Bad For Glass
A deep dive into the literary puddle
Water has long been an elemental trope throughout literature, for the moving target of the swimmer, a medium of agency and transition; for the spectator, a fateful mirror, an abyss that both reflects and absorbs.
Water contained becomes the puddle, thought collected, demanding new depths of introspection. Like the glass mirror there is a world above and below, the surface and endless bottom, so the two perspectives are twinned held cheek by jowl in a single vision.
In his essay ‘A Hanging’, George Orwell gives a typically direct account of an accused man being walked towards the scaffold with the empty noose awaiting his neck to fill it. The accused man changes his step – a seemingly mundane gesture – but Orwell sees something more in it:
“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”
Channelling Camus, Orwell notes the existential hinge of action (as much as inaction) as confirmation of existence, presence of mind as soul. The condemned man is exposed at the precipice of choice, at once trivial and poignant. Knowing he is about to die, the prisoner still affirms his presence of mind:
“his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles.”
He avoids the puddle (the fear of getting his feet wet), even though he is about to die; with the most banal of actions in the face of an extreme situation, the prisoner takes control, the puddle becomes the anchoring motif with which Orwell fixes the moment, a final resistant expression of choice to briefly interrupt the tyrannical process of corporal punishment.
The unasked question here is whether the condemned man sees himself reflected in the puddle, a last vision of life, or is it simply an obstacle to be overcome, one step closer to death? Orwell does not say.
From the deep to the shallow, Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel, Bend Sinister takes the puddle as a purely aesthetic trope that acts as a symbolic image for the novel. In his introduction Nabokov gives a typically pugnacious account of his then writing routine, smoking two packs a day, and looks back on how the puddle increasingly crept into the rich stream of his subconscious, steadily rose to the surface in his mind’s eye until he realised it appeared throughout the book.
The shimmering shifting mask of the puddle was analogous to the original meaning of the phrase, to “bend sinister” being a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side used on medieval family crests. Nabokov infers his choice of words to mean: “an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror [...] a sinistral and sinister world.” This reflects the content of the book, a tyrannical police state, 1984-lite, by way of Kafka-brand paranoia; a narrowed version of a subdued culture; where everything about the trappings of civilised society is slightly off, the everyday experienced through a glass darkly.
For Orwell the puddle is a narrative device, in Nabokov it stands for a more philosophical absence, a punched-out hole in reality, like the uncertainty of a silhouette, or the casting of a shadow, resisting definite interpretation, it sits within its own ontological bubble. Therein lies a vague and watery mysticism.
In the novel’s beginning the author’s cinematic eye pans out from an oblong cobble filled with water, later on it reappears as an ink blot, and a swollen puddle of spilt milk moving only so far but contained by the limits of its spread. Nabokov suggests that the puddle’s exact shape is almost meaningless, it fulfils the liquid state of its physical qualities, we look for shapes that demand meaning or an explanation where there is none but coincidence clashed with imagination, an optical blot that leaves a mental stain – like sunspots in the eye, footsteps imprinted on the mind
Water, contained within the framework of the puddle [lightning bottled] is the portent of flux and infinite malleability, its settling is temporary and contains more suggestion than it reveals truth, it is an unreliable narrator with no story to tell. In Bend Sinister the recurring mote of a puddles offer escapism into harsh truth from the constant suspension of disbelief; the double-think that all forms of totalitarianism require in order to meet their maladjusted functions.
Speaking of mutability, R. S. Thomas’ poem ‘Reflections’ crosses the divide between liquid and solid, static image and new possibilities constantly emerging, the same abyss thrown up by Orwell recurs in the domestic setting:
“The furies are at home
in the mirror; it is their address.
Even the clearest water
If deep enough, can drown.”
The verb of “address” is front-loaded with intensity – this is Thomas hurling a rock at the perfection of the object in order to shatter the seeming permanence of its subject [the viewer, the multiplicity of their reflections] these new possibilities are electrically charged and wild, but chained to their vessel.
As a deeply spiritual Christian writer, Thomas grants the mirror-as-puddle the same transformative powers as analogous to the three forms of God, where water/steam/ice as father/son/holy ghost are both distinct and indivisible. The hope is that the ripples of life visited upon by the wild caprice of the furies will settle after the shock of the bigger and bigger splash:
“[...] you partake of a shifting identity/Never your own.”
In her poems ‘Mirror’ and ‘The Yew Tree And The Moon’, Sylvia Plath explored powers of mirroring and reflection in the other world of doubling, parallel spaces as alternative realities. Using images of the moon dropped like a stone into the body of a lake, it shatters the surface which soon returns to its composure. Like the Greek myths of Echo and Narcissus, we see our world multiplied and altered then broken by ripples carrying the true image off with the tide. Marked by the ink-black bleeding hands of trees, the myth of a singular horizon is overturned along with the sky captured in the water below; as the sea and sky blurred by the weather can sometimes trade places so we are walking on the ceiling with liquid earth suspended above us. Of course for Virginia Woolf, a forbearer of Plath, water was a source of mixed portent as she would drown herself in the river Ouse, filling her pockets with stones to ensure that she would drown and not be forced to rise again.
In his elegiac snapshots of doomed Jazz heroes ‘But Beautiful’, Geoff Dyer runs through a series of vignettes like notes through a solo. When the emotionally shattered Bud Powell is released from a New York asylum some of his mind is still there detached, alienated from reality, like Sartre’s ‘Nausea’, everything ordinary jumps out at him, at once familiar and strange, the lines of normality blurred:
“He saw his face staring up at him from a puddle, the reflected sky deep as space. He walked toward the car, careful not to tread in the image which shuddered and vanished as his foot passed over it.” Like his own shadow passing over the preeminent grave. When Powell is reunited with his wife they lie down to embrace, he notices tears of joy and sadness run from her eye and collect in a pool in her ear. The ebb of water and what it takes away finds volume, is contained and given shape.
There is dialogue between all these writers, in particular Thomas’ and Plath’s emphasis on the hard/soft fragility of reflection, spiritual and visual, throws up the increasingly narrow corridors of light and shadow we move through every day in the contemporary architecture of public spaces, the looking glass become rabbit hole of glass and steel construction of corporate towers and office blocks dominate from street to sky. The one-way mirrors and camera eyes provoke constant observation and self-regulation – straight out of Orwell’s 1984, we become both spectacle and spectator. The book Shard Cinema opens up the black mirror of i-phones and screen devices as a portal into other worlds of image and information, the multiple windows and tabs become refracted in fragments within fragments, countless shards divided into shards, the river of data runs away with itself. Life is sucked out from the emergent chaos of the puddle, pool and lake, the vitality of water that drives introspection and freedom of thought can grow stagnant, the colossal possibilities of water create a new abyss where there is as much to lose as there is to discover.