Hearts of Glass

I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something… Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass. ― Tennessee Williams

The French King Charles VI suffered from a psychological malady which made him believe that he was literally made of glass. As Princess Alexandra of Bavaria, daughter of Ludwig II, was also stricken with this same strange affliction, it seems especially prevalent in royal blood. Descartes and Locke both cited it as a cautionary metaphor in their writings, while Cervantes used it for parody in his exemplary tale, El licenciado Vidriera. The so-called Glass Delusion was considered a type of Melancholia, having several eccentric variants. Psychiatric history records cases of people who were convinced that they were oil lamps and urinals.

On January 14 1632, in his inaugural speech at the Amsterdam Athenaeum, noted Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Caspar Barlaeus, praised the Dutch Colonial empire in a long panegyric while also proclaiming his undying love for the French Queen Mother, whom, he said, could never return his affections because he was ‘completely made of glass and spyglass, able of shattering at any slight tremble or rupture or raise in pitch.’ Barlaeus was gently escorted offstage. After a rest-cure in Leiden, he later returned to his post and never spoke again of his glassiness or Marie de' Medici. But the greatest of glass delusionals was undoubtedly Nicholas du Plessis, a relation of Cardinal Richelieu, who believed that his posterior was glass. He strapped on a pillow to care for that crucial part of himself which he was terrified would one day be shattered.

Cases of glass mania have been recorded in our own time. A contemporary psychiatrist from the Netherlands reports t memorable conversation with one of his patients: "Ah! You've missed the glass in the window. You didn't see it. But it is there." He leaned forward, and said: "That's me. I'm there, and I'm not there. Like the glass in the window."

It is important to note that glass does not mean mirror and that this glass, human or inhuman, might also be colored. Charles VI, naturally, did not believe himself to be recyclable, but akin to church stained glass or a beautiful rare glass goblet. The distinction between glass and mirror was best articulated by the great Yiddish writer S. An-sky in his famous 1916 play, The Dybbuk: The window is made of glass, and the mirror is made of glass. But the glass in the mirror has a thin silver coat. And because of that silver, you can't see other people, you only see yourself.

Thinking oneself to be glass is not merely some subconscious realization of a physical ailment. In osteoporosis, for example, bones become like stone, not glass; it is a fragility of statues, not of ornaments and snowmen. To think you are all glass or that your ass is glass means just what it appears to mean. It is no wonder that royals fell prey to it. As the living heads and figures of the state, these kings and queens might easily come to suspect they were only reflective surfaces. This must be true also for that other spectacular hallucination, Hollywood, but there the danger lies in an infinity of moving reproductions rather than the immobility of a priceless original.

One of Boccaccio’s critics called him a ‘man of glass’ because he was so easily offended—an epithet which utterly infuriated the author of the lusty Decameron. So let us admit it then: Fragility is an insufferable quality. Its rigid preciousness conceals a sadism demanding that everyone walk on eggshells or hang by tenterhooks. The fragile person sits in the center of the universe like an engorged tick unable to fly, expecting a world which has broken him to issue a psychological credit line for what was, after all, a random hit. There are many kinds of fragile men. Fragility in the poor meets only raw elements. Wind, rain, freezing to death—no one watches their words around the indigent, and what terrible strength they possess returns wholly into their own.

Proverbs of Glass: If your limbs are made of glass, you will never dance. When lightning strikes sand, glass is formed by chance. A glass eye follows nobody.

Sad indeed was the fate of Greek artillery and general staff officer Georgios Hatzianestis, another glass man born in a time of earthquakes. In August 1922, having failed to stop the Turkish offensive, he was put on trial for losing the Asia Minor Campaign along with five other men (he was the only military officer among the accused). Despite a fine career which saw him rise through the ranks first of the Hellenic Academy, then the Greek Armed Forces, he began to show signs of mental instability in Smyrna during April of 1922. In the looming shadow of what would prove to be the decisive Turkish assault, Hatzianestis was overcome by the certainty that that his legs had somehow been transformed into glass. At his trial, he blamed the absolute rout of Greek forces on ‘an army of deserters’ and was shuffled off to be executed after the predictable verdict of guilty was handed down. Someone had to pay for the unbearable shame of defeat. Seeing only the ineptitude of the men above him and the cowardice of the conscripts below, it is hard not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for this delicate scapegoat whose inability to accept the events around him manifested itself in an imaginary frailty affecting his soles and thighs. Thrace was death that brittle autumn. Hatzianestis’ story is both silly and terrifying—the reflection of a nervous laughter under the stone stupidities of military command.

There is a synchronicity between outward things and what just happens to cross your mind. Maybe it is part of a secret economy that has not yet been mathematically explained. At any rate, due to the ice storm, the train rattled on like a bumper car jostling the back of the fog. It completed its stiff circuit, with the conductor yelling at stragglers to get in quick before the cold conked out the switch heaters. Every stop was an Arctic outpost. Half way down the car, the raggediest of the three other people unlucky enough to have to go someplace this morning kept up a patter with himself or somebody else on the line. Either way, it was all in his head: “Stalking… can’t go home because I’m looking at a Class A… she slept with the stepson… by the time I was consulted, the PCP guy… a turtle lunged for his finger… Elvis girls with greasy hair and brass knuckles… So I stood there like my feet were made of glass...”