Katherine Bucknell - What You Will

She pulled up a tall stool and sat against the edge of it. As she outlined their forms and their faces, Gwen no longer wondered at all about the women on the vase. It didn’t seem to her as if the women had ever been real. She could remember that when she had been a student, her professors liked to discuss what could be found out about life in, say, fifth century BC Athens, by looking at what was depicted on a vase. Social history on the side of a ceramic object. She didn’t believe such a scene could be real. It came from inside someone’s head. The very place where people part ways with so-called reality.

What she believed was that the clay was real and that whoever had made the clay into a vase was real and that whoever had painted the decoration on the vase was also real. Otherwise it was more like decoration on an Easter egg: it was what the maker had thought of on the day – a pattern, a momentary conclusion, at best a recollection. This might look nice, the painter had thought. Pleasing his eye, pleasing his patron, pleasing his master if he was a slave. But whenever Gwen had tried to discuss this with her professors they had always explained in a remedial tone, Ah, but the Greeks weren’t like that. They weren’t interested in self-expression. They were craftsmen. And she had always wanted to insist, No, that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about self-expression. It’s just a practical fact about making something. It’s how it happens, if you concentrate at all. You have to abandon what you really

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