These are excerpts from M.C. Richards’ Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, originally published in 1964 by Wesleyan University Press. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the book will be out this year, with a new introduction by M.C. Richards. (In it, she notes that if she were to write the book now, she would not use the masculine pronoun to designate persons of both sexes. “This would be changed,” she writes, “even as our consciousness has changed, has become more discriminating, more subtle, more conscientious.”)
— Ed.
Centering: that act which precedes all others on the potter’s wheel. The bringing of the clay into a spinning, unwobbling pivot, which will then be free to take innumerable shapes as potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts. It is like a handclasp between two living hands, receiving the greeting at the very moment that they give it. It is this speech between the hand and the clay that makes me think of dialogue. And it is a language far more interesting than the spoken vocabulary which tries to describe it, for it is spoken not by the tongue and lips but by the whole body, by the whole person, speaking and listening. And with listening too, it seems to me, it is not the ear that hears, it is not the physical organ that performs that act of inner receptivity. It is the total person who hears. Sometimes the skin seems to be the best listener, as it prickles and thrills, say to a sound or a silence; or the fantasy, the imagination: how it bursts into inner pictures as it listens and then responds by pressing its language, its forms, into the listening clay. To be open to what we hear, to be open in what we say . . .
There is a joke that always amuses me whenever I think of it. You may know it too. A man and woman have stayed happily married for years. Nobody can understand how they do it. Everybody else is getting divorced or separated — suffering the agonies of marital estrangement. A friend asks the husband of the lucky pair how they have been able to make a go of it. What’s the secret of their success? “Oh,” answers the husband, “it’s very simple. We simply divide the household problems. My wife makes all the minor decisions and I make all the major decisions. No friction!” “I see,” says the friend, “and what are the minor decisions your wife makes, for example; and the major decisions, which are they?” “Well,” answers the husband, “my wife makes all the little decisions, like where shall we send our son to college, shall we sell the house, should we renew our medical insurance, and, uh . . . and then I take the big ones, like Should Red China Join the United Nations, Should the United States Disarm Unilaterally, Is Peace Possible? . . .”
I think this is a good joke because it takes a warm and humorous view of what is exactly the task of a marriage: a marriage of one person with another, or a marriage within one person of what seem to be separate concerns, and yet unless both are managed well, one’s life or one’s marriage tends to be wobbly indeed. Craftsmen live with a special immediacy in the double realms of these concerns: the questions of technique and the questions of meaning. Where shall I attach the handle to this pitcher? Shall I decorate this surface or let the clay stand clean? How thin? How thick? as well as What is a potter? What is the relation of pottery to poetry? What is the meaning of impermanence? When is a pot not a pot? What is freedom? What is originality? Are there rules?
I will now act as husband and wife to these dilemmas. I will answer these questions:
Where should I attach the handle to this pitcher? The question here lies in the “should.” What does it mean, “should”? What kind of handle do I want? I don’t know, I don’t know. What does it mean, “I don’t know”? It means that there are many different kinds of considerations, and I don’t know how to satisfy them all. I want the handle to be strong enough to support the weight of the pitcher when it is filled. I want to be able to get my hand through it. I want it to be placed so that it does not weaken the wall and crack the pot, and so that the balance of the pitcher is good in pouring. I want it to make a beautiful total shape. I want it to be my handle at the same time that I want to please my customer, my friends, my critics, whomever. And in another impulse I don’t care about any of these things: I want it to be a complete surprise. Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. So if the handle does not satisfy any of the above requirements, the pot may have a certain marvelous charm, an original image: a cracked pitcher that carries in it the magic of the self-forgetful impulse which in a rage of joy and irreverence stuck the handle on in something of the spirit in which we pin the tail on the donkey blindfolded. A glee, an energy, that escapes from all those questions-and-answers, thumbs its nose, stands on the ridgepole, and crows like a cock for its own dawning.
What is it all about? These different moods sweep through us. How much authority should we give them? To be solemn to be merry to be chaste to be voluptuous to be reserved to be prodigal to be elegant to be vulgar to be tasteful to be tasteless to be useful to be useless to be something to be nothing to be alive is to live in this weather.
A pot should this, and a pot should that — I have little patience with these prescriptions.
In pottery, as my first teacher Robert Turner said, the toughest thing to learn comes at the very beginning, if you are learning to throw on the potter’s wheel. The centering of the clay. It took me seven years before I could, with certainty, center any given piece of clay. Another person might center the clay the first time he sat down to it. His task then might be to allow the centered clay to live into a form which it would itself declare. My task was to learn how to bring in the flying images, how to keep from falling in love with a mistake, how to bring the images in, down, up, smoothly, centered, and then to allow them the kind of breath they cannot have if all they know how to be is passionate or repressed.
But of course we have to be passionate. That is to say, when we are, we must be able to be. We must be able to let the intensity — the Dionysian rapture and disorder and the celebration of chaos, of potentiality, the experience of surrender — we must be able to let it live in our bodies, in our hands, through our hands into the materials we work with. I sense this: that we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons. We come to know ourselves, and others, through the images we create in such moods. These images are disclosures of ourselves to ourselves. They are life-revelations. If we can stay “on center” and look with clear-seeing eyes and compassionate hearts at what we have done, we may advance in self-knowledge and in knowledge of our materials and of the world in its larger concerns.
The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church. The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; “art” is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium.
Craft, as you may know, comes from the German word Kraft, meaning power or strength. As Emerson said, the law is: “Do the thing, and you shall have the power. But they who do not the thing, have not the powers.” We can’t fake craft. It lies in the act. The strains we have put in the clay break open in the fire. We do not have the craft, or craftsmanship, if we do not speak to the light that lives within the earthly materials; this means ALL earthly materials, including men themselves.
There is a wonderful legend in Jewish Hasidism that in the beginning when God poured out his grace, man was not able to stand firm before the fullness and the vessels broke and sparks fell out of them into all things. And shells formed around them. By our hallowing, we may help to free these sparks. They lie everywhere, in our tools, in our food, in our clothes. . . . A kind of radiance, an emanation, a freedom, something that fills our hearts with joy and gratitude no matter how it may strike our judgement! There is something within man that seeks this joy. That knows this joy. Joy is different from happiness. I am not talking about happiness. I am talking about joy. How, when the mind stops its circling, we say YES, YES to what we behold.
Another picture from which I draw inspiration: Robert Turner, sitting at the potter’s wheel in our shop at Black Mountain College, giving a demonstration. He was centering the clay, and then he was opening it and pulling up the walls of the cylinder. He was not looking at the clay. He had his ear to it. He was listening. “It is breathing,” he said; and then he filled it with air.
There are many marvelous stories of potters in ancient China. In one of them a noble is riding through a town and he passes a potter at work. He admires the pots the man is making: their grace and a kind of rude strength in them. He dismounts from his horse and speaks with the potter. “How are you able to form these vessels so that they possess such convincing beauty?” “Oh,” answers the potter, “you are looking at the mere outward shape. What I am forming lies within. I am interested only in what remains after the pot has been broken.”
We tend to think that strength is all-important, and yet we have a very shallow notion of what strength consists of. For unless our weaknesses play into our strengths we are not as supple as we should be.
I am a question-asker and a truth-seeker. I do not have much in the way of status in my life, nor security. I have been on quest, as it were, from the beginning. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me: no ambition, no interest in tenure, always on the march, changing every seven years, from landscape to landscape. Certain elements were constant: the poetry, the desire for relationship, the sense of voyage. But lately I have developed also a sense of destination, or destiny. And a sense that if I am to be on quest, I must expect to live like a pilgrim; I must keep to the inner path. I must be able to be whoever I am.
For example, it seemed strange to me, as to others, that, having taken my Ph.D. in English, I should then in the middle of my life, instead of taking up a college professorship, turn to the art of pottery. During one period, when people asked me what I did, I was uncertain what to answer; I guessed I could say I taught English, wrote poetry, and made pottery. What was my occupation? I finally gave up and said “Person.”
Having been imbued with the ordinary superstitions of American higher education, among which is the belief that something known as the life of the mind is more apt to take you where you want to go than any other kind of life, I busied myself with learning to practice logic, grammar, analysis, summary, generalization; I learned to make distinctions, to speculate, to purvey information. I was educated to be an intellectual of the verbal type. I might have been a philosophy major, a literature major, a language major. I was always a kind of oddball even in undergraduate circles, as I played kick-goal on the Reed College campus with President Dexter Keezer. And in graduate school, even more so. Examinations tended to make me merry, often seeming to me to be some kind of private game, some secret ritual compulsively played by the professors and the institution. I invariably became facetious in all the critical hours. All that solemnity for a few facts! I couldn’t believe they were serious. But they were. I never quite understood it. But I loved the dream and the reality that lay behind those texts and in the souls of my teachers. I often felt like a kind of fraud, because I suspected that the knowledge I was acquiring and being rewarded for by academic diploma was wide of the truth I sensed to live somewhere, somewhere. I felt that I knew little of real importance; and when would the day come that others would realize it too, and I would be exposed? I have had dream after dream in which it turns out that I have not really completed my examinations for the doctorate and have them still to pass. And I sweat with anxiety. A sense of occupying a certain position without possessing the real thing: the deeper qualifications of wisdom and prophecy. But of course it was not the world who exposed me, it was my dreams. I do not know if I am a philosopher, but if philosophy is the love of wisdom, then I am a philosopher, because I love wisdom and that is why I love the crafts, because they are wise.
I became a teacher quite by chance. Liked it, found in education an image through which I could examine the possibilities of growth, of nourishment, of the experiences that lead to knowledge of nature and of self. It was a good trade to be in if you were a question-asker.
But the trouble was that though the work absorbed my mind, it used very little else. And I am by now convinced that wisdom is not the product of mental effort. 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. It is not enough to belong to a Society of Friends who believe in nonviolence if, when frustrated, your body spontaneously contracts and shoots out its fist to knock another man down. It is in our bodies that redemption takes place. It is the physicality of the crafts that pleases me: I learn through my hands and my eyes and my skin what I could never learn through my brain. I develop a sense of life, of the world of earth, air, fire, and water — and wood, to add the fifth element according to Oriental alchemy — which could be developed in no other way. And if it is life I am fostering, I must maintain a kind of dialogue with the clay, listening, serving, interpreting as well as mastering. The union of our wills, like a marriage, it is a beautiful act, the act of centering and turning a pot on the potter’s wheel; and the sexual images implicit in the forming of the cone and opening of the vessel are archetypal; likewise the give-and-take in the forming of a pot out of slabs, out of raw shards, out of coils; the union of natural intelligences: the intelligence of the clay, my intelligence, the intelligence of the tools, the intelligence of the fire.
You don’t need me to tell you what education is. Everybody really knows that education goes on all the time everywhere all through our lives, and that it is the process of waking up to life. Jean Henri Fabre said something just about like that, I think. He said that to be educated was not to be taught but to wake up. It takes a heap of resolve to keep from going to sleep in the middle of the show. It’s not that we want to sleep our lives away. It’s that it requires certain kinds of energy, certain capacities for taking the world into our consciousness, certain real powers of body and soul to be a match for reality. That’s why knowledge and consciousness are two quite different things. Knowledge is like a product we consume and store. All we need are good closets. By consciousness I mean a state of being “awake” to the world throughout our organism. This kind of consciousness requires not closets but an organism attuned to the finest perceptions and responses. It allows experience to breathe through it as light enters and changes a room. When knowledge is transformed into consciousness and into will, ah then we are on the high road indeed. . . .
I took up pottery also, in a sense, by chance. Unforeseen opportunity joined with interest and readiness. For the materials and processes of pottery spoke to me of cosmic presences and transformations quite as surely as the pots themselves enchanted me. Experiences of the plastic clay and the firing of the ware carried more than commonplace values. Joy resonated deep within me, and it has stirred these thoughts only slowly to the surface. I have come to feel that we live in a universe of spirit, which materializes and de-materializes grandly; all things seem to me to live, and all acts to contain meaning deeper than matter-of-fact; and the things we do with deepest love and interest compel us by the spiritual forces which dwell in them. This seems to me to be a dialogue of the visible and the invisible to which our ears are attuned.
There was, first of all, something in the nature of the clay itself. You can do very many things with it, push this way and pull that, squeeze and roll and attach and pinch and hollow and pile. But you can’t do everything with it. You can go only so far, and then the clay resists. To know ourselves by our resistances — this is a thought first expressed to me by the poet Charles Olson.
And so it is with persons. You can do very many things with us: push us together and pull us apart and squeeze us and roll us flat, empty us out and fill us up. You can surround us with influences, but there comes a point when you can do no more. The person resists, in one way or another (if it is only by collapsing, like the clay). His own will becomes active.
This is a wonderful moment, when one feels his will become active, come as a force into the total assemblage and dynamic intercourse and interpenetration of will impulses. When one stands like a natural substance, plastic but with one’s own character written into the formula, ah then one feels oneself part of the world, taking one’s shape with its help — but a shape only one’s own freedom can create.
And the centering of the clay, of which I have spoken. The opening of the form. And the firing of the pot. This experience has deep psychic reverberations: how the pot, which was originally plastic, sets into dry clay, brittle and fragile, and then by being heated to a certain temperature hardens into stone. By natural law as it were, it takes its final form. Ordeal by fire. Then, the form once taken, the pot may not last, the body may perish; but the inner form has been taken, and it cannot break in the same sense.
In pottery, by developing sensitivity in manipulating natural materials by hand, I found a wisdom which had died out of the concepts I learned in the university: abstractions, mineralized and dead; while the minerals themselves were alive with energy and meaning. The life I found in the craft helped to bring to a new birth my ideals in education. Some secret center became vitalized in those hours of silent practice in the arts of transformation.
The experience of centering was one I particularly sought because I thought of myself as dispersed, interested in too many things. I envied people who were “single-minded,” who had one powerful talent and who knew when they got up in the morning what it was they had to do. Whereas I, wherever I turned, felt the enchantment: to the window for the sweetness of the air; to the door for the passing figures; to the teapot, the typewriter, the knitting needles, the pets, the pottery, the newspaper, the telephone. Wherever I looked, I could have lived.
It took me half my life to come to believe I was OK even if I did love experience in a loose and undiscriminating way and did not know for sure the difference between good and bad. My struggles to accept my nature were the struggles of centering. I found myself at odds with the propaganda of our times. One is supposed to be either an artist or a homemaker, by one popular superstition. Either a teacher or a poet, by a theory which says that poetry must not sermonize. Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism which claims either hand or head as the seat of true power. One is supposed to concentrate and not to spread oneself thin, as the jargon goes. And this is a jargon spoken by a cultural leadership from which it takes time to win one’s freedom, if one is not lucky enough to have been born free. Finally, I hit upon an image: a seed-sower. Not to worry about which seeds sprout. But to give them as my gift in good faith.
But in spite of my self-acceptance, I still clung to a concept of purity which was chaste and aloof from the fellowship of man, and had yet to center the image of a pure heart in whose bright warm streams the world is invited to bathe. A heart who can be touched and who stirs in response, bringing the whole body into an act of greeting.
We have to trust these feelings. We have to trust the invisible gauges we carry within us. We have to realize that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do.
As I grow quiet, the clay centers. For example, I used to grieve because I could not make reliably a close-fitting lid for a canister, a teapot, a casserole. Sometimes the lid fitted, sometimes it didn’t. But I wanted it to fit. And I was full of aggravation. Then a GI friend of mine who was stationed in Korea sent me an ancient Korean pot, about a thousand years old. I loved it at once, and then he wrote that he thought I might like it because it looked like something I might have made. Its lid didn’t fit at all! Yet it was a museum piece, so to speak. Why, I mused, do I require of myself what I do not require of this pot? Its lid does not fit, but it inspires my spirit when I look at it and handle it. So I stopped worrying. Now I have very little trouble making lids fit.
What I want to say is that as our personal universes expand, if we keep drawing ourselves into center again and again, everything seems to enhance everything else. It becomes unnecessary to choose which person to be as we open and close the same ball of clay. We will make pots for our English classes. Read poems to our pottery classes. Write on the clay, print from the clay. The activity seems to spring out of the same source: poem or pot, loaf of bread, letter to a friend, a morning’s meditation, a walk in the woods, turning the compost pile, knitting a pair of shoes, weeping with pain, fainting with discouragement, burning with shame, trembling with indecision: what’s the difference? I like especially two famous Zen stories: the one about the great Japanese master of the art of archery who had never in his life hit the bull’s eye. And the other about the monk who said, “Now that I’m enlightened, I’m just as miserable as ever.”
What I mean here is that in poetry, in pottery, in the life of the mind, it seems to me that one must be able to picture before oneself the opposite of what one has just declared in order to keep alive the possibility of freedom, of mobility, of growth. As soon as we find ourselves spellbound by order and our ability to control our medium and our tools, to do exactly what we want, we must do the opposite as well. As soon as we feel drunk with the sport of building and destroying, of forming in order to deform, of working unconsciously, with risk (with poetry, if poetry is saying hello to whoever-whatever is there): with danger, and disrespect for the canons of taste, do the opposite. One does not decide between craft and art, pottery and sculpture, tradition and the individual talent. One is in perpetual dialogue and performs the act one performs.
Most of the separations we make need to be looked at very carefully: weakness and strength, sickness and health, not-knowing and knowing, play and seriousness. Human beings are an odd breed. We find it so difficult to give in to possibility — to envision what is not visible. For example, we tend to think that strength is all-important, and yet we have a very shallow notion of what strength consists of. For unless our weaknesses play into our strengths we are not as supple as we should be. And with our fixation upon health, we would do well to listen to the story that sickness is telling, as it brings its truth into our work. We must fill our devotion with the spirit of play, of celebration and holiday. Love-play. The rhythms of work seem to be the natural rhythms of life: they seem to go by polarities which swing around that unmoving center: the very rhythms of our breathing are the dialogue of inner and outer. The single craftsman finding his own way, and the same craftsman seeking fellowship with others. Working by preliminary design is answered by a desire to improvise. The joy of producing a well-made pot, beautiful in its physical balance and grace and accurate in its usefulness, is answered by a kinship with the ambiguous: some image which fills us with wonder or mirth or which leads us into continuous exercise of our faculties in an effort to fathom it, to grasp it, to embrace it. For we must surely embrace our world. Unless our ideals of peace and of love are so much cant, we must surely embrace our world in all its daily happenings and details.
In teaching pottery, I am continually aware of how the learning of a handcraft reverberates throughout the spiritual organism, and it is this sense of personal destiny at stake which makes teaching such a serious and stimulating endeavor. I wish now to speak of two friends whom I taught only briefly but whose experiences were especially meaningful to me in the terms I have been using here: two people in whose personal transformation craft played its part. One, an English teacher who had never before in her life touched a piece of raw clay with any hope of forming it, was imprisoned by fear and striving. The other, a college art teacher, more skillful than I on the potter’s wheel, was impotent with ambition and conceit.
The beginner, a person of deep culture and intuition, did indeed listen, but with such tension that she could hardly hear; and she was tongue-tied in her own behalf. “Is that all right?” she would ask quaveringly. She touched each hunk of clay as if at any moment she might plunge through the bottom into the abyss. Everything seemed alarming, and delicious. Her body sought the contact, but her taste reproved the appearance. Finally I asked her to work with her eyes closed so that her hands could be liberated from the censure of her critically trained eyes. To let the pleasure and search and sinew for making grow a little bit before chastizing their immaturity. To do all the things that hands can do: tear and swat and push and pinch and squeeze and caress and scratch and model and beat. She sat like a blind woman with her clay, and she made a bowl this way, and when she opened her eyes, delight preceded doubt, and she was that much stronger in herself to do it again. She began to understand how it was for her to say if it was all right, not for me. I encouraged her to buy a can of workable clay and take it to her apartment. Her eyes are tired from reading. Let the hands carry forward the education.
Now the other potter had the opposite agony. He worked well, and produced in the beginning a regular storm of pots. But the more he did, the more he drooped. I heard he was going to drop pottery and take up weaving. One night I stood beside him at the wedging board while he morosely kneaded and slapped his clay. Suddenly he spoke. “What is a potter?” His accomplishment meant nothing to him. He did not LIKE his pots. They bore no individual stamp, he said. They did not speak to him. (Perhaps he had not spoken to them?) “What should a potter do?” he asked me. What should he make? Who should a potter be? (You see these are real questions that men do ask!) Well, I don’t remember what I said, probably something about how a potter is a person; what should a person do? who should a person be? I suggested that he take a vacation from these thoughts of “should” — make some clay balloons and take them down to the granite seashore and roll them on the lichen-textured boulders, and have some fun. He did that, and made a charming little stoneware garden. Although he didn’t know exactly what to think about it, he liked it. But his troubles were by no means over. He did for a while give up pottery and take up weaving. I heard later that during the rest of the summer he gradually came back to center and worked with the clay in a way that brought more and more of himself into it, so that he felt good.
We have to trust these feelings. We have to trust the invisible gauges we carry within us. We have to realize that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do. Certain kinds of egotism and ambition as well as certain kinds of ignorance and timidity have to be overcome or they will stand in the way of that creator. And though we are well thought of by others, we will feel cross and frustrated and envious and petulant, as if we had been cheated, somehow, by life.
Some craftsmen seem to be troubled by the question of originality and imitation. My only standard here is that a person be led into a deeper experience of himself and his craft. Human beings learn by imitation; certainly, in the years of childhood, almost exclusively by imitation. One is inspired by someone else’s example. One seeks to do likewise. Sometimes the effort to do likewise gradually creates capacities and perceptions that one did not feel before. These periods of imitation are usually temporary. They too may be aspects of the long journey each one of us is on to get where we are bound for, consciously or unconsciously. I have found imitation useful both as a discipline and as a momentary indulgence. People bring each other into activity. If, however, the phase of imitation congeals and one sticks in it out of inertia, then of course the works will begin to look tired too. Ideas do not belong to people. Ideas live in the world as we do. We discover certain ideas at certain times. Someone enjoys a certain revelation and passes it around. A certain person’s courage inspires a similar courage in others. People share their culture: there are enjoyable resemblances that make us feel like a community of fellow beings, fellow craftsmen — using a tradition and contributing our own impulses to it.
I have a finger exercise for originality which I sometimes use. Working with a piece of clay, hand-building, I destroy every pleasing result, seeking the unrecognizable. For if it is new, it will not look like something else: not like driftwood nor a Henry Moore perforated torso, not like a coral reef nor a Giacometti sculpture, not like a Haniwa horse nor a madonna nor a “free form,” nor the new look in pottery in the Sixties. It will look very odd indeed, if it is really new. Insecurity we need perhaps the most when we are inventing: it seems like our philosopher’s stone, turning base materials into gold. The image we make in such an exercise will not be our goal, but in creating it we will have performed acts for the first time, and these will bring new structures and coordinations into our hands and into our visions.
© Copyright 1964 by Mary Caroline Richards
From Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person
Reprinted by arrangement with Wesleyan University Press
