Two (similar?) things about clay, both read on the same day:
For Harold Bloom
I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness:
the wind tore about this
way and that in confusion and its speech could not
get through to me nor could I address it:
still I said as if to the alien in myself
I do not speak to the wind now:
for having been brought this far by nature I have been
brought out of nature
and nothing here shows me the image of myself:
for the word tree I have been shown a tree
and for the word rock I have been shown a rock
for stream, for cloud, for star
this place has provided firm implication and answering
but where here is the image for longing:
so I touched the rocks, their interesting crusts:
I flaked the bark of stunt-fir:
I looked into space and into the sun
and nothing answered my word longing:
goodbye, I said, goodbye, nature so grand and
reticent, your tongues are healed up into their own element
and as you have shut up you have shut me out: I am
as foreign here as if I had landed, a visitor:
so I went back down and gathered mud
and with my hands made an image for longing:
I took the image to the summit: first
I set it here, on the top rock, but it completed
nothing; then I set it there among the tiny firs
but it would not fit:
so I returned to the city and built a house to set
the image in
and men came into my house and said
that is an image for longing
and nothing will ever be the same again
David Graeber and David Wengrow:
Invention in one domain finds echoes and analogies across a whole range of others, which might otherwise seem completely unrelated.
We can see this clearly in Early Neolithic cereal cultivation. Recall that flood-retreat farming required people to establish durable settlements in mud-based environments, like swamps and lake margins. Doing so meant becoming intimate with the properties of soils and clays, carefully observing their fertility under different conditions, but also experimenting with them as tectonic materials, or even as vehicles of abstract thought. As well as supporting new forms of cultivation, soil and clay – mixed with wheat and chaff – became basic materials of construction: essential in building the first permanent houses; used to make ovens, furniture and insulation – almost everything, in fact, except pottery, a later invention in this part of the world.
But clay was also used, in the same times and places, to (literally) model relationships of utterly different kinds, between men and women, people and animals. People started using its plastic qualities to figure out mental problems, making small geometric tokens that many see as direct precursors to later systems of mathematical notation. Archaeologists find these tiny numerical devices in direct association with figurines of herd animals and full-bodied women: the kind of miniatures that stimulate so much modern speculation about Neolithic spirituality, and which find later echoes in myths about the demiurgic, life-giving properties of clay. As we’ll soon see, earth and clay even came to redefine relationships between the living and the dead.
Seen this way, the ‘origins of farming’ start to look less like an economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can’t know exactly who was doing what in this brave new world, it’s abundantly clear that women’s work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome.