The maker is more public and exposed than my current situation as private collector. I can hide out in the safety of my home and garden. Potters stand in front of their pottery, and the direct responsibility of one for the other is not in doubt. You cannot disinherit or deny your own work. There is a basic courage in affirming your own work after bringing it into existence. If you do not love your own creations, if you do not have loyalty to them after creating them, than you might well be considered a phony and a fake. Yet that love for the offspring of your muddy hands and the wheel is subject to public scrutiny by strangers who do not know you. How do you feel when people walk by your booth at a ceramic fair or exhibit without stopping? How do you protect yourself when your feelings are hurt by sheer indifference? Isn’t that even a more hurtful rejection than any other kind?
Words of Passion
I want to offer you another notion of this ascension of passion from bodily desires to an inclusive love that leads to the contemplation of beauty, truth, and virtue. In his book, “The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism”, Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet of the last century and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, takes us back to Plato and his book, “Symposium” in which his spokesperson, Socrates talks about his encounter with Diotima, a wise foreign priestess. According to Plato, Diotima tells Socrates of the loftiest and the most deeply hidden mysteries of passion, love and beauty.
“In our youth we are attracted by corporeal beauty, and we love only one body, one beautiful form. But if what we love is beauty, why love it only in one body and not in many? And Diotima asks again: If beauty exists in many forms and persons, why not love it in and of itself? And why not go beyond the forms and love the thing that makes them beautiful, the idea? 
Diotima sees love as a ladder: at the bottom, love of a beautiful body; then the beauty of many bodies; after that, beauty itself; after that, the virtuous soul; and finally, incorporeal beauty. If love of beauty is inseparable from the desire of immortality, why not participate in it through the contemplation of the eternal forms? Beauty, truth, and virtue are three and one; they are facets of the same reality, the only real reality. Diotima concludes: ‘He who has followed the path of love’s initiation in the proper order will on arriving at the end suddenly perceive a marvelous beauty, the source of all our efforts…An eternal beauty, non engendered, incorruptible, that neither increases nor decreases.’ A beauty that is entire, one, identical to itself, that is not made up of parts as the body is or of ratiocinations, as is discourse. Love is the way, the ascent, toward the beauty: it goes from the love of one body to the love of many, then from the love of all beautiful forms to the love of virtuous deeds, then from deeds to ideas and from ideas to absolute beauty, which is the highest life that can be lived, for in it ‘the eyes of the understanding commune with beauty, and man engenders neither images nor simulacra of beauty but beautiful realities.’ And this is the path of immortality.”
If the maker can embed a kind of beauty in the ceramic work, then that object can inspire the passionate search for truth and virtue as attributes of ‘beautiful realities’. I would not go along with Plato’s insistence, as articulated by Socrates, that there is only one absolute beauty, that perfect, ideal single form that is the eternal template for all lesser examples.
Variates of Beauty
I see many varieties of beauty as I look around my pottery gallery, taking in diverse appearances that can be traced to many cultures and styles as expressed in historical context through many generations of potters. I do aspire to attain that ascendant mountaintop where I can gaze at the marvels of past and present ceramic civilizations and celebrate that a small portion of that greatness resides in my pottery gallery. Passion can lead to love – a love that transports us to a profound and virtuous state of awakened contemplation and the embrace of marvelous beauty and sublime expression. When will it be safe in our society to talk about our feelings again? I for one am not ashamed to do so.
Art and craft, basic human culture, cannot flourish where emotions are suppressed. Art, and yes, craft and pottery, has been shifting to just another commercial activity, just another exchange of money for product as a financial transaction typical of how our society works. 
If there is no inherent nobility of spirit present, if there is nothing uplifting about possessing works of beauty, then maybe I should just transfer my consumer activity to other products that promise a bigger bang for my bucks. I have been going to craft shows for several decades. There is less and less pottery there because potters cannot afford the high fees required to obtain a booth. So they are being squeezed out. Apparently pottery is not a hot market commodity item or a big profit maker. Well, for me, pottery is not merchandize, and we must find others ways to sing the enriching virtues of pottery. Oliver Wendell Holmes, former Supreme Court Justice, once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. Well, in the same spirit, when you purchase pottery and other craft, you pay for human culture. I think that is a very good bargain indeed.
Consumer Trends
How do you sell a quality of life instead of just more stuff to store in your house? Maybe I should buy all my pottery from China in the future. 
It would be cheap and I could get a better deal than those more expensive America potters. Remind me to check out eBay and find some good buys. Pottery is a part of human culture and ceramics is a part of human civilization. Why can’t we seem to tell better stories of why that is important? Libraries are closing throughout America during these tough economic times. State parks are being closed in California. What kind of a society first closes its libraries and parks? Why don’t we seem to care about these things anymore? Have we forgotten what makes life worth living? Where does pottery and craft in general fit into a more compelling and convincing story about those values that makes everything else bearable? Do we still believe in them or have we also lost faith in what we do and the joyous impact it can have on others?
Passionate Poetry
I want to offer you a portion of a poem that Octavio Paz wrote. Poetry contains the essence of highly refined passion. Emotions are distilled in poetry as metaphors for the universal issues of our brief existence on earth. Pottery uses that very earth to provide its own emotional vocabulary. One poem in particular by Paz speaks of something that all potters dread when they open up a kiln. This title of rather long poem, of which you will receive only a sample, is “The Broken Waterjar”, the last poem in a book of his poetry, “Octavio Paz: Early Poems 1935-1955”. This lyrical song celebrates much of what we have been talking about in these three blogs about passion. This is the last part of the poem,
“Tell me, drouth, stone polished smooth by toothless time,
by toothless hunger,
dust ground to dust by teeth that are centuries, by centuries
that are hunger,
tell me, broken waterjar in the dust, tell me,
is the light born to rub bone against bone, man against man, hunger
against hunger,
till the spark, the cry, the word spurts forth at last,
till the water flows and the tree with wide turquoise leaves arises
at last?
We must sleep with open eyes, we must dream with
our hands,
we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course, of the
sun dreaming its worlds.
we must dream aloud, we must sing till the song puts forth roots,
Trunk, branches, birds, stars.
We must sing till the dream engenders in the sleeper’s flank the
Red wheat-ear of resurrection.
The womanly water, the spring at which we may drink and
Recognize ourselves and recover,
the spring that tells us we are men, the water that speaks along in
the night and calls us by name,
the spring of words that say I, you, he, we, under the great tree,
the living statue of the rain,
where we pronounce the beautiful pronouns, knowing ourselves
and keeping faith with our names,
we must dream backwards, toward the source, we must row back
up the centuries,
beyond infancy, beyond the beginning, beyond the waters
of baptism,
we must break down the walls between man and man, reunite
what has been sundered,
life and death are not opposite worlds, we are one stem with
twin flowers,
we must find the lost word, dream inwardly and
also outwardly,
decipher the night’s tattooing and look face to face at the
noonday and tear off its mask,
bathe in the light of the sun and eat the night’s fruit and spell
out the writings of stars and rivers,
and remember what the blood, the tides, the earth, and the body
say, and return to the point of departure,
neither inside nor outside, neither up nor down, at the crossroads
where all roads begin,
for the light is singing with a sound of water, the water with
a sound of leaves,
the dawn is heavy with fruit, the day and the night flow together
in reconciliation like a calm river,
the day and the night caress each other like a man and woman
in love,
and the seasons and all mankind are flowing under the arches of
the centuries like one endless river
toward the living center of origin, beyond the end and
the beginning.
I think potters already have taken Paz’s advice and “dream with their hands”. Hopefully your pottery sings for you and the song fills the air with who you are and what you have just made and given to the world. Pottery does break down the walls, speaks a universal language, can aid in the reconciliation of all humans. Pottery is made of earth, fire and water, “flowing under the arches of the centuries like one endless river toward the living center of origin, beyond the end and the beginning.”
To be engaged in the world can only be recorded on your soul and heart if you are open to not only receiving sensations and meanings but also providing your own response in return. Many who read this blog do that very thing with their ceramic artistry. There is no reason to make that effort unless that created artifact contains the compressed summary of your thoughts and feelings. That passionate, expressive content is waiting for the observer, dormant in the ceramics object only when unseen or neglected, activated on contact when viewed and experienced.
We have so far explored sentimentality and passion as emotions inherent in the creative process and embedded in pottery. What are some other emotions contained in pottery? We will see in the next blog.
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