Going to Pot: On the Endurance of the Earth

Figure 1.

From inspiration to homage

Figure 2.

Early Japanese Kaki glaze, dolomite mouth

Figure 3.

First dancing girl shape

Figure 4.

Chinese Black Sung with Jun splashes

Figure 5.

May 2010: Chinese Sung form, Japan overlaid glazes and pattern

Figure 6.

Sung real leaf re-created: The Nohzone Tree ... uses real leaf to create pattern between two glazes. Last done Sung Dynasty, method unknown, eight hundred years ago

Figure 7.

The Nohzone Tree

Figure 8.

The Aladdin's Cave becoming unavoidable

Figure 9.

Square pots for one hundred-piece installation

Figure 10.

Round pots for one hundred-piece installation

Figure 11.

First-period earthenware in stoneware style

Figure 12.

A Michael Cardew pot from Vumé; the talisman that possessed two men, in different places

This essay, Peter Whitehead's first extended piece of writing on the subject of his pottery, was originally published in Artesian 1 (Winter 2008). Reprinted by kind permission from Gareth Evans.

Why let yourself go to pot? Lying in a bed in the Leicester heart hospital, eyes blood-shot and glazed, a day after my hectic arrival by ambulance, having survived a 90 minute angiography which should have lasted 15, my heart suffused (through a leg artery) with pungent dyes, the snaking encircling arteries photographed by x-rays to reveal my fate. How much time left? Minutes later I'd have been in the operating theatre (sic) for an emergency second bypass operation which, I was told afterwards, would probably have killed me. My heart was too weak to take the strain. I was on my last artery—one setback and I'd be dead.

My son Harry (not Potter, though soon to be the son of one) secretly asked the consultant to tell me the prognosis, especially as I was now declared inoperable. Was he sending me home to die? "Not quite, not unless—listen Harry, tell your father to stop writing books, and to STOP talking so much!" True, I'd harangued the consultant that I was immortal, and it was all very unfair. And morphine makes me loquacious until it knocks me out. Harry transmitted the warning.

A week before this attack, this collapse with acute atrial fibrillation (not fabulation!), brooding a fatal heart attack for months it seems, I'd completed the third novel of my internet-based "Nohzone Trilogy," Girl on the Train. Set in Japan, a plagiarism of the Kawabata novel Snow Country and based on the Noh play Wind in the Pines, the prose was inlayed with hyper-text links to Japanese art—(When in Tokyo do as Tokyo does ... )—many to the legendary potter Shoji Hamada, acknowledged as the greatest potter of the 20th Century.¹ A book of his work was the only volume next to my bed; I was still trying to figure out why one particular pot haunted me. It seemed so irrational to be possessed by a mere pot, an empty vessel of fired clay, enriched with tinted glazes, ideal for a bouquet of dead flowers, or twigs of autumn leaves. Pine, cedar, persimmon.

So, stop writing and talking, or die! What to do? As I looked at the pot on the Hamada cover, the famed Mashiko kaki red (dead blood) decorated with ghostly pale figures like the quartz intrusions in grey Cornish basalt or ironstone, the image corresponded disturbingly with those still hovering in my mind's eye of my dying heart. A vessel in bondage. The shape of an African cooking vessel, the blocked swollen...