As with many things natural, this blog’s coming to be arose within me from an inner push, an impulse embedded in the setting of a co-nesting world—my lived life: understood, intimately felt and often reflected upon, yet frequently just beyond my deeper comprehension.
I want to share my reflections and my many uneasy question with you, and therewith, perhaps engage your curiosity and enter into dialogue with you on such notions, insights and quandaries.
Please join me.
Facets of my regular, daily existence encompass a diverse array of actions and states, as I suppose it does for most people. I consider this to be normal. For me, this entails having and reflecting on many ideas, images, feelings and insights into the nature and breadth of human thought. It also encompasses the compelling presence of the human body in a physical world. I have queries about the broad realms of art and science, the intense diversity and history of humanity, and the structure of the larger world, both on the earth and in the universe. These feeling/sensing/having aspects are as natural and real as my physical being and interwoven with it: in some way, they are modes of it. I am engaged with these elements of human experience, revelling in them, even while being tossed and turned like so much flotsam and jetsam, and following them—wheresoever they might lead.
They, also, occasionally drive me right around the bend: up to now, I’ve always found my way back. This site with these posts and pages, are some of my different takes on a fairly common inquiry: “so, what’s going on here, anyway – you know, in life?” I am in search of markers, hints, bench marks, un indice éphémère, a whisper of holding together…not too much more. So far, no path! I feel grounded but ephemeral.
The birth of an idea in the human mind seems as unlikely and elusive as that this large, solid stoneware wall piece “cellular construct“, could give birth to actual offspring and life. How could this inanimate thing bring life to be? A fair question! And of course, how could the human brain make an idea come to be? A fair question! Yet, here we all are: oozing lava, ancestral granitic mountain landscapes, the chilly arctic and driest deserts, deepest ocean trenches, blue skies, ancient forests, primordial mud, and living beings who feel, imagine, think and do.
Many of the images in this site demonstrate physicality, that is, my playing and creating with clay — a great love. They illustrate molding, shaping and understanding it, sensing/seeing and getting a grasp of its obscure under-structure through physical adventure and imaginative exercise. I am attracted as well to one of its ancestors, granite — what I often call ‘protoclay’. In these moments of curiosity-driven activity and exploration about clay’s nature and origin, I am drawn to wonder about the inner being of all matter and in that vein, queries come about life itself. In these wonderings, I take myself to be a nexus of life, integrated with the other actual stuff there is. My imagination and some ideas, however, often act as if they are a world seemingly on their own — how odd, yet normal. Making, being, seeming. How do I get to make clay objects which become stone, from an intimation of something — a complex of feeling-thoughts and visions? Words and things: a web in need of untangling.
Art, insight, thoughts, metaphor, language to open windows and doors, to let in fresh air and to enter realms which are our daily world, yet at the edge of what we sense we understand.
I would like to enter into dialogue with others on such matters, because matter matters, as does its offshoot — humanity. You are most welcome to join me. This is not a straight line.
glazed granite
(cone 6 oxidation)
(cone 7/8 oxidation)
So beautifully written and illustrated. It resonates with me as the basis of my belief in universality – the spirituality of life starting with basal elements and the struggle against entropy. I have avoided segregated religious thoughts and alliances most of my days on this planet, which often lead to alienation of “the other,” conflict, destruction, and war. Or as Steven Pinker wrote, “The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”
Please do more!
I’m on that path, one step at a time…
“ my lived life: understood, intimately felt and often reflected upon, yet frequently just beyond my deeper comprehension. ” do you think that one, you in particular, but really anyone, can have that true deeper comprehension that will satisfy all the nooks and crannies of the desire?
As I take some of your words in their straightforward daily use, then I would say we do not ‘fully’ comprehend, probably cannot comprehend, the multitudinous nooks and crannies not only of desire, but also of many other mental, spiritual, planning, and physical undertakings in which we find ourselves engaged on a daily basis.
Sometimes, when we search inside our conscious self in a thorough and delicately intrusive way, it seems that our awareness could go on and on. Some forms of comprehension, the sense of being bundled or gathered together, are so interwoven with deeper sensibilities and mental vision/images, that it is confusing when we try to grasp what it means to comprehend and even to understand — which I take as a more precise grasp of matters.
In this deeper interweaving, finding orderly word structures to articulate what we see, understand, think, and feel — and are able clearly to say — is a most arduous task. Also, inconsistently rewarding!
What I would call some of the richest (maybe also ‘despairing’) cohesive aspects of human living in the bigger picture of life and on a daily basis, can be felt and sensed as ‘wholes’ which defy our literal language. What our poet, sculptor and painter fellow creatures often articulate through the ‘non-logos’ governed devices they have at hand.
I think many humans sense this, and do not easily become aware of the tools to manage the pursuit or the insights. That is an aspect of what I am doing here.