by Dale Peck
There was all of this, and there was, finally, what it all made possible. No, no, not us. People were uncannily unique in my mother’s world, unknowable, therefore inconsequential. The closer they were to her the stranger they seemed, so that the only person more alien to Dixie Stammers than me was herself. No, I mean her pots, of course, tucked into every nook and cranny and spare cubic foot the apartment had to offer, stacked upside down in bulbous columns six, eight, twelve high or scattered about like spittoons or upended copper diving helmets (of which my mother also owned three). Dozens and dozens of those “modern miracles of Mesoamerican methodology” as Art in America called them, in the magazine’s first-ever review of an “(anything but) conventional” pottery exhibition—or, rather, of a potter’s work, since my mother neither showed nor sold her pots until after that review made her famous, just gave them to friends or strangers or let them pile up in cupboards and closets and corners. Really, she didn’t care where her pots ended up or what they were used for or even if they survived. She cared only about making them. The word “process” was used a lot in that first article, though it’s not a word I ever remember hearing her say, just as she never called them “vases,” “vessels,” or “urns” the way the review did, let alone “her work,” “the work,” or any other term that smacked of “artspeak,” by which my mother (who hadn’t graduated from the Academy, but was still the daughter of its fourth president, great-great-great-great-granddaughter of its founder) meant a certain type of exegetical legerdemain that consumed material objects with a Kantian contempt for the phenomenal. My mother had unambiguously rejected the Academy proscription against making the year I was born, but certain lessons were less pedagogy than pedigree. Though she didn’t see anything wrong with combining “already existing materials” to create something new (as if someone somewhere—on the Tibetan plateau maybe, or in the Holy of Holies of the Salt Lake Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—conjured matter out of thin air), she would do so only if what was made resisted “the false gloss” of culture. Thus she didn’t call herself a “ceramicist” or claim to “sculpt with clay,” and never accepted the title “artist” or even “craftswoman.” No, my mother was a potter. She made pots, and the pots she made were nothing but pots. That was it. That was all. End of story.
But the truth is it was only the beginning, right—or why would I be telling you this? Why would you be reading? Not to be too self-effacing (that’s a pun, and if you don’t get it now you will soon enough) but you wouldn’t care about me if I wasn’t the only child of the woman who was, by universal acclaim, the most technically accomplished potter the world has ever known, the “divine” maker of 174 “unparalleled masterpieces of conception and execution,” or one pot for every twenty-eight days of her working life. This quotient is, I know, entirely arbitrary—my mother once made three pots in as many days, and when we moved to the Field two and a half years passed during which she never once touched unfired clay (well, not in the house anyway). Then, too, she was about the least Moon Goddessy–type of woman you can imagine. But still, it’s difficult to resist the lunar resonance, especially when it’s so strongly echoed in the pots themselves, which start out as silver crescents and swell into pale orbs whose single off-center orifice compels your confession like a priest’s cupped ear. The pots themselves took only a day to make—had in fact to be finished in about six hours or the clay became immalleable—but before my mother ever sat down in front of the slab of porphyry she used as her rolling surface she had first to make temper and grog, in preparation for which she visited a restaurant in Marcuse once a week, leaving with a bag of mussel shells she soaked in the porch sink overnight to get the adductor muscle to release its grip, then dried in one of the kilns and pounded into a fine black powder in a quartz mortar as big as a commode. This was temper; grog was the by-product of broken pots she ground into coarse meal the color of thunderclouds, salt to the shells’ pepper. She grabbed big messy handfuls at first (I always knew the days she’d spent wedging because the floor was as gritty as a beachside boardwalk), kneading them into Roman brick–sized slabs of clay, taking ever smaller amounts until finally she was adding the tiniest pinches of black or white powder, like a pastry chef seasoning her dough. She worked the clay for hours until it achieved some magical consistency she couldn’t quantify with a formula, could only feel in her fingertips, then let it set (“It has to set, Jude, not sit. Set. My God, those ginkgos smell like shit today”) overnight in the broken kiln, and the next morning, after eating the corncake rollup and drinking the cup of coffee Mr. B. always left outside our door, she lifted the great gray slimy egg from the kiln and pulled chunks from it with taloned fingers and rolled the chunks into ribbons on the jagged-edged sheet of purple stone at the western end of her potting table. The slight porousness of phaneritic porphyry—i.e., its absorptive capacity—was assumed to be as important as its mildly scabrous surface in working the clay, but despite the elaborate preparation and the rarefied nature of the props—the kaolin imported from the Peruvian Amazon at $34 a pound; the three-inch-thick slab of stone quarried from the same mine in Egypt from which were said to have come the walls of the Porphyra, the birthing room of the empresses of Constantinople; the pair of diffused halogen lamps she moved around on their articulated arms like a dentist peering into an open mouth—she resembled nothing so much as a wild-haired little girl rubbing her hands back and forth, lips pursed, brow furrowed, palms madly rolling balls of clay into pencil-thin ribbons and then—somehow, mysteriously, miraculously—building the ribbons up into hollow globes that were (I’m sure you know this, yet it bears saying again, and again and again, and 171 times again) perfectly spherical and exactly the same size, every last one of them.
It was the former detail that first attracted interest in her pots but it was the latter that made her a sensation: the fact that she made spheres that were not just mechanically perfect but identical, like a latter-day Giotto auditioning for the pope, but working in three dimensions and duplicating the feat over and over again. All this without benefit of mold, compass, scale, or any other tool, including of course—especially—a wheel. She’d worked with wheels once upon a time, like every other woman who takes a pottery class at her local community center (in this case the Wye Wreck Room, where, in the wake of my mother’s success, classes went from $175 for a two-month session to $1,500 for five weeks), churned out her fair share of the earth-toned kitsch you find at swap meets and garage sales, dabbled with Ming, Tang, and Song techniques, went through the inevitable Japanese phase (“Although I mean really, how can you take something seriously when chance is celebrated as ‘realignment’”—index fingers curled into ironic quotation marks that could’ve cracked walnuts—“It’s like it’s impossible to—no, I said ‘refinement.’ ‘Realignment’ doesn’t make any sense, although neither does Japanese pottery if you ask me”).
It was during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City that she was exposed to pre-Columbian pottery and “just fell in love with it.” The color, the texture, but above all “the tension,” which was something you could see if you knew how to look for it, but was best experienced when you held the pot in your hands—which, my mother said, she had to do, lifting a Panamanian Coclé-style infant’s funerary casket from its velvet-lined base and cradling it in her hands for “all of three seconds” before she was surrounded by museum guards who acted like “they would’ve pulled out pistols if they’d been packing.” A pot that’s been shaped from semi-aqueous clay whirled around on a potter’s wheel was, in my mother’s estimation, not just inanimate but dead (“and plus formally it’s about as challenging as dishing up soft-serve ice cream”), whereas a pot built from coils is held together by energetic valences that, a thousand years after they’d been rolled, still set her fingertips atingle the way coca shocks the lips. Trips to Oaxaca, Arequipa, and Tierra del Fuego followed as she experimented with different clays, different techniques, different shapes.
What makes these journeys all the more remarkable is the fact that she was a teenager at the time, a sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girl gamely braving right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing banditos, and, “like, no Spanish” in pursuit of her craft. She spent more than a year fashioning increasingly complex biomorphic vessels that were, in the words of the Art in America critic, “tours de force in their own right”—flaccid bladders with intricately curled tubes that looked like hearts and stomachs with tangled lengths of artery and esophagus still attached—but it was only after she discovered she was pregnant that she hit upon her project. “He was so special, so unique,” my mother told the critic, speaking of her unborn child as though it had been a thinking, talking being rather than a clump of cells multiplying in her thorax. “I didn’t ever want to give him up. I wanted to stretch out the experience forever, to safeguard the miracle that was taking shape within my body” and that, by inference (although perhaps only the former miracle inferred it), had yet to disappoint her with its deviation from whatever image she’d had in her head of the heir to the Stammers heritage and the corrective to a century of misguided Academy philosophy. Dixie’s math is a little fuzzy here, her story a little revisionist, if not simply self-serving. The humbler truth is that I cracked a piece out of number 1 when I was three, but instead of punishing me all she said was “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll just make another.” That’s how I remember it anyway (although even I have to admit it’s hard to imagine my mother calling me or anyone else “honey”), but who’s to say she hadn’t started cooking up the idea years earlier?
Since you’re reading this I assume you have at least a passing familiarity with my mother’s work. No doubt you’ve heard how her pots were tested at MIT, which found that each is as perfectly round as a cannonball manufactured by a munitions factory. Each has an external radius (which is to say, measured from the center point to the outside of the pot) of 141.393 millimeters and a 96.0749-millimeter opening, with a mean weight of 5306.69 grams (the slight differences in mass were chalked up to variations in the temperature and humidity of the rooms in which the pots ended up, although no pot deviates from the mean by more than six grams, which is about how much a quarter weighs), and each is so perfectly balanced that when placed on a plinth no wider than the aforementioned quarter the pot not only doesn’t fall off but its opening sits 23.4° off perpendicular—i.e., the axial tilt of the earth, which, recalling my earlier metaphor, makes the pots planet to their own moon.
You know that. Everyone who’s ever opened an art journal or flipped through the weekend supplement of a major metropolitan newspaper knows that. What no one could figure out is how. People assumed there were casts, a laser sight, a wattle frame that burned away during firing, until finally my mother consented to let a film crew record her making three pots in three days just to prove she used nothing but her eyes and her hands, the slab of stone on which she pounded and rolled the clay and a bowl of water (itself the bottom half of a broken pot, the sight of which caused the documentary’s director to catch his breath as though he’d been punched in the stomach) with which she occasionally wet her fingers. There she is in a soiled smock (I’d long since stopped washing them), braless, the birthmark outside the areola of her left breast (not a port-wine stain like mine, but a cafe-au-lait oval about the size of a penny that’s been run over by a train) becoming increasingly visible as sweat sticks the fabric to her skin. Her loose skirt is pulled up and piled beneath the smock like “the miracle” she’d tried so hard to hold on to, her bare legs and feet rooted to the earth but increasingly rising up on toetips, first one foot, then the other, at first like a ballerina learning to dance on point but increasingly like a dance itself, an oeta or hula whose internal percussion was given voice by the sound of her heels slapping against the floor again and again. By that point her skin was so chafed from years of compulsive bathing it looked like she had prickly heat, but gradually the pink-speckled expanse of her thighs and arms and face grew more and more splattered with gray scales, until she resembled a reptilian hybrid caught mid-metamorphosis (though whether toward the human or away is anybody’s guess). Her concentration was absolute. She didn’t react to noises or movement, didn’t eat or drink or speak or use the bathroom, didn’t ever once look away from the thing she was making and kept at least one hand on it at all times, until, after more than five hours of pushing-pulling-scraping-rubbing-smoothing, she suddenly sat back, tipped the pot on its side, brushed a number on its weighted bottom, and lumbered like a zombie into the bathroom. Number 1 all the way through 174, each (before they were glazed anyway), identical and indistinguishable to everyone but her who, like the mother of twins, could tell one from the other at a glance or, blindfolded, just by picking it up. The director of the film told her that her prices were going to double after she pulled that trick but he was wrong. They quadrupled.
(It was right about the time the film was shot that I came to believe my mother actually had given birth to twins, or, at any rate, conceived them. Academy science, being purely empirical, relieves the tedium of its self-imposed limits by a fascination with atypical physical development, be it congenital, experiential, or habitual. No doubt I would’ve been required to exhibit myself like DeVon Jones and his lactating nipples had my last name not been Stammers, but there were still ample opportunities for display, the October swim being required of all novices, the training going on year-round. Then there was the annual nude self-portrait, for which a fully mirrored carrel—floor and ceiling in addition to all four walls—was constructed, and from which issued a steady stream of drawings displayed in Stammers Hall throughout the fall; and although, as I said, I have no real artistic talent, I could still indicate the extent of my birthmark clearly enough, so that even from fifty or a hundred feet away the lone blotch of color glowed like a beacon on a wall full of darkly shaded kouroi. And so anyway, when I was twelve and discovered the interrelated phenomena of mosaicism, chimerism, and vanishing twins [the terms came from a magazine in my doctor’s office, by the way; genetic theory at the Academy didn’t go much past Mendel], I became obsessed with the idea that my birthmark wasn’t actually mine—that it was in fact vestige and vengeance of a sibling I’d murdered and consumed in my mother’s womb. This isn’t quite as fanciful as it sounds, since, in the first place, many port wine stains, mine included, affect only one side of the body, and, as well, extensive hemispheric nevus flammeus is often associated with one or another of these anomalies. And my mother was a twin, and there were two other sets in the family tree—all fraternal, as it happens, and of mixed sex, which left me with the less attractive fantasy of murdering a sister rather than a brother who might have challenged my claim to the Stammers kingdom. Cain killed Abel, after all, not one of the unnamed daughters Eve begat after Seth: killed him because God preferred Abel’s blood offering to Cain’s grain, which is kind of ironic when you think about it, if not simply grotesque, since God got bored with the whole sacrifice thing four thousand years later and, after accepting his son’s life, banned the practice in its entirety. The Ottoman sultan Mehmed III, on the birth of his first son, had nineteen of his brothers strangled with silk cords in order to ensure a smooth succession; the Mauryan emperor Aśoka was said to have killed no fewer than ninety-nine brothers as punishment for their role in the wars following their father’s death—another irony, since it was Aśoka who’d started the fight, because he wasn’t the chosen heir. I wanted something like that—like Romulus and Remus, Claudius and the elder Hamlet, Michael and Fredo even. Instead I got Caligula and Drusilla—Drusilla!—with its sad, incestuous overtones. For a while I tried to spin it, pretending my birthmark was the poisoned shirt Deianeira gave Heracles, although if any trace of a female sibling endured in me it was more likely manifest through my sexuality than on my skin. And since the cause of my birthmark—or my sexual orientation for that matter—had no bearing on either its effects or its treatment, I’d mostly forgotten about the whole episode by the time I was twent
y-three, when the possibility of multiple genetic populations attempting to obliterate each other like Serbs and Croats within the Yugoslavia of my body was refuted during the course of unrelated medical tests, and I was forced to accept that whatever mismatched attributes and impulses I harbored, they stemmed solely from me.)
All of that, however, was still years in the future. Three by Stammers wasn’t shot until long after we moved to the Field; among other things, the three-person crew—cameraman, director, and producer, a hippie-haired Jewish woman who gave me a few puffs off a joint and then asked, “So is your dick purple too?”—could’ve never fit in the apartment above the bakery, let alone their lights and tripods, their dozen black nylon bags filled with cables, cords, wires, drugs. The High Street apartment barely had room for me and my mother, let alone her collections and toiletries and kilns and pots—at the time, ninety-two of them, minus the seven that’d broken and been ground to grog and the twelve she’d given away, including the three that served as cookie jars (peanut butter, oatmeal, ginger-molasses) atop the Browns’ display case, which caught the eye of an art critic who’d been doing some research at the Academy and wanted something to “get the taste of quack” out of her mouth before heading to the airport. It was the morning crunch. The bakery was filled with “half-awake students and half-asleep professors in dowdy, dour gowns milling about in the black-and-white CCTV monitor like an antediluvian game of Pac-Man” (just one of many displays of arbitrary context-making that showed how little business the critic had at the Academy). Mr. Brown was a genius at knowing the exact moment when the mouth-watering effects of standing in a fragrant bakery crossed from impatience to hostility (whereas Mrs. Brown said it had taken 242 years before her ancestors won their freedom and she could give a flying fig how long anyone waited for a cup of coffee) and neither of them served the critic for several minutes, during which time she found her eye drawn again and again to the three cookie jars, which wobbled like Weebles every time Mr. Brown slammed the drawer of his old-fashioned cash register, but never fell down. At first she thought they were handmade, possibly old—possibly very old. It would be just like some hole-in-the-wall doughnut shop in Appalachia (really? why?) to have pre-Columbian artifacts stuffed with sweets on its front counter (oh, and: the Browns didn’t sell doughnuts). But the Tyrian purple with which they’d been glazed was atypical to say the least, and the chromatic patterning (“like nevi whipped about by the current of an insatiable algorithm”) was completely wrong. Then there was the fact that, although one of the vessels had a four-inch piece glued into it, they were otherwise incredibly similar in size, shape, and glazing, if not actually identical (she was right on the first two counts, wrong on the third, although it took a version of Interpol’s fingerprint-recognition software, modified to work in three dimensions, to prove it), leading the critic to conclude that the pots must have been machine made. But even so, they were fascinating specimens—more compelling than anything she’d seen up the hill anyway—and when she finally reached the counter she asked Mr. Brown where he’d gotten them. Mr. Brown thought she meant the cookies, and he pointed to a sign over his head: