11 July 2007

still time

I do it to myself every time I teach… burn myself out until I crash and collapse. It’s not just the classes, though I do often end up giving extra demonstrations, and saying yes to every student’s request. (It’s my job. It’s what I love!) No, it’s also the social side of Art Camp. It’s the long meals & sidelong glances, the passed bottle of bourbon after-hours at the Glass Studio, then waiting until everyone has gone quietly to their rooms (or someone else’s…) That’s when the beautiful night is mine, moon in the clouds and the howling train, hidden and so faraway. I used to sit on the same bench overlooking the valley every night and listen to my Walkman/Rio/iPod, a little Low or Songs: Ohia to set the tone. They’ve moved the bench, but the songs sound the same.

Unfortunately, I love the mornings there, too. So I make myself get up to the fog and the crow-calls and walk the road to breakfast. I need some time before class starts to prepare, even if it’s only to drink coffee and find the mood of the day. I tend to wing it as much as possible these days when it comes to teaching, mostly from doing it enough over the years but also from the knowledge that Live is better than Pre-Recorded when it comes to Performance… Still, I need time.

This group of students has been especially fine. I do believe they get better every class – and they’ve always been good. It was a real gift to have only 7 instead of the usual 10; we had time to talk, and I had more to give. I kept saying to other people that Good Work was the last thing I required of the class. All I really ask is that they do the work and get along, but when they’re also talented… amazing.

And then, after all the teaching and the printing and the Holiday Parade and the Auction and the drinking and the gossip and the good good food, it was Friday. A quick clean up, a Show-n-Tell and it’s done. One more evening for some of us to sit on the Dye Shed porch with a little wine and a lot of bad jokes, one more Floating Party tonight, wandering from studio to studio, looking for something to hold onto.

But first, I had to go visit John. It turns out we had arrived on the 10th anniversary of his death, and I’d been bearing it oddly ever since, unable or unwilling to go down the road to the churchyard where he’s buried. I go every time I’m there, in simple remembrance of an old friend, but more to honor the great friendship with the one who survived, Ila, who manages to be at Penland whenever I am and a constant source of strength to me, even from afar. Now, usually, it doesn’t even feel like my grief at all. I can hardly remember John, what work he did, what he was like. I have to ask Ila to conjure him up, and I’m usually scared to. The memories left to play get shorter in length and more obscure in plot. But it’s still important.

I think, more than anything, what I was carrying all week was Abstract Grief and, yes, Nostalgia. I met Ila when I first came to Penland 15 years ago, and our other friend from that session, Lee, was there this time too. In this and other ways, Penland has become an odd marker for our lives – all three of us – the touchstone to test us in the middle of muddled relationships and failures and our continued creative lives, pushed on no matter what. Just a couple years after I met Lee & Ila I taught my first class at Penland, at 25. But now, 13 years after that, I’m just another pervy old teacher staring at the young hot Clay assistant…

I know I’m prone to this kind of brooding – hell, most everything I make is about Time and Loss – but I also know it doesn’t look good on me. At the graveyard I sat in the one patch of brightness, bathed in filtered forest light, watery and warm, and gave myself half an hour to get lost. These last two weeks were all about Action & Making & Doing, if anything, and Dwelling on the Past is as bad as Anxiety for the Future – a simple negation of the Present. The best way to face this loss of time is to get up, and do the Good Work.

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