The Clay Magi

I've always believed that when you make something with your hands, it comes alive. Hares and bears and mountain lions and roses and hearth-homes and strange wheeled vehicles, they all wait inside the iron-dark clay. Our hands know how to pull and coax and sing them out. It is, in no small way, magic. At least that's how I find the process of working with clay, the act of sending a bisque-fired creature off into the kiln, to be engulfed in flames, to come out bright-skinned, umbered, new. I always feel a little bit tender, watching them go in to that great old chamber of transmutation. And when they come out; well, they are no longer wholly mine. They can speak. They can carry light. They have dreams of their own. 

I believe old houses are this way too. Made by hand and tool out of materials that were once alive, filled with human love stories and heart-breaks, holding on to the memories and sorrows and passions of those who lived within their walls. 

Behind those taffeta curtains the color of mustard, a dark eyed, white-haired weaver might live, coming and going by the third-story door which has no staircase, but simply opens onto the air beneath the redwood trees on the old road called Cascade. 

Maybe she comes and goes by way of the ghost of the Mt. Tamalpais Railroad, the Crookedest Railroad in the World, which snaked up the mountain at the turn of the century, and left behind only fireroads and a few old railroad ties. Maybe she sits at the top of the mountain on summer evenings when the fog is so thick she can only see her own body, and the nearest rocks, and the moisture on gold grass and the summer mariposa lilies just coming up, singing to the ghosts of grizzly bears. The last one in all of California was shot in 1911. 

Dreaming, singing, storytelling, shaping grizzlies with clay in our hands; all of these things are an act of hope, a declaration of embodiment and the mystery of this world.

Recently a friend asked me what I meant when I talked about magic. I realized that I do talk about it a fair bit, not always remembering that in the dominant culture, "magic" as such pretty much begins and ends with Harry Potter style wizards and green-faced Halloween witches at best, and sexy teen vampires at worst. Or, perhaps just as confusing and ultimately misleading, a kind of sparkling fairy wonderland full of chiffon dresses in the shapes of bluebells. There is also in the word the sense of illusion-- as in the rabbit-out-of-a-hat sort of magic tricks. Perhaps it's partly the word that is to blame, for magic, in its literal etymology, actually doesn't mean quite what I intend it to mean when I use it.

Its roots are Latin, and therefore Indo-European, the language group that came cascading out of the Caucasus some 5,000 years ago on horseback. "Magic" comes from the Proto-Indo-European root magh, "to have power," which, as we all know, is a complicated and dangerous thing to wield. In Old Persian, "magush" meant one of the members of the priestly learned class, and by the late 14th century "magic," from the Old French magique meant something along the lines of "the art of influencing events and producing marvels using hidden natural forces." Apparently the word "magic" displaced the Old English wiccecraeft and drycraeft (dry having its roots in the Old Irish drui, related to druid). 

Magic, to me, isn't so much about the power to influence events in the world, though I do believe that human beings throughout time, from Kashaya Pomo shamans to medieval Persian priests to ancient Transylvanian grandmothers have been able to influence and even control some of the unseen forces at work around us all the time, and that wherever power resides, there is always the possibility of misuse. (Across much of indigenous California, people ran into regular trouble with witchdoctors gone bad—the jealous, nasty sorts of power-hungry shamans who would put the eye on you out of jealousy or revenge, and Poison you.) 

In this lifetime, in this world, magic to me is about the force of life itself. The fact that the fog coming over the mountain makes the shapes it does, impossibly beautiful wisps and coils and tendrils of mist. The fact that the mariposa lily, opening on a hot day, is so perfectly spotted and furred. What can possibly create such yellow? And how can it be that the bees (according to recent studies which only put into scientific language the Miracle that poetry and ancient stories have known all along) talk to the flowers through the hairs in their legs? More to the point, magic to me means that everything is alive. Everything speaks. The entire world is animate. Speak to the clay in your hands, and it will become a bear. Bury that bear in the earth with a prayer for the old grizzlies who no longer walk this land, and I do mean this most sincerely, you never know what might come to pass. 

We are very literally made up of all of the same stuff as the mariposa lily, the grizzly bear, the young rattlesnake sleeping in the shade of a log, the mountain itself. Even the stars. Look to Darwin or to the Creation Stories of the First People all across North America. You will find the same story. This is what magic means to me—all the unseen threads that weave us, one to the next, star to firtop to bear-ghost to human woman to wildflower to ocean to air.

This is why I tell stories the way I do. This is why I imagine dark-eyed weavers at the tops of old houses, and shape animals from clay that take on lives of their own, and dream of ghost-trains and the possibility that grizzly bears are still here in the land of California, somewhere; because I believe that without this faith in the unseen, in the possibilities of unfathomable Dreaming within every form of life, in the understanding that we are all made of one fabric, a brilliant many-seamed and many-colored patchwork—without this we are lost. We are heart-broken. At the beginning of human time, the earliest religion, the earliest form of "magic," was embodied by the shaman, the one who mediated between the human community and the more-than-human realms of animals, plants, stones, waters, winds, celestial bodies, and spirits. The shaman's job, at its most basic and most generalized, was to keep the balance, to not let the people forget who they were, where they stood, how every other being was elder and kin.

How are we to keep the balance now, in this world, when "magic" at its most literal, and its most popular, means a fantastical manipulation of power? How are we to keep the balance in this world, without remembering how to Dream, how to imagine, how to tell stories that bring the houses alive, the clay alive, even the plastic and the concrete alive? The truth is, humans love stories full of giants and talking stars and wise bears. We know it well when we are children. When we grow up, we tend to forget it for a little while. But, even so,  it's never to late to start looking for doors with no staircases and the old wise ones who use them...

Flea Markets, or The Lives of Lampshades

I've always loved flea markets, antique markets, little green stalls full of old moldering books and maps, trays of silver spoons, shelves of old Hungarian linens hand embroidered with somebody else's initials. A few weeks back my dad and I spent a Sunday morning at the famed Alameda flea market, on that man-made island in the East Bay, in a big old tarmac lot that once housed the Naval Air Station, and now hosts a monthly gathering of tents and tables and trucks and masses of old coats and trunks and spoons and buckets and lanterns.

What I love is the stories of old used items, the life of them, and also the basic handmade energy of even such simple things as old crates made to ship fruits in-- wood! In our prefabricated mass-produced world, a storied, hand-made object that has survived through decades, that has felt the hands and palm-lines of many people upon it, has its own life, its own magic, its own meaning.

As a writer and tale-weaver and lover of all things magical, I of course love to imagine up little stories about objects that catch my eye— the old metal tea-cart discovered one day at the top of the lane, rusted and slightly bent, and wheeled down to the stone cottage, patched up, used for bringing tea out into the garden of a spring afternoon, until one day the cart started to produce strange little plates and cups made from shrew-bone and acorn-cap, and rolled off of its own accord through a blackberry hedge, on the other side of which stood a small old man brown as a buckeye who demanded payment for the borrowing of said tea-cart in fish-bones, bee's wings and, most importantly, the fetching of a pot of tea brewed on the particular cold and snowy mountain peak where the twin stars Mizar and Alcor (in the handle of Ursa Major) came down to take their rest and have a warm drink every winter solstice....

You get the idea.

Some things, of course, really were alive once (as in flesh and blood), like the sad small shrunken face of this red fox. I wanted to bring him home with me not because I like the idea of the skinning and selling of foxes for fancy fur trimmings on fancy coats or muffs (though I do respect and admire the conscious and skilled use of animal furs in far northern regions and among indigenous peoples where the relationship between human and animal-to-be-coat is one of compassion and honor) but because, as he is already in this state, I thought it would be nice to give him a warm and happy home, to do him that honor, now he is a scarf. And of course I wondered what stories that little red body had known, both as a live fox and as a dead fox about a woman's neck.

My whole perspective on those things which we call "inanimate" really shifted a few years back when I read this interview between Derrick Jensen and David Abram. Here are Abram's wonderful words on the subject:

"To speak of anything as inanimate is kinda disrespectful.  It's insulting to the thing.  Why do it?  It cuts me off from listening to what that thing might want in the world, to what that object, that presence, might be asking of me.  I don’t see any usefulness in making a conceptual division between that which is animate on one hand, and that which is inanimate on the other.  And I know of no healthy culture that makes such a division between animate and inanimate matter. [...]

People always want to draw the line somewhere.  But you see, it's drawing the line at all that’s the problem: the idea that at bottom matter is ultimately inert, or inanimate.  The word “matter,” if you listen with your animal ears, is basically the word 'mater,' or mother.  It comes from the same Indo-European root as the word 'matrix,' which is Latin for 'womb.'

We all carry within us an ancient, ancestral awareness of matter as the womb of all things, a sense that matter is alive through and through.  But to speak of matter as inanimate is to think of mother as inanimate, to imply that the female, earthly side of things is inert, is just an object.  If we want to really throw a monkeywrench into the workings of the patriarchy, then we should stop speaking as though matter is in any way, at any depth, inanimate or inert.

Every indigenous, oral culture that we know of -- every culture that has managed to sustain itself over the course of many centuries without destroying the land that supports it -- simply refuses to draw such a distinction between animate and inanimate matter. [...]

In relation to certain human artifacts, particularly the mass-produced objects, it ís difficult to make contact with and feel the unique life of that presence.  Yet one can find that life pulsing, most readily, in the materials of which that artifact is made.  In the wood of the telephone pole, which was once standing in a forest, in the clay bricks of the apartment building, even in the smooth metal alloy of the truck door that you lean against -- there, in those metals originally mined from the bones of the breathing earth, one can still feel the presence of patterns that are earthborn, and that still carry something of that wider life. But if I look at the truck purely as a truck, what I see is not something that is born, but something that is made.  And there is surely an important distinction between the born and the made.  But even with that distinction, the made things are still made from matter, from the flesh of a living cosmos."

As a child I think most of us enjoyed that magical sense of suspended disbelief, wherein an old wooden clock, an enamel milk-jug, a rusty blue toolbox, might have a djinn inside, a story to tell when the lights go out and the humans go to bed, a whole life going on downstairs in the cupboards.

But something happens as we grow up, this distancing from the immediacy of the senses and the imagination, that makes the idea that a post-box could be animate totally ridiculous. Reading Abram's words, I felt like I got clocked on the head-- he reminded me that everything in this world is made of this world, from electrical cords to the more obvious things such as wooden chairs. Some objects require more violently intense (and destructive) making-processes, but nonetheless, they are all mater, of the mother earth. A difficult concept for me to swallow, but an important one I think!

Anyhow, the point of all this as I began writing was about the stories of old things, the items cast off and reused, the garbage of one era become the flower pots of the next. Strolling the many stall-lanes of the fair, my dad and I laughed about how human beings seem to hoard, what pack rats we are! And how, I thought to myself, there is more than enough stuff in the world, if used cleverly, re-shaped, re-stitched, to last us all a good long time, if equally shared.

Which brings me to a little excerpt I'd like to share with all of you, part of the quilted-novel that I have been working on (and recently finished) inspired by the paintings of the wonderful Rima Staines. We are very excited to bring it into the world soon! (In the process of doing so now!) The novel is set in a sort of folkloric post-apocalyptic future, and so it is very much concerned with the tattered recycling of strange old things. There is a scene of a little gathering under the stars in an old parking lot by the Bay that I think suits the spirit of this whole post.... It is based upon Rima's beautiful painting, The Bells:

The Bells, Rima Staines

"I listened to the man in the black top hat play on the violin the saddest song I’d ever heard until the moon was all the way up. That’s when I saw the rest of them; that’s when I saw how the music came from every direction along the water’s edge, on the old moldering docks and overgrown lawns, up the overpass that no longer held cars, only walkers. Drums played with sticks, dozens of violins, accordions, bamboo flutes, guitars, strange stringed instruments of knobs and sizes I couldn’t name, women ringing big fistfuls of bells. They spilled up from the bay in groups that gathered around small fires, like a set of tiny sprawling camps. The music made no sense all together, close up. It was a chaos of sound, different tunes and melodies and keys and cultures from one fire to the next. [....]

I can’t speak or write of that evening without crying, now. I can’t tell of it like one tells a normal story, with a narrative arc, with a beginning, middle and end, because it filled me to bursting. My nose, my eyes, my fingers, my stomach, my skin, my ears, my young heart. It filled me like music will, all at once, utterly, so no lines can be made between moments, notes, feelings. Nothing in my life has been like it, before or since—the celebration, the carelessness, the joy, the ragged edges that comforted rather than repelled me, the sense of purpose. We are all ragged inside; why not fray out into the world, dressed in red?

I can only tell it in scraps and pieces, a quilt that has come to cover my heart in order for me to continue despite the fact that it is all in ruin, bones and broken refuse, the joy gone from the world.

It was rabbit skin and fat in my teeth, a feral grassy sweet flavor, rough wine and rougher stars, tipping me with dizziness and warmth, the carts of roasted nuts, of porridges and cakes set up on the old roads, making all the painted lines blurry; a boy playing a grand piano on the top of a hillock above the marsh, a piano on wheels as big as a bike’s, and pulled by tame deer, how he sat up there amidst the brackish smell of mud and played old songs that waltzed and mourned, how beautiful his face was in the moon, a face I loved that instant and will love until I die; how the woman nursing the babe on her wrinkled breast decked me in velvet ribbons with gold bells at the ends, gave me a ragged silk skirt to twirl and flow over my straight pants, blue as any jay, the ceramic pipe of the old grandmother stuffed and smoking with wild sagebrush and orange poppies, the shapes of two hundred small fires along that cement road and in and out of gray patches, parking lots, so the whole bayfront was a walk in the Milky Way, each bonfire a star, its own shape, fed by its own unique pile of branch, chair-leg, willow shoot, shingle."

So, here's to the stories, the ghosts, the lives, the magic, of all the old baubles and trinkets and lampshades and salt shakers that we have made and cast off and repurposed, and here's also to the wonder and the joy of small things. 

Oh and in case you were wondering, I came away with a pile of old Hungarian linens (a nod to my dad's grandmother Anne, whose ancestors came from that land), a nine-tine candelabra (pure magic, let me assure you), and a silver spatula engraved with quite fancy little knots, a birthday present for my love (we lost our other one in the process of moving and then found it again right after I gave him this one, ha!)-- which I've taken to calling something like "the spatula from Camelot," as it is rather ornate in a funny way for a thing so everyday as a spatula. We have begun to wonder if one day it will start flipping oatcakes out of thin air.

This final photo provides a crazy juxtaposition to those covered stalls full of old and reused items, old crystal brandy decanters and satin chairs and tin pails— the huge shipping freighters coming in from Asia and the unloading cranes waiting to do their job (which since I was a girl I've always thought looked like huge elephantine beasts, skeletal ones-- ha! See, it's hard to stop thinking that way once you've started!).

I know that it is complicated, and fraught, and violent in certain ways, to imagine what it would mean if we lived in a world without massive shipping containers full of masses of plastic and packaged and fabricated items come across the great Pacific in great huge freighters, a world not seamed and oiled with freeways and the cars that speed along them, but nevertheless it is important to dream, to tell oneself and one another stories that are not in the language of shipping container and SUVs, but rather in the language of animate beings and materials, of living bodies. For as David Abram says, when we start drawing a line, saying this thing is animate and this thing is not, we automatically produce hierarchies of value and meaning, and it becomes easy to objectify and mass-produce, and thus, destroy.

 But if everything is "animate," well... the thought spirals outward like a thousand dandelion seeds, and who knows where they land... but they do love sidewalk cracks!