When the great beast we cage breaks free
through the glass-domed atrium
We will know its strength1
BQ Convenience, 1508 Newkirk. Awning text: “Cigarettes, tobaccos, candy, soda, Juul, lotto, coffee, ice cream, snack, EBT.” The window displays are lined with giant glassware bongs, and a poster of Mona Lisa ripping from a RAW reefer adorns the push-cart entrance.
And it’s me—a pedestrian—looking away, on the corner of an ambiguous intersection, so the car will go ahead. Feigning obliviousness, so it won’t accommodate me, in its calculus.
Sometimes the streetlight rhythms are with you, at your back—just green pastures for miles of city-block. Sometimes the lights are against you; sometimes they switch full-stop just as you pull up to the curb, nipping all your momentum in its blossoming bud.
A Galaxy slips from a hand’s sweaty grip. Its crystal viewscreen splinters, snakes lightning. The trans- becomes ap-parent; zuhanden, vorhanden. I drop the phone; a cracking, crystalline spiderweb spreads cross obsidian surface.
Glass to refract and absorb. Glass for looking and glass for reflecting—a mirror, a crystal ball, a glass of water, a glass of wine, all turned into one another by the tired savior who waits my table. Raise a glass, always half-full. So sing glassy-eyed men who lean on their elbows, neckties loose. They drink and consider their glasses, jagged crystal ones...
With glass, there is little difference between access and containment. Consider these glass screens through which we might simulate any need unmet. Glass women into whom we put our prayer to be touched. Glass-bottomed boats upon which men in crème turtlenecks drink champagne and lipsync while we eat our demi-glace. Glass made of sugar so as to safely break when our hero comes crashing through, though to some he is a villain...
In a glass city there are more people than there are people. The little boy on my bus speaks to his imaginary friend, actually the new device his dad bought him... The actress sitting in front of her vanity applies makeup to her double, only to become a third person on stage. Her understudy practices the version of herself that gets the part by whatever means, but in doing so she will become someone she doesn’t recognize...[Nick Greer, Glass City]
Life in the Age of Glass. Gorilla glass in the laptop and phone screens; the borosilicate-glass cathode ray bulb in our early televisions, and the liquid crystal display panels of modern. Glass in our skyscrapers, our underground fiber optic cables, our silicon chips. The glass of panopticon and surveillance space.
Perhaps we mark its start with spectacle-maker Zacharias Janssen’s early compound microscope—or van Leeuwenhoek’s 200x magnifiers—or Hooke’s Micrographia, the first images of cells. Perhaps we date it to Newton’s optical experiments with prisms, with dispersion and refraction.
Glass, out of mind and almost not there until it shatters, making its presence known. The glass of Newton’s prism, which split white light into a Melvillean rainbow. “The one remains, the many change and pass... Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.”[P. Shelley, “Adonis”]
Biological experiments are performed with glass test tubes, petri dishes, and slides, using glass-lensed microscopes. Glass to seal off from dust and wind; glass darkened, to seal off the light. Their access to the minuscule, mirrored by the telescope’s access to the massive. Through such lenses was an Age of Wonder launched...
Or the cast iron and plate glass of Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace, a World unto itself & veritable Wonder of its Victorian era, built for that proto-World’s Fair mouthful, ye olde Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, a million square feet and twelve stories tall, whose blazing death by fire was visible across eight counties. Resurrected years later by one Thomas Pynchon, pearl poet of Teddy’s Oyster Bay, all soas to bring it crashing down again in the firestorms of Blitz, its windows smashed (a crash, an end to delicacy, the crystalline thingdome, a system of values, a hothouse incubator, a world where stood...) and in total darkness, one glint of light to illuminate the shards.
That, before its famed banana flapjacks: No coincidence: The Palace was designed by Joseph Paxton of Cavendish banana fame—founder of a monocrop so successful, it now teeters on the edge of a modernist extinction. (Death by a simplification of forms; death by plantation.) The Palace greenhouse, with its internal clime and botanical array, preceded the pyramidal biosphere of Oracle, John P. Allen’s Spaceship Earth. All the great flora harvested by the Empire’s tendrils were there gathered and stored, alongside the world’s largest mirror. Queen Victoria, our rare gem and Empress of India, generously shared her own prize jewels with the world, from a secure distance—the yellow Koh-I-Noor diamond (”Mountain of Light”) stolen by forced contract from India—alongside a gold nugget from Chile (the weight of a grown woman); an Indian elephant taxidermied in regal fineries (plus howdah); imported eel traps from the Māori; a Peruvian lump of guano (later chronicled by Mann); and the assembled bark of a towering redwood from Vineland County (”Mother of the Forest,” 3000 years old and 300 feet tall).
And not just the conquest of space, but time as well: Gothic altars and jambs, Gideon Mantell’s fossil court (interrupted by his overdose by opiate), and lifesize iguanodons (sculpted, with now-regretted errors of inference, altho paleontologists can’t be choosers). Hard to understate the impact of a snowglobe microcosm: Darwin, Marx, Faraday, Colt, Dickens, Brontë (the Elder), The Dodo (Lewis Carroll), and Marian Evans (author of Middlemarch) were all in attendance. So too was Dostoyevsky, who saw something tragic-flawed and decadent in its Palace—metaphor for a coming West.
As for Paxton, he was the best kind, a rags-to-riches: born to a backwater farming fam and by 20 the head of an arboretum, running experiments for the Royal Horticultural Society. Befriending the Duke of Devonshire—namesake of the Cavendish—he improved the noble grounds, designing a fountain (nicknamed “Emperor”) that sent 300 feet of water in the air—a “feat of hydraulic engineering that has since been exceeded only once in Europe.”[William McGuire Bryson, At Home] Bryston keeps the score: Paxton “built the largest rockery in the country; designed a new estate village; became the world’s leading expert on the dahlia; won prizes for producing the country’s finest melons, figs, peaches, and nectarines; and created an enormous tropical hothouse, known as the Great Stove, which covered an acre of ground and was so roomy within that Queen Victoria, on a visit in 1843, was able to tour it in a horse-drawn carriage.” This all before the co-founding (with Dickens, naturally; what in the Dickens) of the nationally distributed Daily News. Before even the construction of a Birkenhead municipal park that would serve as Olmsted’s model for New York City’s Central. So it goes, with the Book of Gardens.
After the Exhibition, the Palace was relocated to a resting place. Seventeen lost their lives porting it across contexts. Cursed, they said i’twas. Burnt and resurrected and burnt again, in phoenix cycles. Modernity’s most unsurpassable artifact: so the art historian Preziosi called the glass structure, for it embodied a modernistic order “infinitely expandable, scaleless, anonymous; transparently and stylelessly abstract,” a plan mighty and ideal.
Perhaps a mineral would be a better metaphor than such an amorphous and asymmetric, supercooled fluid. A mineral: the stuff of trellis. Solid, that is, resistant to flow. Uniformly composed, that is, self-similar, with strict formal bounds on internal dissent. Stamped, tiled, and tesselating. Crystalline and lawful; a periodic lattice iterative and gridbound. Cleavable at its joints. Stable within a regime and temperature...
Saul R. Ort & Suspended Reason, L’Angleland, forthcoming.