Anachronism and Something New

1.anachronism

əˈnakrəˌnɪz(ə)m/

noun

noun: anachronism; plural noun: anachronisms

1.   1.

a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned.

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            marimba, pilates, lost trades, playgrounds

Last weekend in Kyneton  (Victoria) was the  Lost Trades Fair. I wasn’t able to go so I checked the programme online and found there  were delightful old crafts like coopering (making barrels) chairmaking, leadlighting, blacksmithing and hedgelaying. I didn't see pottery listed and  thankfully there is still interest in this craft but if we don’t move forward with the other aspects of ceramics i.e the business end we may well become an anachronism just at a time when the planet needs old fashioned alternatives to so many economic rationalisms.

During the week I listened to a great RN program about children being rescued from an educational blackhole by a creative music program using marimbas. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/tate-st-primary/5325034

The improvement in overall school performance was put down to the fact that the marimba programme involved whole body involvement in its performance and learning, from the making of the instrument as a group, to physically playing while standing and moving and echoing patterns produced visually as well as auditorily. This meant that children could experience the brain rewiring of music without needing to be able to read music first and the fidgety, kinetic learners could be imprinted with the patterns through their bodies, priming their brains for other pattern learning like decoding print.

You can watch a marimba being played here.

When we learn a physical skill our brains remember a muscle choreography and practice remapping it in our brains overnight. I remember this well from childhood, going through the motions of learning one type of high jump (the straddle) to  (scissors) to Fosbury Flop approaching the jump from another angle in a new style but also gaining insights into burgeoning philosophy as my world view literally changed.

 When I learned computing ,my thoughts flashed before me like computer files, as I settled down to sleep and I could see gardening files come into focus with embroidery techniques combined overlaid with watercolour techniques. My whole framework for thinking had done a physical shift as my brain applied what it knew to what this new world order looked like. When I took up Auslan ( Australian sign language), my other language learning accelerated because I now had a physical way of learning and filing languages -in my muscles.

 This blog has changed my way of operating in the world and in my head as I physically engage with the keyboard and I often find myself tapping out thoughts in my head .

Our bodies are not just vehicles for our brains as Ken Robinson describes here but discreet extensions of our brains and each appendage feeds our brain information to locate ourselves within the soup of our environment. If every thought connection in our brain develops synapses then every sensory experience of our world creates a sort of synaptic connection to the universe making us more securely engaged and aware. Limit the experiences and you risk the individual feeling vulnerable and hanging by a thread. Physicality matters!

The discussion about the marimba program follows closely on the heels of a research project in which children were observed in two different playground situations, one where they had standardised safe playground and sports equipment and the other, regular household items such as brooms, buckets and crates. The second group were found to be more creative, more physically active and more socially engaged than the first as they found new and interesting ways to engage with the equipment rather than the prescribed notions of standardised equipment. Everything old becomes new again. So it is important to keep in touch with those old skills and old ways of doing things. Re engage with some of the physical things you did in your childhood and wake up some of those synapses!  

I began pilates the other day to address some of my spinal issues and had to balance on half foam cylinders, something I was excellent at in my youth. It is partly what prompted this post and brought back memories. Wouldn’t it be lovely to see older people balancing on raised curbings around service stations as they try to physically rebalance their lives. Some of our politicians could do with a bit of physical alignment.

Ancient Mayan art of Pilates  gives you rock hard muscles

Autumn is here and acorns are hanging on the oak tree in the park. Sadly most lower limbs have been removed from the trees to prevent children climbing and hurting themselves. I am anxious to get out and moving around in the cooler mornings but have been applying myself to new skills ofsetting up an etsy shop. It is still crawling days but I would appreciate any advice you have so I can unstick myself from this computer.

 https://www.etsy.com/shop/CrankyCeramics?ele=shop_open

No doubt my mind will reframe the world again. I can feel it happening already as I try to apply my own practices of reduce, reuse, recycle, to the practical aspects of packaging and presentation. The initial purchase of a giant roll of bubble wrap had me in a spin trying to work out ways I could offset this hideous purchase.

The bubblewrap made a temporary desk. Printed stock list on a spread sheet streamlined the task a bit.

Every plastic container that comes into my home is now going to have at least one more use. Bubble wrap will still be employed but our office shreddings will now be part of the bubble wrap replacement in nice little recycled paper pillows. 

I have raided a few stores that sell imported Asian products and garnered some little packaging boxes that were being scrapped so my  packaging efforts are coming along. Negotiating the marketing network may take time but I am on my way.

Please take a look at my shop and share it with anyone you know. If you have success stories with etsy that you can share I am a willing student.

Mrs Teapot and International Womens Day

This week I attended a memorial service for an old family friend. It was well attended and full of joy and praise for a woman who had connected with hundreds of lives over an 80 year lifetime. Her last years were difficult as are the last years of many older people, but she had put enough scores on the board in her previous years to more than compensate. She was the ultimate multi tasker, mad as a hatter, trying to improve the world according to her laws of justice based on fighting for the underdog and fearless in her opposition to exploitation whenever she saw it.

In my mind she has been Mrs Teapot for many years, because hospitality and connection to people came ahead of business always. Hospitality included carrying a tray of china for a tea party down through ti tree scrub and across 4 lanes of highway to the beach complete with tablecloth or doilies for her guests who visited in the summertime. If it took 2 or 3 trips to get everything down to the beach, she just did it, scones, butter, cream, milk and sugar and cordial for the children and all with joyful satisfaction in being able to provide the best hospitality. Her endless energy just kept everybody else around her moving too.

She made no differentiation between animals and humans and chatted to them all, and when her cat Lindy died at 23 years of age she felt it was important to notify all those who had ever known Lindy so that they could share their grieving. A cat living with an outgoing person like her could meet a lot of people in 23 years!

Her life was as an educator, and she was of the old school variety which found strength and something positive and interesting in every human to build upon. She worked and raised 4 young men who have gone on to lead competent and fulfilling lives and did it all without the benefits of government handouts and without compromising family life.

I’ve been a bit stuck lately, feeling a bit like a congested whirlpool outside the mainstream, in a world that is streaming past at a great and unconscious rate. My world has been revolving around political agitation and every day there is more to depress and alarm me about our current situation.

I went to the bakery the other day and was deeply impressed with the cheerfulness of the girl who served me. On asking her about her upbeat state she told me that serving was her job and she would make the most of it because no one cares if you have a bad day but you can spread happiness by being cheerful. Well Mrs Teapot would have agreed with her about spreading happiness and doing what you can with what you’ve got but if you can’t care about someone when they are down, especially all the ones who need our help then no amount of fairy dust is going to stop those bad things happening.

 Mrs Teapot was a doer and a fighter who listened and then tried to put people in connection with their own points of strength. That a woman of 80, who has been out of circulation with ill health for 5 years, can still fill a church upon her death is a testament to the strength of human connection and service of others. In this week of International Women’s Day we recognise the grass roots work of ordinary women doing and doing. Hers was a lifetime of teaching , by examples of common sense  kindness and fairness and recognising the hope in everyone she met. She was a roll up your sleeves person and just do what you can with love, sandwiches and endless cups of tea and washing up with others or alone. Blessed are the weird and energetic and God bless Marjie. It’s been an honour to be connected to your story. 

A New Year and Reincarnation

I made a painting nearly 40 years ago in response to a family death. It seemed disrespectful and maudlin to some people at the time and because it was rejected I tucked it away along with some other odd little things I had worked on. It was recently seen and admired through the  new young eyes of someone I respect, not for her art reviewing skills (because I don’t know her very well yet), but because she embraces an attitude to life that I was trying to communicate at the time.  She is interested in taking care of the earth and planning spaces that help populations to live lightly on this planet so that there is enough for everyone. That’s what my painting was about too. I call it Reincarnation.

 

 With a planet reaching 7 billion people some time in the next 50 years, that many headstones alone will choke the land of livable space, let alone arable land. Apparently there is only 7-10% of good arable land on the whole planet. We either need to increase our stocks of good arable land by better land treatment or we need to prevent good land from being locked up forever. We need creative thinking fast to cope with such a crisis, but people are so afraid to discuss this subject. Think about 7 billion headstones along with all the graves of all the people who have come before us and all the people who are to come after us. Grave sites are the stupidest most narcissistic inventions made by man.

 A military graveyard

 

A house may seem like an indulgence, or even a car, or other possessions but they can be used and reused long after we are gone. But a grave site? A patch of real estate that robs future generations for hundreds of years(sometimes thousands) of earth to grow and live on. And don't get me started on archaeologists who dig up old burial sites and then that land is tied up too.

We live in a digital age with amazing technology but bury our dead with the arrogance of Roman emperors. Our world is crying out for regeneration, and chemical free food and water with land enough for all the inhabitants not just humans but we keep locking up precious land with concrete beds for the dead, where no water can move through the soil and release our earth given goodness back for future generations.

There has been some forward thinking, in maybe 50 years but it is not the norm, and we still make concrete and stone memorials and mausoleums many times the volume of the body enclosed. In cultures where land has been vital to existence, different sustainable burial forms have evolved, which also reflect their spirituality. Maybe in this new age where science and the environment are becoming the new religion and or spirituality we may see sustainable death practices which are honourable and allow for continuing prosperity of people into the future.  Cremation is space saving but uses fossil fuels to reach high temperatures equivalent to a bisque firing, with nothing but ash as a product.  Instead of the endless debate about when does life begin, let us turn the discussion to when does dead mean gone and re contributing?

What does all this have to do with clay and ceramics you say? In my daily work with clay, I experience a form of meditation that  goes deeply into the atomic level of the clay. I cannot help but think of aeons of time and life bound up in the material in my hands. Does the porcelain I use contain atomic matter from a courtesan or cockroach in an ancient Chinese or Japanese palace? Do the ground up materials that make my glazes contain atomic material made from prehistoric insects, plants and unicellular creatures? When I reclaim clay from failed designs or just throwing practice is there thought energy encapsulated in my clay?

When learning to wedge clay ( a physically demanding process to remove air pockets and align the clay particles before throwing) we were taught to treat it as a meditation and put our intentions into it. That simply means to rehearse the throwing process in your mind stepping through the choreography of throwing the piece you intend to make. Sometimes when approaching a sculpture however I have been astounded by the way the process has turned out. The clay has other intentions and even though I have begun to build a loosely formed idea, once I am totally in right brain mode (the Zone) I am no longer in charge of the process. I fantasise that I am being channelled by some other force.

This sculpture surprised me as much as anyone else because I feel I had little part in it. My intention was weak- I sort of planned to make a chimpanzee but another boat emerged and before long there were cormorants roosted all over it. It does come from my life and experience but the clay extracted it from me in a stream of consciousness process that I felt very loosely attached to.

 

Before we choke our earth let us use our brilliant human imaginations to step outside the box (or casket) and think of respectable life giving ways to cast off our mortal coils. Let us develop a new language for burial, like planting. Consider the traditional burial method based on the concept of sleep. I prefer to sleep in foetal position.  I also tend to clutch things so for my  last sleep I could think of nothing better than clutching a new plant and nurturing it with my body and to be the start of something new and beautiful like a forest that will house birds insects and animals and one day provide timber for housing and then room for a new human plant to grow. All my details could be kept recorded digitally on a QR code for anyone desperate enough to know of me, like the proximity readers at MONA and could be followed digitally in a walk through the forest, and like Facebook my other relatives could be linked in ever increasing circles so that a history could be quickly surveyed. There would be no hierarchy or religious separation, just a chronological separation beginning in the middle of the forest and spiralling out in Fibonacci series as is natural to many plants. 

 In my new life I could be tall and thin and silent .