Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  In parts of central Europe where lead ores are abundant, the custom has grown of predicting the future by pouring small quantities of the molten metal into water. The metal solidifies naturally in extravagant shapes, and it is from these that the pourer’s fortune is deduced. Germans perform this ceremony of Bleigiessen (lead-pouring) on New Year’s Eve. If the solidified lead resembles a flower, then you will enjoy new friendship in the coming year. The shape of a pig foretokens prosperity, a ship a long voyage, and so on. In Hungary, the ceremony takes place on Luca’s Day (13 December), when lovers pour lead to divine the qualities of their intended partners. The traditions still thrive and, surprisingly perhaps, you can easily buy children’s kits containing real lead for melting and pouring at home.

  Certainly, it’s a procedure that doesn’t seem to require an expert on hand to interpret the results. I decide to improvise for the benefit of my family using some lead salvaged from an old leaded window. Heated in a ladle by the flame of a portable bunsen burner, the crumpled metal quietly collapses until it quivers beneath a layer of white and yellow oxide and is ready for pouring. Can you really tell fortunes, wonders my nine-year-old son as we watch. He goes first. I pour about a dessertspoonful of molten lead into a bucket of water and he retrieves one of the bigger pieces. It is pear-shaped, and we are at a loss for any career it might portend. Then he turns it the other way up and declares that it looks like a balloon. Perhaps he will travel the world by air. My wife is next. With more practised pouring, more elaborate shapes are formed. She picks out an elongated dribble that miraculously does indeed resemble a flower on a stem. A new friendship in the coming year seems a safe enough bet. Finally it’s my turn. I pour the lead again, and extract from the water some attenuated lumps that fail to inspire. But one more sculptural fragment offers greater scope for the imagination, conceivably suggesting a human figure. The resemblance is marred by a splat of lead fused diagonally across the middle of the torso. Perhaps a musical instrument. Should I take up the lute?

  Shakespeare recodes lead’s predictive potential in The Merchant of Venice. In order to win the beautiful heiress Portia, her suitors must make an elemental choice between caskets of gold, silver and lead. Each casket bears an inscription. The inscriptions on the precious-metal caskets make promises that seem deliverable in some material form even if they are enigmatically stated. The golden casket is inscribed: ‘Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire’, the silver: ‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves’. The inscription on the lead casket recognizes only the uncertain world: ‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath’. To choose lead now is acknowledgement that fortunes may not be told at all.

  The first two suitors to appear in the play, whom Portia calls ‘deliberate fools’, are the princes of Morocco and Arragon. They judge that they cannot afford life’s gamble; they prefer what is clearly a trade, even if the terms aren’t clear. Vain Morocco chooses the gold, calculating Arragon the silver. The worthy suitor Bassanio rationalizes the choice differently. In a ‘world still deceiv’d with ornament’ he rejects both gold and silver and chooses the lead casket, opening it to find ‘Fair Portia’s counterfeit’, the sign that he has won her.

  All three suitors have been guided in their choice by their perceptions of the respective metals’ worth. During the course of their deliberations, the men have called lead ‘dull’, ‘base’ and ‘meagre’ in turn, although Portia has been scrupulous in never assigning value to any of the metals. Morocco and Arragon allow the accompanying riddles to compound their confusion, but Bassanio, so far as we can tell, does not read the messages at all. His choice is corporeal. Morocco and Arragon are offended by the ordinariness of lead but Bassanio is undeterred.

  Fortunes may not be for telling, but one thing in life can be foretold all too well. What Bassanio has won he knows too that he will ultimately lose. His correct choice indicates an acceptance of mortality–both his own and Portia’s too. The lead of the casket has already spelt this out to all comers, as Morocco makes plain when he piously announces he cannot bear to ‘think so base a thought’ that Portia’s portrait should be sheathed in lead in prevision of her death. Bassanio’s paradox is that, while he desires the beautiful Portia, he can nevertheless confess of the leaden casket: ‘Thy plainness moves me more than eloquence’. Lead’s dull truth is that beauty fades. Time corrodes our bodies, our skin acquires its own oxide coating, but the soul may be kept pure within. The choice of the lead casket embraces this inevitability, showing that Bassanio will be a steadfast husband unto death. ‘In this way,’ wrote Freud in an essay on mythic three-way choices, ‘man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually.’

  ‘You that choose not by the view,’ runs the scroll Bassanio finds inside the lead casket, ‘Chance as fair and choose as true! / Since this fortune falls to you, / Be content and seek no new.’ It is a final reminder of the gravity of the decision he has made.

  The fortune of all humankind is told in lead. The element’s traditional applications–many of them now performed by substitutes for health reasons–echo the ambiguous role it plays in myth. Two of its oldest uses show how lead encompasses the full range of human creativity and destructiveness: soldiers’ shot and printers’ type. Balls of lead were used as slingshot projectiles in ancient times, but it was not until the discovery in the fourteenth century that gunpowder, then new to Europe, could be made to project a ball from a tube that the cannon became a weapon of war. This crude device was gradually refined into a broad range of firearms for which an equally diverse battery of lead shot and bullets was required. Laboriously cast at first, lead shot soon came to be made, as fortunes are told, with the assistance of gravity in purpose-designed towers. But unlike in Bleigiessen, the element of chance is here carefully excluded. Molten lead is poured from a height to form droplets of a certain size, which cool as they fall before being quenched in a trough of water. I make my way to Crane Park on the western outskirts of London, where one of these buildings still stands. This tapered round tower was built in 1823 for the Hounslow Gunpowder Mills. Today, it has been restored and lies picturesquely situated on the edge of woodland with parakeets swooping noisily in and out of the cupola at the top. A shallow river rushing by provided the essential water. Standing on one of the six circular galleries that gird its bare brick interior, it is easy to imagine the hot lead falling down the middle and sputtering into the water below. A long fall–the tallest shot towers were more than twenty storeys high–ensures that each piece is close to spherical by the time it hits the water, but even then further work is necessary to sort and grade the shot. Gravity is put to use here, too, as the spherules are set off down an inclined plane towards a kind of jump. Those that roll well are able to jump the barrier, while the oversized and misshapen sluggards fall short and are collected for remelting. (The luck factor returns when the shot is fired: though billions of lead ballistics have been manufactured and fired in anger, they have claimed mere millions of lives. This low strike ratio is declining still further, according to the experts, for the simple reason that technological advances in firearm design make it so easy to pull a trigger prematurely.)

  One of the several distinct innovations of Johannes Gutenberg that leads us to claim him as the father of printing was his adoption of lead for type. Gutenberg had some training as a goldsmith and was a skilled metallurgist by the time, around 1440 while living in Strasbourg, he turned his mind to the problem of printing. He saw that the presses used locally for wine-making might be adapted to press lettering on to paper, but for the lettering to be changeable so that different texts might be printed, he would need a material with special properties. It would have to be highly mouldable to take the intricate shape of each letterform, but also sufficiently durable to bear repeated impact on the paper. For fully movable type, each small piece comprising a single letter would furthermore have to remain loose so that, once released from the press, it could be rearranged to set new text. Gutenberg’s
answer–also reached independently in Korea around the same time–was to use lead alloyed with tin and a little antimony. This made the metal flow better while molten and yet form a harder letter when solid. This lead alloy proved ideal compared to bronze, which was harder to work with, or traditional materials such as wood blocks and clay, which were less durable. This ‘type metal’ dominated printing until the mid twentieth century, greatly accelerating the spread of knowledge and expanding the role of literature.

  The profound and contradictory meanings of lead–fortune and fate, creativity and destruction, humour and seriousness, love and death–have led a number of contemporary artists to employ it in their work. Not many are drawn to such an unfashionable and humble material, perhaps, but the few who have been are among the most reputed. The British sculptor Antony Gormley and the German artist Anselm Kiefer, for example, use lead in ways that exploit contrasting aspects of its nature.

  Kiefer works with an unusual range of basic, one might say primal, media including ash, chalk, straw and fingernails. Lead, which is regarded in alchemical and Cabalistic thought as primordial matter, has been important for Kiefer for more than thirty years, chosen for practical reasons of workability–it is one of the most malleable of metals–but also, more importantly, for its multiple cultural echoes. It is, he says, ‘a material for ideas’.

  In 1989, as East and West Germans began to chip away at the Berlin Wall, Kiefer was finishing a major work modelled on a modern bomber aircraft. Kiefer’s plane is made not of aluminium, the lightest practical metal, but of lead, the heaviest. Its patchwork lead sheets are bent and folded into shape, and finished off with a crude parody of the bright rivets that we depend upon to carry us safely aloft. I see the work at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, a place of harmony between land and sea, architecture and art, where it delivers a violent jolt like an injured bird seen on a country walk. In one sense, it is an hilarious proposition, a plane that could never fly. Like the lead axes made by the Romans it would be useless as a weapon of war. And, like the miniature lead boats that have been found on the Greek island of Naxos dating back to the Cycladic period 5,000 years ago, it is going nowhere. It promises flights of fancy yet remains heavily earthbound. Even its long wings and fuselage seem to slump, the spindly undercarriage barely able to resist the inexorable pull of gravity. The work is called Jason. In the Greek myth, Jason and the Argonauts, whom he recruits to sail with him in search of the Golden Fleece, build a ship, the Argo, but find that it is too heavy to launch. It requires the magical intervention of Orpheus, who has joined the crew, before their voyage can begin.

  Kiefer is interested in the fact that lead is mutable not only in physical ways; like us, it also seems to change its character. Many metals suffer from a phenomenon known as creep whereby they gradually deform under an applied stress. Lead is so dense and soft that it creeps under gravity alone, and Kiefer has exploited this property in works where ripples of lead pile up like waves on a beach at the bottom of the picture. Of the seven metals known in the ancient world, lead was regarded as the ‘base’ from which all the others were made in nature, and was the obvious starting point for alchemists striving to make gold. Kiefer believes the white-and-yellow crust that forms on the surface of molten lead is indicative of its ‘potential to achieve a higher state of gold’. The element thus embodies hope, and Kiefer’s works that employ it are intended to be expressive of hope for humanity with its potential to change for the better. But to an artist born in 1945, the year in which the atom bomb was dropped, lead is also linked to a darker kind of mutability. Lead is the ultimate product of many radioactive decay chains, including those of the key atomic bomb ingredients, uranium and plutonium. In the old alchemy, lead speaks of potential for the betterment of humanity, but in the new it foreshadows its violent destruction.

  Antony Gormley’s view of lead is informed by more familiar procedures. His 1986 work Heart is an irregular lead polyhedron. It alludes to the custom of preserving body organs in lead, and, coincidentally or not, also references the work of the German artist, for the same truncated cube recurs in a long-running series of Kiefer’s works called Melancholia, inspired in turn by Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I. The use of lead is apt here as the alchemists equated the metal with Saturn, who was the Roman god of melancholy.

  Gormley’s studio is a grand affair, walled and gated like an embassy compound in a war zone. Inside, metal mesh human figures hang by chains from the high ceiling. Light floods the vast white space. I ask the artist about his materials. ‘I like clay because it is earth. I like iron in its original form as pig iron,’ he says. ‘I am distrustful of bronze.’ Whereas the alloy bronze is charged with human artifice even before the sculptor sees it, the clay of the earth and iron are elemental in one system or another. Lead is equally basic. ‘It is important to me that it’s on the periodic table. I like the fact that it bridges the alchemical and nuclear worlds.’ Unlike Kiefer, Gormley coats the lead he uses in order to prevent oxidation, which lends it a faint redemptive gleam. In a work called Natural Selection (1981), familiar objects–a banana, a light bulb, a gun–are sheathed in this anointed metal. Human and other large forms are similarly treated in other works, notably a series entitled A Case for an Angel, in which each sculpture in the series represents a human body with vast outspread wings, leaden forerunners of his steel Angel of the North of 1998. These ‘body cases’ are hollow–the artist lists air as one of his media in order that we understand this–so they lack the heavy suspense of Kiefer’s lead pieces. For Gormley, it is the sarcophagal impenetrability of the lead that counts. We are sealed out; air–and perhaps something more spiritual–is sealed in.

  Kiefer, on the other hand, prizes lead for its honesty. It presents the unvarnished truth with all the ambiguous consequences that flow from it. ‘It is, of course, a symbolic material,’ he says, ‘but also the color is very important. You cannot say that it is light or dark. It is a color or non-color that I identify with. I don’t believe in absolutes. The truth is always gray.’

  Jason, the lead plane with its macabre cargo of human teeth and snakeskin, is one of several aircraft Kiefer has made that he calls his ‘angels of history’ in reference to the ideas of the philospher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s ‘angel’ is a backward-gazing witness who sees history, not as we do as a sequence of passing events, but as an ever-accumulating pile of disasters, and who, despite wishing to, cannot go back and undo the damage because of the irresistible wind of progress blowing in his face. Kiefer worked on the sculpture as the cold war was coming to an end, a time when our safety was underwritten by such aircraft. The wind of technological progress had brought us to the point where our creative and destructive wills had converged in the supreme achievement of a high-tech machine for mass slaughter, and that same wind would now carry us on into the future with all its unknowable choices. Like so many of the leaden artefacts of the past then, Jason is a votive offering, one that expresses not only the bright hope that we will survive but also the dark fear that we will not.

  Our Perfect Reflection

  In Richard Strauss’s shimmering Mozartian opera Der Rosenkavalier (1910), the plot turns upon the moment when the amorous but essentially innocent Octavian gives the newly ennobled merchant’s daughter Sophie a silver rose. An object of complex symbolism in an opera of symbols, the rose is meant as a customary token of nuptial engagement between Sophie and the boorish Baron Ochs. The seventeen-year-old Octavian has been persuaded by his worldly lover, the Marschallin, to act as the baron’s emissary, the rose-bearer of the opera’s title. Needless to add, Sophie is disgusted by Ochs but smitten by the handsome Octavian, who appears before her dressed for good measure in silver brocade. The drama proceeds, with the usual operatic confusions, to the young lovers’ inevitable duet.

  The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s portrait of rich America in the jazz age, drips with gold but also with silver. The metal is present in images of the moon and stars and their refle
ctions and in the opulent clothing worn by the fast-money millionaire Gatsby. It is both the sign of financial wealth and an indicator of its mineral provenance, for Gatsby’s mentor Cody, we are told, is ‘a product of the Nevada silver fields’. But silver is used especially to characterize the lively Daisy Buchanan, with whom Gatsby had years ago fallen in love–‘the first “nice” girl he had ever known’–before she married another man. Daisy is compared to a silver idol when they meet again, while the young Gatsby, not yet rich, was drawn to her in the first place both for her wealth and for her corrupted innocence, finding her ‘gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor’.

  It is the same in England. In The Forsyte Saga, too, silver entangles wealth, class and the feminine. Soames Forsyte, ‘the man of property’ who gives the first in John Galsworthy’s sequence of novels its title, collects and displays ‘little silver boxes’, which he holds equal among his possessions with his wife. ‘Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table…and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it?’

  Silver has a deep cultural link with the feminine and with the moon, implicitly opposed to gold, which is equated with the sun and represents the male principle. This belief may not be quite universal but it is shared very widely by ancient cultures from Greece to the pre-Columbian Americas. The white lustre of the metal that explains these associations also carries with it more precise meanings to do with purity and virginity, and by extension with virtue, innocence, hope, patience and the passage of time.

  For Baron Ochs, the silver rose is just an empty chivalric gesture (one with no basis in authentic custom, incidentally, but invented for the opera by Strauss’s librettist, Hugo von Hofmannstal). In the hands of Octavian though, it becomes a potent symbol in which many of these meanings are simultaneously and confusingly present. The feminine aspect is especially highly charged as the role of Octavian, who must also appear at one point in the opera disguised as a maidservant, is sung by a woman.