The Gathering: The Magic Pot Theory
Photo: Phelim McDermott
The Gathering: The Magic Pot Theory
Some weeks, I imagine, the news we share here will be practical, gritty, grounded - a report from a trip we have made (this week to Hastings to see the empty Debenhams on the sea front), or a summary of the instructions we are learning on how to make a barn with hand-powered tools - but today, as we are still getting going, I want to share a bit of theory.
Here’s my theory: art is magic.
I don’t mean ‘magic’ in the way the word is often used as a synonym for ‘brilliant’ or ‘special.’ I don’t mean it as my daughter uses it, to refer to the sparkles that shoot out of a unicorn’s horn. Nor as my son uses it when he fills out the ‘magic’ level on his Dungeons and Dragons sheet for his wizard character, Aridon the Blue. What I mean by ‘magic’ is that the act of making something feels closely akin to the act of making a spell.
The unicorn, wizard and witch imagery is potent however, and the word ‘spell’ still makes me think of cauldrons, bubbling, but I think this is useful for what I am trying to articulate. When I am working on something - a blog, a book, a show, or now, an Improbable home, that thing becomes like a cauldron, a great big pot into which I can put all manner of things. I do not follow a recipe. I do not even know the outcome of the spell- the only thing I am sure of is the pot. As soon as the pot is there, then ingredients to put in it start to present themselves - everything, anything: the way my son turned into a wolf, running on hands and feet across the sandy beach near Hastings; the sandcastle we made, falling down even as we built it; the dark, narrow roads we had to drive down on the way back- these things all seem like relevant ingredients. It is not a question of straining to see synchronicities, of trying to force meaning or pattern out of random events - it’s the other way around. The presence of the pot makes meanings emerge, connections that would not otherwise exist- it holds things, and so puts one object/ image/ event in relationship to another. I start to see and notice things differently, because pots, I believe, are magic.
This idea of the pot, the cauldron, the container, in turn makes me think of a short essay by Ursula Le Guin. It’s called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The title is a reference to the theory that, in contrast to the prevalent image of early man (yes, man) with a stick, for hitting things, the first tool, or cultural device, was almost certainly some form of bag “to hold gathered products.” In other words, “before the tool that forces energy outwards, we made the tool that brings energy home.” Le Guin’s point is that the stick/ knife/ weapon that is often imagined as the first tool, in turn has shaped our imaginations, our stories, how we tell about life, which always goes hand in hand with how we live it. Le Guin calls this story - the one with the bashing bone, the one about the great hunt, performed by the even greater hunter, “the killer story.” She writes,
“The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become a part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story….”
I take this essay and its words as a mighty ingredient for our Improbable pot. Our quest for a home is a project that is about the making of a pot, for as Le Guin says, home is “another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people.” And we are not just making any old home or pot, but a pot that will in turn be about the making of pots. Like a story, inside a story, inside another story. The never ending, self-generating nature of this pot, of art, is magic, like the magic porridge pot in the old stories, that refills itself, so no one ever goes hungry again. It is the life story, after all, so it supports life, and yet more life.
Le Guin’s essay makes me feel good about our title of ‘The Gathering’ for our project. The act of gathering is both the reason we need a container, the reason our ancestors first invented one - so they had a thing to put things in - and is a way to create a container too. Gathering is a verb and a noun - we gather and together create a circle, an empty space between us, which can hold a great many things.
All this to say, I am excited. We have turned our quest for a home into an art project, and so it has in turn become a magical process, and I don’t, as I explained before, use the word lightly - there are unicorns in the pot and wizards – our children’s contributions- but also plenty of grit, and grief too. There are abandoned buildings, wolves, dark roads. The magic is working. Thank you for being part of the spell, and for all the clues you have sent us so far. Please keep them coming. In the end, if we get this right, there’ll be porridge for you all and more to spare.
