25
Centering the Body: Centering the Earth
2000

Our points of view remain without contradiction only when they are restricted to the sphere of the psychological and are projected merely as hypotheses into the objective behavior of things. C.G Jung, CW 8,5

I begin with an assumption that only you can test: I don’t think people attend conferences like this one on body, myth and creativity to hear something definitive about anything (“Mythic Imagination, Embodied Soul,” 13-15 April 2000 Santa Barbara, California). Rather, I believe you attend, and we presenters show up to entertain certain ideas, to put our creative cards on the table, and then to see what hands are drawn. Each of us is always surprised when we leave room for ideas, images, concepts, feelings to swarm over us like a hive of new ideas. It is much more exciting to work this way, to make sense of something in such an a-logical manner. I wish to work some ideas around creativity and the body and then to attend carefully to what presents itself from the center, the margin or the landscape in between.

I am returning home from my morning walk thinking about writing this presentation; a thought is visited on me, coming up through myrubber soles as I walk. It takes the following shape: Memory’s importance rests in its capacity to give the body a place in the world; the body, by contrast, is essential to give the memory a landscape in which to reside. Both body and memory are qualities in creativity, and just as importantly, they are both implicated in the formation of myths, both personal and collective.

Consider Joseph Campbell’s surprising claim in his interview with Bill Moyers on The Power of Myth: In the second chapter, “The Journey Inward,” Moyers observed that dreams well up from the psyche. To which Campbell replies:

I don’t know where else they come from. They come from the imagination, don’t they? The imagination is grounded in the energy of the organs of the body, and these are the same in all human beings. Since imagination comes out of one biological ground, it is bound to produce certain themes. (42)

This locale of the imagination has been lost to a large degree in our current climate: the embodied quality of imagination, or even the organic site of imagining. Campbell goes on to point out that for him, C. G. Jung’s idea of archetypes could also be called “ground ideas,” because, as he responds to Moyers:

the archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded.The Freudian unconscious is a personal unconscious, it is biographical. The Jungian archetypes of the unconscious are biological. The biographical is secondary to that. (51)

I could spend the rest of the talk working this idea and asking you to consider the implications of these two insights by the most popularly known mythologist of the last 100 years. But more to the point of this conference: do his ideas leave room for us to consider that creativity, however much we put it in the head, in fact, has its genesis in the body’s organs and gestures? And if this is so, what of organ transplants, when for example, I suddenly find myself sporting a kidney from a stranger, a heart from a second person and a lung from a third? What are the implications of this transplanting for myth, psychology and creativity? Does another conversation begin between and within organs from such a reassignment? It surely asks us to reconsider what is at stake in being embodied and now in the migration of body parts from one person to another.

In a sustained colloquy with the body therapist, Stanley Keleman, Campbell and his colleague uncover an essential element about the body’s relation to experience: “We maintain in our tissues the actual event, and an organization of an image of the event. Out of one event we have organized the experiential and the symbolic” (23). Let’s pause here for a moment. This insight reveals the implicit organizing quality of the body, its own way of remembering in a specific way, which I sense is a mythical method. Does each of us then, organize our experiences both along conventional, cultural lines and along individually, idiosyncratic creative and enfleshed grooves according to a myth that is unique to us as individuals and which has its own inherent organizing impulses? If so, then each of us has a peculiar way of remember-ing—that is, retrieving, reshaping, redistributing—the past in the present. The possibilities herein, if such is true, are enormous.

Jung himself recognized the creative sense of the body’s powers when, assisted by two Italian masons, he began building “with his own hands in 1923” a tower that was finally completed in 1956. As Gail Thomas writes of him in a book entitled The Muses, “for most of the latter part of his life he spent half of every year there, contending that his work could only be realized through the inspirational solitude the tower provided” (91). Jung’s building this tower contributes yet another voice to the power of what Aristotle in The Poetics called poiesis, a making, a shaping and forming something into being. In my own book, The Wounded Body, I propose that poets have for millennia revealed how “the body becomes a being languaged into existence and formed by the vocabulary that gives it expression; its style and gestures and functions are assertively sketched out by the discipline that studies it. The body is made in the image of the myth that powers its envisioning” (11-12). In some mysterious ways, the body is self-creating and language is one of its utensils in this deployment of poiesis.

I could take the safe way this morning and speak about the body and writing; writing is an action I am compelled to engage in daily. But I prefer instead to risk something here by returning to those memories of poiesis in pottery, when I was a pot head several days a week in the ceramics shop of a university in San Antonio, Texas where I taught for 10 years. For five of those years I apprenticed myself to one of the finest ceramic artists of the Southwest, Nancy Pawel, and she I credit for getting me back in touch with the body and creativity by coaching me in throwing pots—actually dozens of them lifted themselves from the wheel and flew every which way on their own—I did not have to throw them. From that experience, and while musing on this conference, it made more sense to speak of that understanding of the body as inspiration and as ground for creativity. Such a statement of course leaves untouched the imaginal connection to the earth herself through her more clayey parts gathering themselves on the wheel to be shaped into a form.

Let’s stay with the ideas of Campbell and Jung for a moment longer and add one more voice to this confab. If you do not know Mary Richards’ book, Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person, you should. Once an English teacher, she gave up on the encrusted world of academe and struck out on her own, determined to support herself by throwing pots and hurling verse. She does both very well and it was her book that helped me understand why throwing pots, cleaning them, sanding them, glazing them and finally, keeping them close to me after they went public, magically dressed and ornamented from the gas-fired kiln, beautiful beyond my wildest dreams, was so crucial to my own development in another kind of kiln. Does not psyche express herself in a kindred kiln?

Richards asserts early on that “the imagery of centering is archetypal” (4) and that to move to the wheel, hunkered over the clay and to begin to shape it and be shaped by it, is to enter an archetype of transformation, which Jung believed could take one of a number of forms: either that of a situation, a condition or a ways and means of doing something (CW 9,180).To center clay on the pottery wheel warrants being labeled an archetypal gesture, one which leads quite naturally to another of Richard’s insights: “It is in our bodies that redemption takes place” (15). I agree and suggest further that in the act of shaping and forming clay—the earth’s substance—a redemptive act, even an act of grace occurs; it has everything to do with the grace by which one wields, finesses, caresses and cares for the clay, which is a form of our own substance shaped by the clay of our hands.

With the hands beginning to squeeze the wet red Austin clay full of gritty grog, and with elbows tucked into the inside of the thighs, and the body bowed in prayer over the wheel, like a spinning altar, some dissolution, some wall or division between soul-body-world dissolves in one complete action: body-clay-psyche perform one unitary act of creation. If we allowed more play with this image, I would say that making pottery out of clay by first kneading its viscous chunks, then rolling it into 2 or 3 pound squares, shaping it on the wheel, then cleaning, glazing and firing it, is a miniature analogue to the re-creation of the world, a form of microcosmic alchemical act of the original macrocosmic creation. Something divine is present in such an alchemical matrix, where the clay’s resistance and then slow yielding to the wet pressure of the hands, touches and communicates something deep in me. Wet, cool and yielding, the clay assumes the consistency of flesh itself, the flesh of the earth as it contemplates its own matter in its own manner, wanting to become something, to make something of itself, with me the vehicle for such a poiesis, while it does not lose the integrity of its own shape and mass.

Several things congeal as I recollect the feel and touch of the clay and feel the ache in my back and in my hands from pushing gently against the earth spinning beneath me on the porcelain wheel. Yes, the act is physical, but in the creative aspect that it invites, even insists on, there opens a butterfly valve in me into the metaphysical; an ontological awareness is borne up through the clay that I attend to, as one would tofeelings, sensations and ideas during meditation. I like how Mary Richards speaks of the entire process: “We have to trust to 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” (25). Such energic presence is daimonic, meaning that a force or impulse wills its way forward into the world’s matter, becomes matter shaped by imagination’s own purposive affect, like an angel of alchemy.

So what is the extreme pleasure associated with this act of making containers from clay? What is its poetic draw, its archetypal attraction, strange or familiar? For one thing, it is a very embodied, fleshy and sensual experience; part of its charm is in getting dirty, playing dirty, playing with dirt and having the spots of earth, wet and red, a bleeding earth, splash over one, crawl under the fingernails, in the hair, on to the chest through an open shirt collar. The wheel itself, an ancient archetypal shape, embodies some magical presence in its movement: while staying in one place, a perfect balance of motion and stillness, it ultimately goes nowhere but into the motion of the clay in its formation.

I sense when I slice off a 2 pound slab of cheesy clay from the large 25 pound block, then kneading it to eliminate air bubbles and to encourage its disparate and unruly molecules to organize themselves all in the same direction, I engage a powerful and ancient ritual that deploys in its action a much larger and timeless drama. Then, the difficult part for me: to throw the kneaded slab into the center of the wheel so that when I turn on the switch and the wheel turns into life, motion, only a minimal amount of energy is required to center it firmly. For instance, I used to be able to tell how my emotional temperature was when I sat at the wheel to center the clay. The clay’s placement always revealed to me, as in a groggy mirror, what quality of balanced interior life I was in or out of. The clay’s own devices deployed my interior balance or chaos outward to its behavior, not the other way round.

Wetting the hands in the small plastic container next to me, then placing my feet up onto a couple of bricks to get the thighs closer to the wheel’s level and tucking the elbows into the knees so that some stability is present; then beginning to engage the earth in fashioned form—is already to enter a creative space through the body’s chunky-hunkered gesture. But that really isn’t it, for working the clay is a means of entering as well a sustained reverie on one’s own muddy nature, what Ish-mael in Melville’s tale of the white whale calls our “more clayey part” (Moby-Dick 231). Being present to the clay’s movement exposes in me an aesthetic and visceral engagement with the world. Undoubtedly, there is some lesson or insight to be grasped in the movement of the wheel and the relative stasis of one’s hands after bringing the clay into a rough shape, soon, I pray, to be finessed into a bottle, a bowl or a cup. But then I wonder, sitting there: who is fashioning whom? Look at me, hunkered down, legs splayed around the wheel—the clay has done its own number on my body, shaping it into its own field of creation! Yet I must assume just such a position if I am to join the dance of wheel, clay, motion and creation, for not just any posture will do!

My hands and fingers are almost still as they tentatively advance pressure on the sides of the cylinder; but because of the wheel’s movement, what is affected in one place transforms the entire body of the shape as well as the shape of my own body. Some residue of chaos theory is at work here, I sense, for a slight perturbation of pressure on a small part of the cylinder eventuates in an enormous change in its entire torso. A shape in the interior terrain of the mind’s eye assumes outward shape in the world. That is one miraculous motion of creating in clay. Here is another.

In the formative period of spreading open and then lifting the clay into its shape, whether mine or its—for I have learned that even when I want to make a bowl, the clay may have its own thoughts intent on becoming a bottle and therefore show surprising insistence in this wish—a dramatic example of which I will relate in a moment. To open the clay from its hard clumpy solid mass requires me to put my thumbs together, pointing down and entering, after wetting them repeatedly, into the center of the clay and plunging down through it until I imagine the tips of my thumbs about ready to pierce the bottom of the clay’s mass and strike the porcelain wheel on which it rests spinningly. Erotic, energizing, ephemeral, enjoyable, enfolding: all of these qualities of feeling and desires surface as my thumbs plunge into the soft moist slippery folds of the clay’s opening.

When I sense that I have plunged deep enough into its flesh, I begin, with elbows resting securely on the inside of my thighs, to pull from the center to the margins and lift up as I push out. I repeat this motion two or three times, wetting my hands again, as the clay yields from solid to a hollow; what it loses in mass it gains in height as the walls grow progressively thinner and its stature grows into an elegant, if fragile, verti-cality to both challenge gravity as well as all of my limited skills. Some transit has just occurred in shape and mass; what was solid is now hollow and in that hollowness assumes a shape it could not assume when massive matter. Its more fragile shape betokens its more definitive birth into form.

I sense as well in this motion of body, imagination and clay an ancient archetypal pattern repeated for millennia: it is the horizontal and vertical axis at play in the clay, the consequence of an image carried from within the body through the arms and hands down through the fingers, which I imagine as a way in which something of my own flesh becomes part of the clay; certainly some of my energy, perhaps from the organs of my body, rise up, enters the mass and gives it form. The shape of the pot is my energy made literally visible, the result of a centering or its lamentable and discouraging absence. Does such an action suggest that energy has a leg up on matter, actually precedes matter? Some theories of the new physics suggest a likeness here.

Nevertheless, some mirroring effect is realized at this moment—call it a likeness by analogy—as it begins to shape something in me and something in the world at the same instant. At this moment it is impossible to declare who is leading whom? Perhaps I am at this instant the kneady one. My own centering, or its lack, gathers outward form as it is brought to bear in the failures and successes at the wheel. My own balance, harmony, proportion or their absence, is tangibly given concrete expression in the clay figure. But this shape also has its own mind, its own eros and its own scent of its palpable destiny. The following incident encouraged me to suspect some animating principle’s self-determination at work and at play here.

One late afternoon after teaching, I headed to the therapy of the pot shop and within a few minutes, in the quiet of the lingering afternoon when the shop is often empty, I sat at the wheel and centered the clay. When I felt very certain about what shape I wanted to produce on the wheel, I began to think too much about the clay mass taking shape below me. I was at the wheel and I was in control. Now as many of you know, throwing clay, like playing tennis or hitting a golf ball, requires a certain non-attention to what one is doing, trusting the body instead to take one to where one needs to go. But as I continued to move into a more cognitive and controlling mode and out of my body in the making, the cylinder, which I had wanted to be a bottle, suddenly gathered itself and leaped from the wheel, flying off the handle, as it were, and landing on the wheel next to mine, gratefully unoccupied. But as it leaped from the wheel, it flew up and hit with its lip my left hand, just a brief but nonetheless solid nick as it passed by my eyes in its trajectory to the neighboring wheel.

When I cornered my surprise enough to retrieve the clay from next door, I saw that the perfectly circular opening I had made at the top had been grotesquely skewed into the shape of a pitcher spout. The assumed shape was unmistakable. The walls had collapsed some and the shape had been altered in midair as it sideswiped my hand in passing. It needed me as its instrument for that quick sculpting effort.

Something told me to leave it. I cleaned it up and tweaked the lip just a bit and even said to this frisky mass: “I wanted you to be a bottle and you had your red groggy heart set on being a pitcher, so a milk and wine pourer you shall be.” Just a figment of my imagination, or did this particular clayey mass, harboring a mind of its own, emerge out of the earth with the vocation in its heart of being a pitcher? I like to believe the latter because it is more fun to do so. Perhaps we all can sense that the soul’s code takes a myriad of forms as it seeks often to codify us.

In Psychology and Alchemy, C.G. Jung believes that the act of imagi-natio entailed the “active evocation of inner images. It tries to grasp theinner facts and portray them in images true to their nature” (CW 12, 400). The place, the wisdom of reality, he went on to suggest, is neither mind nor matter but an intermediate realm of subtle reality expressed adequately only by symbols” (400). In these two insights beats the uneven heart of imaginal activity, one which always converses with the flesh of the world, for it is the world being created anew. Creativity involves the body, both physical and subtle; poiesis is the action, the making of images, which spring from this intermediate realm. Perhaps” making something of myself” is really at the heart of such a pleasurable enterprise as potting around on the wheel in the pot shop or on the larger wheel of life itself. Such is the primordial round that the potter’s wheel reveals to me every time I am called to the clay and feel a deep knead for the earth herself.

Notes

Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. With Bill Moyers. Ed. Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Jung, C.G. Psychology and Alchemy. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Bollingen Series 12. Second Edition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970.

---. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R.F.C Hull. The Collected Works of C.G.Jung. Bollingen Series 9,1. Second Edition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

Keleman, Stanley. Myth and the Body: A Colloquy with Joseph Campbell. Berkeley: Center P, 1999.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967. 2-470.

Richards, M.C. Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1989.

Slattery, Dennis Patrick. The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh. Albany: SUNY P, 2000.