The box is full of shattered glass.
Imagine pink and whitish-pink
glass shattered in a box. Another
box filled with shards of blue glass—
blues suffused into slivered petals
streaked with lavender or cornflower-clear enamels.
Another box filled with pulverized
glass the shade of green glacial ice
in full sun. Another box filled with powdered
enamels in shades of white-
on-white, bits of silica refracting light
like crystals from irradiated ice cores. The scintillating
fragments are uncountable. Slightly convex
and concave shapes discernible but curving
towards no discernible end. The box is full
of vitreous shards, comprising the translucent
textures of the real. Nothing
mathematically mappable. Nothing math-
ematically modellable. At first, the botanists,
filled with expectancy, peered
into the grainy, wooden boxes. They were staring at
uncountability as though it were not
the end, as though it were a new beginning—shattered
nonlinear shards as though they could be re-
sutured together, sloughed-off vitreous
layers as though they could be relaminated.
So that there would be
a system. Or one of several systems. As though
absolute breakage could be reversed, could be
transformed into the orderly planes of
dissection. Then the Wares,
the patrons, examined the breakage,
the remnants of the first
trial specimens. They were accustomed
to chandeliers made out of faceted crystal,
to mirror-plated elevators with redoubling
panels, to elaborate ceiling fixtures
in which frosted light was
mediated by glass. They had grown ex-
hausted from consistently seeing linear assemblages
of beauty, from constantly seeing glistering
simulacra. The system was not
entire, was not even fleetingly whole—
layerings and overplatings of fused
and annealed color pulverized in
the rough-hewn crate. They did not ask
what is the sum, they did not ask for animal
glues or resins. It is hard to say whether
they experienced terror, or even terror
subtended. All one can know with the remotest
degree of certitude is what they saw: irregular
shatterings of dehiscing capsules, stray shards
of styles, nonlinearly cleaved stems of
stamens, pollen grains pulverized into pollen-
like bits of silica, the transverse section of an
anther re-dissected longitudinally with a
wavy edge, shattered scales of invol-
ucres, a not-quite-sixteenth profile of a marginal,
ray-like flower, smashed portions
of blue-violet corollas showing
stamens, perfect florets broken into thirty-something
non-congruent shards. Perhaps they already
knew of the splintering of floral names,
of global dissemination. Notwithstanding all of this, the Wares,
in the face of what were essentially boxes full of broken glass,
commissioned the Ware Collection of Botanical
Models of Plants to fill Harvard’s “sequence of
empty rooms,” with the proviso that the completed
collection should serve as a permanent
memorial to the late Charles Eliot Norton Ware.
