Okay, I know my creation from the short 1 hour in Johnson Art Museum could hardly be called ‘art’.
But it’s definitely an immersion. And, although I complained to my friend how ugly my pen pot was due to the fleeting time that I could hardly do any refinement, I still cherished my work and took it back to my room, bought paint and sandpaper, looking forward to doing more things with it.
There is something peculiar about clay. When you see that wet, soft texture, in the prospect that it will become dry and permanent after you do something with it, you feel that you can see everything ahead of you. Everything, birds, flowers, trees, cloud, stars…the ability of creation gives you power, as if you yourself called out “Lux!” at the first day of chaos.
When our instructor started to show us how we could slap the clay onto the table to make a nice smooth slab, in the absence of a clay wheel that we generally see in workshops, my mind wandered back to somewhere around the Palaeolithic era. I imagined myself living in a surrounding with no complicated technology and life was as simple as it could be. I imagined myself being someone in a tribe who particularly makes pottery for a living. New things every day, each piece adding some color and usefulness to life itself.
The imagination could only be a window to touch upon the past. But buried in numbers and data, we seldom sit down and contemplate, trying to touch the texture of life. I have always been a huge fan of various handicrafts, and there is one favourite thing about them that I came up myself the other day. We are curiously fond of making and often making things that would seem permanent, at least compared to our own lifespan. That is probably because our life is too fleeting, and sometimes there are only memories that support us, which could fade. Creating things and letting them stay is like the process of grasping hold of a handful of flowing time and trying to make them frozen. For every piece of handicraft, there is time woven into it, and they support in some sense an evidence of that we had lived, and lived vividly.
I really like your reasoning that we want to make permanent things as an evidence of having lived. And I think the reason why this evidence is so important to us is that, when doing anything, we’re putting a little bit of ourselves into outside objects. In this sense, an outside object becomes a symbol of individuality, and thus not only evidence of a life lived vividly, but also of a particular, individual life or moment or feeling. We can look at things we make and/or have for a long time and think “that’s a part of me”. Because anything I make will be different from anything you make, and we’ll be making them in completely different contexts, with completely different styles, with completely different sets of skills. And because that shows.
Anything we have and which stands the test of time alongside us is undoubtedly linked to very specific moments, emotions and filled with meaning. And even if we don’t have those things, as with selling handicraft items for example, they still have a really strong meaning: knowing that those objects are being used by others means there’s a little bit of us into others’ stories, and that feels great.
I’m the youngest out of three kids. Several years ago, when my oldest brother went to college outside of our hometown, my middle brother changed bedrooms (the oldest brother’s bedroom had a desk, so it was more convenient to him). That was the time in which it occurred to me that permanent changes were happening. Things wouldn’t go back to where they were before: all of us three in the same house living with our parents. And I imagined how easily we just changed bedrooms. I imagined what it’d be like as I’d change to that bedroom when my middle brother left home, and what the bedroom would look like after we all had left. I started imagining an empty bedroom, and the same bedroom being occupied by someone from a completely different family. No signs of our existence. At all. No objects or signs of memories from that time. All gone. Just the thought of “Mateus’s bedroom” eventually looking completely devoid of the meaning I gave it made me immediately burst into tears.
I wholeheartedly believe we want to immortalize meaningful parts of our life, like you discussed. To have objects representing our moments and personalities, and not only our memories. That’s why we take photos and, before photography was a thing, that’s part of the reason why paintings existed. And that, as you said, is something we get when making objects ourselves.
This whole discussion reminds me of my backpack. It’s far from being a perfect correlation to the topic since I didn’t make it myself (it is a backpack which I received in a competition), but it still evokes, in me, the same kind of feelings. I’ve had it for almost three years now and, with time, the backpack has broken really badly around 6-7 times and counting. And I’ve fixed it all those times (OK, to be fair, the first few times it was my mom, because I had zero sewing skills haha). From the specific moment I’ve received it (the competition’s context, I mean) to now, I’ve considered it a part of me, and particularly because it is linked to so many moments of my life, so many friends and colleagues, so many stories. And it feels rewarding to fix it over and over again because it is, for me, a way to keep those memories alive, to keep the backpack’s meaning from fading away into oblivion, and to give it even more meaning. And I really don’t care how imperfect it is, how obvious it is that it is mended, and how many people tell me I should get a new backpack: its meaning is, to me, far more relevant than anything else.
Thank you for sharing your story. The similar feeling from the bedroom story had puzzled me for a long time as well–because, as an example, no matter how permanent the clay seems to be right now, it will eventually perish. I had once for a long time the extreme fear of the fact that everything is changing and evolving without the exception of a single moment. Not even a gasping moment. The thing you cherish will go, the people you love will die, (your homework will be due…omg) and there is nothing to stop it. But now I am trying to adjust myself to this fact, and that’s part of a reason why I am learning math and physics although I am a bit slow at it. They are in some sense the most permanent things we can think of, even when after humans become extinct and they are forgotten. Maybe we can live in a 5-dimension spacetime someday and this problem will not trouble us again, like what is depicted in Interstellar, but the hope is trivial. For now, the only thing I know to cope with the situation is to accept the fact and cherish what you have now.
For the bag story. I had really similar story but that happened when I was in kindergarten. My mom tried to get rid of my old backpack and buy me a new one, but I refused fiercely, crying, because I always feel that the bag was weeping at me with brooding eyes in the trashcan. I kind of guess that when a thing has accompanied you for a long time and witnessed a lot of your moments, as you said, you will start to weave part of yourself to that thing–and this will result in your beginning to regard the thing as a person or at least a dear animal, not as an object–whether it is somewhat true or just illusion. I believe this is how one kind of ‘animism’ comes into being, and it is really an interesting trait among the living creatures.