the small bird The small bird falls only from the sky
The window is there for the scream The scream is heard only from the window

I do not know why it is so
I only feel why it is so

For the small bird to fall, there has to be some height
There must be something that is shut tight
for the scream to be heard

Just as there is the small dead bird in the field, death fills my mind
Just as death occupies my mind, no one is at any window in the world

Ryuichi Tamura (tr. Takako Lento)
original

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as against everything

Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or where I am.

 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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XXXV Windows

He who looks through an open window from the outside, never sees as many things as he who gazes at a closed window. There is nothing deeper, more mysterious, more fecund, more shadowy, more dazzling, than a window lit up by a candle. What one can see in the sun is always less interesting than what happens behind a pane of glass. In that black and luminous hole, life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Over the billows of the roof tops, I see a mature woman, already wrinkled, poor, always bent over something, and who never goes out. Using her face, using her clothing, using almost nothing, I rewrote the story of this woman's life, or rather her legend, and sometimes I recount it to myself and cry.

If it had been a poor old man, I would have rewritten his just as easily.

And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in others than myself.

Perhaps you will say to me: "Are you sure that that legend is true?" What does it matter what reality might be outside of myself, if it helps me to live, to feel that I am and what I am?

from Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire
tr. Cat Nilan

Les Fenêtres

Celui qui regarde du dehors à travers une fenêtre ouverte, ne voit jamais autant de choses que celui qui regarde une fenêtre fermée. Il n'est pas d'objet plus profond, plus mystérieux, plus fécond, plus ténébreux, plus éblouissant qu'une fenêtre éclairée d'une chandelle. Ce qu'on peut voir au soleil est toujours moins intéressant que ce qui se passe derrière une vitre. Dans ce trou noir ou lumineux vit la vit, rêve la vie, souffre la vie.

Par delà des vagues de toits, j'aperçois une femme mûre, ridée déjà, pauvre, toujours penchée sur quelque chose, et qui ne sort jamais. Avec son visage, avec son vêtement, avec presque rien, j'ai refait l'histoire de cette femme, ou plutôt sa légende, et quelquefois je me la raconte à moi-même en pleurant.

Si c'eût été un pauvre vieux homme, j'aurais refait la sienne tout aussi aisément.

Et je me couche, fier d'avoir vécu et souffert dans d'autres que moi-même.

Peut-être me direz-vous: «Es-tu sûr que cette légende soit la vraie?» Qu'importe ce que peut être la réalité placée hors de moi, si elle m'a aidé à vivre, à sentir que je suis et ce que suis?

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adventures in immediate unreality

My own life, the life of the one in flesh and blood beyond the window, appeared to me suddenly indifferent and insignificant as the travels through unknown cities of the me in the photograph appeared absurd to the live persons on the other side of the glass.

In the same way in which the photograph of me went from place to place contemplating ever new perspectives through dirty and dusty windowpanes, I too from beyond the glass led my unchanging character here and there, forever looking at new things and forever not understanding anything about them. The fact that I moved, that I was alive, could only be by chance, a chance that had no meaning, because just as I existed on this side of the window, I could exist on the other side, with the same pale face, the same eyes, the same dull hair, that converged in the mirror as a bizarre and quick figure beyond understanding.

Max Blecher
tr. Jeanie Han

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endings

“I like an ending that’s both a door and a window.”

Stanley Kunitz

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reveries and memories at the open window

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?"—was that it?—"I prefer men to cauliflowers"—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 

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child in the window

In one of these rooms, was a window looking into the street, where the child sat, many and many a long evening, and often far into the night, alone and thoughtful. None are so anxious as those who watch and wait; at these times, mournful fancies came flocking on her mind, in crowds.
She would take her station here, at dusk, and watch the people as they passed up and down the street, or appeared at the windows of the opposite houses; wondering whether those rooms were as lonesome as that in which she sat, and whether those people felt it company to see her sitting there, as she did only to see them look out and draw in their heads again. There was a crooked stack of chimneys on one of the roofs, in which, by often looking at them, she had fancied ugly faces that were frowning over at her and trying to peer into the room; and she felt glad when it grew too dark to make them out, though she was sorry too, when the man came to light the lamps in the street--for it made it late, and very dull inside. Then, she would draw in her head to look round the room and see that everything was in its place and hadn't moved.

Charles Dickens , The Old Curiosity Shop



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as if nothing

Écrire le jour, ses odeurs, ses lueurs, ses rumeurs. Ce qui s’approche, s’éloigne. Comment parler ce pli, cet instant où tout bascule? Ce fil où l’on attend, en équilibre? Avec le corps devenu écoute, regard. Chaque poème est comme une fenêtre. Un petit rectangle de mots qui donne sur ce qu’on ne sait pas. Sur la lumière et sur les ombres. Sur les visages et sur les gestes. Sur les paroles, sur les cris. Sur ce tissu du monde où, parfois, quand vient le silence, on entend que quelqu’un respire.

To transcribe the day, its odours, its glimmers, its murmurs. What comes near, what distances itself. How give voice to this fold, this instant in which everything vacillates? To this thread on which, poised, one waits? With the body become hearing, become gaze. Each poem is like a window. A small rectangle of words opening upon one knows not what. Upon light and shadows. Upon faces and gestures. Upon words, upon cries. Upon this fabric of the world where, sometimes, when silence comes, one hears someone breathing.  (tr. Michael Tweed)

Jacques Ancet

Comme si de rien

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like the lyre

COMME LA LYRE


Depuis quand nous te jouons
avec nos yeux, fenêtre!
Comme la lyre, tu devais être
rendue aux constellations!

Instrument tendre et fort
de nos âmes successives,
arrache enfin de nos sorts
ta forme définitive!

Monte! Tourne de loin
autour de nous qui te fîmes.
Soyex, astres, les rimes
trouvées a nos bouts de destin!


Rainer Maria Rilke

LIKE THE LYRE

 

Window, just how long have we
played you with our eyes!
Like the lyre, you should be
one of the constellations!

Tender and strong instrument
of our successive souls,
tear out your permanent
form at last from our fates!

Climb! And from afar
spin around us who created you.
Be the rhyme, O star,
found at the end of our end!

Translated by A. Poulin Jr.

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c'est trop beau

Claude Aveline's anthology, Les Mots de la fin. I found Alfred Le Poittevin's last words especially moving in their simplicity: "Close the window, it's too beautiful." In their brevity, they express an entire hymn that is given back to life by a dying man; they cannot be objected to. What was there beyond the window? A tree, the curve of a hill, a bit of sky, a few clouds, the smells of the earth, birds singing? Can a dying man, you ask, really be wounded by so little? Yet it is such things that most surely sustained us; we were nourished by them. Even if we were unaware of it. They form the very framework of life. Le Poittevin was not mistaken. As the separation was about to be accomplished, the window indeed needed to be closed. Ears and eyes were trained elsewhere: it was no longer possible to let earthly echoes enter.

Pierre-Albert Jourdan,
Straw Sandals: Selected Prose and Poetry, pg. 255

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like gravel from the window

Who will help me to starve tonight
and all the nights which may yet come?
The round moon makes a wide arc
away from me, I am already too slim for it.

How I would love it now to drop my eyes
like gravel from the window,
for a drunk down in the street
to tread them deep into first snow.

But even blind, I would still
know everything and see you leave
over again, for sparks climb
like stars of hunger from my crying.

Christine Lavant (tr. David Chorlton)

Photo: Paul Himmel, Falling Snow Boy in Window New York 1952

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endgame

Bare interior.

Grey Light.

Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn.

Front right, a door. Hanging near door, its face to wall, a picture.

Front left, touching each other, covered with an old sheet, two ashbins.

Center, in an armchair on castors, covered with an old sheet, Hamm.

Motionless by the door, his eyes fixed on Hamm, Clov. Very red face.

Brief tableau.

Clov goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk. He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a small step-ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes six steps (for example) towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes three steps towards window left, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. He gets down, takes one step towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. He gets down, goes with ladder towards ashbins, halts, turns, carries back ladder and sets it down under window right, goes to ashbins, removes sheet covering them, folds it over his arm. He raises one lid, stoops and looks into bin. Brief laugh. He closes lid. Same with other bin. He goes to Hamm, removes sheet covering him, folds it over his arm. In a dressing-gown, a stiff toque on his head, a large blood-stained handkerchief over his face, a whistle hanging from his neck, a rug over his knees, thick socks on his feet, Hamm seems to be asleep. Clov looks him over. Brief laugh. He goes to door, halts, turns towards auditorium.

[...]

HAMM: Bring me under the window.
(Clov goes towards chair.)
I want to feel the light on my face.
(Clov pushes chair.)
Do you remember, in the beginning, when you took me for a turn? You used to hold the chair too high. At every step you nearly tipped me out.
(With senile quaver.)
Ah great fun, we had, the two of us, great fun.
(Gloomily.)
And then we got into the way of it.
(Clov stops the chair under window right.)
There already?
(Pause. He tilts back his head.)
Is it light?

CLOV: It isn't dark.

HAMM (angrily): I'm asking you is it light?

CLOV: Yes.

(Pause.)

HAMM: The curtain isn't closed?

CLOV: No.

HAMM: What window is it?

CLOV: The earth.

HAMM: I knew it!
(Angrily.)
But there's no light there! The other!
(Clov pushes chair towards window left.)
The earth!
(Clov stops the chair under window left. Hamm tilts back his head.)
That's what I call light!
(Pause.)
Feels like a ray of sunshine.
(Pause.)
No?

CLOV: No.

HAMM: It isn't a ray of sunshine I feel on my face?

CLOV: No.

(Pause.)

HAMM: Am I very white?
(Pause. Angrily.)
I'm asking you am I very white?

CLOV: Not more so than usual.

(Pause.)

HAMM: Open the window.

CLOV: What for?

HAMM: I want to hear the sea.

CLOV: You wouldn't hear it.

HAMM: Even if you opened the window?

CLOV: No.

HAMM: Then it's not worth while opening it?

CLOV: No.

HAMM (violently): Then open it!
(Clov gets up on the ladder, opens the window. Pause.)
Have you opened it?

CLOV: Yes.

(Pause.)

HAMM: You swear you've opened it?

CLOV: Yes.

(Pause.)

HAMM: Well...!
(Pause.)
It must be very calm.
(Pause. Violently.)
I'm asking you is it very calm!

CLOV: Yes.

HAMM: It's because there are no more navigators.
(Pause.)
You haven't much conversation all of a sudden. Do you not feel well?

CLOV: I'm cold.

HAMM: What month are we?
(Pause.)
Close the window, we're going back.

(Clov closes the window, gets down, pushes the chair back to its place, remains standing behind it, head bowed.)

(read on. nohow on.)

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