Sanad Khoury: " The Glass Café " , Through Glass, We See Ourselves.

In this Ornamental read, contributing writer Sanad Khoury explores how glass reveals the hidden layers of human consciousness from Damascus’s Glass Café to Tennessee Williams’s Menagerie.

A meditation on fragility, repetition, and the courage to shatter illusions.

Read Through Glass, We See Ourselves in Read Ornamental

Sanad Khoury: " The Glass Café " , Through Glass, We See Ourselves.

We cannot hide from the cold truth behind glass. It exposes us to all the instances, memories, and things we'd rather place in our own wooden-made Pandora's box. How can glass make us so unwillingly vulnerable, forcing us to face the darker gradients of our palettes?

Some rooms are built to be seen through. Written in 1965 by Sadallah Wannous and staged in Damascus in 1966. The play talks about its regular customers (dead & alive) doing the same sedated routine despite a customer falling dead in the cafe - the doom of repetitiveness in our modern world. Those cafe-goers, the owner, and the waiter all seem to be caught in an endless, glassy loop. The customer drinks their coffee and plays shesh besh (board game). The waiter serves them, and the owner is responsible for looking after their business while chasing fleas out of the cafe. In this context, glass acts as a double-edged sword. Essentially, the people inside the glass cafe can see life passing by almost sedated, yet there are no signs of change.

The Glass Café play in Hebron

It's a gleaming glass box that, as humans, we lock ourselves in. These boxes, once upon a time, were held by our mothers and grandparents. The writer's use of glass in the play, applauding so, presents it as an heirloom. Yet, instead of being a valued, familial treasure, it reflects unconsciously passed-down generational trauma. The eternally pending question for the characters is: "Will our kids continue this same routine, or will a volcano erupt and change everything?" As humans, our minds are built to protect us. However, this protection comes with a hefty dose of repetition; we know what we need to change, but we often wait for a volcano to erupt first. Ever so late, we realise that the colourful colored glass we were drinking from every day was actually infested with lead.

In The Glass Menagerie, the characters are stuck in repetitive mental routines.

Tom wants to escape his dull work and become a writer. Amanda reminisces on her past and worries about her daughter, Laura. She, on the other hand, is the collector of glass figurines, retreating to her fragile yet lucent menagerie. Themes of escapism were explored heavily in this play, showing that with change comes sacrifice when Laura's glass unicorn shatters while dancing with a male prospect, who later decides to leave and not court Laura. Can signify to multiple aspects. Firstly, how sometimes pushing people to adhere to social norms destroys the magical spark they nourish within.

Secondly using a glass unicorn to depict the glass shattering is a deliberate act . Laura appeared shy and introverted, but the unicorn metaphorically revealed her true nature. A unicorn is radiant , colourful and quite literally out-worldly . With the shattering of the unicorn, it broke the fragile illusion a loss of selfhood that could not have survived the reality. In a way, it's a merciful act. Had the male prospect stayed, the illusion might’ve resisted and continued its legacy of a fragile fantasy.

Original broadway set for The Glass Menagerie in New York

In these plays, glass transcends its physical form to become a mirror of our human psyche. Perhaps no other substance in our three-dimensional world so fully embodies consciousness. Glass gleams, glimmers, moulds, and shatters like thought. It provides clarity on one side and distortion on the other. Within its fragile structure lies the same tension we carry the desire to be seen and the fear of being transparent. When you peer through glass, the image is never static; it shifts with you, reminding us that perception, like the self, is endlessly refracted.

Consider this question: What material, other than glass, could have been chosen to convey these profound themes? This query invites you to ponder the unique qualities of glass and its unparalleled ability to reflect the human experience.

Daily repetition and stasis illuminate the fact that, even through the visibility of glass, in the end, it's an illusion, and the only proper way to change is to break the glass and uncover the changes needed for a better life. Like Laura, we try to find our soft dissent to express our boundaries. In her case, it was through fragile figurines. Tom used glass to reform his guilt by making the settings and objects more airbrushed, with light colours. In the glass cafe, the walls held the silence; they numbed the characters' eyes so they could not witness life passing them by.

As artists, is our use of glass the ultimate acceptance of life as a whole? In our modern world, humans tend to invest in solid relics. These could take the form of gold jewellery, wooden decorations, metal lamps, or a paper marriage certificate. We long for an everlasting relationship with our objects. With glass, we honour the material in its entirety in its beauty and its breakability.

Therefore dear reader

Through Glass, We See Ourselves

Sanad Khoury: " The Glass Café " , Through Glass, We See Ourselves.

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