We see either the dust on the window or the view beyond the window, but never the window itself. If the glass is thick, you don’t see through, so much as with, ti plants and ferns bent toward patches of sun. The glass makes everything appear older, even as it’s only the glass that is. Memories appear larger than they are, when you look through this pane. Complete memory is trauma, past selves eating present ones like popcorn. Be present in the past, it tells you, grinning like a child passed from father to mother, or a coyote loping through a murder of angry crows. For it’s here (there) that you feel most comfortable, not because the past was easy, but because it returns to us as film. To watch an experience as re-watching; it’s not that you were present then, either.
My father stands outside a gate at Dulles Airport, not knowing for sure if I’m arriving. I do, astonished. The airport has changed but he hasn’t, still standing on what is now the other side of security, still waiting for me to arrive, or not, still in his sweater. The curve of the window offers him movement, like the “live” button on the iPhone, just a shudder before the image stills. When I turned his old photo around and placed it on a window frame, he changed. But now the name and address of the studio came visible, as if to reassure us this was just a photograph, not resurrection. Closer were those two moments I looked at my son in his stroller and saw my father, white haired and wordless.
Note: Italicized sentence from Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace
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