Ceramics studio, 10.30am

we are all meat.

It feels like flesh, she says. I look at the slab on the table in front of me. Grey. About seven inches thick. If it’s meat, it’s long gone putrid. I’m nervous to touch it. I’ve built this moment up in my head. Maybe I dreamt about it. This is what I do. I find reasons not to do the things I want to do. I talk myself out of everything so effectively that for a long time I didn’t do anything very much at all. Recently, I have noticed this tendency returning. See, she says, reaching forward to where her own slab rests. She picks it up, squeezes it under her hands. It gives. I put my left hand out, press my index finger into it. I lift my finger, the print is still there. I do it again, pressing harder this time. You’re right, I say, and then, copying her, I break some clay off, roll it between my palms in the same way she is. Suddenly, I find I want to cry.

It’s cold in the studio. A power cut earlier not yet fixed. A door off its hinges. We hand build in a borrowed studio by candlelight. I have never felt real clay before. I am used to the air drying stuff, full of synthetic polymers as she tells me. This is different. It feels profound almost, although I hate to admit it, to roll the smallest particles in my hand, to have in my palms the most malleable material, and dust to dust, and all of it, and I roll it in my hands, this new material, think of my father, think of how intimately he knew flesh, both on and off the operating table, think of how much flesh he liked, think of how becoming one flesh meant so little to him, more to his wives really, the last two of them especially, each baffled to discover the other when he died on the winter solstice where in the northern hemisphere I sat in my garden on the summer solstice, the light barely leaving that short night, burning, I will not say what, not yet. But will we mourn him twice, I asked my sister - half of course, as if he could’ve given us both the same mother and the same name - but she assured me, that no, we would not, once was quite enough. One wife in the hospital, the other trying to arrange his funeral; perhaps it would’ve helped if instead of this abiding obsession with flesh, he’d found a substitute for it elsewhere, perhaps if he’d sat thus at a bench, breath turning to white air in the gripping cold of a near midwinter morning, perhaps if he’d seen the same air rising from the clay, perhaps if he’d felt the raw joy of forming it under his hands, feeling it adapt to the shape of his palms, perhaps if that was something he’d learnt, he’d have had no need for the rest of it - the women, the children, the geographical spread, the recycling of the same names, this endless play of substitution perhaps would have been lessened if he’s swapped flesh for clay, a simple exchange and one I am now doing, swapping instead fabric for a different material. One covering the body. One mimicking the body. Fabric, my mother’s thing. Later my thing. A form of war on my part perhaps. My earliest memories, her kneeling with pins in her mouth, or shears in her hands or sitting at the machine with her foot to the pedal, the material seeming to fly between the metal jaws of the machine. Have I swapped her for him in doing this? Her concerned with concealing the body. Him preoccupied with revealing it. And me, once again, only a ghost of each.

(Post 36 of this ongoing project. Double posting because I missed a few days and felt like it.)