The People in the Windows

Hello Gentle Reader

Over the past few weeks and months, statements have been circulating all over the world: the new reality; self-isolation; social distancing; proper social engineering; exonerating circumstances; flattening the curve; economic collapse; quarantine; and of course pandemic. These words are followed up by others: solitude; confinement; loneliness; uncertainty; unemployment; and boredom. Questions have been raised of what this ‘new reality,’ is and how it has replaced the old one. As it stands, the new reality is one that exists in a state of fluctuations. Every passing day new statistics are released causing greater concern, requiring further recommendations. Politicians take to their podiums with healthcare professionals, and provide routine updates, policy initiatives, and government action. Suddenly streets are barren; grocery stores feel filthy; businesses are closed; panic is in the air; and we’ve become the people in the windows. Exhibits within our homes. Curated in museums of dust. Preserved in panes. Perceived through glass. The days punctuated with unease; while passing by, observed through window panes. Beyond the glass, the world is stark. The routine commute, orchestrated within the former hustle and bustle is now at void. A few cars still drive off to destinations unknown. They are singular and sporadic, never plural or in a pack. They splinter off and speed away, leaving behind the stationary vehicles; resigned to their garages, car ports, or the allocated street parking. Their engines cool, their seats uninhabited, their drivers tucked up in bed, riddled with spasm dreams of what the future holds. Their waking day clouded with worries.

The quarantined world may as well be an absurd apocalyptic vision beckoned forth from the mind of Beckett. Nothing has changed, yet everything is different. The atmosphere tense. The streets empty as the evenings grow long. Street lights illuminate abandoned roadways. Doors locked. Schools empty. Public buildings vacated; public transit uninhabited. Stray souls walk or jog or run down sidewalks—are they escaping or retreating home? The nights are forlorn and quiet. The nightlife all but abandoned. After all: nightclubs, bars, pubs, casinos are all shut up. Their revelry on hold; their merriment muted.  Every house glows as isolative lighthouses. Each lit up window—curtains closed or exposed—a reminder we’re out there; though hidden behind walls, and confined by doors.

The abandonment. The isolation. The solitude. The otherwise macro exemplary shut-in loneliness bring to mind the desolate, solemn, and hollow worlds of the American artist Edward Hopper, and the French artist Claude Lazar. Of course in recent days, Edward Hopper and his paintings have become the posters for the life in self-isolation and quarantine, thanks to social media. Hoppers paintings detailing the derelict and sparse urban spaces of interwar and postwar America have been utilized across social media to provide the artistic and realistic depiction of what quarantine culture looks like. These realistic but otherwise inclined phantasmagoric paintings provide a disturbing relevance of the isolation and confinement, now expected of each individual in today’s infectious world. Edward Hoppers paintings may have been painted in the realist tradition; though they do go beyond capturing still life as its observed. Instead, Hoppers paintings provide a poignant psychological perspective of the collective consciousness—or rather Hoppers take on the collective consciousness: one that is disparate, subtlety surreal, aching in the emotional nakedness, and all but alone.

Morning Sun [1951] by Hopper has been widely dispersed through social media channels. The painting depicts Hoppers wife Jo, sitting on a bed in a bare room, gazing out the window into the morning light, out onto the city that exists just beyond the corners of the window.  She [Jo] is poised, with only her body language betraying the sensation of alienation and loneliness. She sits knees to chest. Her arms and hands tenderly embrace the legs and knees, while remaining hanky and loose, to the point that if a shiver or a quiver of the soul rippled beneath the skin, the entire posture would collapse. The room is starch and barren. The bed is covered in wrinkled white sheets, where she sits in her blushing nightgown. The walls barren and grey, light up with the golden morning sun. All the while the subject gazes off into an unknown distance. In the peripheral of the window a cityscape is insinuated to exist through the seen world consisting of a wall of red buildings, black windows, and up above the morning sky transitioning from the night. Still what does the subject see? One can only imagine. Does she gaze out to an empty world; or does she look out on to a world waking up? Regardless of what unfolds and is beholden beyond those four corners of the window, the subjects gaze is muted in its longing. She is resigned to her life, as inconsequential as it is; as unexceptional as it is; as small and insignificant; overshadowed by the metropolis and the city, and lost in the waves of people set to spill forth in the day. Each one equally as displaced, lost and alienated as the next; but in the briefest of moments, through the action of movement, through the distraction of work or purpose or life, they are no longer concerned with the alienation or the insignificance of being or self.

Now that the daily grind has halted. Every moment has become a private moment, and in these long stretches of moments, we are lost in reverie. As the news and other media outlets continue to divulge greater statistics, more quantities of data, and numeric values that explode day by day, all of us are left to reflect on how small we are, and how little we make up the world. Now in these closeted and claustrophobic spaces existential crisis breed. Those private dramas which carry the greatest and potent pain. Nothing is more accurate in its delivery and sting as self-criticism. It never misses the mark. After the initial contact the criticism and self-doubt spreads with viral speed. The strains of existence and other philosophical conundrums will of course become addendums to the other challenges of this increasingly ambiguous world. Now locked away, shielded behind walls, confined in our homes do we realize just how much of an island we are. Shipwrecked and stranded we maintain our distance from each other. At night our lights call out. Our shadows stamps of proof that we persist and exist. Come the morning we continue in the same fashion as the day before. The days but a continual thread of uncertainty coupled with existential malaise. We’ll sit like the woman in Automat [1927] or the man with his back turned in Nighthawks [1942], the morning coffee aromatically steaming beneath our faces. Distant eyes glazed over, lost in thought or elsewhere. Alienation now acutely atomized. These painted portraits of loneliness, once again reminds us that urban life—or life in general—is not immune to social isolation that is the world for now; for it always has been part of the world. Cities despite their grandness, their beauty, their continuous movement, can also breed the sense that in each of us in our own way are but mere expats in a world forsaken, unachievable, and locked. Even now, after years of departing the emptiness of small town rural life, with the expansive nothingness, interspersed with abandoned aged weather battered barns, or rural farm houses now derelict and dilapidated; or the solitary prairie trees growing singular in their defiant resolve.  The kind of place so extensively expansive, it will consume you. Forget the void being a black hole, or a maw of cosmic nothingness, so alien and foreign its goal simple: consume; it is far more earthly and ephemeral still. It can be the endless prairies, where each step is much the same as the last, where each golden or green field but a replica of the one already past. There under the crushing weight of living skies, and days passing by, is one consumed, lost, and forgotten. The same can be stated with mountains pressing tight, or the exploration of their dark cavernous bowls, echoing screams the last remnant of one’s existence; or the ocean and sea, disrupted one minuet all the while in the next the waves subside, the ripples lessen, and that’s it. The urban world is no different. Behind the high-rises, the concrete, the steel, and the glass; in the herds of suits and ties; heels and blouses; briefcases and umbrellas, we are aptly separate, mere satellites orbiting a familiar but distant sun, our paths crisscrossing intermittently. No time is better now than ever to come to terms with these exonerating circumstances about the human desire for social interaction action and connection. Though introverts may enjoy their own company; this new landscape is certainly an apocalyptic shock to the system. The pains of further uncertainty: health, finances, economic, and occupation related only feed the disorienting whirlwind of the times.

Despite the dread there is comfort in this. We are lonely islands, shipwrecked and exiled. Just like Napoleon exiled to Elba, we plan our return and conquest; though if we are not careful, we will end up on Saint Helena, with further amendments enacted for our health and safety; but also for the community’s wellbeing and preservation. The comfort in all of this is that each of us despite circumstances are in the same situation. We each greet the day with the same discomfort, the same uncertainty. We are assaulted by the same dreadful news. We are buried under the continual rise of statistical analysis. Through it all we sift through the vastness to find the shard of comfort; which in the meantime is our own fortunate health. For now we’ve become the subjects of Edward Hopper paintings. The landscape etched with his same foreboding expanse. The interior and the exterior reminiscent of Claude Lazar’s work as well. Powerfully depicted is the displaced, disposed, and yet completely normal landscapes: cityscapes, rooms, kitchens, and other mundane spaces all deprived of human presence. Yet daily life is capsulated in the timelessness of absence. Everything is in its place, patiently waiting for its utilization; indifferent at the lack of contact; while yet everything is amiss. Such is the world today. The absence is made more eerie by the mundanity of its acceptance. In time we expect it all to come to life once again; or be eroded away by neglect and time. Without the presence of human custodian and maintenance, everything is doomed to return to its more primordial states. In the interim between contrary possibilities, we are the people in the windows forlorn and contemplating. 

For now Gentle Reader, stay safe, spacious and healthy.

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader

Take Care

And As Always

Stay Well Read

M. Mary