Culturally today is the summer solstice and the summit of my series. We finished our firing this afternoon around 4:30. The firing is the summit of another series in my life. Today is the longest day of the year and as much as I love the summer, now I become a little sad to know the daylight hours get shorter from here. We have had hotter firings in terms of air temperature–it was hot firing in the kiln. We have had harder firings in how we had to fight for every degree of heat rise. We are thankful for the friends who are willing to forego some sleep and to wear long sleeve shirts and pants on these hot days. I learned of two deaths today and I am touched by the way both of these people brought meaning to my life. Their voices remind me that lighting a fire or swallowing ice are actions that weave threads of connection and meaning into our lives.
Basho wrote that the life of poetry means lighting a fire in summer, swallowing ice cubes in winter.
The moon is a waning crescent. The skies have been overcast the last couple of nights. Now the fog is floating in, so there are few stars. The kiln is hot and we have been tending, feeding, listening. It is almost as if firing a kiln was like eating stars, hot and peppery, full of patience and anticipation. We stoke, chat, eat, sleep, drink lots of water, and talk about what we get to eat next. More stars, cake? We watch the flame move through the space of the kiln. We look at the ceramic cones (that indicate temperature) and record the pyrometer temperature. At night the flame reaches out of the chimney like a bright mist or tongue.
ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
Sometimes as an antidote To fear of death, I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark Til they are all, all inside me, Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself Into a universe still young, Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space, The light of all the not yet stars Drifting like a bright mist, And all of us, and everything Already there But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough To lie down here on earth Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields Of our discarded skulls, Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis, Thinking: whatever left these husks Flew off on bright wings.
The front of the kiln is bricked up. A propane burner is propped in the base for preheat. Now is the moment when we look around, sit back on our heels and think about the seeds of ideas that are planted in the pots that are slowly warming up in the kiln. I know a lot of my artist and potter friends have found it difficult to work during, first, the pandemic and now the demonstrations and unrest. It’s been an incredibly beautiful spring. We can write about the flowers in our gardens, the weeds that persist with tenacity, and the creativity displayed in the way that they spread. We can look at nature not just to seek respite from the psychic battlefield, but also as a means to continue.
Dandelions
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
dear reader, with our heels digging into the good mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown & lord knows I have been called by what I look like more than I have been called by what I actually am & I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this exercise. which, too, is an attempt at fashioning something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything worthwhile of their burial. size me up & skip whatever semantics arrive to the tongue first. say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning, you could scatter his whole mind across a field.
Warren and I finished stacking our kiln this evening. I often refer to loading the kiln as being similar to doing a three dimensional puzzle. Making pots for that puzzle is both a joy and a knot of a problem. The kiln is an organic whale shape in which the pots sit in and on top of each other. Remembering the clues in order to have enough to fire the kiln is often a quandary. I remember the first time I took responsibility to fire the wood kiln I worked so hard that original effort is stored as a form of muscle memory.
I once had a helper ask me, “how do you plan for stacking this kiln.” I told her I make drawings and lists and then I dream about it. Sometimes planning for the firing feels like filling the inside of piano. At other times it’s more like shopping in a bodega. Today I felt like my whole body was in overdrive and I could not ascertain which direction or which object would solve the riddle of finishing the stack. Stacking our kiln is not a race, nor an equation or a formula. It comes together like a poem with balance, flow, and direction–a specific seasoning for this cycle of work. There are plenty of pots remaining, a good head start to firing a gas kiln in the near future.
THE PROBLEM
You are trying to solve a problem. You’re almost certainly halfway done, maybe more.
You take some salt, some alum, and put it into the problem. Its color goes from yellow to royal blue.
You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem, as into a Peruvian quipu of colored string.
You enter the problem’s bodegas, its flea markets, souks. Amid the alleys of sponges and sweets, of jewelry, spices, and hair combs, you ponder which stall, which pumpkin or perfume, is yours.
You go inside the problem’s piano. You choose three keys. One surely must open the door of the problem, if only you knew only this: is the quandary edible or medical, a problem of reason or grief?
It is looking back at you now with the quizzical eyes of a young, bright dog.
Her whole body pitched for the fetch, the dog wants to please. If only she could ascertain which direction, what object, which scent of riddle, and if the problem is round or elliptical in its orbit, and if it is measured in foot-pounds, memory, or meat.
The kiln loading continued today. To be aesthetically effective requires a mix ranging from large sculptural vases to petite espresso cups. The resonance of each piece is different. Some are new and intriguing making me totally invested in seeing them fired to fruition. Other work has receded in immediacy so there is actually more freedom in the range of potential resolutions.
FOR WHAT BINDS US
There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set down— and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before. There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest-
And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.
–Jane Hirshfield, in Of Gravity & Angels, Wesleyan University Press, 1988
Warren and I have been quietly working in our cave of a kiln. We find we have a personal language we use when referring to pots. So we ask each other, “please pass me the boat, or the fish tail, or the trumpet.” Our verbal shorthand becomes a poetic language. We photograph our progress in stacking, but I realize all the ways it does not capture the rhythm of choices, the things we have learned, or the mistakes we might be making.
The poem that follows is based on a series of photos taken by the photographer Carrie Mae Weems. I found it is best when read aloud. The words work like an echo chamber and remind me that photography depends so much on the gaze of the artist. Both the photographer and the poet shift our gaze through text, color, repetition. Weems and ford remind us what has changed in our culture, what has yet to change, and what we hope to change.
[Swiss Chard in a Boat]
from here i saw what happened and i cried
after Carrie Mae Weems
the blood is red the blues is red the blues is blood the red is dirt the dirt is brown
the brown is red the dirt is blood the blood is blues the blues is brown the brown is skin
the skin is blood the blood is kin the kin is red the red is blood the blood is new
the new is skin the skin is news the news is brown the brown is noose the noose is red
the red is blues the blues is dirt the dirt is skin the skin is blues the blues is kin
the kin is brown the brown is blood the blood is news the news is black the black is new
the new is red the red is noose the noose is black is blues is brown is red is blood—
— t’ai freedom ford, from & MORE BLACK, Augury Books
To fire a wood kiln one has to be resilient. It is not a matter of simply doing it over and over again. We have to lean towards the dreams that are held in our mind’s eye, to scratch and scratch at the itch of the embryonic ideas held in our imaginations. It’s through the tenacity of tree-like growth that we blend our dreams with our hands, the kiln, and clay.
We amass 400-500 raw pots and then spend several days placing them in the kiln. As each pot gets placed we are imagining how it might look after it shrinks and is licked by the flame and marked by the kiln’s atmosphere. Some pots are placed to block the the path of the flame so that it will turn or linger. We like to remember what we did in prior firings, trying to build on experience rather than insanely making the same mistake over and over again yet hoping for a new result.
Today as we chose the work for the back of the kiln and counted plates for the floor I had my moments of doubt. Do we have enough pots? Do we have too many pots. I have learned these are the questions I ask every time I fire.
OPTIMISM
More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
–Jane Hirshfield, in Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems
In a way many of my artist friends were prepared for a pandemic. They tend to prefer their studios to a more social life. When artists are at their best they look at the most difficult things in our society, digging to find an alternative way to navigate into current events. There are times when that digging feels like searching in our pockets for reading glasses, house keys, or a passport but at other times we find tears, meaning, and forgotten memories.
Shovel Plate
VEST
I put on again the vest of many pockets.
It is easy to forget which holds the reading glasses, which the small pen, which the house keys, the compass and whistle, the passport.
To forget at last for weeks even the pocket holding the day of digging a place for my sister’s ashes, the one holding the day where someone will soon enough put my own.
To misplace the pocket of touching the walls at Auschwitz would seem impossible. It is not.
To misplace, for a decade, the pocket of tears.
I rummage and rummage— transfers for Munich, for Melbourne, to Oslo. A receipt for a Singapore kopi. A device holding music: Bach, Garcia, Richter, Porter, Pärt.
A woman long dead now gave me, when I told her I could not sing, a kazoo. Now in a pocket.
Somewhere, a pocket holding a Steinway. Somewhere, a pocket holding a packet of salt.
Borgesian vest, Oxford English Dictionary vest with a magnifying glass tucked inside one snapped-closed pocket, Wikipedia vest, Rosetta vest, Enigma vest of decoding, how is it one person can carry your weight for a lifetime, one person slip into your open arms for a lifetime?
Who was given the world, and hunted for tissues, for chapstick.
–Jane Hirshfield, in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020
A friend of mine took a photo of a bowl of clover. It was evidence of the day with her daughter who was making a meal for fairies. The image made me wistful for the days of fairies with my daughter. Days when we filled bowls with acorns, rocks, and memories. I know Covid-19 has been hard for families with children at home as well as difficult for those friends with parents in nursing homes or assisted living facilities.
I may ache to be with my daughter. I have fond memories of times in New York City, easy habits of riding the subway to Brooklyn, of drinking in the street life culture, of experiencing art in the museums, and of meals at new and old favorite restaurants. My daughter and I have tried to keep notes on the things we notice, feel, read, and cook during the pandemic. I draw the accumulations of things in bowls. One week it might be potatoes or peonies while for the next cycle it is strawberries.
Today I noticed Catalpa flowers strewn in the grass while I was out picking up sticks. I thought those would make a nice collection but they were past their prime. The pristine ones remaining were high on the trees way out of reach. I am wistful for cooking meals with friends and picking out bowls to serve from. But I also stop to ask when this is over and we look back at this time what will I be nostalgic for? The bowl of peas or the quiet dinners on the porch? Imaging things like this won’t make the loss of loved ones any easier, but it will help me fill my bowl.
THE BOWL
If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.
If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.
If a shoe is put into the bowl, the leather is chewed and chewed over, a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.
A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl. Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness, it eats them.
Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.
The bowl cannot be thrown away. It cannot be broken.
It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless, and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.
Hands with ten fingers, fifty-four bones, capacities strange to us almost past measure. Scented—as the curve of the bowl is— with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.
–Jane Hirshfield, in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020
