Running my hands over the old glass panes, following them downwards, six small to one large, and double. The bubbles, dips, bends. Outside looks different as I peer through each rectangle. Warp, magnify, shrink, stretch, blur.
Glass is a liquid, someone told me back then. It just moves slowly. It’s a solid that’s a liquid, a liquid-solid, a supercooled liquid.
Last night I read more about it in an effort to self-fact-check before developing extended metaphors.
It’s not any of those things but remains unclear what glass is. Now glass holds a designation as “neither a true liquid nor a true solid.”
Or a non-crystalline solid.
Non-crystalline means glass is solid but does not have properties universally agreed on as solid, which is a regular stable state in which molecules are aligned in predictable patterns. Glass appears solid, but its molecules are disordered, all over the place, keeping it together, somehow but not sure how.
But some say glass might just be another form of matter that is neither liquid nor solid. A matter that does not have a name and cannot be made to fit into one category or another. Or it is tricky and fits whatever it wants whenever convenient.
Glass slips grasp.
I am in a cloudy place right now and last night I kept padding downstairs and going outside to see if I could see the aurora. I follow news of solar flares, sunspots, all that stuff because of the habit of musing about how things that happen in a faraway elsewhere have visible and invisible effects in this very here. By about midnight I decided I had seen some glowing, despite the overcast sky.
There is a Ray Bradbury story I read as a child called “All Summer in a Day” that has fascinated (and haunted) me since that time. It’s about life on Venus where it rains all day, every day. Once every seven years the rain stops and the sun shines for an hour.
A girl has moved to Venus from Ohio on Earth and she is the only one who remembers what the sunshine looked and felt like. The other kids bully her at school. The teachers are getting the children ready for the big experience. Some are scared, some are excited, they have no idea what it will be like.
The children born on Venus have been waiting for the sun since before they had memories. One thing they do know is they hate the girl from Earth who has already seen and felt it. When the teacher leaves the room for a moment, the kids continue their cruelty and in a mob-frenzy shove the girl in a closet and lock the door.
Soon after, the teachers hustle the kids outside for the brief hour of sunshine and they have a ball. They see brightness. They play with their own shadows. They feel the embrace of the sun’s warmth. Once the gray passes in front of the glow and drops begin to fall, it dawns on them what they have done. Horrified by their actions, they go to the closet and slowly unlock the door and let the girl out.
I count the time, the afterlives of actions, wonder how they faced themselves or her, who she told, if anyone, what became of them. What got missed, what strength might arise from the difference. What she does next.
Another matter that lumps around inside this cerebellum is the pitch drop. I’ve written about this before here. Pitch is a highly viscous liquid which means there’s a lot of friction in it. In lab experiments testing pitch’s viscosity, a drop falls once between eight and 13 years.
The experiments keep running, since 1930 in Queensland Australia, since 1944 in Dublin. The pitch blob’s in an hourglass-like container inside a vitrine next to a beaker that holds its fallen drops. A clock sits next to the vitrine. Every single human witness missed the drop until 2013 in Dublin and 2014 in Queensland, when the drops were captured on video. Now you can see them online, in slow-cinema-worthy live feeds or multi-year timelapse videos that last about 20 seconds, which seems to be the longest attention span deemed tolerable for the frictionless molecules that make up contemporary attention spans.
A robin with a length of straw in its beak is hopping around nearby where I am standing writing this. I am inside and it is visible through a smooth double-paned glass door. This morning a mourning dove stood on the windowsill behind my head where I was sleeping and made its noises to a friend in a pine tree across the way.
I will never forget telling a desperate, spontaneous fib during an interview for a post-graduate course following my M.F.A. Talking about my overwrought multi-year projects about memory, fragmentary knowledge, borders, maps, boundaries, crossings, translations, transmutations, I babbled about being fascinated by liminality, liminal spaces, something to that effect.
The director stopped and looked at me, his lips pursed. Liminality? he queried, small blue eyes piercing behind horn-rims. I felt my heart race. Liminality is wrong, wrong answer, what clues do I have, where do I take this. Dialectics, I stammered. Not liminality, dialectics, that’s what I meant. The border as a dialectical space. The director’s face relaxed and head turned back down to his notepad. I got into the program. Fingers crossed behind my back.
To climb fully into a book, an artwork, a movie, a correspondence. To add to and become other than oneself in the same moment. To find deep untrammeled pleasure in music without counting bars or beats (but feeling them elsewhere), to wonder.
While editing footage captured at the Esrange Space Center this past September, different time and place, I experience myself there and not-there. Haze-sense of nights spent on a borrowed inflatable mattress because an unexpected September blizzard made even the Arctic roads impassable.
I hear my eight-months-younger voice in the video, chatting to the scientists, while letting the images impress themselves on the lens, the sensor, the SD card. We are talking about boxes. Boxes inside boxes. Yes, so many boxes.
These days I am reading more about science and the invention of the idea of scientific experiment. In books I seek confirmation of my own thoughts about the ways that certain models of knowledge divide things up. I yelp aloud YES, and dog-ear the page when I find something that helps me feel like I am on the right track. I beat myself up for having refused to read these books and articles in years past and console (or excuse) myself by saying you just weren’t ready then.
Years ago in a residency in Sweden I shocked someone because of my inability to distinguish or give words to subtle differences in a color I could only call red.
I’m editing the video of the scientists at the space center preparing experiments to be transported to the stratosphere on a massive, helium-filled plastic balloon. At this juncture I am thinking about it as a two-channel film. One channel will be busy with people: scientists at work, work with boxes, work with wires, work in groups, always working and looking at the boxes inside boxes they have constructed. Boxes with gold foil on them to reflect the rays of the hot sun in the stratosphere. Boxes encased in styrofoam to keep out the freezing cold of the stratosphere. Boxes with padding and wires with insulation.
The second channel will be of the landscape where the balloon is launched. The gravel launchpad in the foreground, pine trees and a lake in the distance. Landscape with balloon being filled with a gas extracted from underneath, the scarce helium that will soon run out from all this extraction.
Landscape with invisible dotted lines marking countries, some safe to land in, others that could spark international incidents. Landscape, I am told, punctured with bunkers for the indigenous people of this place to hide in in case an errant balloon payload or misfired experimental rocket hurtles towards them. It was an agreement made in the mid-20th century when the space station was built. An administrator tells me We give them advance warning so they have time to hide.
A landscape that seems impassive but in fact is busy doing things. The scientists have to be patient and wait for the landscape to finish up with its business that is keeping them from doing theirs. Fog, sleet, snow. In the footage, a small blimp-shaped balloon with a big red arrow printed on its side indicates wind strength and direction. It bobs and weaves like it’s tied to a child’s wrist after a birthday party.
That the landscape makes it nearly impossible adds suspense. Following sleepless nights, starts and cancellations, Will this even happen at all, two years of work? We only have a window of three more days before we’ll have to scrap the whole thing. In the end the giant truck named Hercules and the box carrying boxes and the scientists and the landscape together launch a helium-filled plastic balloon to the stratosphere for a few hours to collect and transmit signals through frequencies sent from a place they cannot go.
Thanks for reading.
In other ongoing cinematic news, you can watch my feature documentary BUNKER on Amazon, Mubi, Metrograph-at-Home, and Projectr.tv. Hope you’ll have a look.
a read like this, in the morning, when still debating wether to get up or just never get up anymore, make me feel hopeful again. glass … i was wondering about it too. thank you for giving me another day