Ladder of Shadows

Gustaf Sobin

Published by University of California Press

Sobin, Gustaf.
Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/25669

Access provided at 17 Jun 2019 13:06 GMT from Harvard University

 

The Blue Tears of Sainte-Marthe

per far veyre

Situated at the base of a cliff, Sainte-Marthe is the place-name, the

lieu-dit, of an area terraced in orchards, vineyards, and, occasion-
ally, long rectangles of ground gone fallow. On one such rectan-
gle, on a dry summer day, one can find by simply scuffing the
earth with the edge of a sandal any number of blue, tear-shaped
beads. They’re drops, droplets, really: the debris of a small early-
medieval glassworks. I’d come upon this area, as one comes upon
most things, quite by accident. It covers no more than thirty or
forty square meters of uncultivated soil, and constitutes, I’d learn,
a characteristic part of any historic glassworks: that area in which
waste was disposed of.1
Despite its profound state of dereliction, the site, I came to dis-
cover, is immensely evocative. One can easily enough imagine
those drops—those blue tears—dripping, centuries earlier, off the
white-hot nozzles of blowing irons. As a poet, glass—I must
admit—has always fascinated me. Indeed, I find the process of
glassblowing remarkably similar to that of composing poetry, for

92
 The Blue Tears of Sainte-Marthe / 93

in each, one brings totally disparate substances together, be they

the sand and flux of the parison or the scattered instances of the
poem. Then, by an abrupt increase in temperature—be it caloric
or intellectual—those substances are brought to fusion, insepara-
bility. They undergo a transformation, moving from their original
opaque state to one of pure transparency: from darkness to light.
Moreover, in both glassmaking and poetry, the human breath—
inextricably involved—finds itself enveloped, englobed, in the act
of its own elaboration.
Among the droplets, I’d also managed to find a few splintered
bits of finished glass. From these I could safely assume that the
glassworks were early medieval, belonging to that span of inde-
terminate history we so aptly call the Dark Ages. More, though,
than the facture of the splintered bits themselves, thin as broken
eggshell, it was their color—that pale, translucent blue—that
helped indicate the period of their fabrication.2 Unmistakably,
they belonged to the late seventh or early eighth century: the last
moment before glassworks vanished altogether from Provence
for a full four hundred years.
Then, too, the fact that such a verrerie was located at the base
of a cliff was, I’d discover, perfectly characteristic of those times.
A cliff provided four advantages. First and foremost, its flanks
must have abounded in holm oak and aleppo pine: with the in-
dispensable firewood, that is, for the ovens. Concurrently, it kept
the glassmakers from encroaching on cultivated or cultivatable
ground. Thirdly, the cut wood could be slid down the slope
rather than dragged up from under. And lastly, cliffs offered
readymade abutting walls for provisional shelter. For glassworks
of this sort were temporary affairs. They lasted exactly as long as
did the surrounding firewood (or, inversely, as long as the terms
 94 / The Blue Tears of Sainte-Marthe

of a contract, allowing for the exploitation of such a wood, stipu-

lated). The workers, upon arrival, would construct little lean-to
hovels for themselves, employing drystone for the walls and long
branches bound in puddled clay for the roofs.
And Sainte-Marthe? How long had it survived as a glassworks?
Judging by the extent of the waste deposits that I’d come upon,
no more, perhaps, than two, three years. My assumption here,
needless to say, is nothing more than that: a calculated guess in the
face of so much obscurity.
Aside from wood fuel for the ovens and the abundantly available
clay for the crucibles, silica—accounting for at least sixty percent
of the glass’s composition—must have come from the sandbanks
of a nearby river, the Coulon. On the other hand, flux—the alka-
line base that turns glass into a vitreous paste and allows for its
malleability—must have been imported from a considerable dis-
tance. A swamp plant called marsh samphire or saltwort or—by
extension—glasswort was being cultivated, one may safely assume,
within the Rhône estuary. A halophyte growing in saltwater
marshes, the plant is rich in sodium. Flowering in winter and
ripening in summer, marsh samphire, once harvested, was left to
ferment—somewhat like lavender—in tall stacks. At the given
moment, it was distilled in small underground kilns lined at the
base in clay and covered at the top by a whole network—a mesh,
really—of turtle shells. Just enough space was left between these
shells to serve as flues, points from which the accumulated vapor
might dissipate. Once cooled, the ash of this plant—carefully
screened—was processed into hard white balls, fit for transporta-
tion. From the Rhône estuary to Sainte-Marthe, it would travel a
distance, I calculated, of no less than a hundred kilometers: in
those troubled times, a remarkable achievement.
 The Blue Tears of Sainte-Marthe / 95

And so, I came to discover, water was part of the process. For
the sodium contained in that plant is essentially marine. Add to
this earth in the form of silicates, fire in the white heat of the ovens,
and air, of course—blown in sharp blasts down the full length of
the blowing irons—and one has the four elements reunited. Re-
united, that is, for the sake of crafting the most ephemeral, per-
haps, of all human products: glassware.
None of my own reading or rudimentary field research, how-
ever, helped me to understand who, exactly, they were, these itin-
erant glassmakers. Nor what kind of life they really led, moving
from site to site, hovel to hovel, exhausting the surrounding wood
fuel as they went, and leaving little more than these droplets—these
transparent blue tears—as mementos. For scarcely anything else
remains today. I’d searched for an oven—for traces of some pro-
visional, makeshift furnace. During the early medieval, these rus-
tic structures comprised little more than two rows of massive
stone laid upright over bedrock, then capped with flat overlap-
ping slabs. The ensemble was then caked in layer after layer of re-
fractory clay. Inside, the walls of the kiln widened somewhat into
a womblike chamber, while remaining open at either end like a
wind tunnel: open to the north (the wind-dominant side) for gen-
erating fire, and to the south for creating draft and removing ash.
Hard as I looked, though, not a single trace of an oven at Sainte-
Marthe could be found.
Curiously enough, it’s the dead, lying in their sepulchers in me-
dieval necropolises, who’ve helped conserve the rare pieces of in-
tact glassware we possess from this period. Discovered occasion-
ally, in archeological soundings, with a goblet to the right of their
face and tilted in the direction of their mouth or, in the case of
ecclesiastics, held flush against their chest, they’ve lain there—the
 96 / The Blue Tears of Sainte-Marthe

guardians of that fragile ware—gradually decomposing as the glass

itself, bit by bit, has gone iridescent. Aside from the dead, how-
ever, and random scraps of notarial documentation, we know al-
most nothing. True, there are a few Romanesque frescoes in the
area belonging to a far more evolved period, centuries later, that
depict glassware in scenes such as those of the Last Supper. But
of them, of those, of the glassblowers that moved—itinerant—
through the Dark Ages of so-called historical time, even the spe-
cialists can do little more than speculate.
One is left, in fact, with a period of time—over four hundred
years—that has gone, for the most part, unrecorded (see the pre-
vious essay). There was, perhaps, far too little to record. This is
true in terms of not only its glassware but nearly every other
manifestation of human activity. Living as I do in the heart of
Provence, I find myself continuously confronted with this appar-
ent lacuna in history: this lapsus in its unraveling. In examining
architectural vestige, what’s more, one could easily extend that
sterile expanse of four hundred years to a full thousand. Aside from
a little humpback stone bridge, the Pont-Julien, built in the time
of Augustus, there is architecturally no standing structure within
the immediate area between this stalwart conveyance, built in
23 b.c., and the first smattering of Romanesque chapels that date
from the outset of the eleventh century. Everything else either
has been razed by successive invasions or, constructed out of
wood, has long since decomposed.
One wonders, living in a time such as ours, whether a similar
period couldn’t recur. Whether, indeed, in its own surreptitious
way, it hasn’t already begun. Of course, our own Dark Age, were
it to develop, would be luminous: luminous with neon, cathode
ray, with the green screens of countless monitors functioning
 The Blue Tears of Sainte-Marthe / 97

autonomously in some postlinguistic semiotics, determining

every aspect of our lives, shaping not only our decisions but our
very choices. Yes, a dark, an incandescent dark, that would have
no further need of those very creatures—ourselves—who’d first
wired its circuits and set its screens aglow. Haven’t we already
entered that age, that shadow, the edge of that terrestrial eclipse?
Aren’t there signs sufficient enough: not the least of them, the
steady, ineluctable breakdown in literacy as we move, today, from
the verbal to the visual. From an articulated culture to one elec-
tronically programmed. From a consciousness rooted in speech to
one in which so many neurons react spontaneously to so much
optical stimuli. To life, in short, as video game.
As if foreshadowing that age, there are movements today (grow-
ing in both number and influence) that would break language down
into strict literal units. That would make of literality a diktat,
preparing us, thereby, for that ultimate codification. Post-Marxist,
postmodernist, posthumanist, they’d gladly ban, if they could,
metaphor from accepted usage. “Blue tears,” for instance, is meta-
phor. It’s drawn, like all figures of speech, from a free play of the
imagination, and motivated by the need to weave—reconcile—the
disparate parts of one’s experience into a common fabric: a fabric
by which societies, throughout history, have come to recognize
themselves. By association, resemblance, correspondence in the
Baudelairean sense of the word, metaphor has always allowed us to
create—against irrefutable, totalitarian fact—the common chords
of what was once called a common culture.
Tears, blue tears. They’d left us that much, hadn’t they? They
who’d blown—out of molten parisons—those globes, those viscous
bubbles no thicker than their breath, had left us, in the midst of
so much apparent debris, eloquent testimony.
 98 / The Blue Tears of Sainte-Marthe

As for ourselves, as we gain control or—what amounts to ex-

actly the same thing—lose control over our own ecosystem, it’s
hard to think that the future won’t depend on how we read—
examine—vestige such as this. Won’t depend, for instance, on
how we come to interpret four hundred years of virtual silence
that left us—at Sainte-Marthe, at least—with little or nothing if
not its tears. Its blue tears. The long pendulous waste of its blue
translucent tears.