It is not the djinni of art. It is instead the spirit of the tangible material world revealed by human hands, the world turning inside out through the intervention of human hands into an image of the brain cavity of the human skull. Our world is in that pot, our subsistence, our sustenance. Each pot is an affirmation of the unity of the human with the material world. The potter's craft speaks of the Earth as corn speaks of the Earth with its rich yellow kernels bursting forth from silken ears.
Pottery is the human seed that springs forth from the Earth.
It is a craft that, except in hollow imitation, does not survive without soul, and therefore by definition cannot exist as the product of our neomodern world. Regarding the craft of poetry, we may seek the same answers, and find them directly as they come from that same dark brain cavity of the human skull. Poetry can, like pottery be the affirmation of the unity of the human with the natural world. It is the poet that determines whether poetry grows out of the material world in which he or she lives as a native, or whether poetry speaks with the spirit of trasnslocation, from the heart of a person striving and in conflict with nature. The background on this page is a tiled GIF image made from an original photograph of clouds above the Pacific Ocean in Santa Cruz, California.