Of Curtains and Orange Sky
On the sadness of blackout curtains and blocking the light, with a sidestep to September 2020.
If you asked me if I care about the curtains, I would probably say no. Not really. If you asked me to tell you what the curtains look like in one room or the other, I probably can’t describe them other than maybe a general sense of the color and loose pattern. Who knew such history is stored in curtains?
(Click here to skip the intro.)
“Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends.”
Green Day
Happy Sunday!
I almost put the letter today at the bottom. The letter is an introduction, almost always written last, but it took on a life of its own. This is often the case.
I advocate jumping around in whatever way feels comfortable. If you don’t think you have the stamina for the whole thing, skip to the main essay. It is an assemblage of overlapping curtains, orange sky, and Covid that I didn’t expect.
Today:
After writing today’s letter and feeling disappointed in myself that, once again, I tipped over some cliff that I didn’t even know was there without having any understanding of how to pull the ripcord or control the paraglider, I ran across this phrase: “Why are the curtains blue?”
I was, of course, looking for quotes I might weave into this letter because quotes add texture. It turns out that lyrical quotes about curtains are not abundant. Instead, I kept running into “Why are the curtains blue?”
This appears to have been a meme somewhere along the way that suggests that English teachers manipulate their readings when they, for example, interpret blue curtains as being related to a certain emotion or state of mind. The stereotypical student in this meme conversation argues that the curtains are blue simply because they are blue.
What about metaphor?
What about simile? Analogy?
What about carefully constructed descriptions,
stacks of words that
both sing
on the page and
create an image
in your mind that
potentially has something
to do
with the meaning?
What about texture and nuance and the fact that curtains can be any color, and we make choices, when possible, about what we have, what we hang, how we filter our light and our view?
What about words that can be interpreted in many ways, words that have multiple meanings? What about the possibility that writers sometimes don’t know fully what they have revealed, what has come through the spaces in between, through the words, through the cracks? What about the unavoidable reality that we read with the context of our lives, our histories, and our now contributing to the lens?
We neither read nor write unencumbered.
This unexpected discussion of overreading (or reading into) was eye-opening. This is a discussion about projection, about interpretation, and about the richness of language, the ability for a few words to hold so much more.
It’s been a lifetime since I left the ivory tower, but the balance between reading at face value and overreading was everything to me. The ability to interpret meaning based on even the smallest of signifiers, like the choice of “blue” or, gasp, the decision to have no curtains, or the decision to write about the curtains in a letter, was at the heart, for me, of literary analysis and deconstruction. It seems so very sad to simply assume that word choice doesn’t matter, that writers aren’t intentional and meticulous and masters of weaving. It seems naïve to think we don’t bring our own lives into the reading and into our interpretation.
I want to live in a world where thinking about why a writer said the curtains were blue matters and where there are readers who do think about why the curtains are blue or not blue. In my story today, the curtains are white or clear or transparent or translucent or dingy or yellowing or fading. They are white, but not starkly so. They are not cream. They are not beige. Maybe they are ivory? Eggshell? Ecru? They are not lace. I guess they are embossed. I don’t love the word sheers. Finding the right terms was elusive.
What I know about the curtains is that when the light shines through, they bring a smile. They are a perfect counter to the greens of the trees on a quiet morning shrouded in fog, a soft frame when there are unbroken patches of blue between the branches.
We don’t have many signs of fall. The seasons slide in and out, with things blooming all year long. There aren’t really any anchors for me in September, but I realized one morning this week that I do see the change, even from my chair in the living room looking out the window, I see it. I see the shifting of light. The gold wash on the trees in the evening is different. I feel the shortening of the day. The morning I first started this letter dawned cool after a week of heat, heavy with fog.
On the heels of The Great Pottery Throw Down, I switched to Portrait Artist of the Year, with Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron as a palette cleanser in between.
One of the things they often say on Portrait Artist of the Year after announcing the winner of the week’s challenge is some version of “our commiserations to those who lost.” That phrase catches me every time. It isn’t how I think of the word, but then I don’t think of it as a noun.
I found myself wishing this week that I had someone to commiserate with. The verb.
I sat down to write about trees. But you can’t see the trees without first looking between and past the curtains. Sometimes you look beyond, and sometimes you look at the foreground.
Thank you for reading.
Amy
🔎 A note about journal pages. There are a number of illustrated journal pages shown below. They give visual texture to the timeline. The post doesn’t come with a magnifying glass. The pages are simply part of the record. At the time, they were a lifeline, a daily project to sink into. Looking back, they offer some of the nuance of the days. That summer, on the heels of finishing my year of 50 Before 50 documentation, was the start of Illustrate Your Week, similar to the way I do it now. The pages are a bit gritty, a bit moody, a bit messy, and true to me. (I do think I need to be back in a larger sketchbook.)
Update: this post was free at the time of its publication. A paywall has now been added.