I
I lose myself, every time. The walk ends in surrender yet the struggle remains. It is fighting and losing at the same time, like how the pavement stabilises itself after trembling with the movement of a thousand cars. Studio time starts at nine and I am late, again. I always come on a lazy Friday morning, when everyone is shell and bones. This routine feels like an obligation.I have repeated the walk for more than three years and my feet remain heavy with dread.
Left, right, left, right. There are only two options—the western world has limited it to right or wrong, yes or no, good or bad, heaven and hell. I want it or I don’t. I cannot or I can. ‘No’ is such a powerful word; it provided limitations, the end of all things. It fails to grasp that vast in-between post-structuralists argue about non-stop. Nobody bothers to read them except the academics in this country. Except the undecided struggling me in the flight of stairs, getting her bearing after surviving the train, moving with the unified rhythm of a thousand other bored bodies.
Left, right, left, right. I ended up in the marketplace. I know this area. I have crossed this a hundred times. Here, I am bombarded with the world and its ephemerality. The chicken innards and the pork barbecues, the kalderos clanking to expose today’s fare: the undying menudo and adobo, the bursting monggo beans. Then the world shifts to the silver screen, those shining metal discs with pirated films even politicians scourge for their own pleasure. The light disappears in the narrow alleyway; my knees bump through blue linoleum-covered tabletops littered with DVDs. I hurry past them the way everyone does.
The breeze comes with sunlight. They call the street Sierra Madre, after the mountain range in the north. Tricycles and jeepneys take the place of trees and evergreens give way to intersecting irons and electricity wires. Honks replace chirps and the asphalt mirrors the heat. My mind creates distractions to compress time and space and in-between that time-space conjunct was a sole April shower cemented at the side of what was once a hill, in that awkward space between two houses.
The yellow petals rain over the slanted sidewalk, oblivious to the drivers sleeping in their tricycles or the passerby looking ahead they fail to see the shade above and the droppings below. The yellows foreshadow the inevitable output of today’s trek: that blue building a few blocks away, where the clay awaits my command. Under the bursting petals, I remember Lester who laments we do not have cherry blossoms in the Philippines. I say we have these yellow buds instead, blooming only in the summers. We just don’t line them up on both sides of the road, its tousled branches intertwining to hide the sky and invite romance. We do not have the discipline to grow them into submission, cluster them in parks we never visit because the homeless steals them away anyway. We don’t have the patience for horticulture; we do not linger, we do not have the leisure of time.
II
The studio is drenched in rays of early morning sun while reeking of dried earth. I dropped my bag by the abused wooden table at the centre, surrounded by rows and rows of unglazed pots and bowls and stoneware. The place is lit by floor-to-ceiling windows that viewed the parallel lines of EDSA. Tools were stocked in wooden crates and plastic containers, clustered according to their function in the process. The typical ones are there: the panyeta-shaped wood with a hole in the middle, the baby ice-pick, the nylon strings, the ones for trimming resemble fruit scrapers. There are also non-conventional tools from the kitchen—spoons and forks and knives and cookie shapers.
Joey, my pottery teacher, was already on a wheel. He was a greying man in his mid-40s with crinkled eyes and an inviting smile. He always waits for students—to arrive, to create with clay, to love pottery. He never showed any semblance of impatience. He said many students give up on the wheel. It is a hard animal to conquer. The studio has three electronic wheels and a large imposing kick wheel he purchased from the Pettyjons a few years ago. I never tried it once. I like Joey because he is partly ambivalent about teaching. And he always leaves me alone.
I head straight for the back, carrying back a bag of stoneware clay wrapped in black garbage bag. I cut through the mound with a string, separating them into portions, which I eventually knead into a ram’s head. More shoulders, less knees. More motion, less force. I have grown accustomed to it my body moves on its own.
The summer of 2012 had been my first time at the studio. Kim invited me and I had agreed on impulse. ‘Yes’ is easy to give away when one is young and the repercussions had not solidified itself in one’s imagination. I said yes because she is my friend. It sounds interesting, this pottery in Sierra Madre. I have no expectations, only the looking forward to catching up over lunch. By and by, I forget the superficial reason I go to pottery class. I start to come without the idea of lunch or friendship. I just come. The way the body moves before the mind can comprehend. Familiarity can be scary sometimes.
I take my place riding the beast. The clay embraces the plate and I push it into place. The engine churns. The wheel moves. The rhythm begins. One deep step forward and the wheel turns at its fastest speed. One shallow step back and it slows down. One deep step with the ankle and the turning stops. I stop.
“How do I do this again?” Six months off and I have forgotten.
Joey indulges. The wheel turns in a dizzying pace. Against the palm, the clay begins to waltz. The edge of the palm traps the bottom and pushes in. The clay yields. The swirls move up. The open palm, with its lines and fortunes pushes down again until a mound is created. The act is repeated until the clay cease to fight back, until every last resistance is bludgeoned to become a seamless circular mound at the centre of the plate, rotating as fluid as the water that made it malleable.
The thumb creates a hole and the middle finger slowly pulls it toward the potter. The middle finger then moves at the base, one inside and another outside, pressing the clay to rise. The swirl climbs to follow the pressure until it reaches the lid and ends. The cylinder is then shaped and takes form. And when wheel stops turning, the hypnotism ends.
III
Possession is a dangerous word. I sit there, the world trapped in my hands, my consciousness circling into a world of mass and matter and endless string of thoughts that loses meaning after pitting against each other. When the words disappear, the emotions surface; it whirlpools until it confluences into a prevailing feeling: desire. Desire becomes possession, the yearning to be one with something, someone, the world, the body, the words that lose itself in the vast milky way of the mind. Possession is the penultimate of yearning; the action that caps off the act of desiring. Possession. The body loses itself in order to control. Or better yet, all the levels of yearning are reduced to a single action: to possess.
BBeneath the layers of clay and swirls, I sat besieged. I and the clay. It captures me, the way it always does. Yet, I could only stare transfixed, repeatedly, despite knowing full well it would end like this. Every Friday, every time. When the oneness comes, it does so with a natural sense of belonging. The clay wobbles. I wobble. And once the spirit of the clay possesses my own, I feel the universe consume me.
I die.
The swirls kill the many parts of my body. I lose sense of my feet, my thighs, my arms, my fingers. There was only our combined choreography of spins and pulls. There was no body, no mind, no self—just my eyes looking down on that wonderful creature. My mind ceases to process. There was no longer any options, no yes or no. Nothing. There was only the world shaping itself between my fingers, sucking my thumb to become another universe. I am the mountain from where the world is born. I am the water that softens the face of the earth. My breath turns to air shifting around this drenched creation in my palm. My soul transcends this world. Time stops at my command.
I become a god.
IV
The wheel stops turning. Slowly, the body begins to sting. The tips of my fingers are wet and cold. My nape throbs. My body takes in the world and returns to its corporeal self. My breath calms to a small force that only my ears can hear. My body was transported to another world where I cease to exist and exist at the same time. How was it possible? That my sitting here could produce such explorations? That what’s within had manifested itself in this pot in my hands? When did I begin to lose myself in the process? And be engulfed in an almost enchanting rhythm that propels me to forget the body, the world, the tangibility of everything?
A pottery master I met in Singapore says he knows a potter’s train of thoughts by the creation they produce. Another master from Japan, on the other hand, regards his hands as a medium to let the clay shape itself. But they could not explain the stillness of the craft or how these two compelling and poignant perspectives on wheel-throwing seem to be of different spectrums yet sound alike. When they sit on their wheels, I wonder if their souls transcend their bodies the way mine does. Do they see the billion stars moving to form the crust of the earth? Do they feel being possessed, their bodies a confluence of perpetual rivers and labyrinthine forests? Do they live to die and live again?
No other art, aside from blacksmithing, makes full control of the elements. Soil from the earth, with its ores and minerals, are made malleable by water, hardened by air, and immortalised by fire. But mud does not denote power in the same way that iron did in pre-colonial Southeast Asia. It was not a treasure of kings that passed into legends. It was just what it was, a part of the world to be crafted, possessed. But maybe, its proximity with nature made it the bridge between the human body and the space of the spirits.
Joey never talks about his experience with clay. Maybe it was not something that begets words or maybe it was too sacred to be shared. I still could not grasp it. There are always remnants as gullible as the dried marks on my arms and knees. I can easily wash them away—and I will, I always do.
The water feels warm. I let the mud drizzle from the tips of my nails to the sides of the bathtub Joey transformed into a sink. Not a single sound from EDSA reaches the studio and my breath is the only sign of life. Dust particles float around, carrying the aroma of freshly showered earth. My neck hurts and I feel sleepy. Joey returns to the studio after his trip to the rooftop, where he had just lit a kiln.
Sa Biyernes ulit, I say before I leave. Next Friday.
I lose myself, every time. The walk ends in surrender yet the struggle remains. It is fighting and losing at the same time, like how the pavement stabilises itself after trembling with the movement of a thousand cars. Studio time starts at nine and I am late, again. I always come on a lazy Friday morning, when everyone is shell and bones. This routine feels like an obligation.I have repeated the walk for more than three years and my feet remain heavy with dread.
Left, right, left, right. There are only two options—the western world has limited it to right or wrong, yes or no, good or bad, heaven and hell. I want it or I don’t. I cannot or I can. ‘No’ is such a powerful word; it provided limitations, the end of all things. It fails to grasp that vast in-between post-structuralists argue about non-stop. Nobody bothers to read them except the academics in this country. Except the undecided struggling me in the flight of stairs, getting her bearing after surviving the train, moving with the unified rhythm of a thousand other bored bodies.
Left, right, left, right. I ended up in the marketplace. I know this area. I have crossed this a hundred times. Here, I am bombarded with the world and its ephemerality. The chicken innards and the pork barbecues, the kalderos clanking to expose today’s fare: the undying menudo and adobo, the bursting monggo beans. Then the world shifts to the silver screen, those shining metal discs with pirated films even politicians scourge for their own pleasure. The light disappears in the narrow alleyway; my knees bump through blue linoleum-covered tabletops littered with DVDs. I hurry past them the way everyone does.
The breeze comes with sunlight. They call the street Sierra Madre, after the mountain range in the north. Tricycles and jeepneys take the place of trees and evergreens give way to intersecting irons and electricity wires. Honks replace chirps and the asphalt mirrors the heat. My mind creates distractions to compress time and space and in-between that time-space conjunct was a sole April shower cemented at the side of what was once a hill, in that awkward space between two houses.
The yellow petals rain over the slanted sidewalk, oblivious to the drivers sleeping in their tricycles or the passerby looking ahead they fail to see the shade above and the droppings below. The yellows foreshadow the inevitable output of today’s trek: that blue building a few blocks away, where the clay awaits my command. Under the bursting petals, I remember Lester who laments we do not have cherry blossoms in the Philippines. I say we have these yellow buds instead, blooming only in the summers. We just don’t line them up on both sides of the road, its tousled branches intertwining to hide the sky and invite romance. We do not have the discipline to grow them into submission, cluster them in parks we never visit because the homeless steals them away anyway. We don’t have the patience for horticulture; we do not linger, we do not have the leisure of time.
II
The studio is drenched in rays of early morning sun while reeking of dried earth. I dropped my bag by the abused wooden table at the centre, surrounded by rows and rows of unglazed pots and bowls and stoneware. The place is lit by floor-to-ceiling windows that viewed the parallel lines of EDSA. Tools were stocked in wooden crates and plastic containers, clustered according to their function in the process. The typical ones are there: the panyeta-shaped wood with a hole in the middle, the baby ice-pick, the nylon strings, the ones for trimming resemble fruit scrapers. There are also non-conventional tools from the kitchen—spoons and forks and knives and cookie shapers.
Joey, my pottery teacher, was already on a wheel. He was a greying man in his mid-40s with crinkled eyes and an inviting smile. He always waits for students—to arrive, to create with clay, to love pottery. He never showed any semblance of impatience. He said many students give up on the wheel. It is a hard animal to conquer. The studio has three electronic wheels and a large imposing kick wheel he purchased from the Pettyjons a few years ago. I never tried it once. I like Joey because he is partly ambivalent about teaching. And he always leaves me alone.
I head straight for the back, carrying back a bag of stoneware clay wrapped in black garbage bag. I cut through the mound with a string, separating them into portions, which I eventually knead into a ram’s head. More shoulders, less knees. More motion, less force. I have grown accustomed to it my body moves on its own.
The summer of 2012 had been my first time at the studio. Kim invited me and I had agreed on impulse. ‘Yes’ is easy to give away when one is young and the repercussions had not solidified itself in one’s imagination. I said yes because she is my friend. It sounds interesting, this pottery in Sierra Madre. I have no expectations, only the looking forward to catching up over lunch. By and by, I forget the superficial reason I go to pottery class. I start to come without the idea of lunch or friendship. I just come. The way the body moves before the mind can comprehend. Familiarity can be scary sometimes.
I take my place riding the beast. The clay embraces the plate and I push it into place. The engine churns. The wheel moves. The rhythm begins. One deep step forward and the wheel turns at its fastest speed. One shallow step back and it slows down. One deep step with the ankle and the turning stops. I stop.
“How do I do this again?” Six months off and I have forgotten.
Joey indulges. The wheel turns in a dizzying pace. Against the palm, the clay begins to waltz. The edge of the palm traps the bottom and pushes in. The clay yields. The swirls move up. The open palm, with its lines and fortunes pushes down again until a mound is created. The act is repeated until the clay cease to fight back, until every last resistance is bludgeoned to become a seamless circular mound at the centre of the plate, rotating as fluid as the water that made it malleable.
The thumb creates a hole and the middle finger slowly pulls it toward the potter. The middle finger then moves at the base, one inside and another outside, pressing the clay to rise. The swirl climbs to follow the pressure until it reaches the lid and ends. The cylinder is then shaped and takes form. And when wheel stops turning, the hypnotism ends.
III
Possession is a dangerous word. I sit there, the world trapped in my hands, my consciousness circling into a world of mass and matter and endless string of thoughts that loses meaning after pitting against each other. When the words disappear, the emotions surface; it whirlpools until it confluences into a prevailing feeling: desire. Desire becomes possession, the yearning to be one with something, someone, the world, the body, the words that lose itself in the vast milky way of the mind. Possession is the penultimate of yearning; the action that caps off the act of desiring. Possession. The body loses itself in order to control. Or better yet, all the levels of yearning are reduced to a single action: to possess.
BBeneath the layers of clay and swirls, I sat besieged. I and the clay. It captures me, the way it always does. Yet, I could only stare transfixed, repeatedly, despite knowing full well it would end like this. Every Friday, every time. When the oneness comes, it does so with a natural sense of belonging. The clay wobbles. I wobble. And once the spirit of the clay possesses my own, I feel the universe consume me.
I die.
The swirls kill the many parts of my body. I lose sense of my feet, my thighs, my arms, my fingers. There was only our combined choreography of spins and pulls. There was no body, no mind, no self—just my eyes looking down on that wonderful creature. My mind ceases to process. There was no longer any options, no yes or no. Nothing. There was only the world shaping itself between my fingers, sucking my thumb to become another universe. I am the mountain from where the world is born. I am the water that softens the face of the earth. My breath turns to air shifting around this drenched creation in my palm. My soul transcends this world. Time stops at my command.
I become a god.
IV
The wheel stops turning. Slowly, the body begins to sting. The tips of my fingers are wet and cold. My nape throbs. My body takes in the world and returns to its corporeal self. My breath calms to a small force that only my ears can hear. My body was transported to another world where I cease to exist and exist at the same time. How was it possible? That my sitting here could produce such explorations? That what’s within had manifested itself in this pot in my hands? When did I begin to lose myself in the process? And be engulfed in an almost enchanting rhythm that propels me to forget the body, the world, the tangibility of everything?
A pottery master I met in Singapore says he knows a potter’s train of thoughts by the creation they produce. Another master from Japan, on the other hand, regards his hands as a medium to let the clay shape itself. But they could not explain the stillness of the craft or how these two compelling and poignant perspectives on wheel-throwing seem to be of different spectrums yet sound alike. When they sit on their wheels, I wonder if their souls transcend their bodies the way mine does. Do they see the billion stars moving to form the crust of the earth? Do they feel being possessed, their bodies a confluence of perpetual rivers and labyrinthine forests? Do they live to die and live again?
No other art, aside from blacksmithing, makes full control of the elements. Soil from the earth, with its ores and minerals, are made malleable by water, hardened by air, and immortalised by fire. But mud does not denote power in the same way that iron did in pre-colonial Southeast Asia. It was not a treasure of kings that passed into legends. It was just what it was, a part of the world to be crafted, possessed. But maybe, its proximity with nature made it the bridge between the human body and the space of the spirits.
Joey never talks about his experience with clay. Maybe it was not something that begets words or maybe it was too sacred to be shared. I still could not grasp it. There are always remnants as gullible as the dried marks on my arms and knees. I can easily wash them away—and I will, I always do.
The water feels warm. I let the mud drizzle from the tips of my nails to the sides of the bathtub Joey transformed into a sink. Not a single sound from EDSA reaches the studio and my breath is the only sign of life. Dust particles float around, carrying the aroma of freshly showered earth. My neck hurts and I feel sleepy. Joey returns to the studio after his trip to the rooftop, where he had just lit a kiln.
Sa Biyernes ulit, I say before I leave. Next Friday.
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