Caged Cups and Broken Glass

Scratching is the only noise familiar to me. The feel of the grain under my stylus, the crackle of the granules as they give way. Mice that paw around the shelves, their claws catching on the miniscule splinters in the pantry. Bushes scraping outside the door as the wind dances with the leaves. The sound of my shirt as it drags across the table, flaxen threads fraying from the edge. They all became the noise of my feverish work, from that of air to that of cloth, encircling the glass blank that I hold in my hands, its surface slowly being filed away.
To some, the sound is annoying, a burr in what might be the perfect silence of an artisan's concentration. Amateurs, all of them. What does the silence hold? Nothing. Inspiration cannot come from nothing. Art is not made from nothing, despite what some weak minds may think. I have known painters who only paint with one eye covered, musicians who only compose during rainstorms, and even potters who refuse to sculpt unless they have had three glasses of wine before. These are our inspirations, our muses, our ambiance.
I smile, and pause in my scratching to examine what I have wrought thus far. It is not even nearly finished, but I am pleased with what I see. The original sketched designs have slowly faded, replaced by the etchings of my wheel. Beyond the veil of my deep examination, I hear a new scratching, one that I rarely hear, one of rippling cloth being brushed against a threshold, one of cotton slipping past cotton. As polite as possible, I lift my hand in a wave of acknowledgement, leaving it to the universe for the visitor to interpret my action.
There are no words, but the figure now standing before me is undoubtedly human. There is a pattern to the scratchings, to the sounds of this workshop, that I have un-instinctively picked up. The crinkle of clothe bunching up makes it’s way to my ears, and I know that I am being watched.
Let them, my silent mind whispers. Let them see the wonders you work with this glass. I barely glance up in the next four hours, and my companion seems fit to stay motionless and observe. Those four hours seem to be only seconds as I regard what little I have seemed to accomplish, though my head begs me to set the cup down. Finally raising my head, there is a thrill as I wonder what the face of one so willing to sit like a stone might look like. The night is late though, and I believe my mind is addled: there is nobody. Of course not, I think, sweeping glass dust from the table. There hasn’t been for so long.
It seems beyond me when the next day the dividing curtain is drawn back again and the scratching of silk moving across the powder encrusted floor joins the harmony of this room. My concentration is unwavering and I barely nod my head in their direction, preferring to keep my eyes on the delicate leg that I have begun to grind out.
There is something beautiful about the way the glass shines, the way I can work it against this wheel. The way if obeys my every motion, gently coaxing the sculpted piece to emerge from the blank. There is something mesmerizing about watching bits of glass fly from the wheel, catching the light reflected off of the diamond dust that covers the spinning stone. There is even something calming about watching the glass deepen, the layers precariously removed from the surface.
But not every glass blank is absolute perfection. A granule of glass refuses to budge from under my wheels cyclic motion, and I dare not spin the wheel faster, for fear of cracking the delicate leg of the cage where it resides. I had hoped to not have to resort to the acid, considering it the cheater's fashion in place of a masterpiece. But there is no ignoring it. WIth a solemn sigh, I reach for the bottle at the shelf, keeping my gaze on the clump of glass that refuses my advances. The scratching of branches, the scratching of mice, and the scratching of my wheel, fade around the scratching of the silk. My stoic observer has moved, probably at wonder as to why my pedal foot has stopped turning the wheel, why the dust has ceased to fly through the air.
They will see, I think, unstoppering the bottle before me and glaring with preciseness at the troublesome spot. A drop or two of the liquid should be sufficient to eat away at the glass, but in an abnormal feeling of bravado, I flourish a third on the glass. I pay for my faulty instincts, and nearly fling the cup across the floor as I go to shake the acid off.
To my ears, the scratching of the room becomes disrupted, interjected with a sudden intake of breathe from my watcher and my own self-incriminate huffing.
To my relief, the third drop hadn’t eaten away too much, and I will be able to grind away the remnants of its hunger. So I do.
Silk catches on splinters as my silent companion rearranges her skirts on the bench, a slight aroma of lavender floating towards my nose. My nose twitches, unaccustomed to smells beyond lacquer and wood shavings. For a moment, I marvel at a beauty that is beyond glass, but the moment is gone as my foot resumes its work at the pedal, and the wheel turns.
A month ago, I might not have thought my skills great enough to attempt a cage cup. Looking at the intricate web surrounding the cup Emile had made, my bones had turned to sod just with the thought of comparing my shoddy workmanship to his. But now...now I feel that I could stand to rival him. To some it would seem like fanciful dreaming, as this cup has not yet even completed the first stage of its many staged life, but I have an eye for such things.
Day after day, the wheel turns. With it flies the dust of glass, diamond and stone, some days in more copious amounts than others. Day after day, my visitor comes to call. We never speak. We never look at each other. I couldn’t tell you the color of her eyes or the length of her hair, but I always knew it was her. In the silence of the scratching, we shared a connection, a fascination with the blank that no longer warranted the name of blank but of a partially finished masterpiece. I was forced to use the acid more times than once, but the spinning stone was my true companion.
But glass is not always absolute perfection. There will always be some flaw that I will never be able to see. It is only up to fate whether that flaw is key to the completion of the product. In my case, it was an extremely large key. Not one hour after began to hollow the space between cage and cup, did a faint snapping and cracking interrupt the peaceful scratching of the shop.
If I was anyone but myself, I would’ve attributed the sound to another happenstance of scratching, another player in the symphony of this workshop. But I’m not. I will defend it with whatever will that I may hold dear to myself that scratching and cracking are two wholly different sounds. Where one is the sound of patiently trying to discover something, working with an intent and an end goal in mind, the other is the impatience of one too greedy to let natural things work their course.
My heart seems to follow the cracking lines seconds after the cup has cracked in two, yet the wheel spins on; I don’t believe my feet have yet caught on to the tragedy that lays in my hands. It is gone. All those hours of work laboring to etch and hollow, scrive and deepen, are meaningless. Their result is this broken piece of silica and ash that has no more use or beauty as the clod of dust under my boot. But the glass itself remains to spite me, mocking me in its inherent grace. No longer a cup, a cage, a blank, but just a lump, a shard. It still glitters and gleams, with every reflection of light still the same. As if to say that for all my skill as an artisan, I will never be able to manipulate such a piece of nature to my own desires.
I am silent, the cracking snap still resounding in my ears. I hardly seem to notice the scratchings that have continued unbothered by the foreign noise. The mice, the branches, the dress…
It is the first time that she has attempted to come so close. I can feel her presence, as she stands at my side, no doubt gazing at the broken remains before us. Her hands are gentle as they remove the pieces from my own. I am numb. Not even the sound of her voice is enough to shock me out of my horror. But the words themselves pique my sleeping mind.
“Start again. You are the master.”
The words flit through my mind, trying in vain to find a niche where they can take root. For a moment, my thoughts are slick as ice, offering no threshold for these encouraging ideas. But only for a moment.
It is with a determined stance that I rise, a determined stride that I walk, a determined grip as I grasp another blank. The wheel spins on, leading the orchestra of sounds that I live within. The scratching of silk on diamond dust encircles me, stoking the fire within me to begin again.