In the north of Africa—in Egypt—a sculptured tomb found in Memphis features carved yellow-brown human figures blowing glass, the crystalline globes at the end of their long pipes dangling delicately in the air. Scattered about are 4,000-year-old glass beads, glass scarabs, glass amulets, glass pieces for games no one’s been able to decipher and play. In Sidar, the capital of Phoenicia, the rulers had special sand brought in from Mount Carmel just for glassmaking. But the first manufacture ever of colored glass—the kind that would lead to Usnavy’s magnificent lamp nearly a millennium and a half later—occurred in China, the birthplace of dominos, when the Emperor Ou-Ti established a factory to make rods of tinted beads and other glassware. That’s all gone now, their existence as things of beauty in ruins, alive only in the collective imagination, in the same way that fossilized teeth from Aramis and Kanapoi evoke primitive man/monkeys with their sloping foreheads, inculpable and extraordinary, the unlikely progenitors of Mandela and Madame Curie, Lenin and Lennon, José Martí and Celia Cruz.
