The Persistence of Fire

More about The Persistence of Fire

I have lately travelled through southern Europe and among the Greek islands, where the earth never quite allows one to forget that pottery begins with geology. Ten thousand years ago people were already going to Melos for obsidian—the black glass of the earth’s own kiln. I watched Etna erupt, passed Stromboli smoking at sea, and stood in Pompeii’s forum looking toward Vesuvius.

Yet during ten years planting millions of trees—from the West Coast through New Mexico, Idaho, and Montana—I saw volcanic landscapes orders of magnitude greater in scale than anything I would later encounter in Europe. East of Shasta, I found mountains of volcanic glass beside mountains of pumice, enough, it seemed, to build the dome of the Pantheon a hundred thousand times over. I have seen forests buried beneath lava flows, their trees carbonized into black memories of the forests they once were.

To live on the Ring of Fire is to understand that the potter merely borrows processes the earth has practiced for millions of years.

I loved volcanic sand from the Willamette River. Mixed into clay, it produced wonderful little melted places—small eruptions imprisoned in the body of the pot. No glaze catalogue could quite reproduce them because they belonged to the material itself.

Then I had another idea.

I collected smooth basalt pebbles rounded by the river and painted them first with a white glaze, then with cobalt. Cobalt carries a long history—from Chinese blue-and-white porcelain to its Dutch imitation and the flowering of Delftware—but chemistry has its own imagination. In the reducing atmosphere of the kiln, the cobalt reacted with magnesium in the basalt and glaze, shifting the expected cobalt blue toward a remarkable violet-purple.

I painted OM on each stone. My intention was to fire them and give them to friends who practiced yoga.

The difficulty was that basalt is already a fired thing. At around Cone 6 I was asking the stone to remember what it had been before it became stone.

I loaded the kiln.

Fired it.

Waited nearly a day for it to cool.

Then I opened the door.

Most of my carefully painted pebbles had returned to lava. They had softened, collapsed and run down the kiln brick in dark streams. The kiln looked rather more geological than I had intended.

But one survived.

One stone did precisely what I had imagined.

That single pebble taught me more about pottery than a successful kiln-load might have done. My experiments have generally succeeded at about the rate of one in ten, and perhaps life itself has followed approximately the same proportion. Consequently I have become persistent.

Ceramics is partly the art of prediction, but more importantly it teaches humility before transformation. You learn the materials, understand the fire as well as you can, make enough pieces to give possibility a reasonable chance—and then surrender them to the kiln.

The potter proposes.

The fire decides.

And occasionally, among nine beautiful failures, you open the kiln and find the tenth thing waiting for you: not quite what you intended, perhaps, but something you could never have made without first being wrong.