Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  “Furthermore,” M. J. continued, “the choice is ours. We can block off as many or as few windows as we choose.”

  This was true enough; the government, fearing rebellion, I suppose, has left the options open. Theoretically, citizens are free to choose their own level of taxation, shutting off, if they like, just one or two windows or perhaps half to two-thirds of their overall glazed area. In our own case, we immediately decided to brick up the large pane at the back of the house which overlooks the ravine. A picture window, is how my parents would have described this wide, costly expanse of glass; M. J. prefers the trademark term “panorama vista,” but at the same time squints ironically when it’s mentioned. We loved the view, both of us, and felt our work was nourished by it, those immense swaying poplars and the sunlight breaking across the top of their twinkling leaves, but once we sat down and calculated the tax dollars per square inch of window, we decided we would have to make the sacrifice.

  Next we closed off our bedroom windows. Who needs light in a bedroom, we reasoned, or the bathroom either for that matter? We liked to think at the time that our choices represented a deliberate push toward optical derangement, and that this was something that might add a certain . . . je ne sais quoi . . . to a relationship that has never been easy.

  Before the advent of the Window Tax, light had streamed into our modest-but-somehow-roomy house, and both M. J. and I rejoiced in the fact, particularly since we earn our living as artists—I work in oils; M. J.’s medium is also oils, but thinly, thinly applied so that the look is closer to tempera. Light—natural light—was crucial to us. Just think what natural light allows one to see: the thousand varying shades of a late fall morning when the sky is brittle with a blue and gold hardness, or the folded, collapsed, watery tints of a February afternoon. Still, artificial light was better than no light at all. We did go to the trouble of applying to the government for a professional dispensation, a matter of filling out half a dozen forms, but naturally we were turned down.

  We were, it could be argued, partly prepared for our deprivation, since both of us had long since adjusted our work cycle to the seasonal rhythms, putting in longer hours in the summer and cutting back our painting time in the dark ends of winter days, quitting as early as three-thirty or four, brewing up a pot of green tea, and turning to other pursuits, occasionally pursuits of an amatory disposition; M. J.’s sensibility rises astonishingly in the midst of coziness and flickering shadow. Our most intimate moments, and our most intense, tend to fall into that crack of the day when the sun has been cut down to a bent sliver of itself and even that about to disappear on the horizon.

  It is a fact that my work has always suffered at the approach of winter. The gradual threatened diminishment of the afternoon sun encourages a false exuberance. Slap down the thick blades of color while it is still possible. Hurry. Be bold (my brain shouts and prods), and out of boldness, while the clock drains away each thrifty second of possibility, will come that accident we call art.

  It seldom does. What I imagine to be a useful recklessness is only bad painting executed with insufficient light.

  M. J.’s highly representational work prospers even less well than mine during the late autumn days, not that the two of us have ever spoken of this. You will understand that two painters living together under one roof can be an invitation to discord, and its lesser cousin, irritation. Ideally artists would be better off selecting mates who are civil engineers or chiropractors or those who manufacture buttons or cutlery. It’s relatively easy to respect disparate work, but how do we salute, purely, the creative successes of those we live with, those we stand beside while brushing our teeth. How to rule out envy, or worse, disdain, and to resist those little sideways words or faked encouragement, delivered with the kind of candor that is really presumption? And so when I say, rather disingenuously, that M. J.’s work prospers less well, is overly representational, employs too much purple and lavender, and so on, you will have to take my pronouncement with a certain skepticism. And then reflect on the problems of artistic achievement and its measurement, and the knowledge that systems of temperament are immensely complicated. The salt and wound of M. J.’s vulnerability, for instance, is stalked by an old tenderness, but also by the fear of being overtaken.

  It seems that most artists are frightened by any notion of subtraction, and, of course, the rationing of light falls into the category of serious deprivation. Without paint, artists can create images with their own blood or excrement if necessary, not that the two of us have ever been driven to such measures, but there is no real substitute for natural light. As the accustomed afternoon rays grow thinner, the work becomes more desperate, careless, and ineffectual. We often discussed this over our tea mugs during our midwinter days when the year seemed at its weakest point, how scarcity can stifle production or else, as in my case, clear a taunting space to encourage it. It seemed to both of us monu mentally unfair.

  But then, with the new tax measures, the house was dark all day. Like everyone else we had come to see the cutting back of natural light as a civic protest against a manipulative tax, conscience de nos jours, you might call it, and like all but the very rich we had filled in every one of our windows—with brick or stone or sheets of ugly plywood. Obscura maxima was the code phrase on our politicized tongues, and we spoke it proudly—and on our bumper stickers too—at least in the beginning. (Of course we left the window in our studio as long as we were able, and only boarded it up when we were made to feel we had failed in our civic responsibility.)

  In another country, at a different latitude, we might have packed up our easels and paints and sandwiches and worked en plein air, since no government, however avid for revenues, is able to control access to outdoor light. But “nature’s studio,” as the great Linnaeus called it, is seldom available in our northern climate. Our winters are long and bitter, and our summers filled with sultry air and plagues of mosquitoes. We are dependent, therefore, on a contrived indoor space, our atelier, as I sometimes like to call it, into which we coax as much light as possible—or at least we did before the enactment of the Window Tax.

  The tax, when it was first introduced, had a beguiling logic, and even the appearance of fairness. We know, every last one of us, how widespread the evils of tax evasion are, how even the most morally attentive—and I would put M. J. and myself in that category—inflate their travel receipts or conceal small transactions which have brought them profit. More than once I’ve exchanged little dashed-off paintings, still-lifes mostly, for such necessities as fuel oil and roof repairs, leaving behind not a trace for my accountant’s eye.

  The genius of the new tax was its simplicity. Some forms of wealth can be hidden in safe-deposit boxes or in dresser drawers, but the dwellings we inhabit announce, loudly and publicly, our financial standing—their size, their aesthetic proportions, the materials with which they are fashioned. And what could be more visible from the exterior than the number and size of one’s windows? What feature can be more easily calculated?

  A formula was worked out: so many tax dollars per square inch of window. A populist victory.

  The results might have been foreseen. Overnight, with windows an index to wealth, and thus a liability, the new form of tax evasion became, as you can imagine, a retreat to medieval darkness. One by one, and then hundreds by hundreds, our wondrous apertures to the world were walled in with wood or cardboard or solid masonry. As seen from the outside, the hurriedly filled-in windows gave our houses the blank, stunned look of abandonment. Inside was trapped the darkness of a primitive world; we might just as well be living in caves or burrows.

  The plotted austerities of our own domestic life, so appealing at first, soon faded. A life in the dark is close to motionless; hour by hour the outlines of our bodies are lost—there is no armature of style, no gesture, no signifying softness of the mouth. What follows is a curious amnesia of the self. I had thought that words spoken in the dark might bring back the old force of language, words becomin
g deeds, becoming defined moments, but I found instead that the voice in the dark puts on a dignified yet hollow sideshow, so that we ended up speaking to ourselves and not to each other.

  Of course there was always the alternative of artificial light, which was in fact our only recourse. But a life performed under the burnt yellow-whiteness of electric illumination condemns us to perceptual distortion. There is that vicious snapping on and off of current, and the unvarying intensity, always predictable, yet always startling. The glare of a simple light bulb—think of it, that unhandsome utilitarian contrivance of glass and wire—insists on a sort of extracted/extruded truth, which those of us involved in long love affairs are wary of. Our postures and equivocations are harshly exposed, and the face we show the world subtly discolored. Is there any love that doesn’t in the end insist on naming itself, showing itself to other less fortunate people, oh look at me! at us!

  When two people live and work under the same roof, the solitary nature of consciousness is frayed with a million threads of in calculability, and one of those threads is a decision to avoid emotional dissonance and preserve for one’s self certain areas of privacy. M. J. and I, in the months following the Window Tax, settled for an unspoken equipoise: I kept my self-doubts to myself and, in turn, was spared the usual strong doses of disrespect about my attitude.

  No longer did we discuss our work or show our projects to each other, though we occupied as always the same studio. We kept to our separate corners. I worked mainly during the day and M. J. at night, for with the loss of daylight it scarcely mattered to us anymore which was which. As for our vie intime, well, that had declined radically after just a few days spent under the parching electric lights. While M. J. slept, I worked steadily but with a constant ache of discouragement, attempting with my range of aromatic oils to re-create on canvas the warmth and shine of inflowing light, that which I’d known all my life but now could scarcely remember. This was a flat, dull width of time, though I have always recognized that long chapters of life go on without strong passion.

  It occurred to me one day that my use of canvas might be at fault. Stretched canvas, with its stiff industrial surface, possesses a withholding element and in the best of circumstances is reluctant at first to “open” its weave to what is offered. I knew that it had once been customary to paint on wood surfaces, hearty walnut planks or maple—this was an old and honorable tradition, and one that I thought worth trying.

  At that moment my eyes fell on the slab of plywood we had nailed over the studio window, and the thought came to me that I might overpaint its cheap fir grain with a diverting image: one of my tossed-off still-lifes perhaps, a collection of lemons on a blue plate or a pitcher of pure water, something anyway that was more consoling than the life around me and less inviting of the late afternoon fits and starts brought on by the overhead lights.

  The rectangularity of the wood seemed to demand a frame of some kind, and this I carefully painted in, exchanging the rather harsh oranginess of fir for a subtly grained and beveled oak, a generous four inches in width, working my way around the two sides, the top and bottom, and then, finally, painting in a quartet of fine mitered corners. An easy trick, you might think, transforming one type of wood into another, but the task took me the rest of the day—and half of the next.

  When I paint I am composed, I am most truly myself, but I wish I could tell you how much happiness this particular craftsmanlike task gave me, exchanging wood for simple wood, coaxing ripples from dead surfaces. My usual paintings are compositionally complex and employ a rich color field. I am known for my use of the curved line. It’s even been said that my management of the curve has brought to contemporary painting “an engagement for the eye and a seduction for the intellect.” And yet, the strict linearity of my new “oak” frame brought a satisfaction my rondure illusions have never given.

  At first I didn’t know that what I was framing was, in fact, a window; the knowledge came upon me slowly as I found my brush dividing the framed space into a series of smaller rectangles, bringing about a look that was oddly architectural. Again I reached for a golden oakiness of color; again I kept my lines disciplined and sharp, but narrower now, more delicate and refined.

  Mullions. The word leapt into my head. A relic of an older world from a wiser consciousness. These nonstructural bars dividing the lights or panes of the window proved relatively easy to master, being simple wood strips, slightly grooved on their edges, glinting with their barely revealed woody highlights. Each one of them pleased me, the verticals, the horizontals, and most especially their shy intersections.

  That phrase most especially. Did you notice? M. J. has no patience with such locutions.

  Harder to paint on the surface of ordinary plywood was the image of glass, and so I was forced to experiment. Window glass, as you will have observed, is a curious half-silvered substance, a steaming liquid that has been frozen into a solid plane. Glass possesses different colors at different hours of the day. Sometimes it pretends it’s a mirror. Other times it gathers checks and streaks and bubbles of brilliance and elegant flexes of mood. Its transparency winks back at you, yet it withholds, in certain weathers, what is on the other side, revealing only a flash of wet garden grass, a shadow of a close-standing hedge, or perhaps a human figure moving across its width—the mail carrier or a neighbor or even M. J. out for a late afternoon stroll. Glass is green like water or blue like the sky or a rectangle of beaten gold when the setting sun strikes it or else a midnight black broken by starlight or the cold courteous reflection of the moon.

  Glassiness evaded me. My brush halted; it swung in the air like a metronome. What I produced were gray cloudy squares with a cardboardlike density, a kindergarten version of what a window might be.

  It may have been that I was tired. Or that I was visited by that old fear of failure or by the sense of lowered consequence that arrives out of nowhere, especially when I hear M. J. tiptoeing around in the kitchen, brewing yet another pot of tea. I decided to leave it until morning.

  As always I rose early and went straight to the studio and snapped on the electric lights. My “window” was waiting, but I saw immediately that it was altered. The shadows of my oak moldings had acquired a startling trompe l’oeil vividness, their depth and shadow augmented and their woodiness enlivened by amber flecks and streaks. I had been pleased to arrive the day before at a primitive suggestiveness—window as architectural detail, window as gesturing toward windowness, just falling short of verisimilitude, but this was now a window so cunningly made that it could almost have been opened on its casement hinges. Hinges that had not existed yesterday. The glass panes too had been tampered with. I looked closely and recognized a slick oil shine superimposed on a lake of rainy mauve.

  All day I worked on the glass. It went slowly, so slowly that often an hour would pass with only one or two touches of my brush on the surface. My paint was mixed and layered, rubbed out, then reapplied. By evening I had managed to articulate, or so I thought, the spark and glance and surprise of glass without, of course, stretching toward the achievement of light or air.

  I woke the next morning with a sense of excitement. Even before entering the studio I could feel a soft-shoe dance in the region of my chest, and I reflected that it had been some years since my feelings had run so dangerously out of control. My “window” shone, its oak frame burning with an almost antique burnish, and the troublesome panes giving off their glassy gifts. How is it possible to make light dance on a flat surface, and how does anyone bring transparency to what is rigid and unyielding? I sighed, then readied myself for a day of work.

  It was at least a week before the task was done. By coincidence we were both there when it reached completion, standing side by side in one of our rare moments of tenderness, each of us with brush in hand. One of us reached forward to apply a final brush-stroke, though we weren’t able to remember afterward which it was. The moment was beautiful, but also blurred. We recall a sudden augmentation of brilliance, a
s though we witnessed the phenomenon with a single pair of eyes, our “window” bursting its substance, freed in such a way that light flowed directly through it.

  Not real light, of course, but the idea of light—infinitely more alluring than light itself. Illusion, accident, meticulous attention all played a part in the construction of a window that had become more than a window, better than a window, the window that would rest in the folds of the mind as all that was ideal and desirable in the opening, beckoning, sensuous world.

  REPORTAGE

  Now that a Roman arena has been discovered in southeastern Manitoba, the economy of this micro-region has been transformed. Those legendary wheat farms with their proud old family titles have gone willfully, happily bankrupt, gone “bust” as they say in the area, and the same blond, flat-lying fields that once yielded forty bushels per acre have been turned over to tourism.

  Typical is the old Orchard place off Highway 12. Last Wednesday I visited Mr. Orchard in the sunny ranch-style house he shares with his two cocker bitches, Beauty and Trude, one of them half blind, the other hard of hearing. The fir floors of the Orchard place shine with lemon wax. There are flowers in pottery vases and the walls are covered by the collage works of his former wife, Mavis, who is said to be partly responsible for the discovery and excavation of the Roman ruins. I asked Mr. Orchard for a brief history.

  “Quite early on,” he mused, pouring out cups of strong Indian tea, “I became aware of a large shallow depression in the west quarter of our family farm. The depression, circular in shape like a saucer and some ninety meters across, was not so much visible to the eye as experienced by the body. Whenever I rode tractor in this area—I am speaking now of my boyhood—I anticipated, and registered, this very slight dip in the earth’s surface, and then the gradual rise and recovery of level ground. We referred to this geological anomaly as Billy’s Basin for reasons which I cannot now recall, although I did have an Uncle Bill on my mother’s side who farmed in the area in the years before the Great War, a beard-and-twinkle sort of fellow and something of a scholar according to family legend, who was fond of sitting up late and reading by lamplight—books, newspapers, mail-order catalogues, anything the man could get his hands on. I have no doubt but that he was familiar with the great Greek and Roman civilizations, but certainly he never dreamed that the remnants of antiquity were so widely spread as to lie buried beneath our own fertile fields here in Manitoba and that his great-grandnephew—myself, that is—would one day derive his living not from wheat but from guiding tours and selling postcards. Whether Uncle Bill would have scorned or blessed this turn of events I have no way of knowing, but I like to think he was not a man to turn his back on fortune.”