As part of my research for the novel I’m working on, which focuses on ceramics, I’ve been taking some of my writing time to explore what I can of an important figure in the craft, one who was a “great grandfather” to me in terms of my ceramics education (that is, a teacher of my teacher’s teacher), and one who had a powerful influence on bringing ideas from Japanese and Korean ceramics to the forefront of the ceramics movement in Western cultures. This is Bernard Leach (1887-1979), born in British-occupied Hong Kong, growing up between Japan and the United Kingdom. As a young man, he apprenticed himself to a potter in Japan and began a friendship with art philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu (I recently read this book of Yanagi’s essays. I highly recommend it). Yanagi and Leach’s philosophies had great influences on one another, and when Leach returned to settle in Great Britain in 1920, he began spreading these ideas in the Western world.
I first encountered Leach as a teenager when I began my own ceramics journey. One of Leach’s students, Warren MacKenzie, had in turn set up a pottery studio in Minnesota, sparking the great ceramics movement there that has attracted dozens of potters to cluster around the north edge of the Twin Cities. I remember learning in school about the strictness of Leach’s studio at St. Ives. When MacKenzie apprenticed there, Leach would walk among the potters and survey their work. When he saw an unsatisfactory pot, Leach would stick his thumb through its wall, consigning it back to the reclaim bucket for recycling.
It has been challenging to find Leach’s books in electronic form. But I’ve been exploring two, both published in the last part of Leach’s life: his Drawings, Verse and Belief (1973), in which he discusses his dreams of bridging West and East as well as his Baháʼí faith and, though I’m still in the beginning of this book, The Potter’s Challenge (1975).
As I’ve read, I see that Leach’s ideas concern far more than ceramics. In the first chapter of The Potter’s Challenge, he is taking on central questions of culture, of good living, of individualism. He dismisses much of contemporary art, including contemporary ceramics–few pots, he says, have real life, and the reason has more than anything to do with the spirit behind their making. Pottery made with the aim of self-expression fails, because it draws from the ego. These pots stab at fame, uniqueness, he says, instead of the deeper thusness that should instead emerge.
I read this, and I am thinking about writing. I am thinking about my submissions to literary journals, my consideration of what readers will find engaging as I write. I wonder about art for art’s sake alone, what our motivations are for writing, and what the motivations are that we claim, how true they are. I also recognize the difference between writing and a pot (although I want to recognize their similarities as well). But it all makes me step back and think, what are the right reasons for writing? What will bring the most good and happiness. If, indeed, my goal is to explore life, is that really where I am?
Leach wrote about the distinctiveness to each person that naturally comes from deep engagement with the materials:
I used to be able to tell which person made the pots in my pottery—the standard ware of cups and bowls and plates. There were eight or ten people working and sometimes I would go around and see some of their work on a shelf and I would say to myself the character of the person who made that is coming through. That is what I want to see. It is a very important thing: the beginning of a man’s own statement without his self-conscious, aggressive, leaping ambition. It is the real thing coming through. But in this modern world we have become too intellectual and have lost so much of that naive quality.
I’d like to know words so well, to use them so much for their own sake, to be able to let go of personal ambition. I’m conscious that I’m not there. Alright. That’s fine. Maybe as I grow and learn. We’ll see.
I’ve had two beautiful weeks away from normal school. Skiing with the students was deeply good. I admired their courage, and I also found personal significance in the time in nature and the physical challenge. After that, my husband and I took a few days to visit the town of Lom, where we’d gone in the summer of 2020, the summer we could not leave Norway because of Covid. It was a wonderful getaway, followed by a week back here, with cooking projects, a few little house projects, some good writing, some grading, a couple of meetings with students.
With the terrible invasion happening in Ukraine right now, there is fear and strong emotion here at school. I am saddened at this fighting. I am angered by the unprovoked attack. I am praying for as small a loss of life as can still be.
With love,
Jimmy
Words like trees 
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