Actually, ‘casting’ is where it begins: friends arrive for Christmas Eve drinks several hours early, explaining that they have been casting, and have to get back to it. My brain tries angling and movie-making, both unlikely festive activities for this couple, until they clarify: they are making a mould, or rather a series of moulds. Recalibrated, brain and I attempt to understand the process, which goes: smear the object (details later) with the kind of quick-drying rubbery cement that dentists use for impressions of teeth. This becomes the mould. Then wrap or cover this in layers of plaster-of-Paris bandages, which make a kind of container or stand for the mould itself. I’m not sure how long these layers take to set, or what the object has been primed with to prevent layers of skin coming away with the cement – since the object in question is a breast. Ouch! The exciting thing about this part of the process is the degree of detail in the mould, goose bumps and all. And all of this is a prelude to the main job, which is slumping.
Slumping, I thought I knew, is what happens to brain and body when they’re just too relaxed for grace or comfort. It’s what I was always told off for in my early teens, when existential angst combined with burgeoning breasts to send me sliding hunched into whatever I could find to sit on and scowl from. It’s a state of mind – or emotion, perhaps more accurately – when despair hovers on dark wings at the edge of consciousness. Sometimes it’s associated with this time of year, when the post-Christmas blues combine with long nights and foul weather to dampen the toughest spirits. So in yoga this week I find myself working on the solar plexus, another of those terms which I thought I understood perfectly (as in an incapacitating blow to the tummy) but now find is also Manipura, the third chakra, my core self and source of power, self-esteem, willpower – and warmth. We are working to ‘brighten’ this chakra against the darks of winter, to wake ourselves into activity and optimism. I think, in one of those mind-wandering moments before I remember to drag myself back into the here and now, how the physical contours or sensations of the ‘slump’ are an apt metaphorical representation of financial slippage, personal or global.
A visit to the Garden reminds me that the natural world is already busy with its own brightening. I expected snowdrops, of course, but was surprised all over again by the delicious scents of the wintersweets, a kind of floral cough medicine, and the sudden injections of sweetness on the air from Daphne bholua and Viburnum bodnantense. I wander on from the spicy aromas of the scented garden and – how is it possible after haunting the place for more than eighteen months? – find yet another so far undiscovered corner, this a gravelled path running along the back of the winter garden. There are the yellows of flowering winter jasmine and mahonia of course, and hellebores, and then – here’s a real surprise – several clumps of ice-blue Iris unguicularis. Are these usually in flower so early in the year? What tugs at the heart, though, as I look back across this part of the garden are the stems – the fiery yellows and scarlets of Cornus sericea var. flaviramea and Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’, the orange firebursts of the pollarded willows and the Miss Havisham tangles of the ghost bramble. There are buds on the young cobnuts near the Station Road gate, and very sprightly rusty seedheads – are they seedheads? – on a tree I can’t identify over on the South Walk. Definitely no slumping here.
‘Just google slumping and you’ll find it,’ my friend says. I discover that slump gives its name to a New England fruit pudding (also known as a ‘grunt’!) topped with ‘light, puffy steamed dumplings’ and to a geological form of ‘mass wasting’, a kind of landslip of loose rock, as well as to the ‘slump test’ which measures the workability of concrete. And yes, here is slumping: a technique of shaping glass in a kiln at a temperature just high enough for the glass to become flexible and slump into the mould, but not to collapse completely. It is then held at this temperature to allow it to ‘soak’ and then the kiln is cooled slowly to allow the glass to harden. Apparently the technique can be traced back to Roman times.
A post-Christmas visit brings photos of the results: both a close-up of the mould (including minute wrinkly bits and – yes – goose bumps) and of the finished item, looking rather like a clear sea shell. It’s beautiful, which leaves me thinking: perhaps there is an art to be learnt in allowing yourself to relax far enough into the mould of the moment to inhabit it entirely, without losing your shape altogether. Alternatively, a reminder of how little we know even when we think we know. Listening to Velvet Tango Radio recently, a relatively new discovery, I hear a vaguely familiar Pugliese instrumental called El Embrollo. Curious, I check the meaning. A translation gives me ‘imbroglio’ which I also have to look up, though I’m pretty sure it’s something along the lines of a brothel. So the definition is yet another surprise: an entanglement, a disagreement, a scandal, a confusion, a muddle. Which just goes to show…
Velvet Tango Radio can be heard at http://radio.velvet-tango.net/
To listen to the 1952 recording of 'El Embrollo' (Pugliese's version) go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP6Jf148OYg
Velvet Tango Radio can be heard at http://radio.velvet-tango.net/
To listen to the 1952 recording of 'El Embrollo' (Pugliese's version) go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP6Jf148OYg
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