your ideas because all have a common funnelling exaggeration.

It seems to me you are saying that what people are doing today with
clay is not sane and not leading to a vital culture, what those who do
not adhere to your formula are doing is simply moving in the wrong
direction. But what may be good for you may not be good for the rest
of the world. To quote from the introduction to WALDEN by Henry
David Thoreau, ''He was willing to let his neighbours sleep, for he
was a crower, not a missionary; he would not allow himself to be
forced nor would he force anybody else, since he believed that 'living
one's own life to the fullest was the best way of helping one's fellow-
man! We

We are now living in an entirely different society than those who have
made "great pots". Our society is and has been since the steam engine
in a state of increasing turmoil. Technology and communication have
altered the world from one of many highly developed isolated cultures
to one of a nearly universal culture. It has made it possible for one
individual in his lifetime to accomplish more, arrive at more con-
clusions than did ten generations of vilage potters. We have
libraries and schools that can tell us in a very short time what it took
previous civilizations decades to arrive at by trial and error. It is
most unlikely that individual potters as they exist today, existed then.
An entire village would generally work as a unit on the production of
a type of pottery on which previous generations had also laboured.

Communication provides the information; technology provides the
means - now, we can devote more time and energy to exploration; the
pursuit of ourselves through a media like clay.

The Sung dynasty in China produced the best pottery that was ever made
in that country. They did not have the Pottery Supply House or its tardy
deliveries; they did not have pyrometers or natural gas or A. P, Green
or text books. The Sung pots were thousands of years in the making.
They represent the peak, everything prior was part of the rise and
everything after part of the decline.

That's what's happening, baby, but the cycle today is at times moving
faster than our perception. It is high speed evolution and it can't be

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