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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONUniting The Opposites
An Interview With M.C. Richards
Talk about art by artists usually bores me. Perhaps that's because I'm more interested in what art has to say about life than about art. But with Mary Caroline Richards such distinctions are moot: her art and her life are helplessly, elegantly entwined.
Richards — or M.C., as she is known — is a freelance potter, author, poet, and teacher. I remember my excitement years ago when I discovered her first book, Centering In Pottery, Poetry, And The Person. Here was a practical mystic, a stunningly original thinker who offered us the process of centering clay on a potter's wheel as a metaphor for centering the opposites in our lives:
"As you go out, you come in, you always come into center, bringing the clay into center; you press down, squeeze up, press one hand into the other, bringing your material into center.... We bring our self into a centering function, which brings it into union with all other elements. This is love. This is destruction of ego, in that its partialities are sacrificed to wholeness. Then the miracle happens: when on center, the self feels different: one feels warm..., in touch, the power of life a substance like an air in which one lives and has one's being with all other things, drinking it in and giving it off, at the same time quiet and at rest within it."
It is an eloquent book, unpredictable and persuasive. Eschewing allegiance to any dogma, Richards is deeply religious without the trappings. To be truly creative, she insists, we must embrace life in all its glorious and painful contradictions. This means being clear-eyed and unsentimental about ourselves. "The transformations that await us cost everything in the way of courage and sacrifice," she writes. "Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other."
Richards is also the author of The Crossing Point, a collection of her talks and writings, and Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education In America. She became interested in Steiner — the Austrian scientist and philosopher who founded the Waldorf schools and inspired innovations in other fields — because of her belief that education shouldn't sacrifice the imagination or a sense of the sacred.
Today, at seventy-one, Richards lives, teaches, and works at the Camphill Village for the Mentally Handicapped in Kimberton, Pennsylvania, which is based on Steiner's teachings. She was in North Carolina recently, to give a workshop at Duke University, and we had a chance to talk briefly. Though tired, she endured my questions patiently, her answers thoughtful, her large, graceful hands moving through the air to make a point. What authority in those hands; what wild freedom. When she took my hands in hers, to say goodbye, I felt as embraced as if we had hugged.
- Sy Safransky
(with thanks to R. Haven Bourque)
THE SUN: So many people talk these days of being "centered." Twenty-five years ago, when you wrote Centering, what did you mean by that term?
RICHARDS: "Centering" has become such jargon, connected with terminal states like "bliss" and "self-realization" and "peace." People peer at their navels and ask themselves, "Am I centered?" When someone asks if I'm centered, I really don't know what to say.
I use "centering" as a verb, to mean a continual process of uniting the opposites. Centering, for me, is the discipline of bringing in rather than leaving out; of saying yes to what is most holy as well as to what is most unbearable. The severity of that, as a discipline, is not widely understood; what is more commonly understood by the word "centering" is something much more trendy — something, I think, that addresses only one aspect of reality.
If I have given any originality to the term "centering," it's in the image of the potter's wheel. When you use a wheel, in order to center the clay, you move it both down and up; you widen and narrow; you have both the expanding consciousness and the focus. This is part of its gloriousness and its mystery, too — that it has both of those qualities, of being inward and outward.
In The Crossing Point, I take those opposites and connect them with another image, that of the lemniscate — the geometric form of the figure eight. You have a figure eight which is not a line, but a plane: if you run your finger around the outside of the top loop, then through the crossing point, your finger ends up on the inside of the bottom loop. You have this marvelous law of the continuity of the opposites — the inner and outer — without any break.
I think it's important for us to know that we are both inward and outward; that we live both in the soul-light within and the sun radiance without; that we are both earthly beings, with our feet on the ground, and beings of inspiration and imagination and weightlessness. We're both. That's our genius, and we must not be talked out of it. Of course, in the arts, one can particularly feel that. Anyone in the arts knows how much physical labor is involved and that you don't actually have the thing until it's made.
It takes a lot of work to bring dreams into physical expression. That's what makes the arts such a natural paradigm for what human beings are. We're artists, and life is an art. This connection between the vision and the practice is what makes it art; through the materials, the vision shines.
