Ordinary Prediction
November 29, 2009
If we organize ourselves, if we understand time management, we have to understand prediction. We consider what must be done, consider the likely outcomes, and consider the time involved. Then we set out a plan and try to achieve it and make contingency plans to deal with possible issues that might arise.
That’s prediction. We are our own diviners.
We make our own self-fulfilling prophesies each day. A great part of the I Ching then, is not mysterious. It’s a tool and it augments the ordinary abilities we exercise every day.
Sometimes, though, our goals are difficult to achieve. At times, our goals may conflict with principles or values we may have. We wrestle with difficult problems. We wonder what to do. That’s where the I Ching can provide some value. It gives us a feeling of guidance as we grope in the dark.
Classic Versus the Individual
November 29, 2009
Hexagram 22 of the I Ching is Adornment. The trigrams show fire below a mountain. Might that just not be the kilns for the pottery we’ve been discussing?
But I want to talk about something a little different. I want to talk about classical versus avant garde in creativity. I can remember being in both art classes and writing classes and finally being able to demonstrate some technique from the masters we had been studying. In mathematics, if you can master the same equations as a past genius, it’s a good thing. In art, being able to sing, paint, or write like the masters usually invites scorn from the teachers. Yes, they will say, and then ask: what can you do?
That got taken even further by my high school art teacher. “God can already make a tree better than you can. Why are you trying to copy it?”
Think about the various painting movements. No serious art professional paints in the Romantic, Cubist, Surrealist, Impressionist, or Abstract Expressionist styles. Or take jazz. A student might memorize all of Charlie Parker or John Coltrane’s solos, but that won’t make a career. The odd thing is that these great movements, held up to us as high points in art and culture, belong to their time. We’re expected to find our own way.
The hell of it is that if you’re truly original, who will recognize what you’re doing? If you’re truly truly different, no one will get it.
It takes a long time to go back through all the history of whatever art you’re learning. It’s tempting to try to be classical, a copier of the old masters. Without a doubt, even mastering that may be impossible. I certainly will never be an Oscar Peterson, a Pablo Picasso, or a Su Dongpo. But the way to art is through great masters like them. It requires a lifetime of study, a lifetime of absorption, and then a determination of what is unique in the artist.
It comes down to the individual and the work that is done. Then that is like a fire below a mountain, that is the attempt to scale that mountain and find the peak that is yours alone.
Opportunities for Disaster
November 28, 2009
My mother told me she once counted at least thirteen times in the course of making a bowl when something could go wrong. From the first throwing to the final glazing and firing of the bowl, there were many points where something could go wrong.
Even in the final firing, a bowl can explode, breaking itself and ruining the bowls around it. That’s not all. There might not be enough air. The glaze might be too thick and run, or it might be to thin and burn away in the firing. The bowl might warp. There can also be accidents afterwards. Dropping it, chipping it—there are plenty of opportunities to ruin a bowl.
Then again, even if the bowl is in good condition, it might not be beautiful.
If all the factors come together, and the bowl is perfect, it goes out into life and away from its maker to be treasured by another. But the fragility of a bowl is part of its charm. A ceramic bowl is sturdy if cared for, but every user knows a bowl can be broken. The care and attention needed is part of how the bowl is valued.
Isn’t it odd that a ceramic bowl can last a thousand years, never leak, and yet it can be broken in an instant?
Glazing
November 28, 2009
Once a bowl has been fired, it’s called stoneware. A normal clay flowerpot is an example of ceramics that have no glaze. But for most of the bowls made for personal use, glazing can add beauty.
Glazes in their raw state look nothing like the finished color. A glaze that might be a lovely blue-green will look like gray sludge. A glaze with the potential to be a brilliant red might look like medicine for diarrhea. You have to know how it will look after it’s fired, and glazing is more a matter of guesswork, supposition, and experimentation than it is a painterly composing of colors. That’s why many potters have samples,—flat pieces of clay they’ve glazed with different colors—to guide them.
You can dip the bowl into the glaze, pour the glaze into the bowl and swirl it around, brush it on—though the viscosity of the glaze may not allow this—or spray it on. No matter what, you’re not glazing based on what you see, but based on what you try to predict it to be. You won’t know until you fire it.
Isn’t life that way too? If you have experience, you have to predict the outcome. As we’re discussing the I Ching, let’s not think prediction is something otherworldly. Any craftsperson, especially one working blind like a potter, uses prediction as a matter of
Firing
November 25, 2009
When I was a boy, I saw my mother blown off her feet by an exploding kiln. Being an artist was no easy thing.
A bowl that has been allowed to dry must still be fired in a kiln. If fired correctly, it vitrifies, meaning that it will hold water. The bowls are stacked in the kiln on ceramic shelves, each layer improvised by resting the heavy shelves on ceramic columns of various heights. Firing can take hours, and in the famous hillside kilns of Asia, they sometimes took days.
The potter places cones—narrow ceramic wedges that will melt and droop at a predetermined temperature—in the kiln. During the firing, small peepholes are opened to see these cones, now in an atmosphere orange-hot. When they finally droop, the kiln is turned off. It takes hours more for the kiln to cool. If a kiln is opened too soon, the sudden rush of cool air will make the bowls contract too quickly and they will break.
Further disappointments often happen when a kiln is unstacked. The worse situation is when a bowl shatters, sending shards like shrapnel into neighboring bowls. Or maybe a shelf broke or fell. In the best of situations though, there is the magic of holding a bowl one has been laboring on for so long. Its weight and shape become a pleasure and a great satisfaction.
Patience. It’s such a hard thing. But if we pay attention to the work we do and the secrets of that work, then patience is a practical thing.
The Foot of a Bowl
November 24, 2009
Look at many of the great bowls in the world—the Song dynasty bowl, the raku tea bowl, the porcelain wine bowl—and they will have a foot. This is raised rim on the bottom of the bowl that holds it above the table.
There are many reasons for this. Evenness and steadiness for one. Practicality for another—many people can hold a hot bowl by the foot and the rim, avoiding the hot body of the bowl. And it’s beautiful. The body of the bowl can seem to float above a tabletop, thereby giving it grace and delicacy.
The foot on a ceramic bowl is carved and not thrown when the clay is wet. When the bowl has been made and is the right height and the walls are the right thickness, it’s put aside to dry overnight. There’s a lesson in patience itself. No bowl is made instantly.
The next day, it’s “leather hard.” That means it’s still damp but firm enough to handle. The bowl is put onto the wheel upside down and held in place with lumps of clay. While the wheel turns, the potter carves away part of the bottom to shape the foot.
The potter had to leave enough to carve the foot, of course. There were a few times when I carved right through the bowl itself, ruining it. You can’t test, you can’t see, because the bowl is temporarily anchored upside down. You just have plan and you have to know. If you’re successful, though, you will hold the complete form of your bowl in your hands.
In the same way, wisdom and right action are not far away. They can be held in your hands.
Centering
November 23, 2009
There’s a lot of talk about centering, like it’s some mystical trick. Try throwing a pot. There’s nothing mystical about it, but it isn’t easily mastered either.
Throwing a pot requires making the clay a perfectly centered cylinder with your hands. You know it when the clay is centered. Or, more accurately, you feel it when the clay is centered, because it’s slipping through your hands evenly and without resistance. It’s a delicate pleasure, a real confirmation.
It’s possible for a bowl that started off centered to go off-center later. Sometimes it means that the clay has been overworked and it’s sagging. Sometimes, it means that the potter wasn’t paying attention and his or her hands weren’t steady. Is it the clay’s fault? No, it’s the potter’s fault when a bowl doesn’t say on-center. The clay is just—well—clay. Mud dug out of the ground. If it doesn’t take shape, it’s the maker’s fault.
So it is with the changes of our lives. They are mere clay around us. Whether we make the changes around us into anything meaningful is a matter of how centered we are, and whether we work things within the limits of what they can do. People are called fantastic merely because they understand this principle.
Throwing a Bowl
November 22, 2009
Making pottery, or in the potter’s terms, throwing pots on a wheel, happens to represent all eight trigrams of the I Ching. Heaven is the emptiness of the bowl’s interior and the creativity of the potter. Earth is the clay used to make it, but also the idea that what we need in life is given to us. Water is crucial to making clay and pottery. Fire is the kiln. Thunder is the risk of breakage. Wind is the air needed to dry the pottery and to fire the kiln (since Wind also represents wood, there’s even a reference to the wood used to fire kilns before gas came to be used). Mountain is the act of throwing, of pulling up the clay into a tall cylinder, of the act of something taking concrete form, and it is a reminder of the traditional sites of kilns. Lake, in the sense of pooling and marshes, represents both the place where much clay can be found, as well as the recycling of scrap clay in vats of watery sludge.
My mother was a potter, and I grew up in a potter’s studio.
Throwing a bowl began with preparation. It meant kneading clay until it was even and had no air bubbles. An air bubble embedded in the clay wall meant it could burst in the kiln, ruining the pot. Unevenness in moisture meant that one part of the bowl might sag and be lopsided. A lump in the clay might catch in the hands and make a bulge or even a tear in the clay. Dirty clay would mean a blemish that would show in the finished pot.
While the wheel was spinning, I threw a ball of clay into the center of a plaster “bat” or platform anchored to the wheel by pieces of clay. Dipping my hands in water, the ball had to first be shaped into a cylinder, then a tower, then something like a mushroom, and then back to a cylinder. This made the clay pliable. Only then might I begin to push into the interior, creating the space that meant a bowl.
I had to go at the pace of the clay. Squeeze it too hard, before the bowl made a revolution would mean a pinched and uneven section that would only throw things off when it passed beneath my hands again. Taking too long would allow the clay to tire, and there would be no helping a sagging bowl. Then there was the issue of evenness. I had to find the right, ideal thickness to the clay wall. Ideally, the bowl itself was as thin as was needed for its height, the wall at the base thicker, tapering to a delicate—but not fragile—rim.
There are many times when I have forgotten these lessons, and try to push things harder than they’ll go. But if I prepare correctly, go at the “pace of the clay,” and, of course, stay centered, then there’s a chance of success.
Pottery
November 21, 2009
My mother was a potter. I grew up in a ceramics studio, and learning how to throw pots was part of just being a kid. Whenever I wanted, I could play with clay, make things, and have them fired.
In time, I learned to throw pottery, and the lessons I learned there apply to nearly everything:
The success of the final pot depended on the very first step and every other step being right.
Even if you did everything right, the pot could still shatter in the firing, or you could drop it, or you could just have jerk of the hand at an inopportune time and put your thumb right through it.
And if everything went right and there was no technical mishap, it didn’t guarantee a beautiful bowl.
How true that is of everything. It’s hard to remember that everything we put into a venture counts, and that even though we work very hard, misfortune can still occur. When a bowl failed in the making, my mother through it into a bin filled with water. The clay dissolved, and was recycled. Perhaps something that went on to become a beautiful bowl has been made from clay that had been a failed vessel before.
The Violin
November 20, 2009
The violin happens to express the principles of the I Ching perfectly.
Let’s take the bow, so often overlooked, as our starting point. Everyone talks about the wonders of a great violin, say, a Stradivarius, but no one speaks much of the bow. Yet without a bow, the violin could not make its full range of sound.
In turn, the bow cannot make music without the violin. The violin and the bow need one another in order to function, just as heaven and earth need one another. Heaven, like the bow, is a creative force, absolutely necessary, and yet completely impotent without its counterpart. Earth has the potential for limitlessly fertile wealth, just as a violin can bring forth the richest music—but it cannot even begin without heaven.
Thus, the violin itself is the very model of what the Daoists most hold dear: emptiness. The violin contains a void, and it is that very void that makes the most excellent music possible.
On another level, the musician cannot make violin music without his instrument, and the violin cannot make music without its player. The parallel and the pairing are the same. So much is understandable, if we simply see the yin and yang of it.
