What is Vinegar?
Morning.
From the window of the Piccolo, I see smoke rising from the chimney down below.
A trolley full of wood, a cup of tea.
100 degrees.
200.
Afternoon.
It begins to rain, it feels safe with the rain. The quiet sounds of fire.
Questions are raised by the kiln.
What is vinegar?
Something fermented to do with sugar?
Is blue a refraction of light?
How is it?
Is everything a construct?
Questions find their answers, almost.
Steve has arrived.
What is Steve?
400 degrees.
500.
600.
Time can be measured in the climbing heat from the kiln, radiating like heat from a sun. We sit either side of the kiln to stay cool, open a beer.
Inside the pots are glowing, listening, dancing. Braced for what’s to come.
Structured stoking and a mirror is introduced. At some point cone 06 goes down and the moon comes up.
1000.
We could be done in an hour or so but decide not to be and random-stoke while the music starts up, guided by the plant, mysteriously mainlining the universe through a keyboard. Some kind of two-way frequency that aids the firing on a spiritual level, perhaps and definitely, simultaneously.
We are all here, right now, in this moment.
Sam, Paul, Laurie, Callum, Riyah, Andrew, Karen, Lorraine, Kieran, Chrissie, Carmel, Carolyn, Steve, Paul C, Riccardo and me.
In pockets of silence, the kiln’s low roar is ever-present. Flames burst from the mouth of the fire box, flames lick at the night sky. Inferno is a beautiful word and is happening.
It’s almost time.
Musicians are summoned, we need you to bring it home.
A bucket of soda, nasturtiums & daysies, the music builds and rolls and time no longer exists.
Soda is inserted and tipped and the fire bursts from every crack and orifice of the old Rollo. Again, soda, again and again, in a feverish midnight crescendo.
And it’s done.
We stand back up on the bank and in the roaring silence we light a Gudang and watch the flames. In the same dream, tonight.
I remember thinking this human experience is so strange sometimes and so wonderful.
Long may we roam.
