A match struck in a dark room

Making Light is often a good read - I haven't the stamina to be a commenter there, but I do enjoy the place, and find out there interesting things about the world and all it's parts.  The other day Abi Sutherland had an Open Comment thread up there about a second century potter and why we know who he is at all. 

Because he left a mark.

It's just so human, shouting into the future on a scrap of pottery discovered against astonishing odds c. 1800 years later. 
I made this, I was here.

We're all doing this - we knit and blog and write and have children and paint and sculpt and cook dinner and plant things and build temples to the glory of our gods in all our little ways - I remember looking at embroidery at the Metropolitan - it was 4 or 5 years ago, an exhibit of ...Byzantine art?  I don't remember that, but I remember these tiny micro mosaics and the gold embroidery, the work of someone's hands, the work of someone's life. 

I worry sometimes that in this digital age, this age of service and finance and disposable goods, we manage to mark our lives with stuff that won't last, that our voices will end with the obsolescence of our technology.
Of course I also think that the act of forgetting is as important as the act of remembering and that much has to be lost for the next generation to rediscover and relearn.  What to sacrifice though? 

Fate decides - that exploded kiln must surely have felt like work lost the the potter then, a wasted effort. 

The idea of leaving no mark is terribly lonely, and I think making things, actual things, is a nice way to spit into the void.  I'm glad I make yarn and sometimes, things from yarn.  I'm glad most of the people I know make things, meaningful, beautiful things.

Hello to you, Lucius Meticius Ferenius, and hello to those you loved.  You existed.

Comments

[Kimberly]

great post, and thank-you for the wiki link. You are cool.

[Marin]

Since I was 13 or 14, my biggest fear is that I'll be forgotten -- in this life or on into the future.

I've heard the term "social Darwinism" batted about, often applied to the socially inept or teenaged pop-culture bandwagoneers, but it seems wishing to place your mark on the consciousness of the world is the more positive part of the social survival spectrum.

Also? I live in a dry climate. Maybe my knitting will be mummified for thousands of years...

[twinsetellen]

I like thinking about textile historians 100 years from now analyzing the innovations in knitting of our time, but I like even better thinking about a great-great-grandchild who I will never meet wearing something I knit.

[Danielle]

This rips at my heart.

[lanea]

Those ancient waves into the future are basically at the center of my academic life, and I think I got things a bit backwards, because I'm always writing back to them. But they can't read. Because they're dead. Silly, that.

[Laura J]

This is one of the reasons I like to dig. They were there.

[annie]

i was once a potter, and i loved it. a teacher said that i didn't have to fire everything; in fact, look at the body and ask yourself if it seems like it ought to be around 2 thousand years from now. i still think of that sometimes when i'm creating...

then i became an office worker for a couple of decades, and quit to lay hardwood floors. i just wanted to leave a mark. it felt so good to do work that stayed done, that stuck. i still drive by houses and think of the work by my own hands 'living' in the homes of others.

now i spin and dye and knit and i would imagine that one day i'll weave something... it's really all the same, isn't it?

[caroline]

I read Making Light all the time. I am amazed and delighted always by the sheer intelligence and breadth of knowledge among the Nielsen-Haydens and all the commenters. It reminds me how very starved I am for that level of play.
You might like Child of A Rainless Year. One of many books they have edited. Dunno why, I just have this idea the book may speak to you at some level.

[Lynn in Tucson]

This is a small, crazy world, isn't it? I know Abi Sutherland. I mean, I don't _know_ her, but I'm a fan of her work and we chatted a bit a few years ago when I was going to buy myself one of her books for my birthday. I thought of her again only recently and now here she is again. Methinks I should go buy that book.

[Samantha]

I think this explains why all I want to do at the present moment is knit, for anyone and everyone, and garden. Need things to be tangible, need the footprint to have depth, need to have tactile contact with my own two hands. Everything else feels ephemeral and transitory and unreliable...

[lizbon]

I have had these exact thoughts (put into slightly different words, of course, since we all make our own shapes of things, even the shaping of similar thoughts into different words), pretty much every time I am looking at an object made by an artist or craftsman. Especially ones made long ago.

It's one of the reasons one comes out of the Met totally overwhelmed.

[donna lee]

I have had that thought, that we don't create things with staying power anymore. Our lives are filled with ephemera. It's why I keep at the needlecraft. It might not last for several hundred years but maybe until my great grandchildren have children. Someone will wear a shawl and say "my great great grandmother made this". That's good enough for me.

[Jocelyn]

Yes, yes, yes! Oddly, I'm just picking up another of Betchen's books, and thinking about textiles and women's work as I start this new research project of mine that might someday be something (ha). I also think about this when Rick and I talk about a project he once worked on -- the Yucca Mountain Project -- and the question of how to ensure that our voices will be heard by folks who find whatever's buried down there 10,000 years from now, let alone ten million...

Sing hey for the making of things with our hands.

[Lisa]

Wow. I am breathless.

[Helen]

And this is exactly why I studied Ceramics and one day will get back to doing it properly. It lives and breathes, and will last forever, bearing the marks of my fingers. I am connected right back through those millions of potters to the very first person who realised that "hey! When the mud gets real hot it goes hard. I can make something outta this." I think that is freakin' amazing.