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Potters and writers share a common goal
By Carl Heintze
There was a time in my life when I was into ceramics or, as my wife says, my potty period.
I was attracted to ceramics partly because it's something you do with your hands; because you start with something plastic (clay) and mold it into a shape which, with enough fire, becomes solid and hard; and because, if you get good enough at it, you can make things of beauty.
I never got good enough at it to make things of beauty. I found it a lot like golf. You reach a certain plateau where you don't get any better. You may not get much worse, but you've reached your level of competence. That's it. You have to be satisfied with what you have. So, after awhile--like 10 years, because I am not easily discouraged--I settled for that and moved on.
But there was one thing about ceramics that fascinated me. It still does. In one of my first classes our instructor said, "Now you've made your first pot, you've become immortal."
I thought about that for quite awhile because, like everyone else, I wanted to be immortal. What he meant, of course, was not that I or any other ceramist would be immortal, but that our work would last a long time.
Ceramics, after all, is an ancient craft. It marks the beginning of civilized life. Indeed, in some societies, it's the reason we know much of anything about how people lived. The pots ancient people made or sometimes the shards or broken pieces of what they made are how we've learned this. That goes for ancient Greece as much as it does for the Anasazi, the Indians who once lived in the American Southwest.
Pots made of clay are not indestructible, but almost so. Even when broken, they are almost immortal, telling something of their makers. So, I suppose I was drawn to ceramics in the hope that someone might find one of my pots someday, look at its bottom and see my name and at least wonder who I was.
But then I got to thinking that there are other ways to create immortality. One far less certain is with words. That's certainly one of the reasons I became a writer. I thought that some of my words might, as poet Robert Frost wrote, "ages and ages hence" be telling someone that I was here and I left my mark.
Of course, that's expecting a lot. Literally millions of words are written today in a single day, written, spoken or somehow broadcast to the world. We are inundated with them, turned off by them, thoroughly sick of what someone else has to say.
It's definitely an uphill battle to make one's self heard or read, and the chances are slim that anything one says or writes will last for more than a day.
On the other hand, history is sprinkled with words which remain memorable and which ring through the ages. Beginning with people like Plato and Aristotle and descending to Martin Luther King Jr., some words have a way of lasting as long as pots and potsherds.
For example: "Give me liberty or give me death." "Let them eat cake." "This above all to thine own self be true." "To be or not to be." The list seems quite long when one gets to checking it over.
That, of course, doesn't offer any guarantees that my words are going to last as long or any longer than my pots, but it does give me some hope. The real ingredient that I've let out, though, is what the words say and why they were written or uttered.
Like the pots that become works of art and take on a life of their own, words and phrases that last longer than a lifetime or even longer than a day have an indefinable ingredient, which I suppose you could define as a fourth dimension.
One of great American stylists, Ernest Hemingway, contended this--and in his best work his did. It's a quality that defies identification, but which seems to move beneath the words like an underground stream. It's what differentiates the ordinary from the immortal, and there's no way, it seems to me, to define it more than that.
Like all great works of art, it just is. It exists by itself.
As, I guess, do memorable pieces of pottery. I think about that when I look at some of the wonderful and beautiful pots the Anasazi left behind when they mysteriously disappeared from their cliff dwellings. And I keep wishing that "ages and ages hence" someone may take up something I wrote and wonder who I was and what made me say that. And that's why I keep banging away on this computer day after day.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
