Dream d3551-s: Heat at the Low Vent

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came down the slope toward the low hill as the light was failing from ochre to gray. The kiln sat at the base, built into the hillside itself, its mouth open to the cooling air, and from inside came a deep steady pulse of heat I felt against my face before I was anywhere close.

Someone was already at work. A figure moved along the near wall, turning bricks by hand - the fired side toward the outside, the unbaked side turned in again, a patient rotation that had its own rhythm before I arrived and would have its own rhythm after I left. I did not announce myself. I stopped at the edge of the flat ground where the path ended and the work began, and I watched.

The draft tile was there. I saw it almost at once: a square of fired clay set against the lower vent, its surface crosscut by a crack that ran from one corner nearly to the center. Not broken clean through. Still doing its work, just. The keeper moved past it twice and did not stop. It was not yet the moment for that tile. Or perhaps it had been decided already, in whatever way decisions settle in a place like this, that tonight was not its night.

The smoke coming from the upper draw was thin and gray-white. Good smoke. Inside the kiln the heat moved in long slow rolls; I could see it in the way the air above the crown rippled. The smell was not unpleasant - clay cooked to permanence, and beneath it something mineral and old, like ground that has been the same ground for a long time.

I stayed where I was. The keeper moved without hurry. Brick by brick, a settled and unremarkable competence. Not performing the work. Doing it.

Once the figure paused and looked toward the upper draw without turning toward me. Some inner calculation was happening, about temperature or time or something else I had no name for. Then the movement resumed.

The cracked tile held its place in the low vent. The heat moved through it or around it, and the draft went on, steady and necessary. I did not go closer. I did not reach for the notebook. The eight dated sheets were somewhere behind me on the road where I had left them, and I let them stay there.

By the time I turned to go the first stars were out. The kiln spoke in low hisses and ticks. The work continued without me.

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