I I unexpectedly left school in the winter of 1981. It was complicated. I had just turned seventeen, so everything was complicated except the simple things in my life: I was going to be a Poet and a Potter and be apprenticed and go to Japan. I couldn’t stay at home. I went to New York and stayed with family friends in Gramercy Park and walked and walked, and bought books at the Strand and read them on park benches, and went to poetry readings at the Y (queuing for Joseph Brodsky in the rain, Anthony Hecht reading “The Venetian Vespers”), and haunted the Chinese ceramics galleries at the Met (those celadons, the sky-after-rain and kingfisher blues, the mutton-fat grays). And late one January afternoon, near closing time, weary, baffled by Boucher, I met Chardin for the first time. It was the Frick and it was love: that rectitude, that sensuality. “We stop in front of a Chardin as if by instinct like a traveler weary of the road choosing, almost without realizing, a place that offers a grassy seat, silence, water and cool shade,” said Diderot. Chardin’s Still Life with Plums with its handful of plums dusted with autumnal bloom, that glass two thirds full of water in front of the dark carafe, the two squash, the terracotta shelf of a pantry, and that scumbled wall. It was life barely arranged, more like life discovered. And yet the formal pleasures, one object in front of another, the different gleams and glints on
fruit and glass, contained a sense of “things known and handled,” to borrow the words of David Jones. They had what he termed haecceity,y the thusness of the world: they were themselves not idealized versions of themselves. This was how objects felt. Or, to be more precise, how I wanted the world to feel, how to make the world singular in the way that a poem by, say, Marianne Moore, allowed an inhabitation of a moment of encounter. Norman Bryson got it right: . . . it was rumoured that he applied the pigment with his fingers. Which may well be true: paint in Chardin is trowelled and stroked, it mimics the texture of terra-cotta or of glaze; it dribbles; its texture is buttery, or like cream cheese, it is an almost comestible substance which everywhere announces that it has been worked. Inside the painting, one sees objects which are constantly being touched: polished metal, familiar plates and cups, linen freshly pressed and tables swept and cleaned. It is an epiphany, of course. I’d been making pots since childhood, spent hours every afternoon in the workk shop of an elderly potter. I knew how to prepare clay, knead it in spirals so that the air was expelled, cut it into pieces with the twisted wire made from rabbit snares,
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