Unlearning

A cliché about true learning is that you don't actually learn anything in particular, you just learn how to learn. Another cliché is that the more you know, when you do finally learn something in particular, the less you understand. Your grasp of a few facts grows and your comprehension of the topic overall decreases in proportion.

This has been my experience as a student of glazing – at first, as a total beginner in the studio, you are pointed to a bucket of liquid & holding your unglazed piece in one hand, you dip. Weeks later, your piece comes back from the kiln, a film of colored glass smoothly covering the clay. Easy! I remember my first steps toward learning what that liquid is, toward wanting to learn how to make my own buckets of glaze, toward weighing out mysterious powdered minerals & stirring them together. Feldspar makes things melt, and flint makes things not melt, my teacher told me cryptically, reluctantly, when coaxed. I wrote that down. I had chosen this potter as my teacher & he wasn't so sure he liked the role. He was quite a curmudgeon. I would go visit him, an hour's drive, and supposedly help him out sometimes. He kept deflecting my questions, and looking into the distance, and switching the topic to another potter he knew who was so much better at glazing. Even then, a total beginner, I could tell my (chosen) teacher was the best. I wanted to learn from him. Partly because his pots, his glazes, had that mysterious quiet depth that even the most untutored can recognize, and partly because even then, I guess, I must have known the best teachers are reluctant. They never just dispense what they know. They know that the more they say the less you'll understand.

I've been thinking over these early experiences of learning glazing, and pondering these clichés about teaching, as I wrap up another round of the glaze class down at the studio in Santa Fe. What would my teacher say now if he knew I was standing before others, repeating his words, then pausing as students write them down? Feldspar makes things melt. Each week on the night before class I read through books about glazes, I rummage through my old notebooks from when I first mixed some of my now-favorite buckets, I contrive some activity we can do in class, like a high school chemistry teacher running a lab section. Except I don't know chemistry. My students are eager & intelligent – some of them do know chemistry, geology too – I ponder, I look into the distance, I reluctantly suggest. As our eighth class ends I feel that just as I've confused them & diminished their comprehension of the topic overall, by dispensing a few facts, so I have diminished my own ability to teach – I know less about teaching now than ever. And less about glazes. The primary fluxes, the alkaline earths, are like kindling – they get the melt started? one of my students suggested. The secondary fluxes, the earth metals in the second column of the periodic table – these are like the logs, these sustain the melt.

Right! I said, nodding as though I'd had the idea myself, rather than just faintly recognizing it – remembering – this is how melting glass works. Looking at the pile of good glaze books I have with their recipes, their chapters on crystalline mattes, their charts of UMF formulas & coefficients of expansion for metal oxides, I think hmm I know so little, I know so much less than when I started learning. Not just about glazes – about teaching. Maybe I'll see if some of my students from this round want to teach the glaze class next time.

Meanwhile I'll take the winter off from glaze class. I'll return to my own studio & be a curmudgeon for a couple months. Another cliché I've been thinking through this fall, on a totally different topic: having a deadline makes you work better as an artist. People say that. You need discipline, you need to be made to show up, you need an external reason to make your best work. I believed this last summer while scrambling to prepare pots for an October show and now I want to explore its opposite. Freedom to make your best work comes with lifting expectations. You work better when no one cares what you're doing. Winter – midwinter, just after the new year begins – is the right time to return to this opposite idea.

And one last cliché: actually this is not a cliché at all, it's an idea Socrates had about learning, which is that it is always remembering. I remember someone saying this in high school, and when the idea was repeated in college it already felt familiar – learning is remembering. Now is the time for me to meditate for a while on how this works. In the studio you don’t actually learn anything in particular. Sure, you learn how to learn — really though, you’re reconnecting with your innate sense of what is right, realigning with the route you’re on. This is a constant process, you learn to do it over and over, you constantly get off course, then correct. As a beginner those pots my teacher made with their mysterious quiet glazes were something totally new to my experience — ah yes, I remember thinking on my first encounter with them. Yes of course, how familiar. Yes that’s right! This winter as the quiet long nights arrive I hope to be secretly working away, no deadlines, no commissions, stockpiling pots I may or may not let anybody see someday, remembering how it was in the studio when I first started & didn't know anything.