Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action;
and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
and I want my grasp of things to be
true before you.
I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the wildest storm of all.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
In 1985, Susette Kelo, of New London, Connecticut, lost her home via eminent domain to development by Pfizer, an American multi-national pharmaceutical corporation. It happened, thanks to a divided U.S. Supreme Court decision, Kelo v City of New London (1985), which expanded the definition of ‘public good’ to include increased tax revenues and jobs to the local community. Prior to 1985, ‘public good’ meant things like hospitals, roads, airports–in other words, things that benefit the public.
The sole beneficiary of Kelo v City of New London was Pfizer Corporation. After demanding and destroying the homes of private citizens, however, Pfizer built nothing, provided no new tax revenue, and no jobs. But Pfizer did rip the taxpayers off for tens of millions of dollars. Evidently the ‘public good’ in ‘economic development’ meant the Pfizer Corporation.
No matter what the politicians, corporations, and their lawyers concoct to redefine public good, we all see it for what it is: pickpockets finding a legal way to steal.
The Keystone Pipeline
In today’s news, eminent domain rears its ugly head as an unintended consequence of the Keystone Pipeline project. No matter which side of the political divide you’re on, the government having the right to take your private property to a developer is complete and utter nonsense. Why anyone supports this debacle that will graetly benefit a private corporation in Canada, with dubious to non-existent benefits to U.S. citizens, as well as the potential destruction of our landscape is beyond rationality.
Canada has rules, you see, prohibiting oil pipelines snaking across their land. But not ours. Taking advantage of the absurdity of the Supreme Court decision as well as weakened environmental laws (thanks to the GOP), the non-USA company, Trans Canada Corporation plans to build this controversial pipeline project all across the midsection of our land, and is filing condemnation lawsuits for the property they’ll need for the pipeline all along the way.
Before they even have the permits to build the pipeline.
Trans Canada Corp used the same Supreme Court decision to condemn private property that Pfizer Corp used in the City of New London. Moving oil across a continent is considered ‘for the public good,’ evidently.
In my ecofantasy novel Corvus Rising, the iconic and enchanted Wilder Island is threatened by an condemnation lawsuit brought by a wealthy developer who has asked the local government to condemn the island under eminent domain and sell it to him. He plans to scrape it clean of the thousands of native birds on the island, as well as all the wild wilderness of trees, and build a gambling resort open to the public.
That there is a humble yet consecrated chapel on the island, or that the island and the chapel are owned by the Jesuit Order of the Catholic Church, is irrelevant. Neither God nor the wealth of the Vatican can stop Eminent Domain.
Neither in Corvus Rising, nor in 21st century America can even the uber-wealthy Catholic Church stop eminent domain.
The one way around eminent domain is public outcry. Let’s hold on to each other’s hands on this rare issue upon which we are not divided. We must stand together, across the political divide. Stand with the Crawfords and all the others in the path of the Keystone Pipeline.
That’s what the birds did, the heroes in Corvus Rising.
Probably wabi-sabi was first named for what happens to pottery subjected to the hellish temperatures in kilns, around 2,000ºF (~1100ºC). During the firing, the intense heat vibrates all the bonds that hold the minerals together until they come apart, and their constituent ions and molecules cruise around in a melted bubbly mixture that resembles lava, an igneous rock.
The kiln cools, and the pottery solidifies. Sometimes a gas bubble in the glaze pops at that moment and a little crater forms. Or maybe the glaze didn’t come out with a uniform color, or part of it dis-adhered from the pot and crawled away. Or the tea bowl sagged into another pot.
Classic wabi sabi, telling the story of a unique and unrepeatable moment of creation, fired and frozen in time.
Such wabi-sabi moments manifest keshiki–the landscape of the clay; these imperfections do not in any way interfere with the functionality of the piece, and it would be enormously wasteful to throw something useful away because of a surface imperfection.
One over Infinity
I like to think of firing pottery as a sort of ‘backyard metamorphism’ that changes the pottery, essentially a sedimentary rock, into a metamorphic rock.
I have even made the statement publicly, that kilns are science laboratories in which ceramic artists perform experiments in geology and thermodynamics, which is a branch of science that deals with the advanced secrets of the Universe.
We have learned a great deal about the behavior of matter through experiments that rudely resemble the actual physical universe, tweaked by precise mathematical equations that ignore much of the almost infinite variation therein. Somehow we get close enough that the pieces fit together in rude sorts of ways.
Potter’s kilns on the other hand, much more closely approach the actual imperfection that brought us all the rocks on Earth. And the universe. With a great deal of faith, you consign your piece to the kiln. The wabi-sabi is impossible to know or quantify. There are no round frictionless cows.
Pray to the gods of fire, electricity, gravity and magnetism, that what comes out resembles the vision in your mind. Let me take a moment to calculate the likelihood of that.
One over infinity.
There’s always some wabi-sabi.
A Wabi Sabi Moment with Georgia O’Keeffe
I grew up looking at O’Keeffe art—being that she lived in New Mexico, where I was born and spent most of my life. I’d seen her paintings in books and posters for years. Standing in front of famous paintings in real life—no photograph holds a candle to that experience. It’s not just the colors being more alive, or that you get the true idea of the size of the painting. You are close, very close to the act of creation. And once, I stood mesmerized in that very moment, as close to a painting as the cops at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe would allow. I could not take my eyes off it: a single paintbrush hair embedded in a stroke of color. I felt as if I was there in that one moment when Georgia O’Keeffe stood before this very canvass. A million brush strokes in her long life of painting…and there’s this one that put in that single, unique moment of exquisite wabi-sabi.
It was breathtaking.
I’m glad she didn’t see the hair; surely she would have plucked it out. I would have, in the name of flawless perfection that is found only as a concept within the part of the human brain that dreams of round frictionless cows.
Imperfection: it’s what makes the world
The Hope Diamond
Not even crystals are perfect; they all have wabi-sabi.
They found this one really big chunk of blue diamond, cut all the wabi-sabi away, until it was perfectly huge. Hugely perfect. They called it the Hope Diamond—hoping for another humongous one like it.
One over infinity. It happens. But it’s all the other instances of imperfection that comprise the whole dang universe. The perfect parts are so few as to barely exist at all.
I’ve never made a perfect pot, never wrote a perfect book, never been a perfect anything. I’ll continue to put it out there, though, as long as I have a heartbeat. I am but a fragment of the whole wabi-sabi universe unfolding.
Mary C Simmons ... Art and Word 
You must be logged in to post a comment.