Corner Window

Stage

In the early half-light I usually make tea and sit surrounded by books near the windows in the southwest corner of the room. Like a photographic print developing in a chemical bath, Woodshed Hill's outlines slowly emerge behind the west-facing glass; the south window to my left gradually fills at this time of year with a snow-covered field. For the past few weeks the eyes I've opened each morning have been partly Cézanne's: I open Götz Adriani's catalogue of Cézanne's paintings where I've left a bookmark and turn the page: plate seventy-one, "Large Pine and Red Earth." The world-material spell. Stillness in things.

Before I have stepped out of the house, even before the outdoor world is discernable in the windows, I will have passed through a series of pages under the reading light and will likely have opened my notebook and filled a few pages with observations and fabrications of my own. These pages will be passageways to the rest of the day — perhaps programs, themes the extent of whose influence has no clear end. Being steeped in the page, being so accustomed to its landscape and creatures, it is hard to say where the natural world begins and what in the surrounding, oncoming world does not belong to a page.

What are some of the books scattered around my chair? Cézanne Paintings, Margaret Atwood, Robert Macfarlane, Anton Chekhov, Knud Rasmussen, Javier Marías, Clarence Glacken, Emily Dickinson, Salt and Silver, Nikolai Leskov, Samuel Beckett, On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, Thoreau, Xi Chuan, Susan Howe, Michel de Montaigne, Chagall and Music, Walter Benjamin, Christine Desdemaines-Hugon, Jean Clottes, Bash?, Peter Wohlleben, Max Oelschlaeger, Hans Peter Duerr, Jorie Graham, Tomas Tranströmer, John Kinsella, Daniel Everett, Louise Glück. Below this layer are others I can't see.

There are many kinds of page. What signs and expressions will appear there? What world or mind will they seem to be coming from and what will they hatch in your mind? Will you welcome what the page conveys, will it fade quickly or leave a lingering pleasure or distaste? Will the page in some way change you forever?

And if you prepare to make marks on a page, what will you put there? What will you send by way of the page for someone to receive?

Signs of various sorts cluster on the page. Its customs and messages relate to occasions of waiting, receiving, discovering and offering. The potentiality of the page, the expectancy it sets up is related in my mind to the archetypal events of birth, hatching, sprouting and other sudden arrivals: a new life, a new presence might appear there to share our personal world and engage our energies. Versions of the ancient experiences of hunting and fishing are embedded there: the attentive waiting and observation, the sense that at a distance some encounter is pending, something will be met with and captured. Stargazing, watching for danger, watching for a lover, watching for seasonal signs, for ripening plants, approaching weather. The page can be experienced as an offering of food, as offering or receiving a gift.

Yes, yes, the page is a clay tablet marked with an inventory of wine jars, but before that it was a clearing where something might appear, where the movement of time, the world's changing narrative was epitomized. The page is a performance space. It is an area framed by expectation and practiced conjecture: a ritual space, a forum for appearances and disappearances.

And when we write? We speak to someone or something absent. We detach our words, our intentions, from ourselves and send them out or leave them to be found. We hunt inside ourselves, watch for a birth in language on an inner page and give a performance in words.

It seems to me that what is at the heart of literature, what is most meaningful in it, involves a speaking to someone or something absent or distant. This involves a faith in space and time and perhaps a belief in fate or destiny: that the message (the information, the thought, the wish) that has been sent or left will travel or wait unchanged, intact, and meet with its intended recipient at some future time. This is clearly at work in a letter or a prayer but also in every poem, story and song, every diary entry and tombstone inscription. There is no need to leave messages for those who are immediately present. In the remote past I imagine our preverbal ancestors would have communicated with those nearby using gestures, touches, glances and vocal sounds, but once they began devising and leaving signs for those not present — markings, selected objects, shaped objects, images — they were already engaged in a kind of writing. I think of that ancient sign-making as lying just under the surface of what I'm doing here.

So, the page is still a clearing in time and space, a kind of axis point where we might have contact with those elsewhere and in another time. On its periphery are the dead, the gods, our past and future selves as well as everyone we might want to contact for whatever reason. The signs we send through the page and that appear there have the power to cross barriers of time and space and dimensions of being. They can pass from one heart into another like travelling dreams. Clearly, signs sent like this — with metaphysical force — are the language of spirits and a means to communicate with the powers that move the visible world.

If we go into a cave (some form of cave) and wait for signs to appear to us and scratch those signs on the cave wall, we are at the doorway between the spirit within us and the spirits in the surrounding world. I think the page is always a version, a descendant, of this place and action: a passageway where a spirit coalesces, defines itself, and goes to meet other spirits — perhaps to win their favour, perhaps simply in fellowship or to strengthen their company. In any case, the page is much older than paper or clay tablets.

And the modern blank...