## Metadata - Author: [[Mary Caroline Richards]] - Full Title: Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person - Category: #books ## Highlights - Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. ([Location 519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=519)) - 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. ([Location 523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=523)) - I cannot escape paradox when I look deep into things, in the crafts as well as in poetry in metaphysics or in physics. In physics, matter is immaterial. The physical world, it turns out, is invisible, inaudible, immeasurable; supersensible and unpredictable. Law exists; and yet freedom is possible. In metaphysics, life and death in the commonplace sense collaborate in rhythms which sustain life. The birth of the new entails the death of the old, change; and yet the old does not literally die, it lives on, transformed. In ancient mystery religions, initiation for life required a ritual death. In poetry, in metaphor which is its instrument, the opposites also fuse: ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=527)) - 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. ([Location 604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=604)) - It is in our bodies that redemption takes place. ([Location 608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=608)) - 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. ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=614)) - 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 ([Location 616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=616)) - 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 . ([Location 616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=616)) - It is dangerous to seek to possess knowledge, as if it could be stored. For one thing, it tends to make one impatient with ignorance, as people busy with money-seeking tend to be impatient with idlers. ([Location 628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=628)) - The possession of knowledge may create a materialism of its own. Knowledge becomes property. Teachers compete with each other for status, wealth, influence. ([Location 631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=631)) - In other words, education may be sacrificed to knowledge-as-commodity. Just as life is sometimes sacrificed to art-as-arrangement. The quest is abandoned. Instead, property is bought at the site of the last dragon killed, and a ruling class is formed out of the heroes. The knights grow fat and lazy and conceited and petulant. They parade in their armor on special occasions to bedazzle the populace. But in their hearts are terror and duplicity. And when difficult times come, they fall upon each other with their rusty axes and try to divide the world into those who know and those who don’t. There is nothing to equal in bitterness and gall, childishness and spite, the intramural warfare of the academic community. Where is honor? Where is devotion? Where is responsibility of soul? ([Location 635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=635)) - Most of us have been brain-washed to think that knowledge and security make the world go round. And if the world seems to be going round very poorly, we do not think of questioning deeply its education. The need for creative imagination in the intellectually trained person is drastic. Also the need for spontaneous human feeling. ([Location 643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=643)) - Very little stress is placed on developing powers of observation or on intuition. Thus, with primary experience held so at a distance, sensory life in particular, I find that my principal task in teaching adults is to win their trust. They tend to be overwhelmingly oriented to manipulation and to effect. It rarely occurs to them to work in a direct way with what they know and are. Their primary motivations are to please, to make a strong impression, to do either what is expected (if they are docile) or what is unexpected (if they are hostile). They assume that pretense and falsity are virtues. The whole thing sometimes seems like a massive confidence game. ([Location 649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=649)) - An act of the self, that’s what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center. We must mean what we say, from our innermost heart to the outermost galaxy. Otherwise we are lost and dizzy in a maze of reflections. We carry light within us. There is no need merely to reflect. Others carry light within them. These lights must wake to each other. My face is real. Yours is. Let us find our way to our initiative. ([Location 665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=665)) - Life leads us at a certain moment to step beyond the dualisms to which we have been educated: primitive and civilized, chaos and order, abnormal and normal, private and public, verbal and non-verbal, conventional and far-out, good and bad. To transform our tuitions, as Emerson called our learning, into the body of our intuitions so that we may use this body as in pottery we use our clay. By an act of centering we resolve the oppositions in a single experience. The surrealists in France called it le point suprème and found it also at the center: le foyer central. When the sense of life in the individual is in touch with the life-power in the universe, is turning with it, he senses himself as potentially whole. And he senses all his struggles as efforts toward that wholeness. And he senses that wholeness as implicit in every part. When we are working on the potter’s wheel, we are touching the clay at only one point; and yet as the pot turns through our fingers, the whole is being affected, and we have an experience of this wholeness. “The still point of the turning world.” ([Location 769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=769)) - “Poetry,” said Wallace Stevens, “is a process of the personality of the poet.” Creative work is a training of each individual’s perception according to the level on which he is alive and awake; that is why it is so difficult to evaluate. And it should be difficult. In art, perception is embodied: in dust, in pigment, in sounds, in movements of the body, in metals and stone, in threads and stuffs. Each product, each goal, is an intermediate moment in a much longer journey of the person. ([Location 792](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=792)) - “Art is an intuitive act of the spirit in its evolution toward divine nature.” ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=796)) - I cannot talk about the crafts without appealing to the evolving spirit of man. We grow and change and develop capacities for centering and for dialogue throughout our lives. ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=838)) - Part of the training we enjoy as craftsmen is to bring into our bodies the imagination and the will. We enact. The handcrafts stand to perpetuate the living experience of contact with natural elements — something primal, immediate, personal, material, a dialogue between our dreams and the forces of nature. ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=839)) - Chaos still bubbling and seething with possibilities. And the frenzied artist carbonated with creative impulses. ([Location 914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=914)) - Man has many hungers. But they all seem to me to be versions of a twofold one: hunger for freedom, and hunger for union, a dance of each individuality with the world. ([Location 972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=972)) - any substance is susceptible only to what it is capable of radiating. ([Location 1023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1023)) - We can receive only what we already have! We can become only what we already are! We can learn only what we already know! It is a matter of realizing potentialities. It is not a matter of “adding to” but of “developing,” of “evolving.” We contain within ourselves a world of capacities, of possibilities, which the outer world summons forth, speaks to, releases. ([Location 1023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1023)) - Pain is a script, and as we learn to read it, we grow in self-knowledge. ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1057)) - Ordinary education and social training seem to impoverish the capacity for free initiative and artistic imagination. We talk independence, but we enact conformity. ([Location 1128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1128)) - The artist and craftsman, however far he may be from an ultimate liberation, is continually willing his work. He devotes his life to acts which are a personal commitment to value. ([Location 1132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1132)) - We are something between accidents and pawns in a meaningless kind of mischief perpetrated by heartless inhuman gods. What a romantic disaster! A regular cosmic soap opera! ([Location 1234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1234)) - How do we speak to the child’s hunger? This is the question of the free school. How do we speak to man’s hunger? This is the question of the free conscience. ([Location 1307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1307)) - Love is not a doctrine, Peace is not an international agreement. Love and Peace are beings who live as possibilities in us. ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1349)) - Use your senses. Open your eyes, your ears, your smeller, your taste buds, your skin, your throat, your lungs, your heart, your blood, your interstices. Listen. If we listen, we will not have to ask. If we listen, we will find ourselves at the center of the entertainment. ([Location 1353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=1353)) - It is possible in life to be many things at once. It is hard to say everything at once. We play upon the ambiguities of words as deftly as we can, and yet we are not sure how successfully we have kept paradox alive in their ring. Life is bipolar. Everything contains its opposite. ([Location 2099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005BR0L7Y&location=2099))