Making Better Pots

To Conceive and Carry Out is the Great Privilege of a Few

The winter light this morning in my studio makes me want to photograph everything in it and the light and the photographing begin chattering and I think of this line —

“…to conceive and carry out is the great privilege of a few…”

I chopped it out of Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, a book that feels like one thoughtful line to pluck after another, making it difficult to read until I just read with a pencil and underline obsessively and return to the underlines in time.

Like now.

To conceive and carry out IS a privilege, even when I have no idea why I do and persist in doing other than that there is a force behind it. There are so many things to want to do! A bottomlessness that makes doing difficult at times. I committed myself here to the Poetry Project on Thursdays and now I am mostly erupting and I have to build boxes to put things in so I can contain them.

I consulted chat gpt for container help. I’ll act on the sorting and the box building in time.

This morning I made some prints on my new mini printer. Soon: Making Bad Prints. Until then, I decided to continue with Making Bad Pots because I made so many things out of clay this week. And I am through lamenting and being jealous of those who have found privies IN THEIR HOMES (WTF!)! (Okay, so maybe a little jealousy lingers). Peg and Awl came out of gathering and using old stuff like old growth wood and bricks and WWII gun straps and old leather from all manner of things people mostly threw away and much of it right in our neighborhood. Builders would allow us in 2007 — to pick freely so they’d save some dollars when delivering to the dump. It was so worth the savings that they dropped dumpsters off in front of our row home in Fishtown and we got to pick out all that we wanted before they hauled their lighter load to the dump!

I also lament all the treasures tossed.

Peg and Awl rose out of destruction. I’ve always been rising out of destruction. So when I write about my phone lost to the marsh, or my journal being stolen by a Dutch Thief, my pots going into the sludge, these failures of a kind are stories of growth and expansion, and the magic that comes from the bits that remain.

I was making bad pots all week and the bad pots piled up but they didn’t get badder, they actually got gooder but not good yet. I broke up the worst bone dry pieces and put them into water and it fizzled and that sound was likeable because there was something wondrous in hearing the transformation as well. But then I started to gather so many collected things that I often return to - my very own privy collection from the world’s privies which is everything and nothing. littles that matter and don’t matter at all.

LIST OF TREASURES

1. Treasures from North Umberland from Helen Stephens is a go-to box for so many things.

2. A German porcelain skull and crossbones found at a flea market decades ago. I was told it was for a cabinet at a pharmacy and indicated poison. True or not true I don’t know but I love the story and the object.

3. Old thread from a grandma’s grandma’s house. I wrote about it in a journal somewhere. I love the texture and the aging.

4. Small corked glass viles from flea markets to collect dirt and colour from the earth to later make paint from.

5. Clay houses from Chrissy that I love and traded years ago at a craft show when, in person, I met so many humans who made things.

6. A pig tooth from under The Rat Room floor in our (18th or 19th century) house

7. A sheep tooth from the Thames from Silas’s first visit to London, Søren’s second.

8. Small clay paint pots I made a few years ago with paint I made too from found colour

9. An antique pencil sharpener, a gift from Katie

10. A tiny pocket knife Silas got at a flea market when he was so small and I borrowed it once for a photograph and then, I think, kept it forever? (yikes)*

Glaze Tiles!

Paint Palettes Maybe

*I took a drawing Silas made for his friend Eliet way back in before-Kindergarten times because I loved it so much and guessed the friend wouldn’t keep it for as long as I will. Silas is upset with me to this day, but look:

I came here to Substack this Sunday morning not to share all of this chaos, but my less bad pots. I made vessels to wet my tiny papers when I make tiny prints and palettes for painting.

I’ve been stuck on, An Everlasting Something. I cannot think. Not idea, or vittle, not material, or memory. I don’t know. But everything I do is An Everlasting Something. One thing rolls into the next and sometimes it is like a runaway snowball collecting momentum and snow and rocks and hearts and letters an pen nibs and ink and furry tears with teeth. Sometimes I watch from the top of the hill, sometimes I am in its way, and other times I run with it and add things to it evenly and all around.

All of things that I have and the things too, that I don’t have, create a kind of a fossil record in my new less bad pots and I shall use them to continue the making in whatever direction it shall go.

In my dream last night, I saw my mom again. I saw her face, I think, which is confusing for aphantasia. Maybe I just know what her face looks like when there is no distraction, like in a dream, and it carried over. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t have aphantasia. Her hair was floofy around her face like it always was, but she turned around and there was a flat part — not like bed head or a wound, more like a plastic toy track for matchbox cards where two long drops of food or coffee dripped and dried — indicating how long she’d been in bed for.

She wasn’t dead — she was just away letting these two long drips dry.

She picked up two raspberries from a plate on the table and popped them into her mouth with a smirk.

I awoke with a lump in my throat. How many times will I bring her back to life before I understand what gone means.