Legendary Windows

Posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 8:15 am

Legendary Windows
POEM! Can someone help me understand The Human Condition by Howard Nemerov?

In this motel where I was told to wait,
The telivision screen is stood before
The picture window. Nothing could be more
Useful to a man than knowing where he’s at,
And I don’t know, but pace the day in doubt
between my looking in and looking out.

Through snow, along the snowy road, cars pass
Going both ways, and pass behind the screen
Where heads of heroes sometimes can be seen
and sometimes cars, that speed across the glass.
Once I saw world and thought exactly meet,
But only in a picture, by Magritte.

A picture of a picture, by Magritte,
Wherein a landscape on an easel stands
Before a window opening on a land-
scape, and the pair of them a perfect fit,
Silent and mad. You know right off, the room.

And that is now the room in which i stand
Waiting, or walk, and sometimes try to sleep.
The day falls into darkness while i keep
The TV going; headlight blaze behind
Its legendary traffic, love and hate,
In this motel where i was told to wait.

The Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte produced two paintings called La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition) – and also several drawings which often share the title. In both paintings a canvas stands in front of an open window, but the painting exactly matches what we think might be behind it.

In both paintings, one of the points Magritte is making is that when we look at the world, we think we see the world. But we don’t see the world, we see what we see. When we see an optical illusion (such as an Ames Room) we have no way of knowing that what we see isn’t true (we have nothing to compare it with). We don’t really know what is ‘true’, we know only what we know. Magritte wants to remind us that pictures may or may not be ‘real’, and that the world itself may or may not be ‘real’ in the same way.

Nemerov has taken the Magritte idea, and has pushed it one step further by changing the painting for a TV screen. Nemerov says he is staying in a motel (so he is not at home) and has a TV and a window which he can look at. The TV shows him things that seem true (sometimes cars) and things he assumes are not true (heads of heroes).

But how does Nemerov know that the cars are true, and the heroes are not true – it could be the other way around. How does anybody trust the news (there are plenty of bogus news stories – Fox News coverage of the Chinese scientists who discovered Noah’s Ark for example). And if a TV channel were to transmit News features which were fictional, and a drama series which was true (the life of Oskar Schindler perhaps), how could you know which to trust?

Nemerov goes one further. If You Can‘t trust the TV in the motel, how can you trust the Window either? Maybe the window opens on the world outside, but then maybe it overlooks a 24/7 film set. (The Hollywood film The Truman Show was based on the idea of someone whose life was a reality TV show, but he didn’t realise it; Vanilla Sky uses the same idea).

Nemerov’s poem asks us how we know what is true, and what might only be a story someone is telling us. It starts with the Magritte paintings, and goes one step further.

I don’t think it adds anything interesting to the paintings, so I am unimpressed by this as a poem.

But perhaps you feel differently.