appropriate to the occasion. In other words, museum staff and visitors must assume a posture that accords space but not distance. A nod, a bow, an open and/or extended hand, an averted eye – whatever culturally appropriate action says “I recognize you” in respect, and wish to accord the dignity due you – would be appropriate. If a first acquaintance, people should equally extend an appropriate greeting, in whatever tongue is “called” for, welcoming
the pot into conversation by engaging in the age-old tradition of “hailing and being hailed”, to use a Heideggerrian term. If an old friend, the greeting should extend beyond to that of a loving family member or extended member of the family: people should ask of the pot how it has been faring, how it has been treated, how it is feeling, what it is thinking, what it might need? In other words, pots should be recognized as distinctly individual beings: people should ask, as wonder would have it, who this pot is and from whence it came? This is, after all, about the art of conversation.
And conversation does not take place just in words. People learn through sensations as well. Just as a grandparent’s slight touch of the hand against a grandchild’s head can translate love across generations, so too an embrace, when welcome, can welcome yet an-other into one world, propose a re-creation of the world as it is or should be. They and we need to embrace one another. The first embrace, as suggested above, must come from the eye. The world truly may be constructed from triangles, as the ancient Greeks believed; but it was also Plato who
argued long ago, what we first see, if we see any “thing” at all, is nothing more than shape and color. And what a more glorious way to “see,” than to see the curvature of a pot, whose balance takes us into the formal definitions of point and line, and the subtle shades of color that takes us to the formal definitions of space and dimension (quite possibly time). Each allows us to reach into the Forms themselves, whereby we might see the vision of Beauty that exists outside ourselves, a vision we wish to articulate to “others” so that we collectively might formally understand fully what that vision means and thereby act in a manner that is representative of Goodness.
I am the Pot, The Pot is Me
This is not an argument ground in anthropomorphizing inanimate objects with our own spirit or sense of self. This is recognizing an-other for what it truly “is” and how it chooses to “be”. There is no dictate of how a pot must be perceived, or how a pot must behave. (Let them tell us that.) Rather it is a simple posture assumed towards a pot that says it is another living thing, with which we must converse to better understand ourselves and the world in which we live.
This is why it is also necessary to converse physically with a pot. Arms wrapped around a pot, with fingers finding the curvature of a line or the strike of a stone, ensures not just that warmth is transmitted but identity is preserved. Moreover, with the pot once in our hands, proximity brings forth new meaning: we will smell the earth from the clay, and thus learn of its history through place; we will hear the echo of the chamber, and thus open our ears to new possibilities of languages both spoken and felt; we will search the sound with our eyes, and thus follow the newly established sightline over the opening of the vessel into the inner chamber where we might learn of designs and meanings previously hidden from our eyes or thought to be non-existence to the Mind’s eye.
It is inappropriate, therefore, that museum exhibits and people treat pots as objects to be gazed upon as “pretty little things”, as nothing more than appetizers of and for a human mind that will not be satiated until its has consumed what tiny tidbits of information can be gleaned through idle curiosity, a simple and unproductive cousin of wonder, at a distance.
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