Here on my web site, I update montly.
"...bowls whose surfaces were smooth and dense, deep and new..."
detail: bottle with ash glaze
"...volume eleven of the notebook series I started keeping in 1999."
This Month at Green River Pottery: March 2010
Keeping Time
Inside a broken clock
Splashing the wine
- Tom Waits
I remember hearing someplace that it’s impossible to listen to a regular sound like a metronome without your brain trying to divide up the beats into a pattern, a rhythm. The sound might be just an unending tick tick tick, but your brain wants to put it into an arrangement: tick-tock, tick-tock. Maybe some people hear things in threes. Or fours. I think about this phenomenon sometimes when I’m at a stop light and my turn signal is on: does the clicking sound coming from the dashboard really have that slight syncopation, or do I just hear it that way? The tendency to see pattern, structure—to create meaning—is a basic feature of perception, I guess.
This morning I got to the last page of my studio notebook, volume number eleven of the series I started keeping in 1999. I’ll have to go buy another one this afternoon, and this book, whose last blank page I’m now covering with words in ball point pen as I stand at my glazing table, will take its place high up on a shelf with the ten others I’ve filled. Suddenly, this little journal of daily notes, lists, questions, clay-smeared phone numbers, will become a completed book—a story with a beginning and an end.
It’s a totally arbitrary point of demarcation, I know. There’s no relationship between the page I’m on in my notebook and the work I’m doing in the studio. Nevertheless, the temptation to see the moment as meaningful is irresistible. In what way does this particular week in the studio mark an end-point? What ‘book’ of my career as a potter has just finished? And what new one am I about to start? I indulge the temptation to speculate. Maybe my bowl phase has ended, I consider, hopefully. For the last few months I’ve been frustrated by the form, and fascinated. Everywhere I go I have seen bowls, graceful floating bowls with feather-light rims, clunky craft fair bowls with a floor and a wall and a finger-wide trench joining the two. It all started last year when the bowls I was making struck me as inadequate, unsatisfying. They slouched. They did not reach into the empty space around them, nor hold the space they took up. Wobbles in their sides that weren’t there when throwing appeared during the firing. Unfocused and reticent, my bowls were like an adolescent at the dinner table. Unwilling. That was it—my bowls entered their adolescence about a year ago. So I watched, I waited, I threw fifty of them and jotted down notes about fifty more—I wanted to make bowls whose surfaces were smooth and dense, deep and new as beach sand at low tide; I wanted curves that were pure motion and pure stillness at the same time, like a wave just before it breaks. A good bowl should make you want to get on a tiny surf board and ride I jotted, somewhere back in the middle of the book I’m just finishing. This week, unloading the kiln, I saw a couple good bowls. Not perfect ones, but they have come a long way. There was little I needed to write about them.
I’m a few inches from the bottom of the last page, writing, when the doorbell rings. In walks a potter I haven’t seen in years: my old friend Pete in a wool hat, blue flannel shirt, muddy boots, khakis stained red with glaze. Gruff and shaggy and occasionally very ill-tempered, Pete’s pots are nevertheless graceful, subtle, informed by forty years at the wheel. “I just slept last night on the floor of Mike’s studio,” Pete admits with a gleam as we stand together, chatting. Pete lives way out in the country. I recently moved my studio into town. “I’m getting too old for this!” he says. “But you know? It was kind of good.”
It’s good to see him. We discuss a clay-prospecting trip to Coyote, New Mexico. Pete knows where all the good clay is. Maybe it’s my solitary phase that’s ending now. I’ve been pretty sequestered in the studio. Or maybe—more likely, I remind myself—there’s no phase really beginning or ending after all. In another few years it’ll be bowls all over again. Making pots is a bit like listening to a metronome: the beat goes on and on and without giving it some demarcation, some unit of rhythm, the idea of staying with it, month after month and year after year, is too much to contemplate. A whole life comes and goes and there are still just as many pots to make, as many new glaze formulas to try, just as many things to learn. Progress, narrative, meaning—these are all just a crutch.
Nevertheless, it will make me happy to purchase a new studio notebook today—I’ll probably make a special trip to my favorite art supply store to do it—and tomorrow when I jot something on the first page the words will have a special significance which, even if illusory, will still feel very good.