Alan Yentob was interviewing Edmund de Waal a while ago for Imagine... The name of the program was "Make Pots or Die". I have been mulling things over for a bit.
I have tremendous respect for Edmund and I always admire the way Alan Yentob allows his guests to express themselves, and coaxes out of them a good extra scoop of thoughtfulness or feeling. I have read and loved The Hare with the Amber Eyes. I know this potter is serious, committed, very knowledgeable....can you hear the heavy hooves of my BUT approaching? ...I always see him, making pure white cylinders, little ones, tall ones (never fat ones), by the hundred, by the thousand. Sometimes they have a slight tremulous rim and last night there were having their foot shaved a bit. But I wait for the next thing. I wait for him to do the next thing and he does: he positions them in little groups on pure white shelves against pure white walls. They are never anything other than pure white cylinders, standing about together in groups or on parade, lost in space, cold, looking perplexed. My friend Jill says: you cannot know the mind of another person. Quite so. I completely believe that. But I do know my own mind: what comes next is my question and I can ask that. I guess I am expressing my mind in saying that the netsuke tell me more, and they were made so long ago, about now than what I can read in Edmund's cylinders. I can talk to them. I have an unsophisticated, illiterate mind, and I need a lot more explanations than I am getting from pure white. The netsuke are garrulous, dirty, convoluted, sneaky, so many things. But Edmund's pots are just there. They are frozen, waxy, and still. They do not scream, they do not question, they do not dance or lie down. He spoke os his first reaction to the netsuke, when uncle Iggy first showed them to him: each object would make the old man remember a story, a tableau, an episode of family life in those fabled times of old, when they were stupendously rich and very affable and well known. Edmund described how the object, handled, passed on to the new hand the story of all those hands that had caressed it over time. Also, how these perfect little gems can bewitch people, possess them. hence their great value. So, Edmund did not really like them, he could not make sense of such objects or the making of them. But now he owns them and he makes the connection between speaking in objects and building with words. His white porcelain tubes continue to multiply, referring to old jewish loss, to adversity on an unimaginable scale... I just don't get it. Where in those thousands of white tubes is all this? Is blank the ultimate end of the story? I will continue to look for that meaning: He says he tells stories with his pots; he has to make pots or die; I feel so stupid not understanding at all what he says but clearly see that making those cylinders is a must. Perhaps if I sit at the wheel and make a few?...
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