THE MUSE

To change a culture, one must first change its architecture, at least according to Paul Scheerbart. In his 1914 book Glass Architecture, the German writer enumerates 111 arguments for the titular mode of construction — and, by extension, a “glass culture” — in opposition to the “closed rooms” of his time. Transparency advances from material to metaphor to a means of cultural progress in this totalizing essay, which covers both the pragmatics of glazed construction and its more transcendent potentials. In his vision of the future — pellucid and unbounded — Scheerbart privileges the visual: light can pass through these walls, but sound cannot. Silence is the default setting. “When I am in my glass room,” he writes, “I shall hear nothing of the outside world.” Today we can live in glass towers between glazed planes, but it is just as easy to broadcast the minutiae of daily life through the alkali-aluminosilicate sheet glass of smartphone screens and 4K cameras embedded beneath them. Likewise, privacy and publicity are less opposing poles than two stylistic genres of self-fashioning in an era that all but demands it. Are you demure? Or brat? One might argue that staying silent, or going completely social media-free, is perhaps the loudest statement of all — like silent muses of the past, from Theda Bara to Kate Moss. However, muses, like musings, are context-dependent. The silence of the female source of inspiration resonates differently depending on the moment. Often, it is a well-worn patriarchal cliché, a muting imposed on women by the dominant male producers of culture, as Anne Anlin Cheng has demonstrated in her scholarship on Josephine Baker, a major modernist protagonist in her own right. Further back still, “speak, muse” — that most famous of opening lines — is never answered in the text. This is only ironic to us, glass-culture dwellers. To its early listeners (for The Odyssey, of course, began as spoken word), the entirety of the epic is the response. The muse is the real author; the bard is more like a ventriloquist’s puppet. Put differently, silence can be loud, transparency can be opaque, and a glass room can be just as claustrophobic as one made of brick.