Ciclo CXXXIV

Three observations, and the hand knows they are one thing wearing three faces. The window — la finestra — made of glass, of eyes, of plates, each a membrane between the within and the without, each pretending to be solid when it is only a threshold. The flint, struck by the steel, marvels — si meravigliava — at the fire it did not know it carried, astonished by its own hidden nature made visible only through violence, through contact with what is harder. And the third — the maker, the hand that arranges these things, that sees the window and the flint and knows they are the same parable: that nothing reveals itself alone. The eye needs the light from without. The flint needs the steel. The window exists only because there is something on the other side worth looking toward. La grazia — if one may use that word without the priests arriving — is this: that the self is not self-luminous. That we are all flint, all glass, all threshold, and the fire, the light, the seeing, comes from the striking, from the passage, from what we cannot generate in isolation. The French windows at Amboise are beautiful because the garden is behind them. The flint is noble because it did not know what it held. And I — io — write because the page is my steel, and what sparks from the contact was in me but I did not know it until the trembling hand moved. The third thing is revelation through relation. Nothing is itself alone. The candle gutters. The canal outside is still dark. But the window, even unlit, knows what it is for.