primalmommy on tue 30 sep 03
Malcom wrote:
"The pottery made in Korea, under extreemly harsh economic conditions
(and so loved and imitated in Japan), and the equivalent pottery of
nothern Medieval Europe (imitated in the pottery of Casson); resulted
from economic and cultural conditions that would allow nothing
better. For modern, well educated Japanese,and Europeans to imitate
that type of unrefined pottery is not just silly, but a manifestation
of decadent tendencies. It is faking what in the originals was real."
Malcom, I had a much easier time reading this last post of yours. I
think your point of view is well argued and has validity, though I still
intend to argue with it ;0)
I think you maybe have not allowed for a reinterpretation of the word
"better", as our lives become further and further removed from our
instincts, and our own participation in the day to day of things like
making, cooking, growing, birthing. These things have been handed over
to technology, or factory, or the marketplace. Something echoes sadly in
us all in that hollow place where the work of daily living used to be.
What follows is a collection of examples, more related to my own
experience than to pottery... like the trash can metaphor, but all
intended to explain what I mean by the redefining of the word "better".
My grandparents had a gorgeous old victrola that served them well for
many years. Then they got a new, "better" plastic record player with
records. They shoved the victrola out of the attic window into a trailer
and hauled it to the dump, because the new one was "better". Granted,
technology has marched on from there, with improvements to sound quality
and so on, but they still sigh over that old victrola and what it would
be worth now. It had beauty and value unrelated to its technical
prowess.
Another: Somewhere along the line, medicine convinced women that they
were unqualified to give birth, or to midwife births, or to feed their
babies with the milk nature intended. It was better and more scientific
to hand the job over to a man with a medical degree, and give birth in
an operating room, with the woman drugged into a stupor. Smack the
newborn, put it in a plastic box with no human contact, give it a bottle
of scientific formula, because it could be measured and was "better"
than breastmilk. So the industry took over what nature had been handling
for tens of thousands of years. Never mind that it took days for babies
to recover from their mother's labor drugs; that women and babies had
little contact; that babies got none of the antibodies in breastmilk, or
the physical contact that kept them from feeling abandoned, and that
everybody's instincts were being overridden by a "better", more
efficient and controlled approach.
I'm not saying that the new (pottery, technology) is without value, or
implying any kind of either/or... hospital birthing has saved lives and
allowed for some "miracles" -- but we're rethinking the notion of
"better". Better for whom? In what instances? What have we lost, in our
attempt to control all the variables? (picture the tea bowl here, and
the greek vase.)
Some of us have questioned that kind of "better", and not just for the
sake of nostalgia. My peers and I have reclaimed midwives, breastmilk
and attachment parenting. Ironically, in cases of premature infants,
there was some concern about how to handle the situations in developing
nations that had neither the technology nor the electricity for infant
incubators... in desperation they tried "kangaroo care", or keeping the
preemie naked against the mother's skin (or grandma's, for breaks) with
heartbeat, body motions, breasts available, etc... Guess what? Those
babies survived better, grew faster and had less problems than the ones
in sterile incubators. Now we "developed nations" are making a switch to
kangaroo care.
I don't dismiss the irony of our longing for less technically perfect
days/objects... Pepperidge Farms (the cookie company) invented a machine
that would shape cookies randomly and irregularly, as if granny had
scraped them off the cookie sheet with her spatula. I don't see it as
pretentious as much as just sad.
I'm afraid in my last post I was a little "snippy"... I felt humanity
was being underestimated. But I am firmly in the camp of those who don't
equate modernity, technology, technical precision or symmetry with
"better". If you believe that we are, deep down, creatures of instinct,
with an inherited memory, perhaps part of our aesthetic is shaped by
ancient eyes that have found beauty in the lopsided curve of eggplant
and tuber, the fissures of mud cracks and glacial creeks, frost and
lightning and river ice, the accidental nature of nature in general. The
wonky old teabowls that have made my heart skip a beat have those
elements of accident and forces beyond our puny human ability to be
predictable, symmetrical, reproducible.
I'm not sure I had the background information to be superior or decadent
in my perspective. I like the processes of unpredicatability, Aerni's
flows and puddles of ash glaze, the crackle and smoke of naked raku, the
cool stuff that comes out of the pit fire... not because I am trying to
imitate my primal ancestors, but perhaps because my brain retains some
of their experience, coded in DNA: the way it satisfied my soul to root
cellar apples in fall, or satisfies my hands to pick berries, gather
nuts, haul home pumpkins to bake. Something in us remembers, perhaps...
a deep instinct, drowned out by the blather of media, the artificial
lighting, the habit of not listening to its whispers.
Maybe it's why some of us get the blues, or a burst of industriousness,
when the summer closes and the dark rolls in earlier.. for the farmers
that were my grand and great-grand and great-great grandparents, for
native peoples in this part of the world, for our ancestors back to the
ice age, winter meant some would not live to see spring.. meant if there
wasn't enough food stored and wood stacked, the babies and old people
would die.
I am long winded as always.. but meant only to illustrate that human
experience -- and the reaction to so called "primitive" pottery -- might
be much more complex than the formula you've presented.
Yours, Kelly in Ohio.. following my primal urges this season, with hoop
house and canning jars, gathering second hand sweaters, making the kids
slippers and blanket-sacks... gathering hickory nuts and making
applesauce, drying the last of the tomatoes, buying grain and beans in
bulk from the co-op... mixing chunks of local clay into my clay...
flicking redder terra sigs over light ones... making carved-gourd bowls
that are appealingly asymmetrical and mottled and flawed..
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