#3: Will It Go 'Round in Circles

Oct 8, 2021

Happy Friday!

Welcome back to Soup Season! I hope you’re feeling warm and well-nourished. If I had to describe this essay as a soup, I’d go with a creamy tomato basil, refreshing, familiar, and a little tangy. Bon appétit!

Also, a brief announcement: I’m going to start playing around with release times for this newsletter. I don’t like the idea of a Sunday newsletter, because I’m an extreme procrastinator and, as much as I enjoy this project, I don’t want my weekends to be consumed with it. However, so many people have mentioned that Sunday is the ideal newsletter release day. And there’s nothing like a good habit to break a bad one. So next week’s newsletter will be arriving in your inbox on Sunday morning instead.

I'm turning 32 very soon and lately, I've been thinking a lot about my future. I've always had a vision of myself, in old age, sitting by a body of water and watching the sunset. Sometimes it's a beach and sometimes it's a lake, but it's the image of my life that has altered the least since I began imagining a future at all.

I have no such vision for life in my 30s—or my 40s and 50s, for that matter.

I'm thinking maybe my thirties will be my hobbyist era. Last year, I got a sewing machine from my mom that I have yet to use. A few months ago, I dug my old trumpet out of the attic but have played it just a handful of times since. The futon in my office is covered in naked pillow inserts because I have yet to make the zippered pillows I’ve planned. To top it all off, in the corner of my living room, a fat stack of peel and stick tiles, with which I plan to re-do the bathroom and kitchen floors, has been collecting dust since March.

So, I'm off to a great start.

raina @quakerraina

POV I’m your wife and I love projects

I also started taking a pottery class, something I’ve always wanted to do. During the lockdown, I became obsessed with this program, The Great Pottery Throwdown, on HBO Max. It's almost the same format as The Great British Bake Off and just like Bakeoff, its charm is in its complete lack of manufactured drama. In both, the drama is baked into the process. (Sorry, not sorry.)

I'm fascinated by pottery's ancientness. Through pottery, I sense a connection with a common human heritage. Did you know that the oldest-known ceramic sculpture, found in Europe, dates back to 39,000 B.C.? The oldest-known pottery vessels (cups, bowls, pitchers, etc.) were found in Japan and date back to 12,000 B.C. While I’m wedging the clay I wonder how many of my ancestors were potters. Can I somehow channel that talent? If trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, what else might be?

Unfortunately, I think I did not inherit the pottery gene if such a thing exists. I'm four classes into my pottery course and still can't center the clay properly.

Centering, the act of evenly distributing a mass of clay around the center of the wheel, is the first step in throwing pottery. If your clay isn't centered, you can't shape it on the wheel. It becomes lopsided, too thin in certain spots, and too thick in others. The excess bumps against your fingers as you try to shape the vessel, and if you try to pull the clay upward, it twists and tears.

Even if the clay is only a little off-center, and you still manage to throw a decent-looking vessel, a wonky pot causes problems down the line. Pottery is trimmed (the process of removing excess clay and adding a foot so that it can be fired in the kiln) on the wheel, and a lopsided pot can't be trimmed evenly. You might even trim right through it.

So, mastering the art of centering is every new potter's first concern. It's also the hardest thing to learn. In her book, Centering, M.C. Richards writes that it took her seven years to properly center anything, which makes me feel better about my own efforts.

Centering requires engaging the whole body. You have to hold your arm firmly against your body and press against the clay with the flat part of your palm, resisting the lumpy mound as it bumps against your arm. You have to keep your hands connected whenever you're touching the clay so that you can move them in a synchronous motion. In this way, hand connected to hand connected to arm connected to body, you remain constantly aware of your position. You steady yourself and, thus, steady the clay.

Centering, M.C. Richards argues, is not an act of force but a dialogue between the potter and the clay. You have to listen with your whole body to what the clay wants, to the clay's will. "Tensions in the fingers, in the arms and back, holding the breath—these things count."

During a recent bench session, a veteran potter reminded me to rest my arms against my body as I was struggling to center the clay. I'd been forcing the clay up and down, up and down for a few minutes with my arms out at the elbows, giving me no way of knowing whether I was pushing the clay or the clay was pushing me.

At that moment, I didn't know my arms weren't touching my body. I was totally unaware of them. I was going through the motions, so to speak, relying on brute force and my memory of our instructor's demonstration more than on any part of my body. In a sense, I was trying to shape the clay with my mind.

This happens to me often. When I concentrate, I lose touch with my body. It's not just when doing pottery or another physical activity. When I'm in what the productivity gurus call a "flow" state, I often sit hunched over at my desk, or lean heavily on one arm for hours on end. I'm hyperfocused on the task at hand, and as a result, I lose all awareness of how I'm sitting—a habit that has led to many back problems.

I think this kind of disembodiment happens to many people who spend their working days in their heads. Even during our off time, when engaging in "The Discourse" on Twitter, or listening to a podcast while trying to do five chores at once, or commuting on the subway, we spend as little time as possible in our bodies.

Though not a perfect analogy, this bodily alienation is not unlike industrial alienation, of workers from the products of their labor. Their bodies became tools, rather than the means of production, and they became parts of the machine. Only now, in the information age, the machine is a computer, and the tools are no longer our hands, they are our brains. So our bodies are at best, a neutral appendage, and at worst, a hindrance to our work. This is how we are trained to see them. This is why we optimize them, push them to their limits, and neglect them in favor of the work that must be done.

That creative expression is a necessary part of the human condition is not a new idea, but I think it’s important to acknowledge its primacy in our development. Richards spends much of Centering discussing the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and the idea that while we store knowledge and treat it like a commodity, wisdom is an embodied experience, driven by creative expression:

"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."

The creative process, Richards argues, is an act of transformation. It makes us wise. Creative experiences give us a sense of wholeness, "a kind of inner equilibrium, in which all our capacities have been brought into functioning as an organism." Those moments when we are completely centered—completely in tune with our mind, our body, and the object of our creation—represent a sort of ego death, in which all opposing forces are brought into communion with a force greater than the sum of its parts. "We center ourselves as we center the clay."

In this sense, pottery is not unlike meditation, or painting—or even sports. Centering focuses on pottery, poetry, and teaching, but all forms of creative expression involve embodiment of some kind. Have you seen those videos of KAWS painting a very long, very smooth, very even line in one fluid motion? Or, consider Simone Bile's description of the mind-body connection required to compete safely in high-level gymnastics, which seems to meet Richards's definition of centering.

kaws

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I think it's not a coincidence that some of the oldest homo sapiens artifacts are works of art. When considering the transformative potential of creative expression, that human advancement began with artistic expression seems only natural. It's through creative expression, whether cave paintings or pottery, that we come to know who we are, and what humanity is, and build the kind of wisdom that moves us forward.

There's a saying in pottery that to make a bowl, one asks not what is a bowl, but why is a bowl. A vessel is the embodiment of its function. A teapot, no matter how beautiful or ornate is not a teapot if it leaks, or fails to pour. A slab of clay is a plate if you eat off of it. Therefore, a vessel is not the clay itself but the invisible form inside—the very reason for the vessel's existence. The form of a vessel, then, is not created but realized. It expands out from the center until the clay is transformed, its purpose realized in every part.

This, Richards states will also be the story of humanity once we learn to center ourselves:

"When the human community finally knows itself, it will discover that it lives at that center. Men will be artists and craftsmen in their life and labor. They will live as a community in moral autonomy, each man his own judge, with a minimum of external governing laws. The common laws will be found to operate within each man so that when human beings become awake to their inner nature, they find that for the first time they know their neighbors. Communitas is built into the spirit of men. They have but to perceive it to create it."