Today I saw the surgeon/Who’d sliced into my hands/To help my hand health burgeon/And sculpt as clay demands.
The good doctor says that the healing meets expectations and will likely continue for the rest of the year. After a year, he says, I can’t expect any more improvement. As of now, the only two symptoms of significance are a slight stiffness in my right middle finger and continued tingling of the fingers of my left hand.
I set the wheel to spinning/And formed a mug or two/With confidence a-ginning/And symbiosis true.
The clay body, Ironstone by name, was wonderfully supple and cooperative, and results felt more collaborative than solo-showish.
The serviceable Wareboard/Took on the two with glee/Then Thusséd and then Therefored/”Three fourths of Four is Three.”
The sound of the wheel’s motor augmented with the earcup-like acoustics of the splash tray can sometimes seem like the hum of the Cosmos itself. It is a lovely Alpha Wave maker when the wheel-throwing is smooth sailing.
Alas, the Fourth went sideways/A clay wall bent, then tore./The Clay Gods’ sometimes snide ways/So humble Potter’s core.
Here is when Failure and Success prove they are brother and sister. Big Bro says “Ah well, three out of four beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” But Little Sis whispers, “Let’s take the scrap clay, which is plenty enough for another mug, to the wedging table and reconstitute it better than new. It’s a good exercise, and it’s also good exercise.”
The scrap clay resurrected/Was centered, shaped, and trimmed/And Gloom was redirected/With Wareboard’s glee undimmed.
“Try, Try Again” is ancient wisdom well suited to artisans. Every effort, be it success, failure, or “learning experience” mix, is another rung on the “ladder to the stars” that Bob Dylan sang of in the song “Forever Young.”
Now wrap them, keeping moistness/For handle-adds tomorrow./You’re happy, and your poisedness/Is free from theft and borrow.
The clunky last lines reflect giddiness and satisfaction. Time well spent is truly priceless.
There’s a movie out now: Ad Astra. In Miss Maegene Nelson’s Latin class in 1968 I learned not only that “ad astra” meant “to the stars,” but that it was part of the larger phrase “per aspera ad astra,” which meant “through difficulty to the stars.” You can’t get to the stars without difficulty, nor should you. The difficulty, and your growth in overcoming it, and the knowledge you gain about what it took to get there, all define Success.
Success is not always getting to the stars. Sometimes it’s getting through a day without doing something you know you shouldn’t. Or helping someone else do so. Or earning the grudging admiration of a rival. Clocking in on time. Being the fifth caller and answering the question correctly and getting concert tickets. Putting on sunblock before golfing.
The most successful moment in my life may well have been October 6, 1971. It was that evening that I held hands with the most beautiful girl in the Universe. We had kissed before, but that was a birthday kiss. Ahead of us lay about seven years of serious involvement, and a full spectrum of happiness and sadness, of bliss and anger, of diminishing laughter and rising discontent, cycles, pendulum swings, breakups and attempted reconciliations. A thousand successes; an ultimate failure. I bear enormous guilt about that to this day, and enormous regret for what might have been.
Part of success and failure in Life is weaving a failed relationship into the tapestry of the present and the future. We are always going to school but we are not always learning. And especially in these modern, instant-communication times, we may be skeptical about what is true and what is either marketing or manipulation or “the Devil in disguise.” Success, REAL success, will come to those with an abundance of love and an absence of hatred toward any living creature.
If you must hate, and we must, for to be human is to contain a certain amount of darkness, please hate IDEAS and not the people who have and practice them. Fight tooth and nail against bad IDEAS like exploitation of the weak and indecency and destruction of the environment. Do it with optimism and determination to remain decent and cause no harm. If you fail, own your failure.
Whoops–getting preachy in here. I once got results of an aptitude test that said I might want to pursue a career as a priest. No. Not unless they change the rules. 🙂 Sorry about the sermon.
As for the image, it is my attempt to non-objectively represent Success. So there’s an array of busy, blocky triangles being aligned upward by a celestial force in the form of a sort of overarching field. I hope it’s at least a good-looking doodle.
For this to be a comprehensive record of an expressive journey it is sometimes necessary to include items that don’t exactly work. In this case, though, the not-exactly-working aspect contributes to the theme.
Today is someone’s birthday. That’s always true; but today is the birthday, not only of my sister-in-law, not only of one of the friendliest residents of the retirement community where I work, but also of the woman who was my high school and college sweetheart. And since the page above, done near the end of the year, refers to her, and I’m thinking of her, now seems a good time to post this page.
Here are the words to the treble acrostic:
Caught in the rectangle seven now wait
One sop on Time couldn’t wait for the eighth
Syllogized vector sums wither inchoate
Inching tangentially wouldn’t you know it
Nillie alongside her Porche wears a bra
Even if doffable next Mardi Gras
It has been more than thirty-five years since I was an engineering student, and the meager knowledge I gathered then, about trigonometric functions and analytic geometry and integral equations and other such arcana, mostly withered. But the language of the mathematics stayed with me as a sort of circumstantial evidence that I am better off manipulating word arrays than differentials. Still, since I never punched through the walls between me-then and a master’s degree in systems and industrial engineering, there’s a dim yearning to get back to it and finish what I started. Alas, life is probably too short for me to do so.
One with Clay, Image and Text 