About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Read online

  The loader will also set out test bowls, draw tiles, and cone packs. Test bowls contain minerals in loose or powdered form. The way fire affects these bits of glass and rock gives the potters some idea of how they might behave used in glazes at high temperature. Draw tiles (or draw “trials”) are pulled from the kiln during a firing. Their condition gives stokers a sense of how various glazes are fusing—though not what their colors might be, because the tiles are cooled too quickly, plunged hissing and spitting into a bucket of water.

  Cone packs (or “plaques”) are temperature indicators. They consist of four or five pastel-colored clay posts, each one with a different melting point, set up like a picket row of three-inch fangs in a base of high-temperature clay. Six or eight cone packs, placed atop the bagwall and within view of the side stokers, give the fire boss an idea of time and temperature relationships in the kiln and of differences in heat distribution. At Jack’s the desired goal most often is to “get cone ten down” at the back of the kiln and to “get twelve down and fourteen leaning a little” at the bagwall. (If the kiln has been gaining temperature at about 108 degrees Fahrenheit per hour, cone twelve will go down at 2383° F, cone fourteen at 2530° F. Above these temperatures, very few things on Earth hold together. The most refractory materials known, carbides like tantalum carbide, borides, and sulfides, and a few elements like hafnium, have melting points approaching 4000° F. Outside these rare and often unstable exotics, common clay—2SiO2Al2O32H2O—is nearly the most heat-resistant earthly compound.)

  It’s commonly suggested by fire potters that commercial clays don’t fare well in wood-fired kilns. Many Dragon Kiln potters mix their own clays. They’re after a certain degree of plasticity in the clay body. They’ll also blend in preferred fluxes like talc and bone ash that act like shortening in a cake mix. For color they’ll wedge in mineral impurities, coarsely or finely ground. And they’ll add a greater measure of refractory material like alumina (aluminum oxide) or kaolin to help the pot hold its shape in very high temperatures but still open its pores to the wood ash.

  One evening, stoking at a sideport and taking a few extra moments—with the head stoker’s permission—to stare into the fire with a pair of welder’s glasses, I actually saw the current of white heat moving slowly through the kiln. It flowed visibly around sculpture, vases, and kimchi jars, stroking the larger pieces, as Jack had described. It moved through like a storm front unfolding over low hills and a wooded plain, a silent susurration. The head stoker signaled me to close the port. He didn’t want to lose temperature.

  I sat there in the darkness, listening to big winds coming in off the Pacific and seething in the alder grove without, to the clatter of rain spat and alder twigs on the corrugated roof. The weather, especially the wind, is one of the uncontrolled natural elements that help form anagama ware; in the stacking and in the stoking of the kiln, however, one can’t miss the clear assertion of human will, a desire to exercise authority very much in keeping with human nature, East and West. The Dragon Kiln potters deliberately try to achieve some of the very effects their progenitors in Japan were trying to prevent, by not paying such scrupulous attention to heat and temperature fluctuation, and by not controlling so tightly the spacing and duration of cycles of reduction and oxidizing.

  “We have this incredible tool,” Jack mused one day. “The hard part is knowing what you want.”

  AT MIDPOINT IN a long firing, the kiln and its environs have come to feel as comfortable as old clothes to the participants. To an outsider, the scene may seem as intimidating as an unfamiliar urban neighborhood. Especially confusing is the temporal disarray. Three or four people may be upstairs in the loft above Jack’s studio, sleeping off a night shift. Someone else might be grilling a whole salmon on a bed of coals taken from the kiln’s firebox. Someone else is racking splits of wood in a rick closer to the head stoker’s reach. Another person might be shaking off a nap with a cold breakfast, thrown together from an array of casseroles and fresh and fast food arranged on long tables in a covered area adjacent to Jack’s studio.

  It’s hard to discern a clear pattern of work, but the fire is never without a head stoker, without a personality to engage with. Someone’s always driving. It’s the map that eludes an observer, and to a lesser degree the participants.

  THE FIRE-BAKING of clay, the oldest and most widespread human art, begins with wood fire. Fred Olsen, in a review of the history of ceramics, calls wood “the most alluring of fuels,” but its allure defies analysis. To a stoker it has two salient characteristics beyond its species and mineral content. First, how wet is it? What is its degree of greenness? While green wood may come into play at some point (to hold temperature but not increase it), it’s dry wood the stoker wants. Each split of wood, secondly, has its own volume and surface area. The smaller and drier the pieces, the farther back in the kiln the flame will reach. Softwoods will produce fewer coals than hardwoods and release their energy more quickly, though hardwoods hold more potential energy in any given volume of wood. Barkwood will provide most of the ash and cinder for natural glazing, but the stoker, either as a variable in his or her own regime or in concert with other head stokers, might want to stay with lumberwood for a few hours in order to raise temperature in the kiln more quickly.

  Ideally, the head stoker will examine every piece of wood he or she pitches in, watching especially for painted wood, plywood, wood with nails, and driftwood. Their salt, metal, glues, and enamels could mar the pots. (Such possibilities, again, might be attractive to potters at a particular firing. As a rule, however, stokers set aside any material likely to corrode the interior of the kiln, such as driftwood, because of its salt content.)

  Whatever wood a stoker selects and with whatever rhythm it’s fed, the combination will have three basic effects. It will raise or lower temperature (a measure of the intensity of the energy being released by combustion). It will increase or lower heat (a measure of the quantity of energy flooding the interior of the kiln). And it will change the atmosphere in the kiln. Understoking makes more oxygen available, producing an oxidizing atmosphere for the pots. It will also promote an increase in temperature and allow for fuller combustion of carbon in the wood, resulting in fewer coals. Overstoking removes oxygen from the kiln, creating a reducing atmosphere. It retards a rise in temperature, but permits more ash to circulate in the kiln wind. It also produces an excess of coals, which may crowd the firebox and have to be removed.

  Depending on the stage of the firing, and what effect the stoker is after, he or she will favor either a reducing or an oxidizing fire. (The nature of Jack’s kiln and the method of firing it are such that it’s more often in an oxidizing state.) A stoker can quickly judge the condition of the kiln atmosphere with a glance at the chimney cap. A dunce hat of flame there indicates reduction, a cone of clear shimmering air, oxidation.

  Troy writes that fire has five important characteristics: tempo, velocity, sound, color, and texture. By a regular visual inspection of the fire, by exchanging information with the side stokers, noting the gradual collapse of the cones, and paying attention to the roar, a good stoker can keep track of the behavior of the fire and convey that information to his or her successor at a shift change. (At Jack’s much of this is written down in a kiln log for later review.)

  Traditionally, anagama firings start out slowly. The fire at the Dragon Kiln is lit on bare ground in front of the draft hole. It’s a small fire, meant to heat the interior of the kiln very gradually. Hours later, after the kiln has developed a good draft, the fire is pushed into the firebox. The sideport doors, left open to vent moisture from the kiln during the initial heating phase, are closed and the fire is slowly built up. Sixty or so hours later the temperature at the front of the kiln peaks at over 2400 degrees. The head stoker holds it there for another twelve hours or so, a final, high-temperature “soaking” of the sculpture and pots.

  Firings at Jack’s always seem to end about two in the morning. The last few sticks might be passed a
round and people present might hand-rub them along their length before sliding them through the fire door, sometimes with a generous soaking of sake. The fire door is then closed for the last time and mudded over along with the sideports and the main draft. The chimney is damped and capped, and the fire is left to burn itself out. At a temperature of about 1075 degrees, a few days after the kiln is shut down, its interior has cooled enough to no longer glow. For the first time since a fire was struck at its mouth, the inside of the Dragon is dark.

  SOME FRONT STOKERS WORK in a relaxed manner but are highly focused. Others are fastidiously organized and intense. Some exude confidence, others are unsure, self-conscious. Over the years, Jack’s seen many personalities come and go at the Dragon Kiln, and he has been through the trials of human community with them. In a group like this, where little money changes hands, no one who arrives without wood or food stays long. Jack and the others pose silent questions to any newcomer: Can you imagine the other fellow’s needs? Can you recognize and take on the less glamorous, more onerous tasks? Can you put a young visitor at ease? Will you give as much as you take?

  Since it requires an integrated human community to properly load, fuel, and operate an anagama kiln, keeping the community well integrated is a sine qua non of memorable anagama pots. As the linchpin of a leaderless group, Jack exerts a great influence on the direction a firing takes; and for as serious an artist as he is, he shows remarkable flexibility and patience. During several firings I watched him observe petulance, competition, and immaturity without a ripple. To him, such expressions of frustration are just another stick in that particular fire.

  When I pressed him, about a year after we met, he confided that only three things really bothered him. People who didn’t bring wood or ever join wood-gathering or wood-cutting expeditions. Loadings that went too quickly, because everyone waited until the last minute to bring their pots. And the way people scattered so soon after an unloading. There was no time, then, to savor what happened, to study it.

  IN THE BEGINNING, probably like any outsider, I perceived a relatively seamless group of fifteen or so people ebbing and flowing in their emotions through a firing, all of them clearly at ease with one another and enjoying one another’s company. (Very few human events anymore, of course, bring people together this intensely for this long on a regular basis.) But over the two years I attended firings, I saw people who didn’t have much to offer except their pots eased gently out of the group; and I watched others struggle with new responsibilities as a fire boss. One person’s dog interrupted another person’s sleep or ate someone’s unguarded food and it was roundly denounced to its owner. People kvetched when someone else wouldn’t relinquish his position as head stoker. What I saw was the prosaic stumbling in human endeavor. What always seemed praiseworthy about this polyglot group, what overrode any individual failing, was their willingness to work, to cooperate, to give in to one another. And Jack was the exemplar.

  Toward the end of my time in their community, the Dragon Kiln potters were getting ready for their first group show. The artist’s statements they prepared for it were revealing. Wrote one, “There is no switch to flip to turn the kiln on, and no computer to monitor its progress, so there is room for human ignorance, and therefore room for brilliance as well.” A ceramics instructor wrote of the kiln sometimes speaking “a language hard to understand,” and of the harmonious relationship he found between the “gestural qualities” of his pieces and the action of the wood fire. And he wrote that the ritual of firing helped him reestablish the connections he wanted to have with other people and with the landscape he lived in.

  Nearly every potter used the same terms of wonder, curiosity, and respect in referring to the Dragon Kiln community and in describing ceramic sculpture and pots. They saw each as integral to the most important element of a firing—creation, making beautiful and useful objects within the frame of a working community.

  A potter who’d attended firings at the kiln since the early nineties wrote of how Jack’s neighbors—loggers, fishermen, farmers, store owners, high school teachers—and a small but steady stream of visitors had affected him. “It is the most unusual coming together of divergent personalities and occupations that I have ever seen,” he wrote. “And each time I look at one of the pots that came from the kiln, I am reminded of these many different people who made a difference in the looks of that pot.”

  Jack remarked once that stoking the fire was like “groping in an energy field.” He could as easily have said this of building relations with potters in his community. It annoys him when people don’t attend to each other, or presume they know what someone else is going to say. In response to this tendency toward inattentiveness he once removed a pyrometer (a device that measures temperatures inside a kiln) which he’d reluctantly agreed to install. “People were watching the pyrometer,” he told me. “They weren’t listening to the kiln.”

  SAD MOMENTS COME at a firing—a pot is seen to break down inside or someone suffers a burn or an allergic reaction to the terrific heat. The saddest moments are at the end, when it’s finished and there’s nothing to do but wait out the week and see what’s happened. People drift off to their cars and trucks, some omitting their good-byes. Others collapse in makeshift beds or on sleeping pads in the summer woods and sleep away the rest of the night.

  One time I drove up to Jack’s the evening before an unloading. I found him in the shed, his back to me, his hands to the kiln’s blunt nose above the fire door. He brushed its surface like a man comforting a stranded whale. I went down to the house and waited for him.

  In my memory unloadings often fall on sunny days. (Because so many in the community have other jobs—nurse, set designer, computer technician, freelance photographer—firings usually begin on a Thursday and end on a Sunday, with the unloading a week later.) Robins, Swainson’s thrushes, and fox sparrows call from the alders, and more children than attend a firing are running around, with more dogs. The mood is festive, but anxious. While most of the work in the kiln is personal or even experimental, some potters have expensive commissioned pieces inside and may be on tenterhooks. The chimney is uncapped and undamped and the stoking ports are opened to vent the last of the heat before the wall in the loading port is dismantled. The interior is always warm and, entering the kiln, it’s easy to believe it’s still breathing, still alive.

  It takes only half as many hours to unload or “draw” the kiln. Each piece is examined first in the low-temperature light of an incandescent bulb, then handed to someone outside who looks at it quickly in the warmer but still shaded light of the kiln shed. Finally it’s passed to someone in bright sunshine, where the pale ware of ten days ago reveals itself fully. Here, as if by a miracle, are raucous purples, coy yellows, prosaic blues, belligerent reds, and what the late poet Denise Levertov called ardent whites. Here are glazes thin as breath, cracks that enhance a form rather than mar it because of where they occur. Here are deposits of ash which unify, like a calligrapher’s hana stroke, elements in a piece that previously were not well integrated. Here is a pot that raises nothing but a shrug from its maker and causes someone else to do a double take.

  The pots—jars, tiles, masks, urns, torsos, bowls, faux industrial tools, water pitchers—come forth sintered, flashed, scorched, ash-decorated, swollen, fatigued, and composed. Some glazes are seen to have produced unfamiliar colors, other glazes to have weeped across a piece like colored rain. As the pieces come from the kiln they’re arranged on large tables where a milling crowd of potters and their families and everyone’s friends can examine them at leisure, lifting, comparing, appraising. Meaning bursts through in disjointed ways in some pieces that are technically flawed. Other work shows exceptional technical skill but no strong vision. Classic pieces contrast with kitsch, the whimsical with the romantic.

  Gradually exposed to light, the interior of the kiln appears tomblike. Beneath one sideport a large jar sits bunked in ashes, seemingly the dust of centuries. At another sideport
a cluster of tumble-stacked, unglazed cups looks like a nest of dinosaur eggs. Pots that have buckled may have destroyed stronger pots alongside them. Dripping glazes may have glued some pots to the shelves. (They can often be tapped free using a wooden mallet, a loosening achieved not by direct blows but by setting up a harmonic vibration.) On the surface of pots from the front of the kiln you can read the generational and evolutionary phases of the firing, the layering up of ash. Pieces clink now. Glaze and clay have become glass and stone.

  What Jack calls “successful” is any pot that offers good evidence of the anagama process. It might not in itself be a beautiful object. I asked him once what a potter means at an unloading by referring to a pot as “a failure.” Is it a failure because it cracked or was otherwise distorted by the heat and temperature? Or was it an aesthetic failure because the color was unappealing?

  After a moment he asked, “What’s the difference?”

  The ceramics historian Daniel Rhodes has written, “Often the kiln confers graces on the pots which exceed even the potter’s dreams. The greatest pots are those one meets coming from the kiln as strong objects; they may seem in texture or color quite beyond one’s power to visualize or predict.”

  After an unloading, after everyone has departed, Jack has a frustrated and somewhat forlorn look on his face which perhaps nothing but the preparation for another firing can cure. He is left with his own pots, and perhaps the work of someone who couldn’t make arrangements to get there that day.

  “The best pots,” he told me one evening, “make me understand something I never did before.” After a pause he said, “In wood fire, what I’m involved with in myself is the part some people call ‘nature.’ It’s an emotional thing that’s grown into me through the things I have eaten and the space that I have lived in, and stuff that has seeped into me over a very long period of time. I know that. And if we separate ourselves from nature, we will never understand wood fire. We will never appreciate it in its ultimate sense.”