Window on the World

Black and white world

My window on the world’s turned white.

It’s all mixed-up clouds and snow; take a picture and you’d never know which way’s up.

Yesterday, up in the mountains I was the only living thing. Me and my shadow. Me, my shadow and my footprints – first tracks walking up; last tracks hurrying down. (And alarming, how easy it was to lose track of those tracks in the flat light of the late afternoon, when every landscape feature dissolved in mist and the Hansel-and-Gretel fear prickled behind me.)

The world up there was monochrome. White sky, white sun, white light. Black rocks, black water, black shadows – and then for a moment, the clouds cracked and a ragged patch of blue burst through. Improbable because it just didn’t fit: not a hint of black or white about it.

And all was silent. So silent that when noise came – cracking of ice thawing when the sun reached its peak – it was so unexpected as to be frightening! Partly, because silence had become the norm. Also partly because there was simply No Good Reason for anyone or anything to be up there, in the snow, on a day like that, causing noise – so the fear was, that anything that had taken itself up there to make noise was Up to No Good.

Another day, I’ll walk the same paths again, in the sunlight, and see the mountain vistas. But somehow yesterday I was grateful for the nothingness of black and white and cloud and snow. Somehow, they negated the possibility of bleakness. The mountain-face in autumn can be featureless, grey green and empty. But with the cloud coming and going, the outlook never stretched further than the next brook, the next rocky outcrop; never so far as the mountaintop until you’d reached it. So, you could never see much: but, flipside, you could walk for hours without ever being discouraged by a horizon that grew no closer.

Another thing: with such short vistas, your focus changes. Up by Tignes, there's a sculpture of a woman by the roadside. Slender and otherworldly, a giantess poised on the brink of a cloudscape. Her flowing lines summoned up words like ‘maiden’ and ‘chanson’; ‘chivalry’ and ‘sorrow’. On other days, she might be standing on the shore of the lake. Or at the head of a cliff, or looking out over a village and rolling farmland. On other days, she’ll have context, and with it, meaning, and with it, identity. But today? Today she’s anyone and no one; she’s a blank page. Peasant girl or princess? Snow queen or milkmaid? Who is she looking for? In the white, she’s lost her reality: she’s what I make her. Another day, she’s herself; she’ll have her story back and the world will fill the blanks around her.

Windows on the world, you see. We’re what they make us.