Diving Through Windows

I dwell in Possibility — / A fairer House than Prose — / More numerous of Windows — / Superior — for Doors —

—Emily Dickinson

My wife and I live in a 1907 Craftsman bungalow with original crown glass windows. They were hand-blown in an era long before perfectly flat, massproduced panes. Their ripples and slumps distort the trees outside and the afternoon sunlight that streams in near my desk. It’s mid-July, just a few weeks after a bomb threat forced the evacuation of Evergreen State College, where I spent the year as a visiting faculty member. As I work, my wife listens to news about possible criminal acts at the highest levels of government. I’m transfixed by this political upheaval—but also by the way our old windows transform the sun’s rays into braided flames of light on the hardwood floor.

A first-year MFA student in my creative nonfiction workshop recently turned in a piece about an abusive dynamic in a severely dysfunctional family. The work is powerfully written, candid— an emotional gut-wallop. The narrative unfolds entirely inside a suburban kitchen, and it left me with the acutely claustrophobic feeling of inhabiting a room with no windows. Our workshop community suggested the writer frame in some actual windowpanes, so that the narrator might, for instance, detect a smell or quality of light reminiscent of childhood, or reflect on broader societal dysfunction—anything to give the reader a brief respite into the narrator’s past and the world beyond the kitchen.

In late 2016 I cotaught a writing course with an architectural designer from whom I learned the term fenestration. The word was familiar to me from studying French—fenêtre means “window” or “opening for light.” Fenestration in architecture, I learned, refers to any openings in the walls or enclosures of a building: windows, skylights, ventilation, and doorways.

To trace the history of architecture is to witness a slow, consistent surge of fenestration. We humans migrated from poorly ventilated caves to windowless huts, from stone homes with windows made from flattened animal horns to mirrored glass skyscrapers. In contemporary architecture, the trend toward expansive fenestration helps dissolve the borders between interior and exterior, living room and sky-vault. Our distant ancestors sought to keep the elements at bay; we invite them in as co-collaborators, as with the welcoming of sunlight in passive solar design. Windows and doors are becoming the walls of buildings; architects refer to them as “Big Glass.”

The first line of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Simon & Schuster, 2000) by Dave Eggers reads, “Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic.” This is fenestrated writing at its finest; it’s a memoir about grief and loss, but it rarely detains you in a room with grief and loss—it rockets off in a hundred directions and into the very ether. In the rambling preamble, Eggers even thanks NASA—“¡Les saludo, muchachos!” he writes. In Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation (Knopf, 2014), the image of two individuals cramped inside a tiny metal space capsule works as a central metaphor for the institution of marriage. Yet the narrative is windowed with literary criticism, poetic quotations, Buddhist aphorisms, brief histories of astronomy, space travel, and arctic exploration. Each surprising new glimpse allows us to look away briefly, catch our breath, yet what we view always reflects and amplifies the narrative’s core thematics—for example the marital infidelity hidden in plain sight within the history of Carl Sagan’s Golden Record. Can white space also act as a window of sorts? If so, Department’s poetic, compressed prose is etched on Big Glass.

I would argue that a certain malignant strain of American political discourse suffers from lack of fenestration. Witness, for instance, the way Donald Trump rarely places anything into context. He almost never mentions history or points to anything beyond himself and his achievements. He speaks in airless superlatives or pejoratives about those he deems winners or losers. His own biographer claims he had zero attention span for reminiscing on his upbringing or anything outside the realm of business. Trump speaks the circumscribed vernacular of Fox TV newsrooms, where there’s only one window—a digital facade of single-dimension cityscapes.

The word window evolved from the Old Norse vindauga (vindr + auga), meaning “wind eye.” The original wind eyes were simple unglazed holes in the roof.

The first true windows were little more than blown-glass jars, flattened out into sheets, with circular striation

patterns throughout. It took more than a millennium for glass to become transparent enough to actually see through.

I’m leery of the phrase “now more than ever,” but I can’t help but think there’s never been a greater need for fenestration in our writing and our communication, to help us see beyond our own fenced-in word dwellings to the troubled state of the world. Of course, there are also times when we need to close the curtains, hide and stay safe. But for how long?

The morning my much-loved stepmother informed me she was divorcing my father, I remember the distinct urge to stand and heave my chair—a simple wooden dining-room chair— through the large picture window. I wanted to feel the percussive thud of solid oak against windowpane. The glacial crack, the glass crush. I wanted to force a gasp from our suburban ranch house; I imagined an act of violence might deliver me from the language of another leaving.

Trump’s commercial sky-rises are fortresses of glass and steel. Yet inside his own Manhattan penthouse, the relatively small windows are deemphasized by faux-rococo features, mammary-shaped casino chandeliers, vainglorious ceiling frescoes, chilled marble and mirrors. The effect is to overwhelm the viewer/visitor with his accomplishments—as if to prove there’s no escaping his accumulated wealth and power. That there’s no way out of this other than by submitting to his gilded walls of words.

A border wall is the opposite of fenestration. A clogging of the country’s pores, sure to incite inflammation, eventual eruption.

To defenestrate is to throw something (or someone) from a window. As in the hurling of a vintage Louis XV chair through a window in an act of radical ventilation—to let the outside world and the force of history come storming back in.

“Increase your windows! Wisdom is the house made only of windows!”

—Mehmet Murat Ildan

“They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.”

—Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”

Fenestration: a surgical procedure that creates a new fenestra to the cochlea in order to restore hearing lost because of otosclerosis. Fenestration, then, as a ventilation shaft from the head into the senses.

In The Poetry of Architecture (John Wiley & Son, 1873), John Ruskin writes, “the only prospect which is really desirable or delightful, is that from the window of the breakfast-room… where we meet the first light of the dewy day, the first breath of morning air…in the flush of our awakening from the darkness and mystery of faint and inactive dreaming, in the resurrection from our daily grave….”

What I’ve witnessed via windows:

>The Dominican owners of a Brooklyn bodega speaking quiet Spanish to their child while she plays in the courtyard below my apartment window.

>The smell of morning rain falling fresh on cement.

>Cedar waxwings stripping clean a serviceberry tree.

>A pile of clothes in the neighbor’s yard that I slowly realized was a possibly dead man and later learned was a severely intoxicated one. >An activist in a full skeleton suit protesting a nuclear power plant.

>The soft crush of an early-summer creek flow in rural Colorado. >Washington State Police in full riot gear cordoning off an area for proTrump activists to protest on our college campus.

One might also make a case for an essay or poem that confines the reader in a windowless room with a one-way mirror and a pendulating light bulb. Wherein the writer may interrogate the self, thus eliciting the reader’s own unflinching self-investigation. Or for contracting a fenestrated aperture to shield our gaze from the glare of reality’s “primary noon,” as in Jenny Boully’s The Body (Slope Editions, 2002)—a book written entirely in footnotes, imbuing the reader with the sense of witnessing a solar eclipse through a pinhole projector.

I’m sitting at a picnic table during a summer writing conference in Oregon. Douglas firs and Western cedars calico the sunlight on my wooden desktop. Crows squabble overhead, a bullfrog throat-sings in the spring-fed wetlands, and I feel a stream-cooled breeze on my forearms and lips. In this state of attention I find myself contemplating the expansive terrain beyond Big Glass. As artists, how often do we risk a wild dive through the window? How do we expand our orbits out to the liminal edges of language and possibility? Perhaps these romantic propositions will fade come Portland’s long, wet winter. Then it’s back indoors, the braided sunlight muted under layers of gray, when glass both shelters and confines us. Yet where else besides windows can we perceive the thin boundaries between our inner and outer realities? Where else might we raise the sashes between poetry and prose, the personal and the political, our small selves and the measureless world?