Cody's Pottery

After shoveling the driveway (twice!) yesterday, I climbed up in the attic to get the kids' sleds. I came across a box of Cody's old pottery, took it down, washed it and put it out for display in my living room. I have been admiring it ever since. Some of the pieces are beautifully grotesque, an important reminder (Goethe's own words): "Shaping---re-shaping---the eternal spirit's eternal pastime."

(Click on the image to get to the set on Flickr. For some reason the images don't load in order if you just click through them here. The images/pieces make more sense in succession.)


 After being packed away in the dark for years, this attic discovery seems a timely find. Cody's record release party is coming up to celebrate the completion of this album. Whatever the medium or instrument, Vehicles is the perfect name for him and whatever he creates.

Wisdom from Carl Jung: 
"Being essentially the instrument for his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no reason for expecting him to interpret it for us. He has done the best that in him lies in giving it form, and he must leave the intepretation to others and to the future. A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says, "You ought," or: "This is the truth." It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means either that he is too much given to fear, or else that he is too exempt from it; and if he dreams of the old wise man it may mean that he is too pedagogical, as also that he stands in need of a teacher. In a subtle way both meanings come to the same thing, as we perceive when we are able to let the work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist. To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it once shaped him. Then we understand the nature of his experience. We see that he has drawn upon the healing and redeeming forces of the collective psyche that underlies consciousness with its isolation and its painful errors; that he has penetrated to that matrix of life in which all men are embedded, which imparts a common rhythm to all human existence, and allows the individual to communicate his feeling and his striving to mankind as a whole."