Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person / Edition 2

by Mary Caroline Richards

Overview

A flowing collection of poetry that is also a guide for life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819562005
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1989
Edition description:	25th Anniversary Edition
Pages:	187
Sales rank:	545,170
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

MARY CAROLINE RICHARDS is a potter, teacher, and poet. She received her doctorate in English from the University of California at Berkeley, and has been a member if the faculty at the universities of California and Chicago, Black Mountain College, and the City College of New York. She is author also of The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (Wesleyan 1973) and Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Wesleyan 1980). Her home us in Kimberton, Pensylvania. MATTHEW FOX, a Dominican priest, is founder and director of The Institute in Culture and Creation-Centered Spirituality in Oakland, California.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Centering as Dialogue

CENTERING: that act which precedes all others on the potter's wheel. The bringing of the clay into a spinning, unwobbling pivot, which will then be free to take innumerable shapes as potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts. It is like a handclasp between two living hands, receiving the greeting at the very moment that they give it. It is this speech between the hand and the clay that makes me think of dialogue. And it is a language far more interesting than the spoken vocabulary which tries to describe it, for it is spoken not by the tongue and lips but by the whole body, by the whole person, speaking and listening. And with listening too, it seems to me, it is not the ear that hears, it is not the physical organ that performs that act of inner receptivity. It is the total person who hears. Sometimes the skin seems to be the best listener, as it prickles and thrills, say to a sound or a silence; or the fantasy, the imagination: how it bursts into inner pictures as it listens and then responds by pressing its language, its forms, into the listening clay. To be open to what we hear, to be open in what we say ...

There is a joke that always amuses me whenever I think of it. You may know it too. A man and woman have stayed happily married for years. Nobody can understand how they do it. Everybody else is getting divorced or separated — suffering the agonies of marital estrangement. A friend asks the husband of the lucky pair how they have been able to make a go of it. What's the secret of their success? "Oh," answers the husband, "it's very simple. We simply divide up the household problems. My wife makes all the minor decisions and I make all the major decisions. No friction!" "I see," says the friend, "and what are the minor decisions your wife makes, for example; and the major decisions, which are they?" "Well," answers the husband, "my wife makes all the little decisions like where shall we send our son to college, shall we sell the house, should we renew our medical insurance, and, uh ... and then I take the big ones: like Should Red China Join the United Nations, Should the United States Disarm Unilaterally, Is Peace Possible ...?"

I think this is a good joke because it takes a warm and humorous view of what is exactly the task of a marriage: a marriage of one person with another, or a marriage within one person of what seem to be separate concerns, and yet unless both are managed well, one's life or one's marriage tends to be wobbly indeed. Craftsmen live with a special immediacy in the double realms of these concerns: the questions of technique and the questions of meaning. Where shall I attach the handle to this pitcher? Shall I decorate this surface or let the clay stand clean? How thin? How thick? as well as What is a potter? What is the relation of pottery to poetry? What is the meaning of impermanence? When is a pot not a pot? What is freedom? What is originality? Are there rules?

I will now act as husband and wife to these dilemmas. I will answer these questions:

Where should I attach the handle to this pitcher? The question here lies in the "should." What does it mean, "should"? What kind of handle do I want? I don't know, I don't know. What does it mean, "I don't know"? It means that there are many different kinds of considerations, and I don't know how to satisfy them all. I want the handle to be strong enough to support the weight of the pitcher when it is filled. I want to be able to get my hand through it. I want it to be placed so that it does not weaken the wall and crack the pot, and so that the balance of the pitcher is good in pouring. I want it to make a beautiful total shape. I want it to be my handle at the same time that I want to please my customer, my friends, my critics, whomever. And in another impulse I don't care about any of these things: I want it to be a complete surprise. Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. So if the handle does not satisfy any of the above requirements, the pot may have a certain marvelous charm, an original image: a cracked pitcher that carries in it the magic of the self-forgetful impulse which in a rage of joy and irreverence stuck the handle on in something of the spirit in which we pin the tail on the donkey blindfolded. A glee, an energy, that escapes from all those questions-and-answers, thumbs its nose, stands on the ridgepole, and crows like a cock for its own dawning.

What is it all about? These different moods sweep through us. How much authority should we give them? To be solemn to be merry to be chaste to be voluptuous to be reserved to be prodigal to be elegant to be vulgar to be tasteful to be tasteless to be useful to be useless to be something to be nothing to be alive is to live in this weather.

A pot should this, and a pot should that — I have little patience with these prescriptions. I cannot escape paradox when I look deep into things, in the crafts as well as in poetry in metaphysics or in physics. In physics, matter is immaterial. The physical world, it turns out, is invisible, inaudible, immeasurable; supersensible and unpredictable. Law exists; and yet freedom is possible. In metaphysics, life and death in the commonplace sense collaborate in rhythms which sustain life. The birth of the new entails the death of the old, change; and yet the old does not literally die, it lives on, transformed. In ancient mystery religions, initiation for life required a ritual death. In poetry, in metaphor which is its instrument, the opposites also fuse: for example, I once wrote a very short poem, in the style of the Japanese haiku. It was entitled "Snow." And it went like this:

White moths in crazy mobs hunt everywhere the flame of the winter sun.

Why do I write about moths and call the poem "Snow"? Snow is crystalline, mineral, inert. Moths are alive, fluttering, impelled. The snow melts in the sun, dies. Turns to water, symbol of life. In the swirling snow I see the realm of life, not with my senses but with what you might call my supersenses: supersensible life. Life seeking life, the sun. Seeking light. The cold seeking the warm. The instinct seeking its transformation. Physical weather as the image of the dance of life; the quest, even in the heart of winter; the glorious sun making us ecstatic to burn ourselves alive in its energy, to worship at the center.

At the center. Pottery as metaphysics. Centering. How all these thoughts and experiences create a sense of an enormous cosmic unity, a sense of a quiet inner unity, a unity within me, child of that vast single god-sea, that unity, wherein we swim. In pottery, as my first teacher Robert Turner said, the toughest thing to learn comes at the very beginning, if you are learning to throw on the potter's wheel. The centering of the clay. It took me seven years before I could, with certainty, center any given piece of clay. Another person might center the clay the first time he sat down to it. His task then might be to allow the centered clay to live into a form which it would itself declare. My task was to learn how to bring in the flying images, how to keep from falling in love with a mistake, how to bring the images in, down, up, smoothly, centered, and then to allow them the kind of breath they cannot have if all they know how to be is passionate or repressed.

But of course we have to be passionate. That is to say, when we are, we must be able to be. We must be able to let the intensity — the Dionysian rapture and disorder and the celebration of chaos, of potentiality, the experience of surrender — we must be able to let it live in our bodies, in our hands, through our hands into the materials we work with. I sense this: that we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons. We come to know ourselves, and others, through the images we create in such moods. These images are disclosures of ourselves to ourselves. They are life-revelations. If we can stay "on center" and look with clear-seeing eyes and compassionate hearts at what we have done, we may advance in self-knowledge and in knowledge of our materials and of the world in its larger concerns.

The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church. The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; "art" is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium.

Craft, as you may know, comes from the German word Kraft, meaning power or strength. As Emerson said, the law is: "Do the thing, and you shall have the power. But they who do not the thing, have not the powers." We can't fake craft. It lies in the act. The strains we have put in the clay break open in the fire. We do not have the craft, or craftsmanship, if we do not speak to the light that lives within the earthly materials; this means ALL earthly materials, including men themselves.

There is a wonderful legend in Jewish Hasidism that in the beginning when God poured out his grace, man was not able to stand firm before the fullness and the vessels broke and sparks fell out of them into all things. And shells formed around them. By our hallowing, we may help to free these sparks. They lie everywhere, in our tools, in our food, in our clothes ... A kind of radiance, an emanation, a freedom, something that fills our hearts with joy and gratitude no matter how it may strike our judgment! There is something within man that seeks this joy. That knows this joy. Joy is different from happiness. I am not talking about happiness. I am talking about joy. How, when the mind stops its circling, we say YES, YES to what we behold.

Another picture from which I draw inspiration: Robert Turner, sitting at the potter's wheel in our shop at Black Mountain College, giving a demonstration. He was centering the clay, and then he was opening it and pulling up the walls of the cylinder. He was not looking at the clay. He had his ear to it. He was listening. "It is breathing," he said; and then he filled it with air.

There are many marvelous stories of potters in ancient China. In one of them a noble is riding through a town and he passes a potter at work. He admires the pots the man is making: their grace and a kind of rude strength in them. He dismounts from his horse and speaks with the potter. "How are you able to form these vessels so that they possess such convincing beauty?" "Oh," answers the potter, "you are looking at the mere outward shape. What I am forming lies within. I am interested only in what remains after the pot has been broken."

It is not the pots we are forming, but ourselves. That is the husband's concern. The wife's: Will it hold water? Can I cook in it?

In a book entitled Zen Flesh Zen Bones, there is a section called "Centering." The editor, Paul Reps, tells us it is a transcription of ancient Sanskrit manuscripts. It presents teaching, still alive in Kashmir and parts of India after more than four thousand years, that may well be the roots of Zen Buddhism. The editor, plainly reserving for himself the major questions, ends his introduction with these words: "The problem of our mind, relating conscious to preconscious awareness, takes us deep into everyday living. Dare we open our doors to the source of our being? What are flesh and bones for?" I am a question-asker and a truth-seeker. I do not have much in the way of status in my life, nor security. I have been on quest, as it were, from the beginning. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me: no ambition, no interest in tenure, always on the march, changing every seven years, from landscape to landscape. Certain elements were constant: the poetry, the desire for relationship, the sense of voyage. But lately I have developed also a sense of destination, or destiny. And a sense that if I am to be on quest, I must expect to live like a pilgrim; I must keep to the inner path. I must be able to be whoever I am.

For example, it seemed strange to me, as to others, that, having taken my Ph.D. in English, I should then in the middle of my life, instead of taking up a college professorship, turn to the art of pottery. During one period, when people asked me what I did, I was uncertain what to answer; I guessed I could say I taught English, wrote poetry, and made pottery. What was my occupation? I finally gave up and said "Person."

Having been imbued with the ordinary superstitions of American higher education, among which is the belief that something known as the life of the mind is more apt to take you where you want to go than any other kind of life, I busied myself with learning to practice logic, grammar, analysis, summary, generalization; I learned to make distinctions, to speculate, to purvey information. I was educated to be an intellectual of the verbal type. I might have been a philosophy major, a literature major, a language major. I was always a kind of oddball even in undergraduate circles, as I played kick-goal on the Reed College campus with President Dexter Keezer. And in graduate school, even more so. Examinations tended to make me merry, often seeming to me to be some kind of private game, some secret ritual compulsively played by the professors and the institution. I invariably became facetious in all the critical hours. All that solemnity for a few facts! I couldn't believe they were serious. But they were. I never quite understood it. But I loved the dream and the reality that lay behind those texts and in the souls of my teachers. I often felt like a kind of fraud, because I suspected that the knowledge I was acquiring and being rewarded for by academic diploma was wide wide of the truth I sensed to live somewhere, somewhere. I felt that I knew little of real importance; and when would the day come that others would realize it too, and I would be exposed? I have had dream after dream in which it turns out that I have not really completed my examinations for the doctorate and have them still to pass. And I sweat with anxiety. A sense of occupying a certain position without possessing the real thing: the deeper qualifications of wisdom and prophecy. But of course it was not the world who exposed me, it was my dreams. I do not know if I am a philosopher, but if philosophy is the love of wisdom, then I am a philosopher, because I love wisdom and that is why I love the crafts, because they are wise.

I became a teacher quite by chance. Liked it, found in education an image through which I could examine the possibilities of growth, of nourishment, of the experiences that lead to knowledge of nature and of self. It was a good trade to be in if you were a question-asker.

But the trouble was that though the work absorbed my mind, it used very little else. And I am by now convinced that wisdom is not the product of mental effort. Wisdom is a state of the total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience of meaning that can voice itself as wise action. It is not enough to belong to a Society of Friends who believe in nonviolence if, when frustrated, your body spontaneously contracts and shoots out its fist to knock another man down. It is in our bodies that redemption takes place. It is the physicality of the crafts that pleases me: I learn through my hands and my eyes and my skin what I could never learn through my brain. I develop a sense of life, of the world of earth, air, fire, and water — and wood, to add the fifth element according to Oriental alchemy — which could be developed in no other way. And if it is life I am fostering, I must maintain a kind of dialogue with the clay, listening, serving, interpreting as well as mastering. The union of our wills, like a marriage, it is a beautiful act, the act of centering and turning a pot on the potter's wheel; and the sexual images implicit in the forming of the cone and opening of the vessel are archetypal; likewise the give-and-take in the forming of a pot out of slabs, out of raw shards, out of coils; the union of natural intelligences: the intelligence of the clay, my intelligence, the intelligence of the tools, the intelligence of the fire.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person"
by .
Copyright © 1989 Mary Caroline Richards.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition by Matthew Fox
Introduction to the Second Edition
A Foreword: The Arithmetic, the Bush, and the Plan
Centering as Dialogue
Centering as Transformation
Poetry
Pedagogy
Ordeal by Fire: Evolution of Person Recovery of Manhood

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"What shall we do with our emotions? Suffer them, I hear her saying. The subject she teaches isn't listed in the catalogues. Sooner or later we know we're studying with her. How is she and where? I am okay and growing, and trying to concentrate on really carrying this through. It ain't easy, or comfortable, but here we are, right? Not only the Devil, but the Lord, too, is on earth and doing His work beautifully."—John Cage

John Cage

"What shall we do with our emotions? Suffer them, I hear her saying. The subject she teaches isn't listed in the catalogues. Sooner or later we know we're studying with her. How is she and where? I am okay and growing, and trying to concentrate on really carrying this through. It ain't easy, or comfortable, but here we are, right? Not only the Devil, but the Lord, too, is on earth and doing His work beautifully."

Editorial Reviews

"This book, in its form and in its content, seems almost without precedent. Its style flows directly from an intensity, an honesty, and a frankness which are rare. It is a poem, a sutra, a tract, a confession, a revelation, a guide to art and life . . . In my opinion this is not merely a good book, it is a great book"—Daniel Rhodes, Crafts Horizons

"What shall we do with our emotions? Suffer them, I hear her saying. The subject she teaches isn't listed in the catalogues. Sooner or later we know we're studying with her. How is she and where? I am okay and growing, and trying to concentrate on really carrying this through. It ain't easy, or comfortable, but here we are, right? Not only the Devil, but the Lord, too, is on earth and doing His work beautifully."—John Cage

From the Publisher