The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley
Page 2
Ullage is “the amount a vessel lacks of being full” as my old dictionary defines it. The amount of absence or emptiness in it. Oppressed by the glut of surplus objects, people are beginning to value ullage more than the vessel itself. As a concerned citizen, feeling I should do my bit, I joined a destruction-crew in a field heaped with bottles, cups, mugs, jugs, beakers, demi-johns and other such. A tap or two of the hammer and they burst with a crack, pop or tinkle, their ullage freed to supplement the gasses enveloping the planet.
Our team had been working since dawn with an hour’s break for lunch, and now the sun was setting. In the course of the day I’d smashed hundreds of vessels of various kinds with equal indifference, so why was I moved to spare this one? There was just something about it. A little terra-cotta cup. I looked around. The others were focused on their work, their hammers rising and falling, liberating ullage. Though it was against the rules, I put the cup in my pocket. Just as the whistle blew. The workday was over. We weren’t searched. I took the cup home undetected, hoping the absence it contained would not be missed.
A happy marriage of form and function, but that wasn’t it. It was the cup’s modesty, its humility which moved me. Somehow I identified with it, part of me did — that part which wanted to be small again, to be ‘bounded in a nutshell’, contained.
Erich Neumann, in his study of the feminine archetype, “The Great Mother” (1955), draws a diagram of the Goddess as a vast pot or beaker, vectors connecting her anatomy with a constellation of other objects — beings, substances and things. In a straight line ascending from her right breast we find bowl, cup, and at the top, grail. The grail I pictured was gaudy, bejewelled, ostentatious, vulgar. While the terra-cotta cup seemed to embody Christ’s injunction to “become as little children.”
Strange how anything, the humblest object, can be the agent of a person’s conversion.
In the days that followed, notices appeared. The cup had been missed after all. A reward was offered for its return. It was described as a disposable cup for water, found in India. Where in India? My enquiries had to be discrete, but I managed to discover the specific provenance of the cup: a workshop in rural Gujarat. I resolved to return it to its place of origin.
If we imagine the line from the Great Mother’s breast continuing upward beyond the grail it would eventually reach the ultimate in gaudy vessels: the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, built at a cost of billions. Inside the LHC protons stream at near light-speed around a ring 27 kilometres in circumference before being directed by super-cooled magnets to smash into each other in a spectacular approximation of the conditions which obtained immediately subsequent to the Big Bang.
Inside the cup particles streamed at a more leisurely pace and collided or not, according to chance. After days of travel, the cup and I arrived at a village near Morbi in Rajkot district, Gujarat. In the abandoned workshop the kilns were cold. Nearby the earth had been excavated to a depth of 3 metres. At the bottom it was clay, red with iron oxide. Moist and still warm from the setting sun.
What can we hope to learn from the collision of particles inside the LHC? It may give us direct evidence of the Higgs Boson, a new matter which would push the boundaries of high-energy physics.
What could I learn from the ullage the cup contained? I curled myself around it at the bottom of the pit and waited for night to fall.
Detail from diagram in “The Great Mother” by Erich Neumann
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