Why Glass Works

When I was in college I took a lecture class on sustainable design. The professor said the two most sustainable cups are a clay cup you break and remake each time you drink, and a glass cup you drink from once. It is sacred. I may be misremembering the exact wording and sequence. But this was the jist of the lesson: two completely opposing circumstances. Each image is viscerally charged with opposing culture and habits. The cup that disappears into the earth, and the one in a box lined with black velour, a cup so delicate it could be broken if held too hard. 

I have a distinct memory of glass blowing as a child. On the bottom of Main St. in Rhinebeck was a pit of heat known as the town’s glass studio. Glass, such a hard and sharp substance became the lava we hopped across over the floor in our games of pretend. 

Glass, we saw, was made in unfathomable heat and wound like hot wax around itself in a hell-like pit of molten sand. Humans then use their breath in long tubes to gently bubble out the substance. It was not touched by human hands in its making but nudged into shape. Because of this distance, it seemed quite out of control. 

There is a good amount of danger surrounding glass, a material keen on breaking. On a whimsicle flight to Mexico, whimsacle on account of it being funded by the graduate program, it was 11pm, approaching deep night, when the delayed flight took off from Dallas, the flight was nearly empty and everyone seemed tired, moving from seat to seat because there were no people to claim the front rows. I remained gazing at the raindrop-lined winodow when an excited flicker caught my eye. Against the ceiling ahead was a glorious and subtle rainbow dancing along the clinical white plastic known as plane ceiling. 

Glass manipulates vision and manifests illusion. Whatever images inhabit the other side of the glass is both close and incredibly far away. Often as I walk on the sidewalk I am drawn to the light in apartments above me. Often they are in full view, they are homes where people live, eat, laugh, make love, flounder. The only thing separating us from them besides the height, is the glass. Though the full wall glass apartment buildings, close enough to see from the street, act as beacons. It’s bizarre to be able to see things like a plant or a chair or a dining room table, see how the inhabitants have arranged from the street. Lifestyles displayed like little rectangular jewels above. And all along the sidewalk are big windows of the businesses selling familiar fleeces, or food, selling feelings of things. Probably the most sexy aspect to these visions is the existence of the glass, holding us back, not through strength, but through respect, or at least the illusion that the glass can be broken - but it won’t. The trust in society is so strong that it says the people on the sidewalk won’t break the glass, they won’t throw things against those bright windows up there or on the street, they won’t break the glass of the stores. 

But I am looking in the past. New York City streets, and perhaps other streets in other cities, were a place where the physical windows on the street acted like beckoning fingers, sure, luxury buildings do have large windows, as a type of advertisement. A new potent glass happens to be the glass of the screen. The screen sells feelings - once more, but this time we can be anywhere with “service” and feel it. Service, a word implying labor, feels like an invisible hand or breath that brings the utilities of the phone to life, a strange kind of labor that does not have a face right in front of us. I have similar questions about where the internet lives. Who decides the apparent “natural” narrative of social media sites, sites that look like tributaries but are more like canals, the edges of which we can’t see. Pushed one way or another by algorithms. We, looking into the bright abyss, can only see the stream. 

I can’t help but be blown away by how delicate glass is and how much care it generally needs so as to exist in its form for some time. This care also comes from the knowledge of how hard it is, in fact to make glass as it is. Sand becomes glass between 1400 and 3002 fareinheight depending on the type of sand or mix of substances. 

I watch brilliant youtube videos of molten glass formed with absolutely exquisite heat. The glass making, or melting becomes so hot that it becomes impossible to see as the atoms merge in the sand. 

I love Heronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a mad menagerie illuminated with bright colors and glorious landscape broken by acts of cruelty. I’ve never been to the Prado in Milan where I recently learned that the triptyque in fact, has a cover, what might be a map of the earth covered by clouds. Half is sky and half is earth. The sheen on the side implies the presence of a glass sphere. The true darkness of the interior seems to be illustrated in the tone of this front image. One of the reasons of course being that the world is enclosed, that the people in the garden don’t even know the shimmering glass that encases their wild life. This is the glass of illusion. It is the craft of light refraction and visibility. Mirrors, glasses, help and hinder and manipulate visual understanding in this hyper-visual world. Need I mention the strange world of the mirror? Or the power of photography aided by a play of glass. Captured in an instant, the angles of the photograph are so precise, the likeness so exact it feels like truth. 

If glass manifests an alternate reality, is it good or evil? Is it a truth in itself? In The Snow Queen, Hans Christian Anderson explains that there was a goblin whose mirror that made all that was beautiful appear harsh and wither. When the mirror shattered it few into the eyes and hearts of people, or were made into windows or glasses from which people never saw quite properly. Not to mention the step-mother of Snow White who longs to be young, and trusts in the lies of her mirror. 

And the cup of glass, what is it’s story? What story does it uphold that keeps it safe? How it refracts light, insisting on its own delicacy, or disappearing altogether. Sometimes I find my apartment has no light and I am so saddened by this, for months it seems, and then I realize the glass needs to be cleaned. Notice glass.