THE OUTSIDE FLOODS IN AND THE INSIDE FLOWS OUT. THE VIEW FROM INSIDE IS TO THE MOUNTAINS WHICH HOLD ONE’S STEADY, WONDERING, APPRECIATIVE GAZE: TO THE LIGHT, AND TO BIRDS WHICH MAY KNOW NOTHING OF THE WONDERING GAZE AND WHICH FROM TIME TO TIME FLY RIGHT INTO THE GLASS.
Some of this is seasonal. In spring flocks of Yellowhammers hit the windows in random whacks, aiming trustingly at the image. In the ambivalent light of a grey morning when the mirror in the glass is plainest and there are the most yellow birds around, I put down the blinds.
Larger birds flying with determination towards some other place, aiming for what looks like a light hole will probably die from the force of their collision, they crash – not many of them, it is true, learning via survival that over-not- through is a better rule, they curve like bombs over the air envelope of the house.
A blackbird that took exception to a reflection of itself pecked at the window for a month. Pasting newspaper inside the glass didn’t deter it, and I feared for the integrity of its beak.
Fantails with their fine sense of the particular do understand glass, it is a platter of insects. They will beat up to its surface, judging the intersection exactly. Clip! If the garage window is open there are slow, reliable morning flies against the ceiling inside, and shadowy beams and loops of electric cord that are an appealing kind of tree.
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When a bird hits the glass it is perhaps the orderliness of space which has to be restored to it. It lies at first, blood on its beak; sits, helplessly, over an hour slowly straightening, gains fibre: stands looking out reflectively for the longest time, and in just one moment sweeps its wings hard and has gone.
A bird that wouldn’t ever arise had its head pecked to bare skin by its mate which, intensely, frustratedly over two days tried to get it up again, to its part in the egg-laying contract made between them.
What is surprising, bewildering really when you look onto a plain hillside with farm grass and a long open space beyond is how much life goes by close to the walls. If I stared out now none of it would be in evidence, and I might wonder at the collection.
The detail on the glass is particular, from perching beetles to grasshoppers’ feet to drifts of iridescent scales off moth wings that blaze up at sunrise: to spiders persisting with webs in the frame, to multiple flying creatures sitting quietly on the glass as if they found themselves to be invisible there, the interior of the house camouflaging them to the outside, light shining through them in x-ray form for us within.
A beetle encased in ice was first trapped by water set out for wildlife: falling into it, held by the power of surface tension, then fatally by the clear envelope of ice that grew around it, it seems to be climbing through a transparency that it can’t overcome.
We don’t own our space here, they do, we work around them. It is an accommodation that we make. For own comfort not their safety we’ve added the consistency of glass between us and the open, moveable air that they float in.
WORDS & IMAGES: JAN KELLY
