Glass
As seen through the spectrum of three separate but inter-related people, fictional and otherwise.
First:
Seymour Glass. The above picture is of 82nd Street, just west of the Park, in New York City. Seymour would have raced his brother Buddy down this exact street, had he had legs and nonfictional life, on their way home from the barber or any of the many libraries they were known to frequent. Seymour is J.D. Salinger's crowning achievement and one of my own favorite characters ever penned. Born in 1917 to Les and Bessie Glass, Seymour was the eldest of the Glass children and the most brilliant, the most shining, the most astute of the lot. A born poet and a vehement letter writer (see "Hapworth 16, 1924", a story in the form of a letter from Seymour to his parents written during his stay at summer camp as a boy.) Most readers know that Seymour did kill himself by firing a single shot through his head while his wife lazily naps on the bed beside him. Most readers even know that she was most likely the reason for his death --- the first sentence of that story is: "She was a girl who for a ringing phone would drop exactly nothing, she looked as if her phone had been ringing off the hook continuously since puberty." (Well, maybe not verbatim, but that's how my memory has it pinned down. Ringing phone to me always sounded like an alarm, and to start the story with one being ignored is poignant.) A story about his suicide that opens with such a mundane yet defamatory image of his wife and goes on to an extended image of her talking on the phone with her mother about all sorts of markedly superficial, markedly human worries, is a somewhat see through set up. Let us remember, though, that the story isn't written by Salinger, but by Buddy Glass, Seymour's brother, who no doubt is in need of a coat rack to hang his sorrow on and what better than the absent, careless, depthless wife who is unpoetic and drastically normal. Let us now recall: this was not an isolated incident. The story itself reveals that Seymour had tried to die by crushing his car into a tree (as reported during dialog) and not only that, but the visible scars on his wrists are hinted at in another story. Not to mention the scars that he's collected from when beauty has touched him --- Seymour's skin is even under attack from the world and makes him his own special version of the word "sensitive". There are many wonderful things about Seymour, like his overly yellow teeth and his big nose that saves him from being called "gorgeous", and his unshakable ability to love his family, and his unending wealth of compassion, and how he says that he is a paranoiac in reverse because he suspects "the world of plotting to make him happy." My first diary online, started in 1997 at the suggestion of a friend, was hidden under the name "s. glass" and happily jampacked with hundreds of entries, to no one's care or clamor, for a happy 4 or 5 years --- so he is, for me, a quite personal companion. Again, in the spirit of the Glass family themselves, and their knack for recalling entire passages verbatim from long forgotten, dusty texts, I bring to the table my own quotation of Buddy Glass which I find makes a fine definition for Seymour. It marvels me now as it did 10 years ago when I first read it, and I don't think a single breakdown has gotten past me that I haven't recited this to myself, incessantly, before feeling at least a little bit better. Think of glass, think of what glass means, think of what glass is:
"...a Sick Man who not at all seldom, though he’s reported to childishly deny it, gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go both his art and his soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness, and yet (the rumor continues) when his unsalutary-looking little room is broken into and someone—not infrequently, at that, someone who actually loves him—passionately asks him where the pain is, he either declines or seems unable to discuss it at any constructive clinical length, and in the morning, when even great poets and painters presumably feel a bit more chipper than usual, he looks more perversely determined than ever to see his sickness run its course, as though by the light of another, presumably ‘working’ day he had remembered that all men, the healthy ones included, eventually die, and usually with a certain amount of bad grace, but that he, lucky man, is at least being done in by the most stimulating companion, disease or no, he has ever known. On the whole, treacherous as it may sound, coming from me, with just such a dead artist in the immediate family as I've been alluding to throughout this near polemic, I don't see how one can rationally deduce that this last general rumor (and mouthful) isn't based on a fairish amount of substantial fact. While my distinguished relative lived, I watched him - almost literally, I sometimes think - like a hawk. By every logical definition, he was an unhealthy specimen, he did on his worst nights and late afternoons give out not only cries of pain but cries for help, and when nominal help arrived, he did decline to say in perfectly intelligible language where it hurt. Even so, I do openly cavil with the declared experts in these matters - the scholars, the biographers, and especially the current ruling intellectual aristocracy educated in one or another of the big public psychoanalytical schools - and I cavil with them most acrimoniously over this: they don't listen properly to cries of pain when they come. They can't, of course. They're a peerage of tin ears. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source? With such wretched hearing equipment, the best, I think, that can be detected, and perhaps verified, is a few stray, thin overtones - hardly even counterpoint - coming from a troubled childhood or a disordered libido. But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist. (Surely the one and only great poet the psychoanalysts have had was Freud himself; he had a little ear trouble of his own, no doubt, but who in his right mind could deny that an epic poet was at work?) Forgive me; I'm nearly finished with this. In a seer, what part of the human anatomy would necessarily be required to take the most abuse? The eyes, certainly. Please, dear general reader, as a last indulgence (if you're still here), re-read those two short passages from Kafka and Kierkegaard I started out with. Isn't it clear? Don't those cries come straight from the eyes? However contradictory the coroner's report - whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death - isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say (and everything that follows in these pages all too possibly stands or falls on my being at least nearly right) - I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience."
I italicized the last sentence because, to me, it is as see through and perfect as a pane of glass. Artist as seer, seer as sight, sight as clarity, clarity as glass. If he is made of glass, he is reflective and refractive, and for him to be dazzled to death by his own scruples makes sense, especially if they are in fact blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience. I did have to go back to some text to remember the full quote, and the bit I found on the web happens to have
the entire story however be warned: it is rife with spelling errors, I found no less than 11 in the 3 sentences I quoted.
Quite funny: "they're a peerage of tin ears" was "a peerage of tin cars". That was my favorite little statement in that whole heavy paragraph when I was a teenager and even wrote an essay for class about it. I can't help but think how damned thrown off I'd have been had the stupid internet been around then for me to read off of instead of my own faithful text. So much hinged on such a small letter. Never before in the history of language has such a fine image been composed in such few words: a peerage of tin ears. Not "a group of people who selfishly dismissed the cries of pain of a real honest to god poet" and not "quacks and sham doctors" (as Nab would have dashed them off on paper), but a "peerage of tin ears". They cannot hear because their ears are made of tin, no judgement or reprehension, a simple declarative statement that is as crystal clear as anything could ever be.Second:
Philip Glass. I don't know a whole lot about Philip Glass, but I suspect he looks a bit like a real life version of Seymour, with his largish nose and his hairy arms (Seymour's siblings would joke that he should take his sweater off, referring to his hirsuteness.) I know he is a composer of music, but it is not quite "music" music in the sense that it does not flow nor does it have a melody usually. Like the rest of art at his time, he was more interested in the expression and less in whether that expression might produce a pretty sound or a nice song and it's no wonder that his first actual concert, in 1968, was as abstract as its title: Music in the Shape of a Square (two flutes, an homage to Erik Satie) and Strung Out (score tacked to the wall, musicians had to move while playing). They go on, too, and most people have at least one or two great Glass stories to share (writing orchestras in reverse with swapped solos and chorus, adapting Poe or Beckett into music, overlapping pastiche, and twisting the definitions of Baroque, Classical and Romantic into such a knot as to be entirely unrecognizable once his signature is affixed). How see through is Philip? More see through than Seymour? Philip seems to try harder, which to me makes him a bit more opaque. With Seymour, as outlined by Buddy, his poetry simply "came to him" without any work and without any corruption from the hands of man. Philip, conversely, seems to be happy to use his hands to twist whatever might be in front of him. This doesn't separate him into some other sector, far from the ethereal glow of "the natural", it just bathes him with a different kind a light: "the artificial". Philip Glass's art could be called the art of artifice, in fact, and his wrangling and strangling of a note until it ceases to be the same note makes him a magician of the most supreme type. If Seymour's a happily empty glass, Philip is a full one, and both have beauty in their own rights. For the former: the beauty that comes from quiet emptiness, specifically thinking of his poem dashed off on the back of a cardboard shirt-shaper "John Keats/ John / Put your scarf on." The latter: the beauty that comes from the packed creation of mankind using all fingers and all ideas at once, the polyphonic epiphany of noise as it jams against itself.
Third:
Philip Johnson. This is a bit of cunning wordplay that may have gone over invisible heads of you invisible readers, and I'm not the kind of person to let a gem slip by unnoticed: he made the famous Glass House. Seymour Philip Glass, a nice name combining all three men into one personage!
Johnson was one of the countries most famous architects and made some of the most wonderful buildings of his time and ours. That's all fine and good. He also made a house out of glass. Not entirely glass, but enough so that the entire structure is referred to by its one overwhelming trait. He wanted buildings to be art and was not concerned with much else and is still quoted as famously saying: "I would rather sleep in
Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms." What is see through about this? A lot, thankfully. It is not often that an artist feels the freedom to say something silly, something he knows is silly and something he knows the entire world will think is silly. A normal person would always prefer a utility like a nearby toilet over the grandiose beauty of art, fore as nice as art will always be to the eyes it will be a blight on the bladder in any shape if it doesn't have at least a toilet for one to eliminate into. His position is so transparent that its glorious, and so exceptionally thin that it floats. It doesn't seem like such a stretch to imagine this man building a home (the home that he would live in for the last 40 or 50 years of his own life) with all the walls entirely see through and without any obstruction at all to block his view. Need we pause on the metaphorical implications of this tiny but huge image? I've been to pushy with this, so no, you are off the hook dear reader and on your own to let that one expand in your mind without my nudging. A person in a glass home, a person living happily in a glass home, a person who built the glass home! It is obscenely nice to think about the freedom he must have felt, the liberating release of opacity, the shiver of reality upon meeting first your own reflection within the house and the second shiver of reality upon meeting your own reflection from outside the home as well. Oh this box, this box for living in, see through from all angles. I have a like mind to insert the fictional John Shade into this home and have his waxwings flying at night as they did in his Pale Fire. Seymour Philip John-shade Glass: an amalgamation of fictional poets and real life men. (End last digression with a stunny point). Philip Johnson brings to life the see-throughness of Seymour, he see's more, as well as the hand-madeness of Philip Glass. In him we have a prime example of the tendency to create with things and to create with ideas, a poetry of objects and materials, and a sort of uselessness that almost seems useful (unlike Philip G. who can at times be guilty of making ueseless things for the sake of them being humorously useless.) A house made of glass seems far fetched, as far fetched as a symphony composed entirely of empty, quiet notes --- yet looking through it a bit more, catching a stray reflection of trees against the backdrop of one's own face, even the useless is given the gift of purpose.
