iandol on wed 27 nov 02
An interesting quote and very much in the W. Morris and Early Edwardian =
style of writing.
But it is something well known agricultural folklore. Better wines come =
from mature vines. They are the ones which have developed Roots. Fresh =
air and water are not enough to grow a fine wine. Real sustenance comes =
from the Bed Rock.
Apply this concept to the Ceramic arts of any culture.
Leach just had a round about way of getting to the point.
Best regards,
Ivor Lewis. Redhill, South Australia
Lee Love on sat 30 nov 02
----- Original Message -----
From: "iandol"
>Real sustenance comes from the Bed Rock.
I don't know if this is really true.
Most critics of Leach and Hamada have never read what they
wrote. They only "imagine" what they think these two people taught or go by
what other people say about them and those sources rarely take a serious look at
Leach and Hamada actually said. Where this is most obvious is when they try to
make Leach, Hamada or Yanagi say that we should all be copying the Japanese.
None of these fellows ever said anything like this.
Sometimes a culture will grow stagnant. Actually, there is not much
substance for living things in dead bedrock. The part of the earth that
gives sustenance to life is pretty mobile. It is the decomposition of mobile
things, (leaves, animals, decaying rock, water, air and sunshine), that makes
up the living soil of the earth that is only a very thin veneer on its surface.
If you look at how the Mingei movement came about, it wasn't because
of a "bedrock" culture, but it came from the new meetings of very different
cultures. The coming together of east and west was responsible for it. From
the beginning, what Leach and Hamada did' was by nature, international. If
you look at Hamada's museum here in Mashiko, you'll find objects in his
collection from every part of the world.
As much as Hamada gave to the West, I believe that what the West
gave to Hamada was equally important. What he learn from Leach and his 3
years at St. Ives, helped him develop an approach to his creative life that
transcended nationality or any specific culture.
Here his a little story from Kosho Uchiyama Roshi's book, _Opening
the Hand of Thought_:
How Does a Persimmon Become
Sweet?
"The persimmon has another characteristic that's very interesting, but
to understand it, you have to know something about he Oriental persimmon: There
are two types of persimmon trees, the sweet persimmon -- amagaki in Japanese --
and the astringent persimmon, called shibugaki. When you plant the seeds from a
sweet persimmon tree, all the saplings come up as astringent persimmon trees.
Now, if I said that if you planted seeds from a sweet persimmon, all the
saplings would become sweet persimmon trees, anyone could understand, but it
doesn't seem to work that way. Without exception, all the saplings planted from
sweet persimmon seeds are astringent. So now if you want to grow a sweet
persimmon tree, what do you do? Well, first you have to cut a branch from a
sweet persimmon tree, and then graft it onto an astringent tree. Then, in time,
the branch will bear sweet fruit.
What I always used to wonder about is how that first sweet persimmon
tree came about. If the saplings from the seeds from a sweet persimmon all come
up astringent, where did that first sweet persimmon come from? One day I had
the opportunity to ask a botanist who specializes in fruit trees, and he told me
this: First of all, the Oriental persimmon is an indigenous Japanese fruit,
it goes back many, many years. It takes many years to grow a sweet persimmon:
Even the fruit of a tree forty or fifty years old will be astringent! That
means we're talking about a tree that's at least one hundred years old. Around
that time, the first sweet branches on an astringent tree begin to ripen. Those
branches are then cut off the tree and are grafted onto a younger astringent
one. What took over one hundred years to grow on one tree is then transferred
to another one to continue there."
The same can happen with culture too, as long as we do not allow
ethnocentrically and bigotry to keep us from accepting the sweet branches of
knowledge from the world's great cultures.
--
Lee Love
Mashiko JAPAN Ikiru@hachiko.com
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