The Glassblower(65)

Maybe that was it! Maybe she had to free herself from the idea of use and function. Marie’s eyes widened. Suddenly her mouth was watering, so much that she had to swallow hard. What was the opposite of useful? Not useless, surely? No, she mustn’t be discouraged, she had to keep thinking.

She wanted to capture a curve, a swing. A movement that had made her smile, that made her feel joyful. Perhaps there was no way to do this on the base of a dish. Perhaps the only way to capture feelings was to create something with no function in mind. Something that existed for no other reason than to please the eye and lift the heart. The idea of blowing glass as a work of art, for its own sake, with no practical purpose was risky, however.

If she were to ask the glassblowers of Lauscha whether they saw what they did as a craft or an art, the overwhelming majority would say the former. Marie knew of one man in the village who called himself an artist. His name was George Silber—he insisted that people pronounce his name with a soft g in the English manner—and he traveled a great deal. On the rare occasions when he was back in Lauscha he held forth about all the international exhibitions where he showed his pieces to a select audience. The rest of Lauscha laughed at him and his shapeless glass figures, which he gave odd names like Venus Awakening or Zeus at Daybreak. Art? Well, if there were any such thing as art, it meant something quite different to them. A drinking glass painted with a wreath of lily of the valley—that was art. Or a figure of a stag made using the free-blowing technique.

Anything else was just a waste of time.

So what if it was? Marie decided that as long as she liked whatever she drew or dreamt up, nobody could laugh at her for it. Nobody had to agree to call it art.

Thoughtfully, she opened her sketchpad. Now she was ready to let her pencil go wherever it wanted. This time she felt even after the first few strokes that her pencil was guided not by the hand that held it but by some power deep within her. The feeling was not entirely new, but she had never known it to be so strong before. She gave herself up to it entirely, trusting its strength.

She drew and drew. Her hand picked up the pencils, color after color, without conscious thought. Instead of putting each one back into the box, she let them drop where they would. Soon the workbench looked like a battlefield, strewn with colorful spears. Marie shaded and crosshatched, blurred the lines or drew them in more strongly.

All the while she was thinking of the gas flame and the glass rods. Glass was difficult to work with, perhaps more difficult than any other substance. Joost had said this over and over again, even when they were children; if a glassblower didn’t hold the rod over the flame for long enough it was sluggish and recalcitrant. Heat it up too much though and it flowed and dripped like honey. Its transparency was unique—Marie couldn’t think of any other material that could match it in this respect—but that very quality tested a glassblower’s skills anew every day, for every little mistake was clear to see. There was no way to hide even the least little bubble or knot or bump. A wood carver could cut away here and there. Iron could be filed down or wrought anew, but glass had to be perfect. And as Marie saw it, a sketch was worth nothing if it could not be made at the lamp.

By the time she finished, her fingers were trembling and then some. She put her hand to her mouth as though she wanted to hide even from herself that she was so awestruck. But the shape she saw on the page in front of her was easily described. She had drawn a spiral. A spiral in all the colors of the rainbow, growing ever brighter and fresher as her eye followed it upward. At the very top was a dainty little loop from which it could be hung. In a window for instance. Or from the ceiling.

A glassblower would have to know his trade well to blow and shape such a spiral.

A glassblower would also have to know how to make the rods of differently colored raw glass melt cleanly into each other.

But all that was just tricks of the trade. Technique.

Marie was captivated by something else, however, something that could not be put into words; she could imagine the colorful light that this spiral would beam into a room when it caught the sunlight. She could almost feel the movement, turning and turning, that the spiral would make when tapped with a fingertip. Images and emotions showered down upon her like a warm summer rain. Marie leaned back on her chair and savored it all.

She saw a housewife, tired from the day’s never-ending chores and work. A couple of children clung to her skirts as she elbowed the door open, a basket of laundry in her hands. And then she would catch sight of Marie’s spiral hanging in the window of the room. Even this first glance would lighten her mood a little. Perhaps it would be enough for her just to look at the spiral. Perhaps she would run her finger over its smooth, cold curves. A smile would flit across her lips. And when she left the room, there would be a new lightness in her step. Perhaps the smile would even stay with her for a while.