ON THE DANGERS AND DISORIENTATION OF GLASS BLOWING AND THE RELAXED REFLECTION OF SUMMER
Friday July 26 2019
Dear Sarah,
I loved your letter last week and the space you gave it, and yourself, to wander! That sounds like the spirit of a lovely vacation continuing to thread its way through your days. There is something special and delightful about just giving something time to unfold, whatever it may be. Sometimes I’ll set myself off intentionally on a spool of internet research about whatever strikes my fancy, taking notes and following threads and ducking left and right around the infinite maze of information and ideas that are all linked up if you look at them the right way. It’s different than the times when I find myself just clicking aimlessly around the internet — it feels different to do it with even the slightest bit of intentionality, like keeping an eye out for wildflowers and shades of green on a rambling walk.
It’s been an odd week and I’m glad it’s Friday. When I was first thinking about this week’s letter to you I was stumped, my head tired, and I thought about your letter in Week 36 and the peaceful wordless time you’d shared with Marlowe, and then I thought I’d write my letter to you about Monty Don and his shows about small gardens and historic gardens and secret gardens and just gardens in general. But when I woke up very early this morning and started this letter, all my brain wanted to tell you about was my glass class, so here goes.
I’m halfway through a neon glass class, working at Foci Center for Glass Arts in Minneapolis. This means that in the middle of the summer on Thursday nights I descend into a huge room with furnaces blazing along one side, ready to melt glass. We work with neon glass tubing over a burner of sorts, a swing arm with a sliding adjuster that provides you with an inch-wide strip of gas flame that you can lengthen or shorten depending on the thickness of the glass tubing you want to heat up, and the type of bend you’re making. The tubes are clear glass (they can also be powder-coated on the inside) and they get filled with neon or argon gas later in the process; the first step in working with neon is learning how to heat and bend the glass to make the shapes you want to see. The other component to neon glass is called splicing, wherein you have two tube ends that you have to weld to each other to make a continuous tube without any air holes. Splicing involves a hand-held torch with two flame-arms reaching toward each other; you rotate the torch so that the flames surround and heat the two tube ends you are aiming to join. When they’re cold they are just two glass tubes. When you heat them, the circular edge of each tube becomes red-hot; at this moment you join the two circles so the red-hot ends stick to each other, then you reheat the seam you’ve just created, and then you gently pull on the tube while also blowing air into it, to essentially puff the splice into a smooth knuckle joining the two tubes.
If you have a gas stove you may come near an open flame often. But in our kitchens our flames are always in the same place, and we tend not to leave the stove top flaming while we move around doing other things. At the neon tables in the glass studio, we leave the flames on all the time, stationed at the corners of each of our working tables (though you can swing the burners around so they aren’t poking into any walkways). The splicing torches rest in notches at the other corner of each table, gently burning if you’ve lit them, so that when our whole class of four is present there could be eight flames burning around the tables. While we’re watching demonstrations and moving about the space, this requires a layer of remembering where your body is at all times, remembering where the flames are. Yesterday I leaned in toward a demonstration to get a better look at a particular process of bending glass to fit a circular pattern, and I felt a flush of warmth as I bent near a lit torch, forgetting the flame as it quietly burned. I didn’t catch fire, but I tucked my shirt in after that, kept my eyes on each of the flames as I moved more deliberately around the space.
I’ve taken lots of classes in lots of different kinds of craft practices. Sometimes I think about whether there are certain kinds of people that gravitate to certain material practices. I’ve been thinking a bit about the differences, for example, between what I think of as wood people and glass people. When you’re working with wood you change the material by cutting or abrading; you remove areas with a saw or a chisel, or take away ever-finer layers with sandpaper or a scraping edge. There is an urgent moment while you are using a saw — measure twice, cut once, because once you cut away wood you’ve made a move that you can’t quite return from — but once you’re done with the saw you can linger over the tasks of woodworking as long as you like, planing, chiseling, fitting, sanding, adjusting, finishing. Glass seems more immediate and at the same time oddly more flexible; while there is the possibility of cracking your glass by heating it again and again in the same place, if you make a bend and it’s not quite right, you can bring the glass back to the flame, heat it again, see about moving it into place where you want it; it is malleable and fluid while it’s there in the heat, and once out of the flame it is briefly flexible and can be manipulated.
I find open flame to be scarier than saws. I think this is because the flames can simply be there, burning, hissing a little, easy to forget in a hot room filled with other sounds. When you’re working with wood you turn your saw on when you need it, turn on your dust collector to suck up the sawdust created as the blade slices through wood, and when you’ve made your cut you turn off your machines. You don’t leave saws running, not least because they are sharp and dangerous, but also because they are loud.
I’ve found the glass class and its heat and open flames to be mildly disorienting; whether I’m simply not drinking enough water, or whether my brain is forced to react to new stimuli in new ways, I find myself on the drive home feeling like a malleable noodle of glass myself; propelling the car home feels new and foreign even though I’ve been a driver for years; it requires a refocusing of my sight and attention. What is this? Does my attention after these classes become more fluid, like glass? Is there some process of shifting into a completely different way of thinking that leaves me just outside myself each class?
This week it was my turn to take you on a rambling word journey — looking forward to reading yours!
Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva
July 26, 2019
Dear Eva,
Another week! I realized as I sat down to write this letter that this will be our last letter exchange of July. I had a temporary panic — August always seems like the last gasp of summer, and I hate to see it end. But as I think about it, this summer has, in many ways, been exactly what I dreamed it would be: a spacious time for family delights and relaxed reflection.
The first chunk of the summer I spent a lot of time making an effort to get out of the house just to talk to people, meeting neighbors for lunch, chatting with friends of friends over coffee. Without exception, every single conversation has been gratifying. And each one so different. I talked to a father about all that he is learning about strength and resilience from his trans child. I talked to a retired neighbor about her efforts to find meaning and structure in open days. I talked to a former colleague of a friend about what it has been like to redefine an identity after a career switch. It has been fascinating to me to see how much a single face-to-face conversation with another person can infuse me with a different kind of energy and community attachment. We have lived in Iowa for more than five years now, but I realize I still feel like a newcomer in some ways since my professional life resides in the interwebs. It has been grounding to start to lay more of a foundation in my neighborhood and town this summer.
I have also had the chance to do more reading for pleasure this summer, and some of the books have quite literally changed the way my mind works. I think I told you that I read Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, thinking I was needing to learn more about the growth mindset for parenting purposes but quickly realizing I needed it just as much as my kids. After reading it, every little thing I have historically struggled with during my life, like fumbling with words when I am put on the spot, suddenly went from being a fatal flaw to a growth opportunity. And the book we are both currently reading, How to Do Nothing, has been equally mind-transforming for me. I have started working on strengthening my attention muscles by making a point to read or listen to a poem each day. I have a mind-wandering problem that I need to get under control someday. Another growth opportunity! Ha!
Our pair of letters last week made clear that we have both done a lot of thinking this summer about how we spend our days, working to make sure we are doing as much as we can to be deliberate about what makes the cut in our limited bandwidth. Sometimes I think there is a sense that doing that sort of reflection can make people feel more unsettled somehow, perhaps shining a light on some unpleasant realities of how they end up frittering away (stealing your word) much of their precious time. But as I wrote to you last week about the types of people I envy, I started to realize that there is so much about my current life setup that fits the bill I described. I have a multi-faceted life that I spend with three humans I adore, full of plenty of creative outlets like this letter-writing project, learning opportunities like my MBA program, and deep friendships like ours. Of course, life is never perfect, but damn, I cannot / should not / will not complain.
I feel a sense of calm and contentedness that I don’t remember feeling in a very long time. So, thank you, summer, and thank you, Eva!
Your friend,
Sarah