#341: The Golden Trees
Thirteen different ways of looking out a window
I’ve done it again. I’ve found myself taking photos of the same thing. I have been unknowingly drawn to a particular image, finding similar pictures in the camera roll of my phone.
This time, it’s trees.
Golden trees against blue skies. Autumn trees that are made to glow twice. Once when their green turns to orange. Twice when the low sun lights up those leaves.
But this time, these objects show a shift. They start, snapped outside on a trip away from home. But the most recent photos are taken from my desk, snapshots of the world beyond. Often a segment of the window itself is in sight. One object frames another and creates a story. It tells of the inside world we now inhabit.
In a year that has simultaneously brought big sweeping changes, but also an endless monotony, it is poignant to note the patterns in the objects we are fascinated by. The last thing I found myself repeatedly taking photos of were light patterns on the wall. As we enter another lockdown, it is no wonder that the images I have been taking recently — trees from the insides of windows — also speak to the “outside/inside”.
And those repetitions aren’t just happening inside me, a single person, but between myself and others. This year, Katie has also found herself writing about windows and shafts of light that enter her flat.
I could be critical of myself, and note that I haven’t come up with a very unique subject for my blog post. That trees and windows and looking at trees through windows feel very similar to the thoughts Katie and I were having at the start of this pandemic. But instead perhaps we should step back and appreciate that like life, our writing has patterns; it is cyclical. The déjà vu of another lockdown is just mirrored in the déjà vu of another blog post that looks out of a window at the world.
Can we really expect ourselves to find something new to write about when the world serves us more of the same?
Instead, I am reminded that though we might repeatedly gravitate towards the same themes, the same objects, we can always experience things anew. I think of Wallace Stevens and his ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and I wonder if 2020 will simply be ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking out a Window’.
I know there is a lot to despair about. I know that in England we are all battening down the mental hatches as we go into another lockdown. But I hope we shall all find at least thirteen different ways of looking out of the window, or at our homes, so that we may keep writing and hoping this winter.
