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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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clay
Now about clay: It turns out that there are two kind of people: hand-builders and throwers. (I'm talking about pottery here, people. Try and keep up.) M, as it turns out, is a thrower. I, of course, am a hand-builder. Or, at least, I think I'm a hand-builder. (In fact, I'm pretty sure I know that I am a hand-builder, if only because I've done it twice without ever feeling the same frustration that I felt after several weeks of throwing pots on a wheel. M is so talented that the instructor asked him when he had done this before. (M said after our first night's class that he must have been a potter in another life, and has since had dreams about pottery�though he didn't necessarily recognize them as being about pottery, my poor, repressed boy.) He throws beautiful shapes and can impose his will on the clay on a spinning wheel, which is something that I am not able to do (and wouldn't be able to do without a damn lot of patient practice, which I know I am not good at�patience and practice, that is). I can throw recognizable and nearly balanced bowls, but nothing that is extraordinary. M says that the freedom of hand-building frightens him. There are too many possibilities to things in hand-building. I say that the repetition of roundness is numbing. M wakes up with the shapes of pots on his mind. I wake up dreaming about infinitely possible things in clay: plates, jewelry, teapots, platters, bowls, bookends, cups. All of which are things that you can throw on a wheel, but which I am unable to imagine if I have to have the wheel as a tool in my repertoire. Hand-building is slow, but people all sit at the same table and some of them chat easily with each other, and people comment on and validate your work as you go along. It's easily social, whereas throwing seems so suspiciously individual. Two accomplished artists I was sitting near were talking yesterday as they worked about a woman whose husband was berating her for continuing to play an instrument with a symphony which only paid her $250 a performance. The woman was miserable that her husband wanted her to give up music for a more lucrative career. They artists agreed that it was a travesty that the man didn't recognize that if you are a creative person, that you must do creative things because your spirit depends on it. Several times, I also heard them discuss the limitations of the clay, and how you had to get to know the clay. One woman also said that you shouldn't get mad at the clay because then it would do what you wanted it to. The other, later, said that she never found clay fun. She loved it, but it wasn't fun. This led me to comment that you often learned more (about yourself, about creativity) from an activity that was not fun rather from one that was. One day of hand-building, and I made a platter, a box shaped like a Mayan pyramid, a bowl and started a cup.
More lies:
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