Cleaning the workshop at the end of the day there were crumbs left on the table and at the potter’s wheel, for which I judge no one lest I be judged myself for being slovenly or careless which I admit to being at times. But it sat uneasily with me nevertheless. You can turn clay into a person, after all. So many of the world's great galleries are a testament to that, with people standing, thinking, looking - the people who people have cared enough to make - and I couldn't stand by while little pieces of people that could be got dry and were crushed to dust on the floor, so I saved the crumbs up in a plastic bag in the fridge over months until I accumulated a lump the size of a grapefruit.
And then the potential that sat unformed in the little bag made me anxious so I got it out and sat and looked at it - nowhere near enough for a person - but what was enough for a person?? What gave me the right to take my time in the sunshine, to run down the clock accumulating the correct amount? So I rolled out a little tube for the torso and a ball for the head and for the arms and legs I rolled out more tubes. They were the wrong dimensions. They were tiny and weak. The person I made would be unable to walk or to carry heavy grocery bags. I pinched off little pieces of the torso and head. I felt terrible. I imagined how terrible the person felt, too. I imagined their agony. "You will become stronger from this," I whispered to them. I was aware of others making vases and bowls around me but they did not sing in the opera that was happening at my table.
I pinched and shaped and I found more crumbs that had been abandoned. One of them was a funny little misshaped pyramid. "A nose," I thought, and I pressed it into the person's head. I stood them up on their feet and looked at them. Ugly. Asymmetrical, lumpy, with strange bumps and deformations all over their skin. I couldn't do it. I couldn't, in good conscience, create a brand new person just to leave them looking like this. I had a duty of care to them. I had a responsibility to make sure they weren't hideous. There is too much beauty in the world to knowingly create ugliness. The world boils and writhes with unflattering comparisons. So I rolled them back up into a ball and added more crumbs and kneaded and folded them over one million times until the clay was smooth. I studied the dimensions of people I knew to figure out how big to make the tubes and the balls. I rolled them out carefully and joined them with the utmost precision. And there sat a little fellow with a round tummy and little legs. A nice little fellow. I gave him a smile so he could be cheerful. I gave him some nice thick eyebrows. I got down on my knees to be at his level on the table and peered at his face. He had a funny face. I picked him up and walked him along the benchtop. He looked at the brushes. He rode on the wheel. Then I went off to wash my hands and I got talking to a deliveryman out by the door.
When I came back he was still there but his skin was chalky and his posture was slumped. I panicked and coated him in blue glaze and threw him into the kiln on his side. I watched for hours through the tiny window in agony as he lay there. It took all my self-restraint to not throw open the door of the kiln and snatch him up and cradle him in my arms. Eventually I fell asleep, my face pressed up against the door of the kiln.
When I woke up the kiln was cool. I opened the door and carefully took the little man out with a pair of tongs. He was smooth and perfect and immoveable. I tried to bend his legs and arms but I couldn't. I tried to tilt his head upwards but it would not tilt. I tried to see in his face the same spark of humour and quiet intellect which had so quickly appealed to me earlier but it was covered in glaze. I held him in my fingers up to the light to see through the hard blue coating the tiny pits and crevices where his features had been, just to detect them, not to commune or apologise with him, just to know they were there, and I did indeed find them, or perhaps did not find them. It was difficult to say. The potential he had once beamed out was still there, just darker, blurrier, harder to smile fondly at. But I could detect it.