the messages in bottles

PY always inspires me. today her inspiration came in the form of shiny glass objects, namely glass bottles. in one of our typical g-chat conversations, she asked me, "is it weird that this site is exciting to me?" she proceeded to paste a link to a site for "specialty bottles". my first reaction was one of confusion. why on earth would PY be looking to purchase specialty bottles? (this i still do not know); however, this confusion was rapidly supplanted by a fascination with the austere contours of the empty bottles. my mind hummed with memories of sorting through heavy bottles of hydrochloric acid, carefully dripping unknown compounds into tiny class flasks then stirring these flasks vigorously. there was so much potential in every glass bottle in the lab. potential energy, for starters, but potential for chemical reaction, for danger and surprise. each glass bottle in the chemical hood contained some unique compound that performed miracles when used properly.

last summer my parents were digging up the roots of a dead liquid amber tree in my backyard back home. they spend a lot of time gardening. i think it's a sort of restless urge to maintain a god-like control over something organic. in any case, they are often surprised at just how little control they have over the land they till. as my mom beat at the rotting, dirt-caked roots with a shovel, she heard the sharp crack of hard surfaces converging. at first, she thought she'd hit a rock; however, when she bent over to move this pesky rock out of the way of her work, she saw that no rock but a dirty yellow bottle peaked through the ground near the remnants of the tree. being the artist-archeologist-anthropologist that she is at heart, my mom shouted to my dad, "chris, get over here. we have excavation to do!"

rather than extricating the decayed tree roots, my mom and dad proceeded to carefully "excavate" four glass bottles of varying sizes. two of them resembled the first yellow glass container my mom struck, however their sizes varied slightly. the other was a rather large cylindrical glass bottle with very clear indentations that read, "CLOROX." after a few google searches, my dad concluded that they had stumbled upon what was once a pile of trash in the 1920's that perhaps the day laborers (who lived in my house then) threw out haphazardly.

these glass bottles have lived happily upon the window sill above my mom's kitchen sink since that summer day. when i was home over winter break. however, while sitting undisturbed one of them (for no apparent reason) shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces. now there are only three fragile artifacts of some forgotten act of carelessness, and believe you me, my parents adore these ruins of bottles.

in her award winning short story "entitled" PY introduces an ethereal character she names katie who collects rather unusual things in glass bottles. PY describes the story's central character, tyler, encountering katie's collection, writing,

They walked to her apartment, where she kept entire shelves lined with bottles in her bedroom. Tyler held his finger up against their cool smooth surfaces as he felt the entire rainbow of emotions. Katie had it all, everything from love and peace to anger, anxiety, and grief.

katie goes on to give tyler a fleeting taste of happiness:

“Go on,” she reassured him. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth. “You should know by now,” she whispered as the warmth spread over his tongue, “happiness is fleeting.”

He swallowed, and then, as its giddiness tickled down the back of his throat, Tyler was filled with an immense joy he had not felt in a long time. The warmth bubbled in his heart, and sang through his body, coursing through his veins.

Katie’s eyes flicked to her bottles. “But I,” she said, in a slowly escalating voice, “I’ve found a way to make it last. To save up for when times get rough.”

Tyler didn’t want to think about the end of happiness. He fell back on the bed with a content sigh and raised his hands, staring up at their new pinkness wondrously as he wiggled his fingers.

besides getting at some of the deeper themes involving the complexity of human emotions, i think PY's story illuminates what exactly is so fascinating about an empty glass bottle. katie fills her bottles with the most impossibly enticing substances. her collection of "noncollectable" substances serves as a reminder of the sort of infinite possibilities for collection and retention we find in an empty bottle. bottles serve immediately utilitarian purposes for containing such things as perfume or detergent, but they also can house mysterious elixirs or lost messages. the potentiality of the empty glass bottle is overwhelming and, thus, such a seemingly odd online shop for 'specialty bottles' makes perfect commercial (and aesthetic) sense to me.