Craftsmanship

I spent most of my time in the pottery studio today in complete wonder - at times bordering on desperate bewilderment - at the things that humanity has discovered the ability to make. More importantly, the process of turning that one-time possibility into a consistent skill impressed me.

Because, if there's one thing I can be pretty sure of after today, it's that even just making whistles (let alone whistling vessels) took a lot of tinkering for the first groups of people. And I wonder how they got the idea to begin, because it seems to me that hollow spheres with holes just so and air ducts perfectly cleared weren't really being made for many other purposes, which makes it difficult to believe the idea of a whistle arose by mistake. Perhaps experience with certain shells prompted the idea? Of course, I'm merely speculating, and a bit wildly at that; but I wish I could know what precisely was going through the minds of the first people to make these awesome vessels. That process of innovation is so human, and yet so often inscrutable in hindsight.

I may have mentioned this with the Jomon pots, but the amount of effort and perfectionism that must have gone into some of these ancient creations is crazy. I began trying to make the body of my whistling vessel today, seeing what it would be like to coil it, but also trying to make it as presentable as possible . . . And it was tough. Every once in a while (perhaps increasingly so that farther I got into the project!) a little part of me would mention, "You know, the vessel will still hold water, even if its sides aren't smooth . . ." The same thing would happen as I tried to get my now-solid whistles to sound: "Well, that was pretty close to a note - you could hear that from across the room - so what if it's a little airy?"  The standards of the pots we've found, however, are much higher than these; that, or with rose-tinted glasses, we perceive it to be so. I wonder if there was a lot of experimentation and "good-enough" pottery, that perhaps we haven't been as likely to find, or that was more likely to be broken? Or perhaps pottery was important enough that everything truly did have to be perfect in order to find use. Whatever the reason, I remain very impressed by what those long before me have accomplished - on the whole, they were far more skilled than I.