Inspiration

At the start of this blog I swore to never discuss any personal drama, and to that I hold, but I think it is high time I posted an entry regarding what exactly makes me tick, because some people think I tick kind of strangely, maybe even have a whole different ticking mechanism on a whole different frequency from normal people, and I can't swear to any of that but here, in brief, is why I am who I am, and why my WISE project is so perfect for me, and why I chose it, and all of that.

(The following is not what I originally intended to write about but it is important.)

 I think respect is the highest compliment one person can pay to another, and the person whom I respect most in the world is a man named John Darnielle. He is a musician but he is also a poet and an artist and a human being with a totally other kind of energy which acts like a magnet toward me and my other-frequency ticking mechanism.

I would like to post some of his lyrics to show you why my heart is so filled with love for this man but I do not think that they can achieve their full effect without that beautiful desperate energy which he possesses in intoxicating, addictive quantities. If you would like to scratch the surface of beginning to understand - I don't know how to help you. You may YouTube "This Year" but you will get live versions with shit audio. To spare you the trouble, it goes, in part:

I am gonna make it through this year 

if it kills me

I am gonna make it through this year 

if it kills me

And I need that assurance, I need it badly, and somehow the only way I can believe it is if it comes from him. It comes through in every single one of his several hundred songs, even the ones which don't spell it out like that, even the ones which are in fact saying exactly the opposite. And the reason why this is relevant is that I probably would have dropped out of school some years ago if it were not for this magnificent person, and so it is really down to John that I am in WISE at all. So.

Now I can say what I intended to say when I first conceived this entry.

I live here:

I mean, I live in a house, but if you look out my window, as I frequently do, you see the above. If you walk a hundred paces up a hill, you get to the below: 

And if you walk along that an unspecified number of paces, you come to this: 

Not just that ^ , actually, but a whole multitude of little secret waterfalls and streams and gorges and cliffs and what I am trying to say is that when I was bored as a child I went out in the woods and played by myself, as I do not have any siblings or cousins and live miles from civilization, and as a result of that strange wood-child isolation really from a very young age I have seen things in a very different light from most people whom I know. Or at least I try to. The ability is leaving me as I get older and have more contact with humans who live in the real world and I don't like that at all. Not the humans nor the real world nor the fading of my vision.

Water ^. 

Where I have grown up there is water and earth and in this project I am taking the earth and purging the water and submitting the finished project to a baptism by fire and air, joining all the elements in my process and most importantly creating, defying entropy, transitioning from the randomness of wet clay to the fractal-like order of a well-thrown vessel. And then so that I don't become too linear I introduce the element of the kiln, the fire in the earth, where anything can happen. I put something in and I get the same skeleton out but really it isn't me who has modified it, but the substances which the earth has given to me which I am only very gently manipulating.

Talking of fractals: Trees.

And stones. I don't have a picture for you, but the waterfall just beside my house looks like a staircase, as though somebody had carved it. Nobody did, it just exists like that. It is proof that nature can give you order out of chaos, and you can also, conversely, give order back to nature and it will introduce an element of chaos, so that nothing is weighted, everything is balanced. In my pieces I desire a balance between the uniformity of the round vessel and the skin of it, the colors, which I cannot predict, which just occur according the the position of such variables as sunlight, temperature, quantity of salt, quantity of soda, length of burning, amount of wood, type of wood, dryness of wood - they are infinite.

The following pictures are examples of the vision I have acquired from the woods. Every few steps on the path there is a gift of beauty, something out of the ordinary, given from no one to no one, just there.

I know that the patterns or colors on my pieces will be irregular and random and I want them so, I want that contrast with the symmetry of the vessels themselves. As you can see, things do not have to be uniform to be beautiful.

Sometimes the unexpected is what pleases the eye.

Sometimes we see patterns or pictures that aren't there, or maybe they are there. Maybe they are meant to be and maybe they just happened.

Maybe the uncertainty over which is true is the better part of beauty.

Maybe I should go to bed.