6. The Molecularity of Glass

Phocan is leaving. Lazda might join him later, in Riga, or perhaps in London. Or she might not: he might stay in, or return to, Riga – quit Pantarey, his jostling with Sennet for ascendency, the lot … Or they might both move somewhere else entirely: Berlin, Rotterdam, Helsinki, start afresh … Or none of the above. Everything is possible and nothing certain. There’s a kind of vertigo, exhilaration almost, that comes with moments like this, born of knowing that an old order of things has ended, that the world-as-was must be remade, or at least reconfigured. Lazda’s great-grandparents, their generation, would have felt it with the People’s Council’s declaration, 1918: amidst all the violence, the catastrophe and death, vertiginous exhilaration of the new, of independence … Last night, he thought she’d want to sleep, but they made love instead, repeatedly, she sobbing between each bout, clinging to him, scratching him, in passion or in anger. Did he cause Vanins’ death – precipitate it, bridge the final gap between the deed’s potentiality and its conversion into action? Maybe. If he did, though, he’s a bridge for her as well, between this new time into which she’s entering and the previous age in which her grandfather was still alive. And he understands Vanins: he’s read his papers, knows what he was all about. Other bridges she seems to be burning: she decided straight away to sell the dacha; and the aviary, site of the cataclysm, the old order’s end, she’s going to have pulled down almost immediately, once the birds have been rehoused or just released …

A taxi has pulled up. Phocan’s getting in; it’s pulling off, passing the abandoned playground, turning into the nearest of the three narrow, ditch-lined tracks. Its engine, still in low gear, makes the window of Vanins’ study rattle. The taxi disappears; the window, of course, stays: it isn’t going anywhere. It’s a wood-framed window with four panes. The panes, as Phocan noticed two days ago, seem imperfectly matched to one another. And with reason: they’re not just of different ages but of different constitutions too. Three of them (from garden side: bottom left, top left, top right) are made of float glass – soda-lime-silica-constituted, batch-mixed, tin-bath-poured, roller-lifted, lehr-cooled and strainlessly annealed, machine-cut rectangles displaying a regularity, indeed a sharpness, of light propagation with refraction kept right down at <1.5 per cent and scattering, reflection and such manner of distortions similarly minimised. The fourth, though (bottom right), has been cut from different quartz-cloth: cylinder-blown sheet glass, trench-swung, stand-cooled, heat-scored, flattened and hand-measured – tailored, as it were, to order, to the frame’s dimensions. Where the other three panes are replacements (occasioned by, in chronological progression: one frost-crack wrought by an exceptionally cold February; one quince, thrown by a young Lazda at a darting cousin whom it – obviously – missed; and one tawny pipit lured, assassiyun-like, by the artificial flowers and sky and general depth-illusion laid across its surface by the guileful Old Man of ray optics), the fourth is original: an 1896 piece, putty-set into fresh aspen timber by Vanins’ father when he built this dacha.

He, Kārlis, the father, obtained this pane from the glassworks beside Jumelans – no longer, as Phocan saw, operational, nor even really present, its batch-house, furnaces and packaging huts discernible now only as brickwork footprints in the unkempt marram grass through which summer bathers traipse on their way down to a beach whose sand they might still notice is laced to an unusually high degree, a point of saturation almost, with glass fragments, smoothed and coarsened edges posing no risk to their unshod feet. There is a circularity to the beach’s mineral constitution: for decades it was its own sand that, shovelled, winched and chuted, fed the glassworks’ doghouse, where it mixed with sodium and calcium and magnesium and barium landed by the sack-load from the vessels that once plied the inlet – and, contrafluvially, the blown cylinders’ off-cut fragments, the crushed alkali or cullet, that was spat back out to lie around the beach until it was scooped up and thrown back down the batch-feed’s gullet once again: sand turning into glass, glass into sand, an endless loop. Or so it seemed, until the glassworks closed in 1985. This one veteran pane, though, still bears witness, through the variant, and varying, texture of its vitreous mass, its imperfect transparency, to the old Jumelans stikla fabrika character. How? Unlike the newer ones, it contains bubbles, waves, inclusions, reams and pleats. Looked through from study side, it introduces to the garden little folds, occlusions, doublings – each one near-imperceptible alone, but in amalgam overlaying the flow of branches, well and wood stump with a set of tiny visual hiccups, backwashes or eddies that’s at once bewildering and quite hypnotic. All windows around here (since they all came from the fabrika) used to produce this effect – which is to say that, viewed from the inside of houses, churches, offices and schools, the entire region, all its scenes and people, used to hic and eddy like this, pause and run and gloop to these same quirky Jumelans rhythms …

There’s been debate in recent years, in the more speculative fora of the world of academia, nebulous zones where physics, palaeontology, even musicology start unravelling across one another, about whether or not certain objects and materials could – in theory, at least – be viewed as ready-made or ‘inadvertent’ recording devices. In 1968, the normally placid proceedings of the International Congress of Classical Archaeology, co-hosted by the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and the Berlin Ethnologisches Museum (Abteilung Materielle Ethnologie), were ruffled by the presentation of one o. Prof. Friedrich Kelpler, who’d dropped in from Karlsruhe – or, to the ears of his fellow delegates, another planet – where he held the Chair for Ästhetik und Theorie der Medien. What caused all the kerfuffle (picture scowls, snorts and disruptive muttering, even – unprecedented – walk-outs) was o. Prof. Kelpler’s claim that potters’ ribs, needles and fluting tools would etch into the wet, receptive surface of thrown clay as, spinning, it was coaxed into the form of bowl or amphora a set of furrows very similar to the grooves carved into lacquer by the heated stylus of a gramophone recorder; furrows that, just like the stylus’s, would impregnate the clay with sonic vibrations of the atmosphere surrounding them – which vibrations, clay once hardened, would become immortalised, at least for as long as the ceramic object lasted. Thus, in effect, or retrospect (this was the o. Prof.’s central thesis), an Attic potter’s workshop served as a two-thousand-year avant-la-lettre recording studio. To yelps of incredulity, Kelpler ran a reel-to-reel of sounds (crackles and scratches set against a whistling background) that he claimed to have picked up by ‘playing’ an Apulian krater using a hand-held crystal cartridge.

Two years later, after Kelpler’s ‘findings’ had, against the wishes of most of its editorial board, been published in The Journal of Archaeological Science, a second article appeared, in Ethnos, this time co-authored by Yale anthropologist Kent Foster and Lund acoustician Åke Engström, both well respected in their fields. They claimed to have verified Kelpler’s hypothesis, or at least its mechanical possibility, by recording, by means of a vane whose impedance at attachment point into wet clay was ZM(12/11)2 (groove modulation velocity thereby being set at vg = 2 pS/(ZM(12/11ss))), their own voices singing ‘Ja, må han leva’ (it was Engström’s birthday), and then subsequently reviving these voices with a custom-made tone arm and off-the-shelf Euphonics U15P pick-up.

This second article opened the floodgates: from ’75 onwards, archaeoacoustics research labs sprung up in universities around the world; Mycenaean kantharoi, Corinthian alabastrons, Thracian mortaria, pithoi and pelikai and pyxides from Syria to Hibernia were off-mastered, pressed and distributed. Words, phrases, whole stretches of dialogue in Aeolic, Doric, Latins Classical and Vulgar were detected, intercut with barks of Roman dogs, cries of Athenian street-merchants; one archaeoacoustician, in Chicago, even claimed to have eavesdropped on Homer trying out his Rhododáktylos Ēs line while stopping by to watch a kylix being spun … The craze came to an abrupt end when no-nonsense Columbia emeritus Wade Gudron Jnr detailed, in the spring 1982 issue of Hesperia, the counter-experiments in which he’d reproduced the playback element of Foster and Engström’s (and most subsequent archaeoacousticians’) sessions but – devastatingly – not their recorded-content one: in place of ceramic objects, he’d run arm and pick-up over bricks, sandpaper, a table top, a pair of jeans and even, with the level cranked to max, thin air. When he demonstrated, both in sound and sine-wave visuals, near-identical ‘voices’, ‘barks’, ‘cries’ ‘phrases’, etc. (not to be outdone, he rendered audible not just one but three lines from The Odyssey), produced quite evidently from no more than a combination of random static and the listener’s imagination, the game was up.

Or rather mothballed: funding streams may have atrophied, but a life-line, a clutching-straw of sorts was thrown out in the form of a postscript- or addendum-article, placed in Phoenix (1984, fall issue), by Cameron Blaine Ph.D., Reader in Linguistics at Laurentian, Ontario. Blaine argued, quite correctly, that, while archaeoacousticians’ putative ability to separate the signal of antiquity from the noise of contemporary hardware and enthused projection had been thoroughly discredited, nonetheless the existence, and indeed the buried presence, of the signal in the object had, by Engström, Foster et al., and even by Gudron Jnr, been adequately established. The melodies might be, for now at least, unheard; and, until the requisite hardware (one, admittedly, with needle<haystack signal-magnification ratio) came along, they would remain inaudible; but they, and their immortal words, were there – ‘if,’ as Blaine signed off, channelling George Herbert, ‘we could spell …’

And glass? Is it not, as much as clay, a ‘plastic’ artefact? In the absence of oscillation-inscribing ribs and needles, the gramophone-analogy may not, in this case, hold – but here the science, if anything, is stronger. While a stylus merely translates into spiral grooves the sound-waves captured in its feeding diaphragm, blown glass is formed by – as – the direct imprint of the human diaphragm itself: Atem, πνεῦμα, breath of life. And after setting, flattening, cutting, even installation, its ‘solidity’ is no more than apparent, an illusion that takes in the short-term contemplator only. To the longue-durée gaze it is perpetually fluid, molecules migrating over decades, even centuries, about a three-dimensional plane: top to bottom, side to corner, outer to inner surface, all about the swirling Equatorials and Gulf Streams of its oceanic body. This process is reactive: glass is super-sensitive. In 2009 MIT engineering professor Dave Able and his team, in partnership with Microsoft and Caul Research, using equipment that made cartridges and pick-ups look as ancient as the potter’s studio that Homer did or (most likely) didn’t visit, filmed, without any audio input, an empty tumbler standing on a drinks-table beside which one of Able’s graduate students was declaiming ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’. While to their naked eyes the tumbler was quite still, when replayed at a speed of 4,300 fps, motions, caused by sound-waves hitting its surface, of one tenth of a micrometer, or five thousandths of a pixel (inferable through boundary fluctuation, or just changes in the pixel’s colouration as one region encroached on another), were rendered visible and, through Caul’s algorithm, translated back to sound, until And everywhere that Mary went her lamb was sure to go warbled back out of a speaker half an hour after its first, natural iteration. Although, in this instance, it was the real-time disturbance in the glass’s form that furnished such a level of retrievability, the glass, as Able’s team knew all too well, would have continued its displacements far into the future at levels lower and more micrometric still – in terms both of its edges, their vacillation through the air about them, and of the internal scurry of its sound-shocked particles within the confines of their gathering-containing cylinder, up and down the sides, along the rim, the convex pools extruding from its base-plane: so many pinballs ricocheting endlessly off solenoid-filled bumpers, kickers, slingshots, off each other – and then, even after that, the bumpers’ memory of being hit, replaying in quivering aftershock, detectable on no seismograph perhaps but solidly, materially, at nano-scale, the scale of atoms, happening …

And if sound, why not light? Do photons, too, not bounce and multi-ball around? Light, the fifteen-year-old Phocan was made to recite mantra-like in GCSE Physics class, travels in straight lines until A Level. Even air can bend and warp it, send it arabesqueing into mirages, fata morganas, floating castles. So windows … windows are to light what mazes are to rats, or pots to lobsters: looming edifices full of switchbacks and blind alleys, forks and three-way junctions, secret passages that magic travellers to far parts of the labyrinth, or even duplicate or triplicate them till they occupy two or more stretches at the same time – but, like all enchanted palaces or funhouses, exact their toll, a levy measured in the photons that are doomed to traipse about their corridors for ever. Absorption (as Phocan’s teacher informed him when he turned sixteen, popping with one thrust his optics-cherry) is the term for this entrapment: not, strictly speaking, loss of light, but rather its snaring, and eventual conversion into heat – which, just like sound, wreaks havoc with those flows and currents, spreading its own interference waves, disturbance patterns that in turn spark new disturbance patterns, chain reactions, on and on. Viewed from this perspective, isn’t every window a light-capturing machine? An event recorder, like the murder victims’ eyeballs said to retain imprints of the acts they’ve witnessed? Even ones with low refractive indexes, like Vanins’ study’s three newish, float-glass panes, claim as many as fifteen of every thousand photons seeking safe passage through them. And the fourth: the kinky, stuttering, gaze-tripping Jumelans stikla fabrika pane? This one’s voracious, swallowing seventeen and up, a Scylla and Charybdis furnace-fused into one giant, vitreous monster whose very flesh retains the heat-conversion traces of innumerable devourees.

If we could spell … What would this pane divulge? The light residues of which histories does it store up? No murders, certainly – just visits to the well; the stumping of the birch that once stood next to it, then the stump’s service as a platform for the chopping into firewood of smaller birch and aspen logs; proliferation of the spruce branches, their annual pruning; springtime growth of grass, its summer scything; rain, snow, more rain, sunlight, moonlight, starlight, the accumulated meteor-streaks of a hundred and twenty-two Augusts and Septembers; ditto those of (averaging out to account for species variation) forty-three generations of birds darting, pausing, swooping, in one tawny pipit’s case for the last time; mainly, nothing more than tiny oscillations in grass blades and twigs … And somewhere, lodged in the still-shifting contours heat-marked by those billions of levied photons, broken, scattered and kaleidoscoped to a degree no high-speed camera or algorithm yet devised could reverse-engineer, one scene, from 1969: of Jesēnija – Raivis’s wife, Lazda’s grandmother – standing in the garden, moving and not moving simultaneously.

She would be planted, feet apart, between stump and well, playing a novelty game better known in the last few decades by the proprietary title ‘Swingball’ but in those days referred to as ‘tether tennis’ – playing on her own, with (or against) herself. The set, purchased by Vanins on a recent trip to Zürich, consisted of a pole whose whittled base was sunk into the earth and to the upmost portion of whose mast a coil or spiral was affixed; to the coil, in turn, a ring clip had been fastened – fastened, that is (being looped around rather than welded on), to the coil’s overall helix although not to any one spot of this, thus enjoying (if that’s the word) free reign to corkscrew its way up and down the spiral’s length. To the clip a string was tied; the far end of the string, a metre away, fused into a tennis ball. Jesēnija Vanins (née Lazdiňš) was hitting this ball with a racquet: first with one side, forehand, then, as it swung on its leash round the pole back to her, with the other, backhand. It was April; in the Atlantic Ocean, the Apollo 9 had splashed down some days earlier; in the sea of Japan, a US EC-121 reconnaissance plane had splashed too, downed by a North Korean MiG-21; in Britain, the first vertical take-off jet had just been trialled; in Riga, at the Universitāte, the entire administrative board had resigned under student pressure, replaced by new and more permissive blood. A handover, or changing of the guard, winter to spring, seemed to hang in the texture of the garden’s air as well: a finer and more grainy quality of light, a dotting of the visual field with midges, dragonflies and bees, whose buzzing laid an intermittent base note underneath the thwock, thwock tenor of the racquet’s strikes …

It was the mechanism that had made Vanins buy the set: this curved metal bar along whose length the ring clip glided had instantly reminded him, when he’d first caught sight of it in the Sportwarengeschäft’s display window, of Lillian’s models; of hands tracing their turns and loopbacks, again and again, the repetition copying the same paths over to the tracers’ bodies, consigning them to memory of limbs and muscles. On this spring morning (mid-morning, that long stretch of unconcern that sets in an hour or so after breakfast), it seemed to Vanins, watching from his study (he was writing a paper for the Soviet Physics Journal, on the reasons for the N1 programme’s failure), that Jesēnija was playing the tracer’s, the path-learner’s, role, performing movements programmed into and dictated by the core form of the coil, as though she and not the ball were its final extension, gliding in locked orbit. With each of the ball’s anticlockwise loops her shoulders would reach with the arm and racquet to greet its return – and with these, in their wake, the segments of her back would take off, one after the other, like so many cohorts of an army obeying orders to decamp, to strike out on a march, each unit moving separately and yet in conjunction with the larger troop formation; and, as though chasing these, her hips, too, would rise, hoisted on thighs that in turn were driven by soft knee-hydraulics, by articulated calf-and-ankle mechanisms further down; all in the space of half a second. Then, the ball being met and dispatched on its clockwise counter-loop, her arm, in each second’s remaining half, would sail back, wrist bending the other way to reset hand and racquet angle, a boat smoothly changing tack, easing its way through calm, compliant water to the spot (unmarked on any chart yet implicitly, through seamanship so ancestral it’s become almost genetic, known) at which it would once more bump up against the yellow buoy or, more accurately, fellow (if counter-directional) voyager, sputnik, this small sphere that on contact always found itself, if not in the exact same location, then at least in the same place relative to its circumnavigation’s compass …

The window was, of course, integral to this scene, to these effects. As Vanins watched her through it – that is, through three old Jumelans panes (the frost-cracked one had already been replaced), the main part of the action framed, as circumstance of height and desk-placement dictated, within the pane that now survives – its glass not only stretched Jesēnija’s movements; in its glucose thickenings and accretions, it seemed to expand the duration of these movements too, doubling each moment and replaying the doubled passage in a kind of simultaneous slow-motion. Jesēnija, twenty-six, was already expanding on her own, waist and bust widening as she laid in fat in preparation for Dagnija’s, Lazda’s mother’s, birth (the pregnancy, having one week earlier cleared the three-month hurdle, was no longer secret). Her body, as she swivelled one way then the other, seemed to store up and replay for him a wider set of movements and positions, their associated scenes, from early courtship onwards: a gesture made when greeted in the street on one chance meeting; the way she’d once set a cup down in a cafe in Alberta iela; how she’d reached for her coat afterwards, flung a scarf round her neck; or flung the neck itself back, laughing, when he’d told her a joke one day on the bridge in Bastejkalna Park; had done the same each time he kissed her in a certain spot, under the chin … These and scores of other moments, transposed and repeated, merging with his own partial reflection in the glass, sparked in him a sudden awareness of synchronicity, of processes all happening at once – or rather, being re-melted, blown into and held within some new formation, an arrangement relegating the time of their actual happening to insignificance. Nor was he observing this from outside: he was held by the formation too, gathered and absorbed in its consistency: watching, remembering and anticipating fused together, rhythm and suspension merging, thwock, thwock, with his pulse-beat …

How long did he watch for? Hard to say, in light of these reflections. It would be wrong to call the episode ‘timeless’; that is, to try (rhetorically at least) to place it out of time. It was packed full of time, and times – so saturated with them, though, as to defy all measure. Vanins was, it’s true, entranced – but even in that trance, amidst its swirl and billow, he maintained a sharpness, a keen perspicacity. As the parts of the kinetic symphony presented by Jesēnija and the tether-tennis set seemed to detach themselves, to wander from their posts while still somehow ensuring that each post continued functioning, he started seeing racquet, ball and figure (torso, elbow, thigh, etc.) not as what they were but rather as objects in a long celestial dance, all acting on each other: racquet attracts ball, which attracts figure, which carves rhomboids, sinusoids and gyres into the air, which in turn draw racquet – all of this drawing and holding his attention, which in its own turn (was Jesēnija aware that he was watching?), fuelled and sustained the dance, sent all its parts careening round their orbits and meridians once more: another cycle, and another … Vanins thought – how could he not? – about his work: of states of equilibrium, sines and cosines, vector sums and net force. But, rather than being harnessed as correlative for these, a prompt for new practical applications, the tether-tennis symphony seemed to take hold of them and send them into orbit too. Everything – work, the world, politics, even physics – seemed suspended, flipped into a mode of operation in which operation itself has been stood down and, in that very passiveness, that uselessness, been opened up to every possible new use. At one point it occurred to him that he was watching nothing less than life, in its pure, concentrated form, unhidden by the camouflage of purpose – but he put that thought on hold, since to name, to give a label to the phenomenon he was engaged in contemplating would have gone against its nature, nature of which his abandoned contemplation, contemplation for its own sake, was a merging, doubling and careening part …

He did, though, even in abandonment, experience a sense of urgency, of mission. Over the next weeks, and months, this urgency, this mission, would act on him like a coiled helix, dictating his activities. Right now, though (now, then, whenever – ask the windowpane), its first motion took the form of his right hand reaching – slowly, cautious not to frighten off a thought so delicate it might take flight, or just evaporate, at any second – down to ruffle the pages of his essay draft in search of a clean sheet. Failing to find one, he turned over the most recently composed page, covered on one side only, and, on its virgin verso, wrote in English, beneath the heading T.T.:

Dear Lillian,

I think I’ve made a discovery …