Impurities (Part 3)

So is pure water water pure? Or does water carry the memory of its past lives? I have spent time thinking of how this can be, and my conclusion is that the memory of water, if such exists, must be heavily diluted by time and chance, for time and chance happen to every molecule.

Yet there are those, especially homoeopaths and dowsers, who contend that water remembers. And I should say, I believe that clay and other aluminosilicates can indeed remember, for all that memory needs is present in their most crystalline formations.

Today I had a conversation about that. Crystals and false-crystals, how they replicate memory at a distance. In the lunulae all of decayed bronze and gold, we see the moon; in the carbonaceous glitter of diamond, we see the stars. O, all the golden and silver apples!

Metal is the bane. Metals conduct, and in the sudden earthing of electrons, they wipe memories clean. Who knows what the clay knew, before heat-haze and electron-storm glazed it into the fired husk of itself? Yet the impurities that remain make it beautiful again, just as we humans are.

The Ceramic Legacy

The oldest technologies are often the best, simply because they were the first. Clay and brick, cement and concrete, porcelain, superconductors, pottery, tiles — these are the ceramic legacy. As I was reminded last night while reading the fourth chapter of the second epistle to the Isthmus, I am a jar of clay.

My legacy, therefore, is one of storage and structure, protection and placement, resistance and refraction. I keep an eternal glory inside, and like any well-made vessel, as long as I am sealed, the pressure within me must perforce exceed the pressure without.

This then is why I am hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not despairing, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. I have a ceramic legacy that will not rust, and being well-made, will not break under the natural conditions of use.

There is a corollary to that, though. Some day, I will be poured out. The light of what is within me will be released. The ceramic vessel will be emptied. And containing nothing more, it will only thereafter be of ceremonial use.

The Perfect Storm (In A Teacup)

I remember this phrase leaping out at me from the pages of the movie review section, some time ago. It sounded so Platonic, so beautifully complete in itself (yes, that's one of my themes these days, sorry for boring you). But then I realised that it's hard to define 'perfect storm' when you don't know what a perfect storm is and have never seen one. Sure, you can extrapolate; sure you can imagine and calculate and invent an ideal storm – but you will never know perfection, or indeed, if such a thing can be made perfect at all.

It's like people who want to be the perfect star, the perfect cyclist, the perfect fencer, the perfect clown. Perhaps these are indeed their destinies; most probably, not. But God has wrought in each the potential to be the person perfectable, the person who will be made perfect in weakness. Not for humans the perfect symmetry – your left lung has two lobes, your right lung has three; your liver is on one side, your stomach the other. Rather, an asymmetric whole, which God will have His own opinion on, whatever you might think about it.

We are all perfectable, and we may not know why, or how, or in what way. But He does, and that whole perfection is worth all the wait. As a famous poet wrote in one of his not-so-famous moments:

Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time’s wheel runs back or stops: potter and clay endure.

We are clay, and clay does not define its final shape. But if God is the potter, God will, and does. And that is what makes purpose; not what the clay chooses, but what the potter makes of it. Even a teacup will do.