M.C. Richards, Centering: Life + Art — 100 Years

M.C. Richards Centering: Life + Art — 100 Years

M.C. Richards Centering: Life + Art — 100 Years

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Published by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in conjunction with the exhibition M.C. Richards: Centering: Life + Art — 100 Years Curated by Alice Sebrell + Julia Connor Catalogue Edited by Julia Connor Organized by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center 56 Broadway, Asheville, NC 28801 828.350.8484 www.blackmountaincollege.org June 3 – August 20, 2016 Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center at 56 Broadway Asheville, North Carolina © 2016 Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center © 2016 Julia Connor for “An Introduction to the Catalogue“ © 2016 Paulus Berensohn for “Homage“ © 2016 James C. Anderson for “M.C. Richards: Speaking of Theatre“ © 2016 Irwin Kremen for “On Black Mountain College“ © 2016 Jenni Sorkin for “M.C. Richards, Communitarian“ © 2016 Deborah Haynes for “The Literary World(s) of Mary Caroline Richards“ © 2016 Jeffrey Spahn for “M.C. Richards’ Legacy“ © 2016 Deidra Heitzman for “M.C. + Rudolf Steiner“ © 2016 Matthew Fox for “Stories + Anecdotes with M.C. Richards: Nineteen Snapshots of a Vigorous Life“ ISBN 978-1-5323-0998-4 All rights reserved.

Artwork in this publication is protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in any form. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and each of the contributors.

Support for this project comes from The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, Ananda Hair Studio, Anonymous, Cynthia Bringle, Jasper + Lindsay Brinton, BlackBird Frame & Art, Centering on Children, Ellen Clarke + John Byrd, Tom Goodridge, Deborah Haynes, Highwater Clays, Elizabeth Holden, Lake Eden Events, Jack LenorLarsen, Marshall High Studios, Marywood University, Brian + Gail McCarthy, Odyssey Community School, Grace Ann Peysson, Micah Pulleyn, Rob Pulleyn, Rosaly Roffman, State Archives of North Carolina, UNC Asheville, and Warren Wilson College.

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+ title page images: Pinch Bowl, ca. 1990s, stoneware with acrylic paint, 3.25 x 4.75 x 4.75 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of the Artist. cover detail

+ cover design: Susan Rhew Design, Asheville, NC

book

photography:

All photographs of art work by Alice Sebrell unless otherwise noted.

M.C. Richards making pinch pots, ca. 1980s. Courtesy of Julia Connor.

Table of Contents 7 Foreword

by Alice Sebrell 15 An Introduction to the Catalogue

by Julia Connor 27 Homage

by Paulus Berensohn 35 M.C. Richards: Speaking of Theatre

by James C. Anderson 59 On Black Mountain College

by Irwin Kremen 65 M.C. Richards, Communitarian

by Jenni Sorkin 73 The Literary World(s) of Mary Caroline Richards

by Deborah Haynes 95 M.C. Richards’ Legacy

by Jeffrey Spahn 101 M.C. + Rudolf Steiner

by Diedra Heitzman + Sherry Wildfeuer 115 Stories + Anecdotes with M.C. Richards:

Nineteen Snapshots of a Vigorous Life

by Matthew Fox

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Fish Plate, ca.1950, glazed stoneware, 10 x 10 inches. Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

Gift of M.C. Richards and Grace Ann Peysson.

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Foreword

The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present.

— M.C. Richards

M.C. Richards’ Birthday Party, July 13, 1955, photographer unknown.

Courtesy of Julia Connor.

This project was conceived by M.C. Richards’ great friend, poet, and fellow traveler, Julia Connor, over several conversations with Caprice HamlinKrout, an Asheville-based artist greatly influenced by M.C. Richards’ words and work. In 2012, I was brought into the conversation, and we began planning the centennial exhibition, its catalogue, and the related events and programming. I have felt deeply privileged to have this opportunity to explore M.C.’s extraordinary life and far-reaching legacy.

M.C. Richards’ importance to the arts and education is a story that hasn’t yet been fully told. While her years at Black Mountain College are central to the story, other chapters of this woman’s complicated life are also important: Reed College, U.C. Berkeley, Greenwich House Pottery, Stony Point, Haystack, Penland, Camphill Village, University of Creation Spirituality, and many trips to teach workshops all over the globe. And of course M.C.’s books are another thread that weaves her life together and chronicles her intellectual journey. Through these journeys of mind and body, M.C. made countless personal connections as she shared her passion for life, art, poetry, nature, and education.

With a life so large and layered, it’s impossible to do it justice, but we have tried to cover as much territory as possible. This catalogue contains essays by people who knew, loved, and worked with M.C. We thank them for their contributions as well as Susan Rhew for her excellent catalogue design.

We deeply appreciate the following donors who generously supported this project: The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, Ananda Hair Studio, Anonymous, Cynthia Bringle, Jasper + Lindsay Brinton, BlackBird Frame & Art, Centering on Children, Ellen Clarke + John Byrd, Tom Goodridge, Deborah Haynes, Highwater Clays, Elizabeth Holden, Lake Eden Events, Jack Lenor-Larsen, Marshall High Studios, Marywood University, Brian + Gail McCarthy, Odyssey Community School, Micah Pulleyn, Rob Pulleyn, Rosaly Roffman, State Archives of North Carolina, UNC Asheville, and Warren Wilson College.

And to those who have given their time and talent out of love and appreciation for M.C. Richards, we express our full gratitude: James C. Anderson, Paulus Berensohn, Connie Bostic, Brian E. Butler, Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, Julia Connor, Matthew Fox, Ruth Ghio, Sydney Green, Michael and Caprice Hamlin-Krout, Deborah Haynes, Diedra Heitzman, Irwin + Barbara Kremen, Ron + Linda Larsen, Thomas Meyer, Jay Miller, Grace Ann Peysson, David Silver, Jenni Sorkin, Heather South, Jeffrey Spahn, and Sherry Wildfeuer. Grateful thanks also to the board, staff, and interns of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. ­— Alice Sebrell

Program Director, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

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White Pinched Bowl, no date, glazed stoneware, 3.625 x 6.625 x 5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

White Pinched Bowl, no date, glazed stoneware, 3.25 x 6.5 x 5 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Sarah Russo.

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M.C. Richards, Easter Haiku, no date. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Green Bowl, no date, glazed stoneware, 2.875 x 5.5 x 5.5 inches. Collection of Paulus Berensohn.

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Bowl with Handles and Teeth, no date, glazed stoneware, 2.875 x 7 x 5.625 inches. Collection of Grace Ann Peysson.

Bone Study, no date, terra sigilliata, 3 x 3 x 3 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Untitled Raku Pot, 1979, raku-fired stoneware, 11 x 11 x 11 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

Gift of the Estate of Jonathan Williams.

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Sea Angel, 1976, stoneware with appliquĂŠ, 1.25 x 13.5 x 12.375 inches. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Cup, no date, glazed stoneware, 2.5 x 5 x 3.75 inches. Gift of Phillips

Jonathan Williams, M.C. Richards, Skywinding Farm, Scaly Mountain, NC, ca. 1970s. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Collection.

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An Introduction to the Catalogue

by Julia Connor Cup, 1990s, glazed stoneware, 2.375 x 5 x 3.5 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Mary and Edward Phillips.

Because the work of M.C. Richards has been influential in so many disciplines, each contributor to this catalogue will focus on a different aspect of Richards’ contribution. Inevitably there will be cross currents because M.C.’s many loves – writing, ecology, pottery, education, poetry and theater were streams she allowed to flow into each other to create a vigorous circulation. She always maintained that life was the big art and all the rest apprenticeship. She apprenticed widely. Pots were inspired by passages in books such as Black Elk Speaks (“Four Virgins of the Elk Dance”/ “Six Grandfathers of the Flaming Rainbow Teepee”), by dances (“Series of Dances”), by the St. John Gospel (“The Seven I AMs”), by visions and dreams (“Dream Angel”). Poems were often inspired by the work of others: Your pots are decisions, Lucy Rie, she wrote in a poem to the British potter. The music, my God, the music!” she cried out in another to John Cage. Or they arose from experiences of daily life, a ripe peach, an ear of fresh corn. Paintings found their source in poems (“Start here / start with a blue chair”), in myth (“Demeter”, “Persephone”) out of the festivals of the year (“Advent Apple”), even the cracking of an egg (“The Egg Series”). Books manifested out of talks and appearances (Centering, The Crossing Point, Opening Our Moral Eye), and out of coincidence at work in the zeitgeist of the times (The Theater and Its Double, Toward Wholeness). 1 There seemed to be no end to the confluence of meanings, the richness and plurality of languages. In an unpublished letter to Merce Cunningham written shortly before she died, after enumerating a long list of memorable moments they had shared M.C. declares, Merce, we have been given too many roses, not enough vases – only these big tubs. 2 I can hear her stressing that word tubs and the poignant chortle that would have followed – always followed when she paused to realize what a big life she’d had.

A young mother in the late 1960s, I had just completed my studies of ceramics at Chouinard Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles when a copy of M.C.’s book Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person was put into my hands. I had become disillusioned by the direction ceramics seemed to be going – the confusion of cleverness with authenticity, the intent to erase the mark of the hand, the way professionalism seemed to rule. Shortly afterwards, my husband and I and our two young children moved to Northern California and shortly after that, yet more discouraged by the election of Richard Nixon, to Canada. I finally read M.C.’s book toward the end of a long snowbound winter in Quebec and as the neighbor’s out buildings began to emerge from under snow banks so did the love that had drawn me to clay and poetry return. Almost every page of that book is underlined or annotated, its binding worn and held in place by book tape, the corners rounded and fuzzed. Like legions of others, I felt the book had saved me, had called me back to an inner world I valued and loved. Yet, there was more. At the level of instruction, it was teaching me to trust my own experience, to listen to my perceptions, to risk being who I was. Who in the world was this woman I wondered? Then, in 1974, I came upon a brochure announcing M.C.’s workshop at Rudolf Steiner Institute in New York. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a three-week workshop with ample time for long chats and pastoral walks. I left with a promise that M.C. would come to California the following spring. What had begun was twenty-six years of close connection that continually morphed – M.C. being in turn my instructor, mentor, patron, muse, companion and most beloved friend. I believe that her ease with and orientation to creative source, her ability to incorporate and find beauty in discontinuities, her profound understanding of inter-relationship, her attentiveness to the arts and crafts as a means of ‘presencing’, as well as her effort to knit together art and agriculture, will be recognized as work well ahead of its time. This is not to say that she was always delightful. She had a shadow that plagued her to the very end. Her suffering was real – to herself and to those of us who loved her. Pleurez et re-commencer was her motto. Cry and begin again. And, so, we did.

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In an article written for Craft Horizons she referred to Black Mountain College as a golden seed while saying that poet Charles Olson, College Rector for its last half dozen years, called it a spirit place. The college no longer exists on the physical plane, she explains. It was pulverized by poverty, fatigue, and legal challenge. Yet how its dust flies and shines in the inner eye….

How its form resurrects and prophesies, like a hologram, visible through all physical and emotional disasters. That’s what the alchemists said long ago, that spiritual gold is incorruptible….Black Mountain is inviting more interest now than it did then. Obviously it is still alive in spirit and still doing its work. For Pie Plate, ca.1950s, glazed stoneware, 1.25 x 9.125 x 9.125 inches. six years I taught courses in creative reading and writing. I put my poems into Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Mary Fitton Fiore. the folder with student work for class discussion. We found a stash of type in an old building and gradually unscrambled and cleaned it. Anais Nin, who was printing her own books in New York City, came to help us set up our print shop, and to talk to writing students. They printed their own works, college announcements and programs, the first issue of The Black Mountain Review. My favorite concert program was printed by Tommy Jackson on cigarette paper rolled around tobacco – we smoked our programs after the show.” 3 Toward the article’s conclusion she says, ‘Why did Black Mountain fail?’ I am asked. Fail? It didn’t fail! It lived its life passionately and earnestly; and because it was alive and not artificially preserved, it ceased in due course to exist as a body. How vividly it is living now in the imaginations of persons! 4 Having arrived at BMC as an academic, she was to leave some six years later differently tuned.

I enjoy a range of creativity in clay, from a conventional thrown stoneware mug, to the wild pinching that takes the energy right through the bowl wall – into holes and rips – an image not of stressing the pot but of transcending its limits, 5 M.C. wrote for the catalogue to her exhibition at the Worcester Center for Arts and Crafts, shortly before her death in 1999. Creativity is built-in, I heard her insist time and time again. She worked from a fundamental ground of awe, knowing that the earthly miracle is matter, in its myriad forms. She made art, be it with clay or paint or words, to manifest what was real to her – to behold the invisibly present. She worked naturally and energetically out of deep reverence but always free of theorem, making decisions with the immediacy and surprise of a discovered meaning. As she would come to say more than once in her books, Paradox is at the center. 6 While still an instructor of writing and literature, she writes of her introduction to clay:

In 1950, Robert Turner came with a kiln builder to set up a pottery studio on the far side of the lake beyond the Studies Building: two or three wheels, an oil-burning and an electric kiln, table space in the middle, ware shelves, an alcove for materials, and a view of hayfields and mountains. Turner was my first teacher at Black Mountain in the potter’s art. He taught us to make a mold and to cast a simple form, which we decorated in different ways. I made “tumblers” and learned to trail slip and sgraffito and inlay.

I was crossing a threshold into a different language…. 7

It is in our bodies that redemption takes place. It is the physicality of the crafts that pleases me. I learn through my hands and my eyes and my skin what I could never learn through my brain. 8

Having experienced her own grappling with opposites, she will go on to argue the danger of their arbitrary institutionalization in education, in art and in life. The long labor of softening these boundaries, of making them more plastic and relational will continue to the end of her working days. Focusing on the division between poetry and prose in the early pages of Centering she says:

This book has not only a plan but a music. Its form is a demonstration of what I say in it. Themes recur and vary. There are passages of development and recapitulation. I wish to offer its meaning not as rationale but as physical presence in language. 9

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The Black Mountain Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, June 1951. Collection of Julia Connor. The Black Mountain Review was started in 1951 by M.C. Richards and some interested students as a vehicle to show what sort of work was being done at BMC. This was the only issue they completed. In 1954, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley revived the publication and published seven more issues with the goal to create a forum for the new poetry of the time.

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This blending of the opposites is the foundation of her argument for wholeness, which, in turn, is the basis for what she called a centering consciousness. The centering consciousness in poetry brings together those experiences and objects which appear separate, finding in the single moment of felt-perception a variety of elements simultaneously aglow. As language art, it occupies a realm where through the mysteries of speech, the multiple forms of perception fuse, transcending every single sense, and both space and time. I once wrote a poem, she tells us, consisting of only two words.

Hands

birds.

…How hard it is to say anything about the poem without as it were putting handcuffs on the hands and tethers on the birds. If however one utters the word “hands” and then moves in its wake through the stirring stillness to “birds” and the two notes then work their magic simultaneously, the poem begins to live and to so its work in the listening ear. 10

Of this simultaneity poet Andrew Shelling writes: “Poem” seems like it had to have been written by a potter. The utility of an earthenware or clay pot – LaoTzu famously wrote – depends on the emptiness. “Knead clay in order to make a vessel. Adapt the nothing therein…and you will have the use of the vessel.” When most people speak of poetry, it is to describe images, thoughts, sounds, feelings. But poetry is something more than that. Using Lao Tzu’s terms, poetry is a precise way to “adapt the nothing” in speech – the emptiness, silence, or unspoken wider context that poetry is particularly adept at pointing toward. All the rest of the poetic “material” – the click of consonants, the open sounds of vowels, the rhythm, repetitions – may be rough or refined, wobbly and thick or paper-thin, heavily glazed or coarsely baked. Does the nothing that poetry holds make a poem “useful”? John Egg Series #7, 1998, acrylic on paper, 22 x 29.5 inches. Collection of Cage, the composer, philosopher, poet, and Richards’ friend, described this Camphill Village Kimberton Hills. nothingness in music and poetry as silence. (sic) Here is what Richards said of her poem: Two nouns, two sounds, with a long silence between. A long time of silence, which on the page, is a long space of emptiness.” 11

In the third of her “Nine Easter Letters on the Art of Education”, M.C. remarks …brightness and disobedience have an affinity for each other. 12 She is speaking personally and in hindsight but the words also point to the interdisciplinary workshops she began offering in the mid 60’s where she was able to test and put into action ideas that until that time had existed as private practice or in her books. Beginning with courses offered at Haystack School of Crafts, “Writing as Handcraft” (1965), and “Cross-Over to a New View of Language, Verbal and Non-Verbal” (1966), she explored the tearing down of barriers between disciplines that would later lead to her signature workshop “Clay, Color and Word”. Central to her endeavor was the belief that divisions between cognitive (writing and thinking) and proprioceptive (moving and making) activities were arbitrary, reductive, and harmful to the creative human spirit.

Psychologically speaking, a state of wholeness, then, was inclusive, it was an “and”, not an “either / or”; one could be practical and an artist, a scientist and a dreamer, a potter and a philosopher. The implications for education were enormous. It is small wonder then that the totality of the vision behind the Waldorf School Movement, an educational impulse generated by the work of Austrian seer, Rudolf Steiner, captured her imagination.

In 1989, awakening to a hunger for color, M.C. began to paint in acrylic on paper. The brushwork loose and free – the intent one of working toward not from image. In 1995, during a painting trip first to Florence and then to a village 100k south of there, we spent ten days painting on card tables set up in a vacant yard immediately adjacent to the cottage we shared. On our last day there, M.C. woke me with some urgency muttering something about a

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Egg Series #9, 1998, acrylic on paper, 21.5 x 29.125 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

Egg Series #8, 1998, acrylic on paper, 21.75 x 29.5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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gallery. I stumbled outside with my coffee to find our paintings hung by clothespins on ropes strung the length of the property and several villagers wandering about commenting in Italian. Our gallery was having an opening!

The Egg Series painted in 1998, arose out of a teaching dilemma. M.C. was then offering a course at The University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland. It was just before Easter and she was mulling on the theme of creativity and how to make it new for this group of students. Earlier avenues did not suit, she confided. Then, out of several days meditation arose the Egg Series. She could hardly contain herself with excitement after she had painted the first two, telling me how she had simply cracked an egg for breakfast and there it was; how she had “seen” the sun in the yolk. She writes, It was the earth floating in space, sunlit, until in the seventh, my brush and egg broke free, spilling the creative yolk into the cosmos – spreading the word. …. By example and practice, I try to teach that creativity is built in – like the sun it shines in everything we are and do – Look! 13 ENDNOTES

1

Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. M.C. Richards, Grove Press, 1958; M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person, Wesleyan Press, 1964; M.C. Richards, The Crossing Point, Selected Talks and Writings, Wesleyan Press, 1973; M.C. Richards, Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America, Wesleyan Press, 1980; M.C. Richards, Imagine Inventing Yellow, New and Selected Poems, Station Hill Press, 1991; M.C. Richards, Opening Our Moral Eye, Essays, Poems, Paintings, Embracing Creativity and Community, ed. Deborah Haynes, Lindisfarne Press,1996.

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Unpublished letter in the possession of the author.

3 4

Craft Horizons Magazine, “Black Mountain College: A Golden Seed”, M.C. Richards, publication date unknown, 21.

Ibid., 70.

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Imagine Inventing Yellow: The Life and Work of M.C. Richards, Worcester Center for the Crafts, 1999, 13.

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Centering, 6.

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Craft Horizons, 70.

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Centering, 15.

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Ibid., 6.

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Centering, 67-9.

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Shambhala Sun, ”About a Poem: Andrew Shelling on M.C. Richards ‘Poem’”, July 2011, 96.

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The Crossing Point, 45.

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Imagine Inventing Yellow, 15.

facing: M.C. Richards, correspondence, poetry broadside, and first book of poems, c. mid 1940s.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Jesse Dawes Green and Sylvia Ashby.

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They Are Sleeping, 1996, letterpress on paper. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Specked, Applique Vase (two views), no date, stoneware with appliquĂŠ (inside glazed), 7 x 8 x 8 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Heart Person Vessel, 1976, sawdust-fired stoneware, 11 x 10 x 5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Vase with Iron and White Glaze, Pink Decoration, no date, glazed stoneware, 8.625 x 5 x 5 inches. Collection of Grace Ann Peysson.

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Homage

by Paulus Berensohn

Mary Caroline Richards was a vivid presence radiating the colorful life of her body and how she lived in it, and of her soul and how she suffered it. She held little back, most often offering her self generously. She could be over-whelming, even confronting; she was most always compelling and yet, often, delightful; her natural intelligence dazzling.

For many of the rest of us, those who loved her, the rich music of her voice when saying, when inhabiting a poem as she did, was thrilling, an inspiration at gut level. She was a teacher with a progressive poetic vision of justice, of community, of inter-disciplinary and arts education that often awoke initiatives in us. She taught us through the rich textures of her writing, in her workshops and talks, and one on one.

I was fortunate to be one of the one-on-ones, to expose my questions to her questions over a period of decades, devoted years of sharing our longings and how we were surviving them, as soul mates, as the artists we were. It felt as if she were whispering in my ear, infecting me with resonant images that caused change in my inner landscape. Simple sounding words such as “ear” and “awe” flavored her intimate pedagogy. Or, it could be a story like the joke she told me on the first day of our friendship about the one-legged whore who charged extra because she was special; this became a life saving strategy, transforming wounds into their potential as initiation for creative behavior.

In the first workshop I took with her, during introductory remarks, she turned to look directly at me and said, “it’s not a question of having ‘taste’, Paulus, but of having the capacity to taste what is present; to behold.” She helped open me to the world beyond personal likes and dislikes, opening me to a wider world. I bow in reverence to my teacher. Thank you.

At one point she asked my help in finding a new name by which to call herself. I suggested ‘Anneal’, an idea taken from the process of slow cooling metal or glass to temper it in order to remove internal stresses and strengthen it, in recognition of her own capacity to slow cool the strength of her sensuous world view and by so-doing reinvent herself, and us. Yes, thank you.

top:

Paulus Berensohn, Seed, 1999/2000, clay and cremated ashes of M.C. Richards, .5 x 1 x .625 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Cynthia K. Homire.

right: Red, Blue, Yellow, White Pinched Bowl, no date, stoneware with acrylic paint, 3.875 x 6.375 x 6 inches. Collection of Paulus Berensohn. facing: Lavender Pinched Bowl, no date, stoneware with acrylic paint, 4.25 x 10.5 x 10.125 inches. Collection of Paulus Berensohn.

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White Pinched Bowl, no date, glazed stoneware, 3.125 x 5.125 x 4.5 inches. Collection Paulus Berensohn.

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Florida, 1980s, unglazed stoneware with seaweed, 17.5 x 5 x 5 inches. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Brown Bowl, no date, glazed stoneware, 3.25 x 7 x 6.75 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

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Mug (two views), no date, glazed stoneware, 3.25 x 5 x 3.75 inches. Collection of Paulus Berensohn.

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Fire Speech, 1979, stoneware with appliquĂŠ and rutile glaze, 5 x 12 x 12 inches. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Bouquet, 1999, letterpress on paper. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

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Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, Grove Press.

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M.C. Richards: Speaking of Theatre

by James C. Anderson

M.C. Richard’s influence in the realm of theatre is often overlooked when assessing her importance in 20th Century art and letters. On the occasion of her centennial, it is appropriate to bring under consideration her singular contribution to English-speaking theatre. It is singular in the sense that her reputation rests not on practice, but on translation: the translation of a single book. It is also singular in the sense that from the date of its publication in 1968, this single book, more than any other text of theatrical ideas, subsequently altered the course of theatrical practice in America—and arguably, in the English speaking world. Of course ideas that bring change occur in an historical context, and American theatre was at that moment ripening toward some new impulse, felt but not yet clear. The seed that was cast into that wakening soil was Antonin Artaud’s, but the compost was M.C. Richards particular poetic sense of the English language and her intuitive apprehension of his ideas.

The following essay is divided in three sections. Section one summarizes some of Artaud’s most important ideas and suggests the context in which those ideas evolved. Section two presents a sketch of M.C. at Black Mountain College, the persons and experiences that pointed her towards the task of translating this daunting work.

Section three surveys some of the radical theatre practices and practitioners that have evolved out of The Theater and Its Double’s theories.

Le Theatre et son Double1

Le Theatre et son Double, is the collected essays and letters on theatre by vanguard French poet and theoretician Antonin Artaud. Originally written between 1931 and 1938, each of the essays became a chapter in the book, which was published in French in1938. Other than his work as an actor, which was irregular due to his emotional instability, Antonin Artaud was primarily viewed as a theoretician rather than a practitioner. Of the two plays he wrote to embody his theories only The Cenci was ever produced—by himself, and with himself in the main role. In Europe, before WWII, his theories were considered by most to be beyond eccentric—wild, raving, and dismissed as unproduceable. His manifestos and writings rebelled, indeed railed against the forms of theatre then prevalent in Europe: realism with its simple narrative of everyday life, and intellectual theatre: poetic meditations such as those by Yeats or Cocteau or didactic discourses like the plays of Shaw or Giraudoux.

Above all he railed against the primacy and tyranny of the written text.

Artaud proposed in 1938 that only theatre that directly and viscerally assaulted us through the senses was capable of moving us to the core, in such a way that we are changed and liberated. Theatre that explains action through talk leaves us in our cocoons of habitual thoughts and feelings, comfortably intact, as do movies, which may disturb us with their heightened images, but cannot convince us that what we are watching is dangerous, because we know it is not real. It is for this reason he says in No More Masterpieces that we turn instead to the train wrecks, murders, wars and catastrophes that reach us through the daily news, reported in the most urgent language, with graphic photos of real events. These are experiences we dread for ourselves, but know to be real. If theatre cannot attain for us a level of fear and dread sufficient to experience it as a real event, then we will continue to be numbed into accepting the “reality” of society-wide catastrophes as inevitable, unable to imagine and act upon an alternative. In 1938 he was prescient—a Cassandra, heard but not heeded.

No doubt his prescience came by way of his own mental/neurological condition, which led to an excruciating, heightened sensory awareness. His early poetry and letters speak directly from this condition. Like a perpetually

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drowning man trying to express his experience and be heard rather than saved, he wanted his inner experience to be validated as real rather than to have it cured. One thinks of Van Gogh, of whom he wrote extensively, and he shared with Van Gogh frequent periods of confinement for treatment. During each of the World Wars he was confined to sanitariums for treatment for “breakdowns” (an interesting sequestering: was it his psychic sensitivity to the “breakdowns” being acted out by armies throughout Europe?) In any case, the magnitude of horror that the two World Wars wreaked on the European psyche and the mood of existential despair that followed, found polite discourse inadequate. This created an opening for reconsideration of his ideas for a theatre that could address the century’s catastrophic experience directly, the way a spectator at the ancient Greek tragedies once had experienced cathartic healing.

He first presented an imagination for a different kind of theatre in 1933. In The Theatre of Cruelty he invokes the word “cruelty”, not as a representation of perverse actions onstage, but,

…the idea of a serious theatre, which, overturning all our preconceptions, inspires us with the fiery magnetism of its images and acts upon us like a spiritual therapeutics whose touch can never be forgotten…..Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that the theater must be rebuilt. 2

As his translator, M.C. Richards maintained there is no adequate English equivalent for the French word cruaute, so she opted for cruelty, but admitted it did not convey the full range of his possible meanings. In The Alchemical Theatre, Artaud speaks of the double nature of theatre:

Whereas alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Double of an operation which functions only on the level of real matter, the theatre must also be considered as the Double, not of this direct, everyday reality of which it is gradually being reduced to a mere inert replica—as empty as it is sugar coated—but of another archetypal and dangerous reality, a reality whose principles, like dolphins, once they have shown their heads, hurry to dive back into the obscurity of the deep. 3

In several other places in The Theatre and its Double, he proposes that, the theatre is “a world of glyphs, ritual, and shadows”. It is a realm that by magical or alchemical means has the potential to right the balance. In Artaud’s concept of theatre the actor standing on the stage is a “glyph”; the physical being we see is merely a threshold to a larger being, performing actions in a “shadow reality”. The actions the actor is capable of onstage, such as murder, are real to the psyche of the observer. On the other hand, the “real” onstage actions of the actor, perceivable at all times to the critical mind (he walks stage left and lifts up a knife, etc.), are dismissed by the psyche as artifice.

Artaud’s critique of the theatre of our times holds that the actor has been taught to represent, to pursue realism, and that this causes the spectator to identify with the supposed situation and proposed resolution. This whole proposition reinforces the primary assumption of a human-centered view of the world, without spiritual dimension or conviction, in which resolutions are limited to the ones predetermined by the circumstances, without the possibility of magical of imaginative interventions. He posited that the ancient and real purpose of theatre in all cultures was always to make clear the presence of the spiritual and magical forces that are operative in the “shadow world behind the world of forms”, and that the psyche knows this to be the true reality. When it is shown and supported by theatrical means, theatre returns to its full potential to transform.

In the The Theatre and the Plague, the opening essay of the book, he equates the phenomenon of the plague with that of the theatre in several ways. Both have the potential for irrational and radical action. The plague is random and irrational in the way in which it spreads germs; the theatre in the way it propagates ideas. The plague enters the body and specifically attacks the brain, the theatre enters and attacks the mind. Again, plague specifically attacks lungs; the theatre, the breath and spirit. Both can demonstrate radical transformation of character, behavior and action. Understood imaginatively, he is citing the vast potency and potential of theatre—if its practitioners were to conceive of its spiritual dimension: the world of shadows behind the trappings of plot, character, etc.

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In The Theatre and the Plague and other essays he asserts that the times demand an anti-hero protagonist, who nonetheless has heroic will, who radically refuses to accept the judgment of a corrupt and rotting society; only such a protagonist can right the balance of nature out-of-whack! For his example of the antihero, Artaud goes to the extravagant world of Elizabethan revenge tragedy, where the hero does not commit his acts of transgression unwittingly, but with full consciousness and intention. One might think of the Macbeths or Titus Andronicus, Artaud’s example is from John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. These protagonists begin with one unthinkable act, and they answer to being exposed, by committing even more outrageous ones. As in Hamlet, the rot of the larger society is responsible for a state of imbalance for which the protagonist’s outrageous acts seek to provoke a correction? Can an “unthinkable” act in the human realm, release energy in the natural world, recreating balance? Perhaps there is a larger meaning to the moving of the woods of Dunsinane that brings about Macbeth’s downfall.

As he explains in his two chapters on Asian Theatre, On the Balinese Theatre, and Oriental and Occidental Theatre, ancient and indigenous rituals use masks, drums, gamelans, dance, and ritual objects, not just to represent the world, but to invoke the presence of the superhuman. The actors in Balinese and other Asian theatre assume the function of glyphs; nothing is ‘human’, every movement is ritualized and has a specific meaning or nuance: it is a language of theatre. In the abstract world created by costume, movement and sound the actors materialize both the forces that act upon the human being and the human being himself reacting to these forces, thus creating the double and the magical world in which the double exists. In his essay Metaphysics and the Mis en Scene, he reimagines the modern equivalent of each element as it would be applied to the creation of a Western theatre, a total theatre, involving every means that is within theatre’s reach to create such affective transporting spectacle.

Five years after the publication of her translation of The Theatre and Its Double, M.C. Richards summarized the thrust of Artaud’s vision of theatre as she saw it:

Its power was to be redirective, turning petty sensuality and egotism into metaphysical participation. Ideas of Being and Becoming were to infuse the spectator after a transforming theatrical experience. The director-stagemanager-playwright uses costumes, lighting, objects, sounds, movements, voices, instruments, language, screams, everything he needs to penetrate through the deafness and defenses of his audience. He must reach them. Man must be initiated into the truths of being. He must not be allowed to remain a spiritual weakling and ignoramus. The actor must ACT, and the spectator must re-ACT. Themes are mythic. Actors are emotional athletes and virtuosos of movement and voice. Everything is composed to a hair’s breadth. Artaud defies anyone who experiences theatre of this kind to leave the hall and thereafter to lend himself to the opiates of war, drugs, and mass attitudes. Our “esprit” may be awakened by a theatre that rouses centers of perception, and once awake we will not be so likely to drowse into inanity… (and, quoting Artaud) Only one thing in the world is exalting: contact with powers of the spirit.” 4

Words are also glyphs, representing clusters of possible meaning, which are not equivalent across languages.

The Theatre and Its Double is above all a poetic and imaginative text. Its ideas are challenging and dark, and their meanings are easily made reductive. Choosing the wrong word in translating may convey only one meaning of the original, often the most literal, excluding other possibilities. Rendering it into English would demand a translator who could deeply live into the spirit, as well as the letter, of Artaud’s French, and whose familiarity with cutting-edge theatre and breath of linguistic experience could reveal multiple implications in the rendering of an English equivalent. M.C. Richards was that ideal translator for this work. It would be ten years before her careful translation would give English readers the opportunity to investigate his thoughts.

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Program for The Death of Cuchulain, 1950. Collection of Julia Connor.

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M.C. Richards at Black Mountain: A Preparation

The 1930’s and 1940’s brought a European influence and new ways of thinking about art and form to Black Mountain College. Josef Albers became Professor of Art in 1933. A leader of the Bauhaus movement in Germany, he applied those principles to the instruction of art at BMC. In 1935, he wrote:

Under the term of art I include all fields of artistic purposes—the fine arts and applied arts, also music, dramatics, dancing, the theatre, photography, movies, literature and so on…If art is an essential part of culture and life, then we must no longer educate our students either to be art historians or to be imitators of antiquities, but for artistic seeing, artistic working, and more, for artistic living.5

The art of “seeing” was to infuse itself into the pedagogy under his influence over the next 20 years.

Other artists contributed. Anni Albers (his wife, a student of Paul Klee, and a visionary textile artist) proposed an understanding of textiles as woven text following ancient Meso-American tradition, an idea that would later be endorsed by poet, Charles Olson. In 1945, the American painter Robert Motherwell added the ideas of the European surrealists, then influential in the New York art scene. During and after WWII, additional artists, fleeing conditions in Europe, brought their particular points of view to this environment of artistic experimentation.

This European-influenced artistic ferment did not exclude performance. Eric Bentley, a gifted translator of modern European playwrights, injected the radical theories of Bertolt Brecht and read translations of Brecht’s plays, at the time not yet performed in the United States. He lectured at BMC starting in 1940 and was in residence from 1942-44. He challenged the students to grasp the intentions as well as the radical staging techniques of vanguard European theatre. Though an engaging teacher, Bentley’s Soviet leaning-politics and progressive theatre ideas divided the student body and faculty into factions. He left in 1944.

M.C. Richards was aware of this cauldron of experimental ideas. In 1945, with an undergraduate degree from Reed College and a PhD from U.C. Berkeley in English and Linguistics, she left California intending a visit. As fate would have it, she was offered a semester’s teaching at University of Chicago. There she met and married a philosophy teacher, Albert William Levi. However both became discouraged by the rigidity of academia, and left for Black Mountain that summer. BMC historian Mary Emma Harris characterizes their arrival:

(M.C.) was attracted by the college’s promise of ‘wholeness’, but she found that the faculty, despite their professional accomplishments, ‘were very undeveloped in the arts of cooperation’. She accepted the ‘voluntary poverty’ as the price paid for freedom from outside control, and found that ‘limited means, which are voluntarily accepted, encourage a cheerful and imaginative resourcefulness’….(She and Levi were) part of the new faculty that set out to abolish the last vestiges of traditional academe and to create a more egalitarian democracy.6

Levi taught social sciences and philosophy. Asked to take on the mantle of “Literature”, M.C. responded with characteristically wry understatement to offer “Reading and Writing”. Appearing to say, “Let’s start at the beginning”, each semester the seminar nonetheless covered a broad range of literary genres, authors and texts. Both she and Levi were by all reports deeply influential and popular teachers. Mary Bowles, who was a student recalls,

M.C. was excellent at making people clarify themselves or clarifying an idea herself…she wasn’t teaching in the sense that she knew and she was going to let you in on it. It was a kind of joint pursuit to what was there. And my gosh, How exciting...she always had a very keen intelligence mixed with a lot of feeling...She was married to Bill Levi, who was the most intellectual kind of man, and she, herself, understood that kind of language and was excellent at it. But she’s by nature…more like the artist in that she was very spontaneous and full of feeling. Her interests lay not in trying to determine the cold… objective truth. Her interest, her passion, lay in…what tickled her, what delighted her...not what truth was so much as how the truth was presented.7

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Hazel Larsen Archer, Buckminster Fuller as Baron Medusa in Ruse of Medusa, Summer 1948. Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer.

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Program for The Ruse of Medusa, Summer 1948, letterpress on paper. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

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This testimonial gets at the very qualities that would make M.C.’s translations both alive and accessible. She also became an active participant in the work programs and all the interdisciplinary activities at the college, absorbing principles which would later inform her writing, and her lifelong practice of “artistic living”.

The composer John Cage arrived for the Summer of 1948 to teach and deliver a series of lectures “In Defense of Satie”. The French composer, Erik Satie, aligned with Parisian avant-garde artists in art and theatre, was then little known in the United States. Both his music and ideas went against the grain of the Beethoven dominated tradition of Western Music, and Cage set out Among the midcentury avant-garde were, from left, the painter Robert to challenge that perspective. Cage brought along a copy of Le Piege de Meduse Rauschenberg (seated), the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham,

by Satie. M.C. “had French” as they say, and she translated the play into English, the composer John Cage, the poet M.C. Richards and the painter Jasper Johns, in 1958. The New York Times, Sunday, February 4, 2001, Art / Architecture.

The Ruse of Medusa. A full production for Cage’s “Satie Festival” became the Bob Cato/Courtesy of George Avakia. focal point of the summer. It was directed by Arthur Penn, then a student, and included performances by several guest faculty: Buckminster Fuller, Elaine De Kooning, and Merce Cunningham; Cage played the piano. This was an important experience in artistic collaboration for all involved, and it began a lifelong relationship between Cage, Cunningham and Richards.

In 1948-49 M.C. and Levi, took a year off teaching at Black Mountain College to travel in Italy, France and England. On her sabbatical she translated two Cocteau plays, Knights of the Round Table and The Marriage on the Eiffel Tower, and some of Cocteau’s quite original ideas about theatre:

A certain sentence, gesture, which had only for (the actor) a value comparable to that of a volume for painters, contains secret meaning which each person will afterwards interpret. The true symbol is never foreseen. It emerges by itself, however much or little the bizarre, the unreal, enter into account.

The action of my play is made of images, while the text is not. I try here to substitute a poetry of theatre for poetry in the theatre. Poetry in the theatre is a delicate lace impossible to see at a distance.

A poetry of theatre would be a coarse lace, a lace made of string, a ship on the sea.

It is there, on the margin, that the future is sketched out…This new genre, more suitable to the modern spirit, remains still in an unknown world, rich in discoveries…where the fairytale, the dance, acrobatics, pantomime, drama, satire, orchestra, language combined may reappear under a new form… the plastic expression of poetry.8

In many ways, these ideas, though brighter in hue, anticipate the ideas M.C. would encounter in Artaud.

Upon her return to Black Mountain for the 1949-50 academic year, M.C. directed a staged reading of Knights of the Round Table and a full production of The Marriage on the Eiffel Tower, in which M.C. implemented Cocteau’s staging ideas: “The set…which was designed to create a total environment for cast and audience alike, was the platform of the Eiffel Tower, from which one looked ‘down’ on the skyline of Paris. Thanksgiving dinner for the entire community was served on the platform prior to the performance.” In the Spring she directed a performance of William Butler Yeat’s The Death of Cuchulain, “staged on an open gravel terrace of the Studies Building beside the lake on ‘a windy wild night’. Kerosene lamps were used to light the performance area, and entrances were made from the stairways leading from the upper floors and from the marsh, from which the wailing queens emerged.”9 One can see here M.C.’s first moves to make theatre with the open spirit of investigation that her students had experienced in her approach to ‘reading and writing’.

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Hazel Larsen Archer, June Rice Christensen in Marriage on the Eiffel Tower, 1950. Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer.

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Hazel Larsen Archer, Katherine Litz at Black Mountain College, 1951. Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer.

M.C. and Levi separated in 1950, and Levi left at the end of the fall semester. M.C. stayed on. That summer she met David Tudor, a classical pianist and frequent interpreter of Cage’s music, who came to accompany Katherine Litz, who was teaching dance. M.C. and Tudor began what was to be a ten-year relationship. At the end of the 1951 summer session, M.C., Tudor and two students drove to California. In the fall she drove Tudor and Litz on a concert tour of the South. Tudor and M.C. then settled in New York, where they deepened their creative connection with Cage and Cunningham.

M.C. became a fourth element in the fruitful cross-disciplinary investigations that concerned these artists. Her wide knowledge of literature, and especially contemporary French literature, made her a conduit of literary sources from the vanguard fringes, and her participation in interdisciplinary performance, had instilled in her a deep curiosity for theatrical experiment.

In the summer of 1952, Cage and Cunningham returned to Black Mountain; Tudor came as pianist and accompanist, and M.C. returned to deepen her study of ceramics. Merce Cunningham recalled,

Cage organized a theatre event, the first of its kind. David Tudor played the piano, M.C. Richards and Charles Olson read poetry, Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings were on the ceiling. Rauschenberg himself played records, and Cage talked. I danced…the audience was seated in the middle of the playing area, facing each other, the chairs arranged on diagonals, and the spectators were unable to see directly everything that was happening. There was a dog which chased me around the space as I danced. Nothing was intended to be other than it was, a complexity of events that the spectators could deal with as each chose.10

Following Cage’s “score”, timing was determined by chance operations. It was left to the individual performers to design their respective appearances within the framework of predetermined “time brackets”.

Due to the simultaneity of many events and the seating configuration, audience members perceived the goings-on from various perspectives. The result was that members of the audience actively engaged in structuring the work for themselves. This was not abdication of structure or intention. In Cage’s view, the creator must think of the whole from the perspective of each person in the audience.

Theatre Piece No. 1 is widely regarded in art history as the first “happening”. Though simple in concept, its structure was radical and cross-disciplinary and its use of time and synchronicity was revolutionary. It marks a seed-point for the introduction of these impulses into the stream of American Art. Cage’s application of time, chance, and silence as compositional elements, continued to mature in his own work and has been taken up by another generation of composers and musicians; Cage extended these explorations through extensive collaborations in theatre, dance and performance art. Merce Cunningham’s use of many of the same ideas applied to movement has similarly inspired several generations of choreographers to reconsider the relationship between music and movement and to use variations of time, space, and synchronicity as elements of dance. The happenings of the 1960’s bear a direct lineage to this event and much of the subsequent work in multimedia, and in conceptual and performance art derive from principles first manifested here. Participation in the event also informed and cross-fertilized some of the most potent minds in American artistic thought, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olson, David Tudor and M.C. Richards among them.

John Cage credits his “collaborative close reading of Artaud’s groundbreaking essay with M.C. and David Tudor” as providing the impetus for this multimedia proto-happening.

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M.C. first heard about the book when reading Jean-Louis Barrault’s “Reflections on the Theatre” (1951.) Barrault recommended it as one of the five works on theatre all actors should read. Richards, who was stunned that he had devoted a chapter to a book she had never heard of, mentioned it to Tudor, who happened to have a typescript he had made for his own study while rehearsing for the performance of Boulez’s “Deuxieme Sonota”. It was one of the books Boulez had been reading when composing the sonata, and Tudor had hoped that a knowledge of the work would be helpful in interpreting the difficult composition. On Tudor and Cage’s suggestion, Richards had decided to translate the book from the French, and in both New York and Black Mountain in the summer of 1952 she read sections of her translation to interested listeners.11

Serendipity is in play here. My thesis is that through her time at BMC and her active participation in its cross disciplinary experiments, including her forays into theatre and theatrical translation, M.C. had honed her formidable gifts of language into the perfect sensibility to translate this particular text. Artaud is regarded in his own country as a poet, his voice is passionate, and his ideas about art and theatre are experimental, radical, and visionary.

Everything about the person she had come to be at Black Mountain, had uniquely prepared her to bring these sensibilities to the task of trying to find the right word, the most INCLUSIVE word, to get at what he must have meant. The translation, which has become a classic in American Theatre Studies, is so, in large part because she was able to bring alive in English, the realm of imagination and the poetic and passionate language of the original.

There is nothing didactic or “scholarly” about her translation, just as there is nothing didactic or scholarly about the original: both texts are alive with imagination and open possibility.

The Theater and Its Double’s influence on American Theatre

When M.C. arrived in New York in 1951, she entered a city in a ferment of its own. In the previous decade, as at Black Mountain, émigrés from Europe had imparted the seeds of new ways of thinking about art and form, and with the emergence of American Abstract Expressionism, New York City was about to become the nexus of world art. Poets too were breaking out into new forms. M.C. lived in the city until 1954. Along with Cage and Tudor, she attended meetings of the Artist’s Club, a group of avant-garde painters and sculptors who met to talk about their work. She gave her first public reading there of a “work in progress”: her translation of Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double.

The mainstream theatre on Broadway, however, was clearly holding to the tradition of realistic narrative-based drama, indeed this was its Golden Age, with its greatest playwrights embracing the form: Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and even O’Neill in his later plays. Only a few avant-garde theatres in New York were experimenting with poetic and expressionist forms. The foremost exemplar of a new impulse was The Living Theatre. Paul Biner’s 1972 biography of the troupe12 surveys their journey into and through Artaud’s ideas; I will quote from it extensively in this section.

Established by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in 1947, the name conveyed its founding principle: “a ‘living theatre’ would emphasize contemporary plays in such a way as to move the spectators.” Hoping to garner support for their vision, a founding letter was sent to “actors, directors, set designers and also to poets painters and dancers…including eminent ones such as Robert Edmond Jones, Jean Cocteau…and John Cage.” However, it would be 1951 before they would produce their first program of plays—in their living room. The short plays,

by Bertolt Brecht, Paul Goodman*, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Gertrude Stein, each of whom pursued language in a non-realistic way, reflected Beck and Malina’s abiding concern with language: “We believe in the theatre as a place of intense experience, half dream, half ritual…it seems to us that only the language of poetry can accomplish this...or a language laden with symbols and far removed from our daily speech.” In a 1961 Theatre Arts interview, Beck spoke of these early years:

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We wanted to change the whole method of acting, but that cannot be done in one stroke. The language had to change, first of all. In our reaction against naturalism, we turned to the contemporary poets, to a poetic theatre. We wanted the theatre to accomplish a revolution, eventually, one that had already transformed the other arts—music, painting, sculpture.13

Though as yet unfamiliar with Artaud, The Living Theatre was already on a path towards a similar objective.

Over the next three years, the efficacy of using poetic language for the stage was tested in plays by Stein, Rexroth, Eliot, Pound, Goodman and John Ashbery, using staging techniques called for by Alfred Jarry, Brecht and Japanese Noh Drama. There is little doubt that M.C. and her circle attended many of them before 1954, the year Cunningham did the choreography for Paul Goodman’s The Disciple.14

Goodman’s 1947 book Comitas, a classic study of urban architecture, had influenced the thinking of a number of BMC students and faculty. It inspired the architect Paul Williams, and his wife Vera, to envision forming a community with M.C., Tudor, Cage and Cunningham, where the artists could live and share the work, mutually supporting their artistic endeavors. Williams, who designed and built several buildings while at BMC, was also a major benefactor of the college. The Williams eventually provided support for such a live-work community, and during the period from 1954 to 1964, M.C. and her circle, joined by BMC potters Karen Karnes and David Weinrib and others, lived and continued their artistic explorations at Stony Point, N.Y. Though outside the city proper, they maintained an active connection with New York, and with The Living Theatre.

In 1954, The Living Theatre was evicted from its building. They “temporarily” moved to an uptown loft where they produced plays by Auden, Strindberg, Cocteau, Pirandello, Racine, and Goodman. They found a ‘permanent’ home in 1957, and Paul Williams designed the interior space. David Weinrib contributed a sculpture for the lobby.

The new theatre opened in 1958 with Many Loves by William Carlos Williams (a hit) and The Cave at Machpelah

by Goodman (a flop). The staging of Many Loves borrowed from Pirandello (using electricians and stagehands doing their real work to open the play) blurring the line between reality and the actor’s fiction; the three prose sections are counterpointed with three sections of free verse, to convey the views of the two actors in a love triangle with the leading lady. In their next play, Beck and Malina would depart far from verse in their search for ‘the language of theatre’.

The Connection, by Jack Gelber, staged in 1958, used hyperrealism to draw the audience in the drug addict’s world:

The play deals with a group of addicts waiting in the apartment of one of them to make a connection with ‘Cowboy’, a Negro pusher. It is not presented as a staged performance, but as a “real” gathering of “real” addicts, as conceived by a movie producer who is there with his crew and who speaks to the audience. The play moves like a pendulum between two liberating forces, jazz and drugs.

There is contact, between the actors (who are acting) and onstage musicians (who are not), and between the audience and the actors; and the idea of ‘a connection’ was explored in many analogous ways. The spectator, disarmed by these devices, experiences the ‘staged’ events, including the detailed enactment of an overdose, as viscerally as possible. Biner observes,

Not resting content with merely performing, being intent on playing on the spectator’s nerves as well as his mind, these were signs of a spontaneous move towards Artaud. A sizable obstacle stood in their way: Artaud was not yet translated into English.15 That summer Malina and Beck received a manuscript copy of The Theater and Its Double from M.C., prior to its publication by Grove Press. It was a revelation.

Still, they had always worked with text, and the right script needed to present itself in order to begin to apply his ideas. Meanwhile they continued to experiment. In directing The Marrying Maiden, by Jackson MacLow, Malina

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Goddess / Nourishing Speech, no date, stoneware, 12.5 x 9.75 x 3.75 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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employed the I Ching to dictate the structure, which changed every night: the actors followed alternative texts and used five different tempos that were dictated by chance through throws of the coins or a pair of dice. John Cage’s “music” (a manipulated taped reading of the play itself) was utilized in a similarly chance way. Other offerings, Brecht’s In the Jungle of the Cities and Man is Man and Ezra Pound’s adaptation of Women of Trachis, explored alternative staging approaches.

In The Apple, Gelber’s second play, Beck and Malina explored techniques to alternately disarm and disrupt the audience. Pretended improvisation dominates the dialogue, which is conversational and ranges through mysticism, social problems, politics, clichés, jokes, and parodies, while firecrackers go off under the spectator’s seat; an artist paints an action painting which is auctioned to the audience, and a “paranoiac Fascist drunk” emerges from a seat in the audience to disrupt the proceedings. Another audience plant, an Asian woman, takes the stage and argues for a “yellow world”, whereupon a black male arises and counter argues for a “black world”. There is little conventional action and the actors often wear animal masks as directed by the script.16 The entire affair is a critique of our culture, of our way of life. Though the styles of these productions were diverse, individual elements called for by Artaud (to redefine the stage space, make the action more confrontational, to erase the line between performance and life) are already in play.

Finally in 1963, The Living Theatre was handed a play that directly addressed Artaud’s call for a visceral, direct experience. The Brig, by Kenneth H. Brown,17 is not, conventionally, a play at all. It meticulously compresses and reenacts onstage the power dynamics as lived during “one day” inside a Marine Corps prison—a brig. For Beck and Malina, it was a metaphor for the current social order and its institutions. Malina, who directed, did not want to substitute; she wanted the actors to experience directly. By this means too, the public would be able to feel immediately and directly the horror of the brig.

The idea originated with Artaud, and it is fully explored in his chapter, The Theatre of Cruelty. This is the first time they deliberately used inspiration they had drawn from his theories. Julian wrote:

Artaud believed that if we could only be made to feel, really feel anything, then we might find all this suffering intolerable, the pain too great to bear, and then being able to feel we might truly feel the joy, the joy of everything else, of loving, of creating, of being at peace, and of being ourselves.18 Beck’s careful reading of Artaud’s ideas highlights the true cathartic purpose of “cruelty”: not a journey to the darkness, but a journey through it. In order to achieve the intensity and authenticity needed for the actors to “experience directly” the life of the brig, Malina implemented strict rules for the actors to keep for the entire rehearsal, and infractions were met with consequences. The objective was to create a spirit of extreme tension, from which there would be no break. In rehearsal, any actor who felt that he was about to crack could get a five-minute timeout only by implementing a “cry for mercy”. In performance, the actors were confined to a proscribed space delineated by lines drawn out on the floor which established the walls of the brig interior and exterior, and determined the exact spaces and access for all allowable behaviors. A wall of barbed wire severed them from the audience: no escape:

All moves by the inmates had to be executed at a running pace, or if physically impossible, then at a trot—never walking. “The guards’ manner alternated between cynicism, sarcasm and fervent conviction…Prisoner’s heads are shaved and they must always address the guards in a loud, clear impersonal voice, always in the same manner: ‘Sir, request permission to speak, Sir!’…Prisoners were often denied permission to execute basic bodily functions.” The slightest violation was met with abuse, verbal or often physical.

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Brown’s premise, that “the Marines use depersonalization as the method of ‘rehabilitating’ those who have committed infractions”…in one sense symbolized a world dominated by money and power, a world doomed, in The Living Theatre’s belief, unless man takes action.19 In performances, the actors were rotated for every performance from being a specific prisoner to being a specific guard, from victim to torturer:

The actors were being tested day by day, their behavior was becoming the behavior of victims and tormentors. They felt the world was hemming them in from all sides…“the troupe felt a relentless honesty, for the first time, and their reality was profoundly transmitted to the audience. The spectator remembered his own vulnerability and the victim on the stage became his brother. Everything took place as in a ritual; it was not the purpose to ‘provoke’, and commitment was total on both sides of the barbed wire.20 The Living Theatre had succeeded in creating the ‘theatre of cruelty’ asked for by Artaud.

The Brig also served as a rite of passage for the troupe. Artaud asserts that an act of true theatre can alchemically produce an affective response in the greater world. If so, the immediate and unanticipated onslaught of confrontations with ‘society and its institutions’ that followed immediately upon the heels of The Brig’s unanticipated success, may validate the premise. The Living Theatre’s building was seized, they were evicted, they resisted; they were arrested, defended themselves in court, lost, and were jailed. For the next five years, the company would become a troupe in exile, creating, performing and evolving in Europe. Julian Beck and Judith Malina were serious and lifelong pacifists, they had also become anarchists, who believed that each individual is responsible for the state of the society in which he lives, and only individual, non-violent, actions can change that society. This philosophy would be the touchstone for their future productions.

The company increasingly participated in the co-creation and direction of the productions, fulfilling the anarchist’s ideal of the individual activating the community. As Beck and Artaud each expressed, there is joy and communion on the other side of the terror. The new works created in Europe explored this paradox. In Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, ritual, gestures, language, and chant, and scenes that alternated between joy, terror, and communion, gave the piece its shape and meaning. Antigone plunged the audience into one long ritual in which the audience became the community, confronted with the play’s choices and moral dilemmas. The huge scaffolding constructed by the actors during the performance of Frankenstein, becomes the laboratory, a multi-staged platform for enacting ritual, the belly of the world we live in, and the monster itself. The actor becomes Artauds’s glyph: divested of his own personality. His actions become acts of heroism in a theatre of “cruelty”.

In Paradise Now, the Living Theatre’s most famous piece, the anarchist ideal is given ritual form. The actors alternately invoke community rituals on the stage or wander the audience declaiming prohibitions: I am not allowed to travel without a passport….I am not allowed to smoke marijuana…I am not allowed take my clothes off.

Spectators are confronted face to face, invited onstage to join in the actors’ rituals. The actors disrobe and present their nakedness as a statement, an invitation and a challenge. They reenter the audience space. At some point (and in some performances) the audience, randomly at first then in increasing numbers, take to the stage, some have disrobed, the actors have once again moved to the audience space. The spectator has become the performer. The collection of spectators on stage have become actors. They have made an “action”, and must take responsibility for choice. The two groups merge and continue the rituals, of contact, trust, risk and acceptance, which increasingly become celebrations of freedom, and joy.

I have presented The Living Theatre as a case study because it has an acknowledged direct connection to M.C. and her translation. I like to see the imaginative open hand of M.C. in this journey from the darkness and pain of The Brig to the openness and ecstasy of Paradise Now. I believe it is somehow implicit beneath the darker invocations of Artaud’s words: M.C.’s voice saying, “Yes… and this too!” The Living Theatre returned to the United States in 1968-69 for what could only be described as a triumphal tour. They presented many of their European

49

pieces in cities across the country, provoking the whole range of possible responses. Their exhibition of Artaud’s ideas, now manifested in tangible theatrical forms, awakened a new wave of experimentation in a culture on the verge of great change.

I will end by suggesting individuals and companies whose work continues and extends this tradition. Some have acknowledged being directly influenced by Artaud’s ideas through The Living Theatre or by M.C’s English translation, others have a more distant but very recognizable connection to the sources and ideas he proposed:

Joseph Chaikin joined The Living Theatre in 1959 and left in 1963 to form The Open Theatre, which pursued a similar goal. He devised techniques to facilitate the ensemble’s spontaneous creativity by an intense and fluid exchange of energy. Playwrights Meghan Terry, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and Sam Shepard collaborated with Chaikin, and each went on to create a body of work redefining narrative conventions.21 Tyrone Guthrie, Minneapolis Theatre Co., acknowledged his gratitude to Artaud for the ideas in his groundbreaking 1967 production of The House of Atreus. 22 Tom O’Horgan, acknowleged Artaud’s influence throughout his career.23 He directed over 50 plays for the experimental theatre, La Mama, and several off-off-Broadway classics. His first Broadway production, Hair, in 1967-68, made famous two of The Living Theatre’s most revolutionary tropes: in addition to mainstreaming nudity, he invited the audience to the stage for a “be-in” finale.

Peter Brook, the English film and theatre director, is often credited with being the first to seriously present a performance that embodied the spirit of Artaud’s vision. Marat/Sade, as re-envisioned by Brook, became “a showcase for Artaud’s theories in action.” The intention was to challenge both the “objectivity ” of the spectator, and to replace a sentimental identification with the actor with a direct experience of fear and dread.24

The Wooster Group and their director, Elizabeth LeCompte pioneered use of video and sound scores as stage environments along with the actor, immerse the audience in a direct “total theatre” experience; they complement this by deconstructing and reordering familiar texts, to challenge our assumptions about the primacy of narrative.

The contemporary Dutch director, Peter van Hoeven, has his actors recite the author’s exact lines but deconstructs the author’s ‘story’ and supporting subtext, reconstructing it to foreground more primal urges that unleash the characters actions and compel their relationships.

Some companies have created new techniques to train the ‘new actor’ Artaud spoke of. Ann Bogart, and her company SITI, train actors to discover multiple possibilities in their character’s actions, undercutting the spectators expectations.25 Tadashi Sazuki, her frequent collaborator at SITI, emphasizes the energetic body over the creation of a psychologically motivated character in his actor training method.

Pina Bauch’s Tanztheater has perfected an entire language of movement to manifest the underbelly of everyday actions, gestures that are abstracted through repetition to travel under the spectator’s defensive shield, seeking recognition in our collective memory.

Julie Taymor has used masks, giant puppets and non-human costumes, drawing upon Asian Theatre and African cultures, to create magical stage spectacles, her most well-known being, The Lion King.

50

Ariane Mnouschkine’s has engaged Theatre du Soliel in a range of experiments: for example, a ‘puppet show’ in which actors are made into Artaud’s glyphs by marionette-like movements, achieving actions more ‘real’ and potent than realism, or in the opposite direction, a seven-hour play-spectacle in which global refugees to portray global refugees, blurring the boundary between “a story about refugees” and an actual experience of the plight of millions.26 Butoh, the post-modern Japanese dance form, achieves the intense and non-narrative state of being that Artaud sought for his own plays, the superhuman presence of the double that haunts like a spectre. The Seattlebased troupe, Dappin’ Butoh, has combined the intensity of butoh and the formal abstraction of Noh theatre.27 Marina Abramovic’s performance art restates the relationship between actor and spectator, challenging the spectator to take on the ‘force and presence of the actor’. “The individual experience (of the actor) morphs into a collective one and creates a powerful message.”28 Joseph Beuys similarly employed immanent danger as a central performance element in his work, using the performer’s risk of bodily harm to awaken the spectator’s identification and empathy. Surely this qualifies as Theatre of Cruelty, and aspires to the same goals. Indeed the entire genre of performance art owes a great deal to Artaud’s ideas.29 The list could go on exponentially of experiments towards a theatre that does not yet exist, as Artaud said. Within this new theatrical watershed, a post-Artaudean world, directors, companies, choreographers and performance artists without direct knowledge of Artaud’s theories, freely experiment and have arrived at theatre that fulfills his visions. In the English-speaking world, the primary conduit for those visions has been M.C.’s enduring translation of The Theater and Its Double.

ENDNOTES 1

Antonin Artaud, Le Theatre et son Double, published in Collection Metamorphoses, No IV, (Gallimard, 1938).

2

Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. by Mary Caroline Richards (Grove Press, 1968), 84-5.

3

Ibid., 48.

4

M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Wesleyan University Press, 1964), 126-27.

5

Gabriele Knapstein, “Interdisciplinary and Multimedia Learning: Artistic Education at Black Mountain College”, in Black Mountain, (Spector Books, 2016), 284.

6

Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, (MIT Press, 1987), 111.

7

Ibid., 111.

8

Jean Cocteau, The Marriage on the Eiffel Tower, trans. by Mary Caroline Richards, (excerpts from unpublished manuscript), 1, 3, 5.

9

The Arts at Black Mountain College, 210.

10

Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time: Essays 1944-1992, 141.

11

The Arts at Black Mountain College, 228.

12

Paul Biner, The Living Theatre (Horizon Press, 1972).

13

Ibid., 27.

14

Goodman was an early associate of Black Mountain College. An anarchist and a pacifist, he established a reputation as one of the most radical American intellectuals. He was a poet, thinker, playwright, author, a practicing Reichian therapist and one of the founders of gestalt therapy. He was invited to teach at the BMC 1950 summer session by Bill Levi. In New York City, M.C. and her circle had frequent contact with Goodman.

15

Jack Gelber, The Connection, as produced by The Living Theatre, 1959, The Living Theatre, 51.

16

Jack Gelber, The Apple, as produced by The Living Theatre in 1961, The Living Theatre, 59.

51

17

Kenneth H. Brown, The Brig, Methuen, 1965.

18

The Brig, as produced by The Living Theatre, 1963, The Living Theatre, 67-68.

19

Ibid., 64-67.

20

Ibid., 71.

21

While with The Open Theatre, Terry created Viet Rock, van Itallie created The Serpent and American Hurrah; Shepard collaborated with Chaikin on Tongues and Savage Love.

22

Lewis Segal, “Artaud, O’Horgan and Total Theatre”, in Performing Arts (Spring,1964), 6.

23

Ibid., 44-45; Futz, by Rochelle Owen; Tom Paine, by Paul Foster; Massachusetts Trust, by Meghan Terry; Hair, by James Rado and Gerome Ragni and music by Galt MacDermot. Hair also introduced a new genre, “the rock musical”, from which one can follow a stream of mutations by way of his 1971 Jesus Christ Superstar, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, directly to today’s rap musical, Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

24

Ibid., 7-8; Marat/Sade was first performed in 1963 in London, the same year as The Living Theatre’s The Brig in New York.

25

Bogart and Tina Landau have formulated these experiments into an approach called Viewpoints.

26

Theatre du Soleil: Drums on the Dam, by Helene Cixous (1999), and, The Last Caravan Stop (2003).

27 In Dappin’ Butoh’s chilling 1998 production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the text was chanted to the side of the stage as in Noh theatre, the dancers incarnated the Macbeths and opposing characters in slow butoh movements. In the last moments, the ensemble—the woods of Dunsinane—advance ominously upon Macbeth and the audience, as the lights slowly fade into a final image of dread.

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28

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012) was a static, silent piece in which Abramovic sat in a chair for 736 hours and 30 minutes over a month and a half; spectators were invited to assume the chair opposite her; 1400 people a day did, presented with their own experience of intimate contact. In, Rhythm:0, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 1974, Abramovic sat passively, near a table with an array of objects—from a feather to a gun—from which the spectator is free to choose one to “manipulate her body”. She declared of the piece, “the identity and nature of humanity at large is unraveled and showcased”.

29

Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, Rene Block Gallery, New York, 1974. The performance lasted for 8 hours a day for 3 days. Spectators view the event through a glassed in performance space, which is occupied by a wild coyote. Beuys, wrapped in felt and assuming the role of shaman, shares the space with the coyote. The coyote and Beuys eye each other, the coyote circles him and rips at the garment, Beuys makes symbolic ritual gestures, they resume their distance, stalking, etc.—the “action” of the piece. After three days Beuys ends the piece by embracing the coyote, who has come to tolerate him.

Ballerina, no date, unglazed stoneware, 3.25 x 4 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

Trio of Small Figures: Gagaku, Unicorn, and Untitled, no date, unglazed stoneware, 4.375 x 3.625 x 2.5 inches (Gagaku), 3.625 x 6.5 x 3 inches (Unicorn), 4 x 3.25 x 2.5 inches (Untitled). Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Caliban, 1963, unglazed stoneware, 4.5 x 6 x 4 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

Gargoyle Box, 1957, unglazed stoneware, 9 x 8.75 x 6.5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

54

Poster for M.C. Richards’ St. Andrews College Residency, 1975. Collection of Irwin and Barbara Kremen.

55

Demeter, no date, sawdust-fired stoneware, 6.75 x 6.5 x 4.5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

56

Persephone, no date, sawdust-fired blackware, 7 x 7.75 x 2.75 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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58

On Black Mountain College

by Irwin Kremen

My friends call me Krem, a name that suits me, and I prefer it to the one originally given me. I came by this new name at Black Mountain College, a gift from wordsmith M.C. Richards, who one day playfully said, “You’re crème de la crème and that’s your true name – Krem!” M.C. knew that I had come down to Black Mountain newly released from the structure of value, goal, and identity that M.C. Richards and Irwin Kremen at Black Mountain College, 1946. had sustained my adolescence, and that I sought fresh experience, different idea, expanded feeling, in short another way to be in the world. Her renaming of me blessed the venture I had started upon – the remaking of myself.

Of the many ways that M.C. has affected my life, I must mention two more here. Twenty years later, to the month almost, M.C. jolted me out of what was then my academic and professional routine when she got my entire family to make fabric collages one hot evening in North Carolina, me included. The process gripped me and several months afterwards I began making art – collages, painting, constructions, assemblages – using a great diversity of mediums, some rather unusual. I worked feverishly and with abandon, free to use whatever struck me as visually exciting – even if outrageous – because I was mindful of the fact that my friends at Black Mountain had been able to make their matières out of almost anything for Josef Albers’ class in design. My sense of freedom was enhanced by knowing also that in his music no sound was excludable for John Cage, nor was any possible human movement anathema to Merce Cunningham. This knowing came not as cold dicta garnered from journals or reviews, but gained directly from many conversations with these dear friends over dinner or wine in the fifties while I still lived in New York. Thus, when I turned to art after a long hiatus, something of my stance toward my materials, towards the content of what I made, towards art itself, I know to have been infused with much that I learned from them, learnings that escape easy statement, that remain ineffable but vital.

John and Merce both came to Black Mountain after I had left. It was M.C. who brought us together in New York forty years ago.1

ADDENDUM 2016

Not to diminish the importance of BMC matière making nor of Cage’s or Cunningham’s respective compositional freedom as models for my wide use of diverse materials, in 2011 I suddenly realized that, actually, James Joyce stood as the primary figure affording me that liberty. In the essay I wrote for the catalogue of my late works, exhibited that year at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, I said “. . . only recently . . . did I dully appreciate the centrality that Finnegans Wake served in this regard. Early in 1952 I initiated an ambitious reading project that required going through the entirety of that immense work while enunciating out loud each amazing portmanteau word constructed by Joyce from innumerable languages across time and place. Here indeed was the free use of material exemplified and from a vast domain.“2 facing: Shallow Bowl, 1976, glazed stoneware, 1.5 x 12.125 x 12.125 inches.

Collection of Irwin and Barbara Kremen.

M.C. at Merce’s Sheridan Square Studio with Rachel Rosenthal (left), David Tudor and Louis Stevenson (from left), 1953-54.

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The story of that reading project needs telling here, for in it M.C. figured crucially. Late in 1951 M.C. left Black Mountain for New York to live with David Tudor. I began hanging out with them and, so, also with John. David was to give a concert of Cage’s music as well as Stefan Wolpe’s early in 1952 at the Cherry Lane Theater. For that concert John handed me a complementary ticket, and I went to it together with M.C. seated at the prompter’s bench in that cramped theatre with her in the first row just behind me, on looking over the other bench sitters I spied a woman of great beauty and, turning to M.C. I pointed and blurted out, “Oh, look, I’m a goner!” At intermission M.C. urged me “not to let the pretty one get away,” so I accosted her in the lobby and later bird-dogged her as we all, Cageians and Wolpeians, went afterward to the now-famous Cedars Tavern for a party. At its breakup I escorted Barbara Herman to her apartment building Uptown near the Hudson.

Barbara Herman, 1950. Photograph by Anne Valenti.

Two days later, on a trumped up excuse, I managed to visit Barbara briefly where, my, oh, my, I found she possessed a copy of Finnegans Wake! I had wanted to tackle that momentous opus since I had read Ulysses with M.C. six years previously at BMC. What a trio we could make, I thought – that beauty of the prompter-bench, M.C., and me – three funds of knowledge, lore, and experience, overlapping to some extent certainly yet vastly different in others; coming together to read out loud every word of that astounding book, discussing and making sense of it as we would go along – it would take months. I was quite sure M.C. would leap at the opportunity. Barbara might be another matter but I sensed she might be willing especially since M.C. would be along. So pronto the next day I began to work on it. Our first meeting took placed shortly thereafter, and thus began a great adventure spanning over two years. We would meet every Saturday afternoon at Barbara’s unless one of us was out of town. The readings were high-spirited, jocular, exhilarating, intellectually wide ranging, often profound, and a strong bond grew between us three. Another, different in kind, formed between Barbara and me, intense, exciting, amorous, and deep. Having met in February we were a couple by May.

How lucky I was that M.C. came to New York just at that very time and I could reconnect with her. Barbara, being one of the consequences for me, initiated what was to become a totally new direction. Now, sixty-four years later with both of us nonagenarians, we remain fiercely devoted to each other.

ENDNOTES

M.C. Richards, Barbara Herman, and Irwin Kremen in Connecticut at a table in the yard of the parent’s home of a former BMC student, June 1952. Photograph by David Tudor.

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1

Reprinted from The Black Mountain Connection: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Irwin Kremen, M.C. Richards, Tampa Museum of Art, 1991, 29-30, with permission of the author.

2

Irwin Kremen, “Insight Out”, In Site: Late Works by Irwin Kremen, Asheville, North Carolina: Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2011, 4.

Untitled, no date, acrylic on rice paper, 10.375 x 11 inches. Collection of Irwin and Barbara Kremem.

61

Black Mountain College Summer Institute in the Arts, 1953. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection.

Black Mountain College Reunion, 1992. Collection of Julia Connor.

62

Leaf Platter, ca. 1953, glazed stoneware, 13.5 x 12.75 x .5 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Mary Fitton Fiore.

63

Alchemical Form, 1961, unglazed stoneware, 22 x 6 x 6 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of the Estate of Jonathan Williams.

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M.C. Richards, The Communitarian*

by Jenni Sorkin Assistant Professor, Dept. of Art History and Architecture, U.C. Santa Barbara

From 1945 until 1951, M.C. (Mary Caroline) Richards played a central role at Black Mountain College, presiding over of a large network of artists, writers, events, and ideas. A beloved faculty member, and the only woman on the faculty with an advanced humanities degree, Richards taught English literature classes, what she called simply “reading and writing,” but her informal, often uncredited contributions loom large in the College’s legacy.1 She was also directly responsible for recruiting and hiring Charles Olson, who became her immediate successor and the College’s last rector.

A poet, potter, translator and essayist, Richards earned her doctorate in English literature in 1942 from University of California, Berkeley, when women were not encouraged to pursue graduate studies. At a time when literature was taught as distinct from the craft of writing and public performance, she was far ahead of her time, one of the first pedagogues to activate its interdisciplinary potential.

M.C. Richards and Bill Levi, BMC, ca. 1946-47.

Spanning both Josef Albers’ and Charles Olson’s rectorships, Richards was the connective tissue between the two administrations, and the only woman Chairman of the Faculty from 1949 until her departure in 1951. She was a frank and thoughtful leader during a time of intense intergenerational strife between its factions. The Dreiers and the Alberses favored pushing forward an arts-only curriculum, while the younger faculty, including herself and her then-husband, the philosopher Bill (Albert William) Levi were determined to expand liberal arts offerings. As she wrote to the Dreiers in 1948: “Tell me if I am wrong here: I have the impression that you and Albers want to make BM into a well-manicured, distinguished looking example of modern design; that takes money, of course…Whereas, if I had to make the choice, I would rather have a shambly campus, more teachers, fewer students, and less money. Now how do we get together?”2 Owing to philosophical differences, both the Dreiers and Alberses left the College in 1949. Richards’ teaching served as the bridge between literature and the visual arts, which manifested itself as an intensive commitment to theater, particularly in the absence of a formal drama teacher in the years between 1945 and 1950. She was also a key participant in the student-initiated Light Sound Movement Workshop, which produced short, multimedia theatrical works using projected imagery, dance, music, and oration between 1949 and 1951.3 Such experimental juxtapositions of media, perspective and space preceded John Cage’s Theatre Piece #1 (1952), considered the first Happening in modern art, but also involved overlapping participants, which reappeared in Cage’s work, including Richards herself.

Whereas peers like Cage privileged artistic production over teaching responsibilities, Richards devoted herself to the growth and enrichment of the community as a whole, relishing the intense convergences between art and life that a radical live-work environment fostered. As she wrote: “Black Mountain College is a place where everybody is encouraged toward the creative practice of life. Its vitality may yet save the world….The aim is to train ourselves so that we can produce acts, objects, and relationships which feed the stream of coherence and happiness in the world.”4 M.C. Richards and Karen Karnes at NYC show on 2nd Ave.

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Through her collaborative pedagogy, she was fully committed to eradicating the traditional hierarchy of teachers and students: spearheading collective theater performances with mixed student-faculty casts; founding the Black Mountain Press, used for the college’s literary publications, which later morphed into The Black Mountain Review, the literary journal that reinforced the college’s reputation as a haven of experimental poetry; and restructuring the curriculum to maintain financial solvency, using thematic institutes year round, attracting well-known visiting artists for two-month durations.

Due to her influence, the community was able to experience French absurdist theater and its radical doctrines: she translated Erik Satie’s The Ruse of the Medusa (1913), for its first English-language production, performed August 14, 1948, with Buckminster Fuller and Elaine de Kooning. The play was directed by two of Richards’ students: Helen Livingston and Arthur Penn, the latter who would go on to a distinguished film career in Hollywood, director of both The Miracle Worker (1962) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967). In 1950, Richards translated Jean Cocteau’s Knights of the Round Table (1937) and translated and directed his surrealist comedy, Marriage on the Eiffel Tower (1923), performed in June. She also directed W.B. Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain (1939) that same month.5 In 1951, she began translating Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double, one of the formative texts of twentieth-century experimental theater and subsequently influential to Cage’s performance.

Steadfast in her anti-authoritative ideology, Richards also became a student while at Black Mountain as well: studying pottery with Robert Turner and Peter Voulkos, and returning for the 1953 Summer Institute. Her experiences at Black Mountain inaugurated a lifelong commitment to communal living. Following her departure, she became the epicenter of the experimental Gate Hill Cooperative, an artist’s community known as Stony Point, in Rockland County, New York, established in 1954 by four ex-Black Mountain couples: Richards and her partner, David Tudor; the potters Karen Karnes and David Weinrib; Paul and Vera Williams, and John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

Richards left academia, but continued to teach and write widely. Her best-known work, Centering: On Pottery, Poetry and the Person was published in 1963, and became a touchstone for a generation of craftspeople, a poetic and philosophical text that examines the moral act of community building as a form of artistic and experiential education.

ENDNOTES

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*

A fuller accounting of her work on M.C. Richards appears in her new book, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

1

M.C. Richards to Charles Olson, June 14, 1956, Series II, Box 208, Folders 1954-1956. Charles Olson Research Collection. Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.

2

M.C. Richards to Ted and Bobbie Dreier, July 25, 1948. Series I. Box 1. Folder 5. Mary Caroline Richards Papers (960036), The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

3

Robert Wunsch resigned in 1945, and Wesley Huss was appointed in 1950. Elizabeth and Peter Jennerjahn were the students who initiated the Light Sound Movement Workshop. According to Mary Emma Harris, other participants included Nick Cernovich, Mark Hedden, Dorothea Rockburne and Vera Williams. See Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College. London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987, 206-211.

4

M.C. Richards, Promotional Flier, “Summer Session in the Arts: July 9–August 31, 1951. Series I. Box 1. Folder 3. See also “Letter to the Faculty, 1951” in which she writes the following: “One new thing that we mean to do this year is to have, say, four visiting artists, on 2-month contracts, feeding into our study and experience through the year...This scheme seems on the way to being fit for an abundant pedagogy.” Series I. Box 1 Folder 4. Mary Caroline Richards Papers (960036), The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

5

Richards’ translation of Cocteau’s Knights of the Round Table appears in the chronology of her life and work in the exhibition catalog, Imagine Inventing Yellow: The Life and Work of M.C. Richards (Worcester, MA: Worcester Center for Crafts, 1999). She also directed W.B. Yeats’ The Death of Cuchulain (1939), (June 4, 1950) Playbill, Black Mountain College Papers, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh.

M.C. Richards’ house at Stony Point 1954-64.

M.C. Richards in the Stony Point Studio, 1956. Photograph by Valenti Chasin.

67

Exhibition Flyer, no date. Collection of Julia Connor.

68

Universal Human, no date, unglazed stoneware, 15 x 14 x 5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

69

Dragonfly Tiles, no date, glazed stoneware mounted on wood, 12.75 x 16 x .5 inches. Collection of Grace Ann Peysson. Photo by Jeffery Spahn.

Tiles from Stony Point, ca. 1960s, glazed stoneware with metal frame, 16 x 25.5 x 1.5 inches. Collection of Grace Ann Peysson.

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Copyright Š 1989 by M.C. Richards. Reprinted from Centering (second edition), by permission of University Press of New England.

This broadside was designed and printed in 1991 in the Book Arts Department at the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts.

The numbered edition is printed on Rives Heavyweight paper, the Roman-numeral edition is on handmade Umbria.

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72

The Literary World(s) of Mary Caroline Richards

by Deborah J. Haynes, M.F.A., Ph.D. DeborahJHaynes.com

A Roundabout Introduction

In essence, this essay is a dialogue with M.C. Richards. Descriptions of her ideas, in her own words or in direct paraphrase, are interwoven with personal musing—RIFFs—about her primary themes. I have always been fascinated by the visual and literary forms of M.C.’s writing. For instance, her essays include cycles of five “Prayers,” nine “Easter letters,” five “Runes” and eight “Bouts”; her own and others’ poetry is interspersed within prose narratives; and color and unique formatting (capitalized, italicized, and bold-face letters and words) are used. In this essay I do not intend to mimic such literary devices, but to engage them.

RIFF is a musical term that came into English usage in the 1930s, perhaps related to “refrain.” In jazz and popular music, it means a short repeated or improvised phrase, sometimes played over changing chords and harmonies, or used as a background to a solo improvisation. Here, I use the word as I reflect upon and enter into dialogue with particular themes in M.C.’s literary oeuvre. To use such a musical term is especially fitting, given M.C.’s many comments about music. Near the end of Centering she asks herself what she has learned the most from in all of the arts, and she answers, “poetry and music.”1 Cultivating the listening ear is crucial to both of these artistic forms. Poetry, of course, is a natural response for M.C.; she was, after all, a poet for most of her life. Although she was neither a musician nor trained in music, music was crucial in her education. Learning about elements of music such as pitch, duration, timbre, volume, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, atonality, serial composition, and indeterminacy shaped her life, art, and writing. Yet, how well do we actually hear? “If we can hear, we have a better strength to maintain balance in a world which tempts us into making ignorant choices.”2 So, “study in depth! . . . Listen!”3 And, in a poem written for her 80th year, M.C. asked how she might celebrate that transition. “I hope there’s music up ahead, / of course there is, / where else would it come from— / All my years I have spent / coming toward music, / emergent to music, / baffled, blended, immersed / in this intrinsic ballad . . . .”4 My RIFFs are an attempt to listen to M.C. with both my outer and inner ears.

I have known M.C.’s writing since I was a young college student, and I read everything she published as it became available. My understanding of the intersections of art and life developed as a result of reading her writing and getting to know her. My concept of the vocation of the artist developed as a result of reading M.C.’s definitions of art, craft, and prophetic imagination, alongside our in-person conversations. My willingness to embrace the darkest sides of my psyche developed as I heard about her life and read her books. At the outset of Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America, M.C. used the image of living process in describing her approach to Waldorf education in the United States: “[t]here is a creative way to write and to read, Rudolf Steiner said, which keeps the faith with living process, and which does not tend to congeal and rigidify ideas. He asks the readers of his books to follow them as an unfolding process, not to seize upon points here and there for momentary stimulation. We must try to keep a sense of the whole at all times.”5 Such is my goal here.

facing:

Epiphany, no date, bisque-fired stoneware, 11 x 10.125 x 3.75 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

M.C. Richards, Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Eduction in America, 1980, Wesleyan University Press.

73

M.C.’s life and work reflect an unusual set of values about creativity and the arts, and about living in community. Her values provide a fresh and courageous counterpoint within our highly commodity-driven world. She had a multifarious career and might therefore be called a renaissance woman: a brilliant teacher, a fine potter, a spirited and well-respected translator, writer, and poet, an engaged abstract painter in the last years of her life, and an ardent advocate of community.

Her creativity crossed traditional boundaries within the arts and sought to connect art to life; and she brought this “cross-over” into her teaching in various contexts in the United States, Canada, and England. She was fearless in exploring the unknown, including the experiences of living with and caring for others, then aging in community until her death. She lived her last years in Pennsylvania, at Camphill Village, Kimberton Hills, an Anthroposophical community for disabled adults. Even the end of her life reflected the values about which she wrote and spoke.

M.C.’s first published work was a translation of Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double. This book provided germinal ideas that revolutionized American theater in the 1960s and 1970s. As Susan Sontag put it in reviewing the book, “The course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods—before Artaud and after Artaud . . . .”6 The theater and alchemy are virtual arts, like a mirage in Artaud’s view. They are practices of “virtual efficacy,” where apparent deeds are not actually, literally, acted out.7

Of her four nonfiction books, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person formed her reputation and remains her most well-known and influential work.

It has been continually in print since its publication in 1964. In this book M.C. explored the relationship between the cognitive and creative, the visible and invisible worlds. To speak of art and the creative process as radical presence is to question traditional boundaries between art and life, as well as the assumption that creativity should result in marketable products. Centering is impressive for its synthesis of thought, plain speech, and incantation. It became an underground classic, pulling together ideas about perception, craft, education, creativity, religion and spirituality, arguing for the interconnection of art and life and the creativity of every person. In that book, M.C. described art as a Moral Eye that M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, opens and closes, helping us to see truly what is around us. At the center of her 1989, Wesleyan University Press. vision there was no product to sell, no “specific object” such as minimalist artists M.C. Richards, The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings, touted in the 1960s, but instead a process of becoming a whole person.

1973, Wesleyan University Press.

The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings is a collection of essays, nearly all of which began as talks. Written between 1964 and 1971, these texts extend her investigation into the realms of literature, philosophy, and depth psychology. The central image for The Crossing Point comes from studies in projective geometry and plant growth, in particular the lemniscate and the meristem.

The lemniscate resembles a figure eight or Mobius strip, where what is enclosed turns into what is open and lifting up. The meristem is the growing tip in plants. She linked these forms not only to the archetypal image of centering clay, but also to inner processes. We move inward toward the self, and outward from the self into the world with our own growing edges. Essay topics include fire, transformation, and metamorphosis, medieval alchemy and the self as alchemist, and a number of other concepts such as conscience, moral imagination, karma, and reincarnation.

As with her central image of centering, M.C. considered all of these themes crucial to the disciplines of pottery, poetry, and the quest for personal wholeness.

Toward Wholeness documents with earnest feeling the development and expression of Rudolf Steiner’s educational philosophy. If there is a pervasive dialogue partner in all of M.C.’s writing, it is Rudolf Steiner.

Following his interest in questions about what and who a child might be, Steiner initiated the first Waldorf

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school in 1919 in Stuttgart, Germany. Based in Goethe’s concept of metamorphosis, Waldorf schools were an expression of Anthroposophy, which M.C. described as the inner language of anthropology. The central question for anthroposophy is “what is the human being?” The arts formed the basis of the curriculum: eurythmy, painting and drawing, music and voice athletics, poetry, handwork of various kinds. Often performed with music or spoken poetry, eurythmy is not dance movement or personal expression, but a vocabulary of movement, like the alphabet we use in verbal language. In Waldorf schools, students develop writing out of painting and drawing. Handwork, such as knitting, crochet, sewing, and cross-stitch, is introduced when students are quite young. Later as students mature, master craftspersons teach weaving, woodworking, pottery, sculpture, basketry, bookbinding, and other arts. Education, in this model, should be understood as a lifelong process, not confined to a few years in elementary and high schools, but extending throughout the span of life. Consequently, the training and inner life of the teacher is absolutely essential. M.C.’s comprehensive personal appraisal of Steiner education mingles philosophy, description of the schools, and poetry. The book took four years to write, and its nine major chapters cover a range of themes addressed to “parents, students, teachers, philosophers, pilgrims, and question makers.”8 The book also includes a directory of Waldorf schools, institutes, and adult education centers, and a brief chronology of Rudolf Steiner’s life and his works. This is the only book written by M.C. that contains a bibliography.

Opening Our Moral Eye: Essays, Talks, & Poems Embracing Creativity and Community contains eight essays addressing a range of themes—from her auto biography to philosophical and sociological concerns. “Toward M.C.” was the result of a series of conversations in 1985 with Gerry Williams, editor of The Studio Potter magazine. “Black Mountain College: A Personal View of Creativity” was given as a talk in 1992, during a celebration of this educational experiment. Here she discussed many of her formative influences, including her parents, experiences at Reed College, the University of California, and Black Mountain College; her early work translating Antonin Artaud; important individuals such as Robert Turner, John Cage, David Tudor, Charity James, Seonaid Robertson, and Paulus Berensohn; particular clay series, such as the seven “I AMs”; her experience with Rudolf Steiner’s ideas and Waldorf education, and the decision to live at Kimberton Hills.

Other themes of these essays, such as the role of imagination, activism, community, agriculture, and right-livelihood, informed the last quarter of her life.

Besides including poems in each of her books, M.C. also published two books of poetry during her life: Imagine Inventing Yellow and Before the Beginning. Collected The Studio Potter magazine, Volume 14, Number 1, December 1985. and edited by Julia Connor, Backpacking in the Hereafter was published in 2014.

Backpacking in the Hereafter: Poems by M.C. Richards, 2014,

M.C. spoke to diverse audiences, including writers, artists and craftspeople published by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. from many disciplines. She taught at a number of schools both private and public: the University of Chicago, Black Mountain College, Haystack School of Crafts, Pennsylvania State University, Penland School of Crafts, Swarthmore College, Rhode Island College, Antioch College, Central Washington University, Colby College, Art Institute of Chicago, University of Oregon, Oakland Community College, Rudolf Steiner College, Institute of Creation Spirituality, University of South Florida, and Schumacher College, to name but a few. She also gave numerous talks to organizations, which appeared later as essays in her books. She spoke to the Association of Occupational Therapists, and to conferences such as the American Craftsman, the Washington State Art Association, and a Friends (Quaker) conference. She spoke to Unitarian Universalist women, and to a large conference of women artists. And, of course, she spoke to other

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M.C. Richards, Imagine Inventing Yellow: New and Selected Poems of M.C. Richards, 1991, Station Hill Press of Barrytown.

groups of craftspeople, including pottery guilds in various locations. After leaving fulltime teaching, she taught for short periods in the curriculum laboratory of the University of London—Goldsmiths College, and at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.

As I end this roundabout introduction, a few further words about myself. I met M.C. Richards in many settings over nearly thirty years; experienced her teaching multiple times; read all of her non-fiction and poetry; helped to pack her art for a comprehensive exhibition in California in 1986; then found a publisher for and edited her last book of essays, Opening Our Moral Eye. My experience editing this book gave me a new appreciation for the creative ego, both hers and mine. M.C. was prickly about her writing. I had already published two scholarly books with Cambridge University Press, and thought I knew something about writing. But she did not want me to edit any of her language. And although I had suggested the book’s title based on a sentence in Centering, M.C. wanted to call the book Communion of Worlds (private letter, July 4, 1995). The editors at Lindisfarne Press, however, preferred the original title, and the book appeared in late 1996.

Subsequently my own life revved up, with my first university administrative position, then a major move to undertake a more complex administrative position with the prospect of building a new visual arts complex at a research university.

Our correspondence continued, but I did not see M.C. again until I joined others to sit beside her body during the days after she died in 1999.

ENTERING THE LITERARY WORLD(S) OF M.C. RICHARDS RIFF 1: centering

So, back to the beginning. In early 1971 I was a college undergraduate at the University of Oregon, majoring in ceramics. A particular book was urged on us. Originally published in 1964, the first paperback edition of Centering appeared in 1969. Our teachers read it with excitement and invited us to read it too. Here, in the humble guise of a book written by a poet and potter, was a philosophy of creativity and a philosophy of life. If books such as David Green’s Understanding Pottery Glazes and Daniel Rhodes’s Clay and Glazes for the Potter offered the body of ceramics, and if Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire and Guy Murchie’s Music of the Spheres provided the intellect, Centering articulated its spirit.

In her book Richards spoke in a poetic language about the connections between life itself and our work as potters who center clay and create vessels that must withstand the ordeal by fire. She talked about the hard work of bringing into being–through our speech, our gestures, our acts–a self capable of responding in life, as well as in art, to other persons. Here, for the first time, I encountered a vision and articulation of the moral dimension of artistic work. “How do we do it,” she wrote, “how do we center in the moral sphere? how do we love our enemies?

How do we perform the CRAFT of life, kraft, potentia?”9 The German kraft means power or strength; and we must use that power to form not just the pot, but ourselves.

One of the most prescient statements in all of M.C.’s writing concerns life and art. “Life is an art, and centering is a means. Art is a mode of being in which elements of form and content; style and meaning; feeling and rhythm—all the living perception may be imaged forth in a way that does not sacrifice the moving character of the world. Every person is a special kind of artist and every activity is a special art . . . All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life. We must, as artists, perform the acts of life in alert relation to the materials present at any given instant.”10 We learn about intention and aspiration, about limits and possibilities, about success and failure. We learn how to live by working with clay or marble or paint on paper, or by playing music, singing, dancing, and performing. It is “a law by which one comes into such a relation with the world and with oneself that one feels the whole in every part.”11 The potter must bring the clay into a perfect equilibrium,

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such that there is no difference between the inside and outside of the vessel. The center, then, is everywhere—a quality of equilibrium and balance. I love her assertion that everyone is an artist. So said artist Joseph Beuys too.

Richards’ writing appealed because it was vivid and personal. This was no disembodied abstract philosophy, but one that stimulated the senses. She told jokes, and talked about how we tear and swat and push and pinch and squeeze and caress and scratch and model and beat the clay. She related philosophical ideas to her life as a poet, author, teacher, an “odd bird” in both academic and craft worlds. She talked of the paradox of the human longing for union and separation, and of the pain and suffering that accompany our attempts to live and to love. At the center of all our yearning and urgent activity is mystery and paradox. M.C. called Centering her spiritual autobiography.

RIFF 2: the crossing point

Just as we have developed our capacity for rational thinking, so we need to develop the faculties of intuition, imagination, and inspiration. “We need to develop a crossing point from one order of awareness to another . . .”12 I find this an elegant use of the image of the crossing point, a way of acknowledging that all these ways of knowing are actually interdependent.

The central image of the crossing point is a distinctive part of plant geometry; it is the lemniscate, from lemnis, which means “ribbon.” As she suggested in the essay, “Toward M.C.,” take a ribbon, and make a figure eight with it. Hold it upright. Then, put your finger on the outside of the top loop, and follow the ribbon to the crossing point. Here you will find yourself on the inside of the bottom loop. “What you have is a form with continuity between the outside and inside.”13 In a plant this crossing point, where the root moves down and the shoot grows up, is sometimes only one cell wide. And the analogy for us is that we are rooted by gravity and never lose touch with the earth; yet we grow up and out into the world through our senses, imagination, and intuition.

“Life is not an achievement course,” M.C. opined, “it is a continually changing insight. Nothing fails like success, because success is quickly obsolete, the goal once satisfied changes. In every practical solution there must be growing points. All living organisms have one. In plants it is called the meristem.”14 A poignant expression of this is found in her poem, “Evening Primrose”:

Sitting in the roofless tent, listening…

See all natural forms, he said, not as forever fixed but as expressing a tendency toward another form I saw you last night, evening primrose, preparing to open: In an instant you changed from bud to bloom, pulling back the outer sheath as the petals expanded and became flower. And the tendency then, barely visible, to lose moisture, to wilt, to droop, to shrink, to drop, to become earth.

I feel in myself the growing tips of age: to travel without an agenda, to seek a new furniture of emptiness and silence where I can voluptuously sit as in a pool of warmth, living toward dying, blooming into invisibility.15

Reading “Evening Primrose,” as well as her other poems, I am reminded of Giambattista Vico, an Italian writer who lived in the seventeenth century. Many of our linguistic metaphors are drawn from bodily and erotic life, as Vico

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observed in The New Science. The head is the top or beginning. We speak of the shoulders of a hill, the eye of a needle, the lip of a cup, the teeth of a rake, the tongue of a shoe, the bowels of the earth, and so on. Fields are thirsty and willows weep. The poems collected in Opening Our Moral Eye reflect a similar sensibility: — “a naked corn cob is “cool, sweet, intimate, smooth, like skin I’m holding.”16 — “This hand flickers at my lips, / this hand falls to its knees and bows, / two hands drum time out of silence. / Like flowers they open and close.”17 — “In the garden the wild mind buds and swells / with words that cannot rest, cannot be spelled, / that turn this pink, this lemon yellow . . . .”18 — “I have painted the female hills / stretched and piled against the sky. / They are sleeping. / I have given them golden haloes. / They are saints. / They are sleeping.”19 The crossing point is a kind of double realm, a threshold that may be experienced as a door that opens into the unknown world. And, in the moment of approaching this threshold, “the whole world is our religion.”20 RIFF 3: moral imagination and the prophetic

In M.C.’s writing, the imagination is a sense organ that perceives spirit and matter. Imagination is a concept with a long and vivid history. The word is derived from Greek and Latin words, phantasia, eikasia, imagination— fantasy, evolution, and imagination, respectively. It refers to the image–making capacity in human beings, which can be as varied as dreams, fantasies, illusions during daily life, reverie, artistic creativity, mystical visions, and the ability to envision others’ lives or a better world. The vocabulary of imagination is slippery, and therefore it might be considered more of a myth than concept. Like a myth, it has a complex history full of diverse interpretations.

Through the crafts and arts such as poetry, we can develop our moral imagination. On the one hand, moral capacity is “the ability to be guided in one’s speech and action by the standards of quality to which one gives allegiance.”21 On the other, by envisioning and eventually creating what is not yet present, we exercise moral imagination. Centering in the moral sphere, we learn to handle, skillfully, personal preferences. As M.C. suggested, the prophetic artist should study the laws of polarity and “participate in that from which he [or she] feels most separated.”22 Conscience plays a powerful role in this process.

In Opening Our Moral Eye, M.C. Richards wrote passionately about the renewal of art through agriculture. As a result of living in an agricultural village, she became a practitioner of biodynamic agriculture, the principles of which were defined by Rudolf Steiner. Both art and agriculture develop the powers of the imagination and are dependent on careful observation of living processes and intuitive improvisation.

How might we enhance our powers of imagination? Through carefully observing how all things live and how they die. Time can be experienced through color, especially the changes of color associated with different times of day and year. Both farmer and artist watch the sky and learn to read it, through clouds, light, shadow, and stars. Tending plants and observing the world, we learn meditative attention. Finally, M.C. Richards, Opening Our Moral Eye: Essays, Talks, & Poems as a result of developing the ability to imagine, our capacities for inner and outer vision Embracing Creativity & Community, 1996, Lindisfarne Press. develop, as does our compassion for the suffering of others.

Edited by Deborah J. Haynes.

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Fire Flower (Homage to Pele), no date, stoneware and acrylic paint, 9.75 x 12.5 x 10.25 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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RIFF 4: wholeness

Wholeness is a crucial concept for M.C. “To bring universe into personal wholeness, to breathe in, to drink deep, to receive, to understand, to yield, to read life. AND to spend wholeness in act, to breathe out, to give, to mean, to say, to write, to create life. It is the rhythm of our metabolism and may not easily be put into words.”23 This, I think, is M.C.’s definition of the purpose of life. Committing ourselves, as artists, to the goal of fostering our own and others’ integrity and spiritual unfolding, we work in solitude and in community with others, toward wholeness.

Rereading M.C.’s books and essays, I am struck by several fascinating meditations on the threefold nature of the human being. The human being, she said, has three ears: the outer organ, which we call the ear; the inner ear which connects to the brain and the rest of the body; and the whole person, who hears the meaning of what particular sounds are saying. “It takes a golden ear to be empty enough of itself to hear clearly.”24 Listening is therefore a profound centering discipline.

Each person is also a threefold being of body, soul, and spirit—or, I might say, body, mind, and spirit. We act, we think, and we intuit the deepest connections. Further, the human organism has a threefold functioning. The “nerve-sense” system functions mainly through the brain and nervous system. We reflect, think, and meditate. The rhythmic systems of breathing and blood circulation are centered in the chest and connected with feeling. And, we each have a metabolic system that digests and transforms what we take in. We use our limbs and will to act in the world. Through thinking, feeling, and willing, we thus learn in a threefold process.25

M.C. encouraged the cultivation of a strong and centered inner self that can move confidently into the public sphere. She spoke of the essential self and the evolutionary development of consciousness and the spirit, ideas that are also articulated by Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Sri Aurobindo. Like these writers, she believed in both an individual and the collective consciousness, a creative unconscious. Like Rudolf Steiner, she affirmed the existence of an inner self that is free of cultural programming, suggesting that knowledge is possible free of the gendered body. For a twenty-first century feminist such as myself, this is a dated point of view, but it nevertheless served M.C. RIFF 5: teaching and learning

M.C. discussed her views on education, pedagogy, institutions, teachers, and students in at least nine essays and in her comprehensive study of Steiner education in America. A number of pertinent questions pervade her reflections. What or who is the teacher and what is a student? What is intelligence, and why do our intelligent and well-educated psyches still result in national and international messes? What are our institutions now, and what might they become? She wondered how institutions come into being, and how we can work to free ourselves from the ways in which they bind us. She thrilled at the unique strengths of Waldorf education, for its focus on the inner life of the teacher and the possibilities for educating students through the visual and performing arts. As she mused at the beginning of Toward Wholeness: “Where do you begin? Where do you stop? What do you include? What do you leave out?”26

The word education comes from the Latin educare, which means to draw out or to lead out. Pedagogy is a formidable name for the craft of the teacher; it comes from two Greek words meaning child and to lead.27 Consider the breadth of her definitions of education: “Education is a process of waking up to life.”28 “We teach all the time, by what we are and what we do. We learn all the time by what we see and feel and think and do.”29 “To foster a sense of life at its profoundest depth and in it sacred value! Is this not the premise of our pedagogy?”30

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“Education is the art of inner enjoyment.”31 “Education is an art of healing and making whole.”32 “Education is an art because it relies upon that combination of know-how and inspiration, of enthusiasm and dedication, of ability and restraint, which the artist has, and which is awakened in the artist-teacher.

The teacher, like the artist, is in touch with inner sources, with creative imagination, and with the unconscious world of the archetypes.”33

In “The Public School and the Education of the Whole Person,” M.C. articulated her ideas about wholeness and education. Originally published as a booklet by Pilgrim Press, it appeared simultaneously in 1980 alongside Toward Wholeness. This essay became an underground classic. Public education was already in crisis, a crisis that has not abated in these many subsequent years. In fact, the crises may be even more extreme now. The challenges of cultural pluralism are ongoing, and include the basic problem of language when students are increasingly diverse. Nevertheless, the public school has a significant double role: to provide continuity in the transmission of culture, and to stimulate creative change and transformation. In the past decades since both her essay and book were published, the impact of new technologies, especially the computer, television, and smart mobile devices, has become an even more potent shaping influence on education, including home schooling and the proliferation of charter schools.

M.C. saw education as a path of initiation and a sacred art. She was both an inspiring teacher and a committed student. She insisted that teachers must not only practice what they preach, but they must listen carefully to what another person actually means. “You must be able to enter again into a dialogue with all senses alert to the human meanings expressed, however implicitly. The experience of the potter listening to his or her clay strengthens this capacity.”34 She suggested that all teachers should practice an art as they prepare to teach. “I’m a student on the path.”35 RIFF 6: the daimonic, fire, and transformation When The Crossing Point was published, I eagerly read and reread the chapter “Wrestling with the Diamonic.”

Written as a series of eight “bouts,” this essay describes M.C.’s challenges with the inner impulses that are the source of both human creativity and destructiveness, the “light” and “not-light.” The root of the word daimon means destiny and knowing, the character of our lives and an epistemological standpoint. The daimonic “stands within, unfolds as fate; something about knowing stands likewise within, perceiving things and beings . . .”36

In all of her reflection about transformation and metamorphosis, M.C. took her central image from firing of the kiln. “It is especially difficult in our day to give up the picture one has of oneself and of truth and to keep ourselves open to transformation.”37 Fire is archetypal, and there is a way of looking at inner development as an art of fire, of transforming the self through experiences of strong emotion, pain, and suffering.38 On the one hand, she mused, “I do not want the fire. Though I am burning in it, I deny it. For I am afraid to think what will become of me. I will be consumed. I will not know myself. All the familiar apparatus of my life, all my supports, will they not be melted away? I cannot risk everything.”39 On the other, “I was born to be happy, of this I had no doubt. Strangely unawakened to the dark powers, insensitive to evil. I did not come face to face with Fear until I was nearly 40 years old. Time and again my life contracted into an agony of cross-purposes, confused aims, frustrated love . . . And I entered into the first fire of the first darkness. Seven years later I was brought to another crisis, and I entered into the true fire of the true darkness.”40

M.C. described the arts as alchemical traditions, processes of transmutation that use matter to awaken an inner realm. The arts of pottery, of clay and fire, are therefore related to transformations of the person and of society. “When we say that life is an art, that life can only be understood if it is approached as an artistic process, we mean that, as in theater or alchemy, something is deeply infused through its physical forms. And to understand the physical forms accurately, it is necessary to see them with a double eye. This way of seeing is a need in all disciplines.”41 It is for this reason that M.C. urged everyone to practice an art, to regard even livelihood and professional work as an art.

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Dream Angel, ca. 1960, unglazed stoneware, 8 x 5 x 4.75 inches. Collection of Deborah J. Haynes.

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RIFF 7: mystery, paradox, and negative capability

Creativity is mysterious. Artists, poets, makers of all kinds, and scientists: all work from inspiration, a mysterious process of creation. “Mystery sucks at our breath like a wind tunnel. . . . Let us pray, and enter,” M.C. wrote.42 The artist and poet is a person whose destiny as a human being is not to amass wealth or influence, but to perfect ourselves. “The facts of life are hard. Many forces are at work besides our devotion. A mystery is at work. . . . It helps, I think, to consider ourselves on a very long journey: the main thing is to keep to the path, to endure, to help each other when we stumble or tire, to weep and press on.”43

Alongside mystery, we cannot escape paradox. We face the paradoxes of life and death, the paradoxes of the physical world that is invisible, inaudible, immeasurable, supersensible, and unpredictable. Yet we live in this world, making choices, centering ourselves as we center clay. Human beings are hungry; we are born hungry and seek satisfaction throughout life. We hunger for food, love, erotic pleasure, money, power, truth, pleasure, and approval. In short, we hunger for freedom and for union. One of the greatest human paradoxes concerns our opposing desires for freedom and union, for separation and connection, for solitude and community. In a talk titled “Insight 1969,” M.C. offered a long poetic reflection on freedom. We grow out of diverse processes, such as the freedom to participate or not participate; to be independent or dependent; to change direction and feel that one is not losing the path; to reject or to sustain the freedom to say yes or no or maybe. We experience the freedom to change things or to conserve; to care about or come to conflict with; not to know what one is doing and yet to do it. We have the freedom to despair, to love, to develop insight, and to take the consequences for all of our thinking, feeling, and action.44

M.C.’s life work might be defined as a sustained attempt to reframe “the sacred” in terms of the natural world, the arts, and crafts. She identified the tension between our practical and visionary capacities. Holding such powerful paradoxes in one’s mind and heart requires “negative capability.” I first heard this phrase when I met M.C. in 1971, and she wrote briefly about it in Centering: “The craftsman experiences Form as a continuous force [that comes] unsummoned . . . Once we know in our flesh that the world is imbued throughout with formative energy, we begin to experience how alive the world is, the air is, the earth is, we are . . . It is this Negative Capability which John Keats was so struck by . . . . ”45 And, once we begin to grasp how illusory our certainties and doubts actually are, we can begin to enjoy them.

RIFF 8: karma and destiny

“What do I do, when I can do whatever I want to do?” M.C. asked.46 What each person wants, she said, is to be born into the body, with the freedom to pursue our creativity. “Our studies of Eastern philosophy teach us to let go, to drop it. To surrender our attachments, our mentation. To free ourselves from ignorance and suffering. Our studies of Western philosophy teach us to surrender our minds to perception. . . . There is only the moment, and yet the moment is always giving way to the next so that there is not even NOW, there is NOTHING. True, true. There is nothing, if that is the way to understanding how much there is.”47 We learn about the suchness of things. Later, M.C. quoted a saying (identified only as from “the Orient”) that “transformation is the aim and purpose of all practice.”48 Through our practices—of the arts and crafts, meditation and prayer—we are transformed, and transformation has distinctive karmic dimensions.

Each person’s personal biography and personal destiny are not the result of impersonal forces. Instead, they are connected with where we are in our lives, and with our karma. M.C. defined karma as reaping what one has sown, of experiencing the consequences of past action, even from our past lives. Beyond this, “karma is the complex and subtle fabric of our inner forming, its causes and purposing. In my own life and study I have found that one does not go very far into one’s deep wrestling with the daimonic without developing a sense of journey which is bound neither by birth nor death.”49

Usually we know and experience life as a stream of likes and dislikes that form both our personal attachments and what we reject. And these are karmic: what we carry with us as inner patterning from the past may be related to a family pattern or to our racial past. M.C. acknowledged that to try to talk about karma is indeed complicated.

Nevertheless, we should transform our karma through initiative. Ultimately, everything we do makes a difference

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and everything therefore is important.50 She identified reincarnation as a form of re-embodying. It means rebirth, taking up a new visible form through an inner process of growth, development, and change.51 And she again found a powerful metaphor in the plant world, especially in the cycles of the seasons, and the process of a plant’s growing, flowering, bearing seed, and dying.

In Opening Our Moral Eye and in The Fire Within, a film based on her life and work, M.C. recounted a formative dream.52 She was standing in her vegetable garden. About fifty feet away, on the compost pile, stood a Being with a strange smile and three eyes. The right eye was the sun, the middle eye a diamond, and the left a huge human eye. Its front teeth were crooked, and it had a large benign countenance. In her dream she was asking this Being a question, a life or destiny question such as “when will I . . . when will my time . . . what is my destiny? She could hardly find words for the questions. But this Dream Angel answered her immediately: “I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you.” She went into the studio and made a sculpture.

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

For M.C. caring defines the intersection of writing and handcraft. The artist and craftsperson care about the vessel, the ornament, the tool, the table, the stool, the symbol, the food, the room, the others working in the studio.

To care expresses our capacity to respond humanly. And from what does this capacity emerge? It comes at least partly from the natural pleasure of handling materials, of choosing and participating, and thereby being connected to the greater world. “To respond to the life in nature and each other. To be given a chance to say Yes and No, to speak for ourselves, to hear our own voice in the vast mosaic of our culture.”53 Caring comes from the body and bodily sensations, and it comes from the heart. It comes also from the spirit and from conscience, from the sense of what it means to live as a human being in a world with others.

M.C. acknowledged that, while the handcrafts may be an anachronism in our time, they are basic to spiritual life. We walk a path of the crafts, indeed of all of the arts. Through these practices we learn to extend our caring “from the center through all the parts. This does not happen of itself. It is a discipline of inner plasticity and shaping. It is craft without end.”54

The work of caring is profound; and it involves affirmation, healing, teaching, supporting and attending, concentrating on the needs of others. M.C. cared for others throughout her life, and was, in her final year, cared for by others. “Now I am quiet, slow, a bit unstable, and in good spirits. I like this new planet I am on–this new way of being. . . . I have enjoyed coming to know the mystery and secret joys of REST–not diversion, not entertainment, not ‘relaxation’ nor change, but REST: no sensory content, inhabiting myself as BEING, experiencing Being.”55 This sentiment was powerfully expressed in the final lines of her poem “Dying,” published posthumously: “…ready to experiment, be creative, serve be beautiful, be real, be nowhere be no one I already know be birthing myself waves and particles backpacking in the hereafter.”56

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This essay would not be complete without acknowledging a few individuals. M.C. herself, as should be clear, was absolutely formative in my personal and creative life. I thank Bob James and George Kokis for their initiative in bringing M.C. to the University of Oregon twice in the 1970s. “The Fire Within,” a documentary film

by Richard and Melody-Lewis Kane is an astonishing resource about her life. And without Julia Connor, M.C.’s oeuvre would not be available today. I also am grateful to the many unnamed individuals with whom I shared M.C.’s presence at the University of Oregon, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Hop Bottom Farm, and Camphill Village at Kimberton Hills.

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Grief and the Burning Bush, for John Cage, 1992, acrylic on paper, 28.5 x 25 inches. Collection of Julia Connor.

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SOURCES AND REFERENCES Books and translation by M.C. Richards (in chronological order) Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Richards, M.C. Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1964. ________. The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. ________. Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980. ________. Opening Our Moral Eye: Essays, Talks, & Poems Embracing Creativity & Community. Edited by Deborah J. Haynes. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1986. ________. Imagine Inventing Yellow: New and Selected Poems. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1991. ________. Before the Beginning. San Francisco: Tangram, 1995. ________. “Notes from an Experience of Illness and Aging.” Privately circulated, June 1999. ________. Backpacking in the Hereafter. Edited by Julia Connor. Asheville, NC: Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2014.

References used or noted in this essay: Bachelard, Gaston. Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Green, David. Understanding Pottery Glazes. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

Keats, John. http://www.keatsian.co.uk/negative-capability.php or http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/john-keats-and-negative-capability. The latter is an excellent article on the British Library website.

Murchie, Guy. Music of the Spheres. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Rhodes, Daniel. Clay and Glazes for the Potter. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1957.

Vico, Giambattista, The New Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968. Rev. translation of the 3d ed. (1774) by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.

Additional Notes on Sources M.C. Richards’ archives are now housed at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Her archives reflect many of the critical ideas that influenced American culture and art in the twentieth century. For instance, she had a life-long correspondence and interchange of ideas with such leading figures as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charles Olson, and R. Buckminster Fuller. URL: http://archives2.getty. edu:8082/xtf/view?docId=ead/960036/960036.xml The following is inevitably a partial list of the sources and references in M.C. Richards’ books. Because she seldom identified particular books or articles, this is simply a list of names.

For a bibliography of Rudolf Steiner’s books, see Toward Wholeness, pp. 199-210. As mentioned earlier, M.C.’s writing reflects a continuous dialogue with his work.

Philosophers: Sri Aurobindo, Owen Barfield, Martin Buber, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E. Graham Howe, Ernst Lehrs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Psychologists, mythologists: Roberto Assaglioli, James Hillman, E. Graham Howe, Carl G. Jung, Laurence Kubie, R.D. Laing, P.W. Martin, Erich Neumann, Wilhelm Reich.

Historians: Mircea Eliade.

Scientists: George Adams, David Bohm, Albert Einstein, Norwood R. Hansen, Hans Jonas, Olive Whicher.

Artists, dancers, musicians: Paulus Berensohn, John Cage, Sister Corita, Merce Cunningham, Margaret Israel, Bernard Leach, Marisol, Warren McKenzie, Isamu Noguchi, Daniel Rhodes, Lucy Rie, Rosanjin (Fusajir¯o Kita¯o ji), Mary Scheier, Henry Takemoto, David Tudor, Peter Voulkos. ¯o¯ØooØØ

Poets: Dante Alighieri, William Blake, Andre Breton, Norman O. Brown, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Hamlin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, John Crow Ransom, Rainer Marie Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, William Stafford, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth.

Writers from other disciplines: Edward Albee, Antonin Artaud, James Baldwin, Fred Blum, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Norman Cousins, Martin Duberman, Gustave Flaubert, Suzi Gablik, Thomas Hardy, Homer, Ivan Illich, George Leonard, C.S. Lewis, John Milton, A.S. Neill, Laurens van der Post, Sir Herbert Read, Paul Reps, Seonaid Robertson, Gertrude Stein, John Neihardt.

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ENDNOTES 1

M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1964), 127.

2

Ibid., 128.

3

Ibid., 129.

4

M.C. Richards, Opening Our Moral Eye: Essays, Talks, & Poems Embracing Creativity & Community, ed. Deborah J. Haynes (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1986), 184.

5

M.C. Richards, Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 3.

6

Susan Sontag, quoted on book cover of Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

7

Opening Our Moral Eye, 36.

8

Toward Wholeness, xii.

9

Centering, 5-6.

10

Ibid., 40-1.

11

Crossing Point, 177.

12

Ibid., 105.

13

Opening Our Moral Eye, 50.

14

Crossing Point, 140.

15

This poem was written August 24, 1997, and privately circulated in M.C. Richards’ “Notes from an Experience of Illness and Aging.” Curiously, it has the same title but different content than a later poem published in Backpacking in the Hereafter.

32

Ibid., 117.

33

Toward Wholeness, 69.

34

Centering, 21.

35

Crossing Point, 223.

36

Ibid., 190.

37

Ibid., 55.

38

Centering, 56.

39

Ibid., 133.

40

Ibid., 135.

41

Crossing Point, 181.

42

Centering, 8.

43

Ibid., 140-41.

44

Crossing Point, 125-26.

45

Centering, 115.

46

Ibid., 52.

47

Ibid., 53.

48

Crossing Point, 24.

49

Ibid., 193.

50

Centering, 42.

51

Crossing Point, 110.

52

Opening Our Moral Eye, 19.

53

Crossing Point, 22.

54

Ibid., 25.

16

Opening Our Moral Eye, 147.

17

Ibid., 152.

18

Ibid., 156.

19

Ibid., 159.

55

M.C. Richards, privately circulated “Notes from an Experience of Illness and Aging.”

20

Crossing Point, 244-45.

56

M.C. Richards, Backpacking in the Hereafter, 32.

21

Centering, 62.

22 Ibid., 132.

23 Ibid., 65-6.

24

Ibid., 59.

25

Crossing Point, 147.

26

Toward Wholeness, ix.

27

Centering, 97.

28

Ibid., 15.

29

Ibid., 97.

30

Ibid., 129.

31

Crossing Point, 43.

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Purple and Green Pinched Bowl (and interior detail), no date, stoneware with acrylic paint, 3.875 x 7.875 x 7.875 inches. Collection of Ruth Ghio.

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Covered White Box with Cups, no date, glazed stoneware, 4.25 x 7 x 4.5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Waste Basket, no date, unglazed stoneware, 14 x 12.625 x 9.625 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Small Aqua Bowl (and interior), no date, glazed stoneware, 2.75 x 5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Four Virgins of the Elk Dance, 1971, stoneware, 7.75 x 4.75 x 4.75 inches (Sun), 7.25 x 5 x 5 inches (Star), 7.5 x 5 x 5 inches (Moon), 8.25 x 5 x 5 inches (Hoop). Collection of IUP University Museum.

Face Bowl, no date, unglazed stoneware (inside glazed), 8.25 x 8 x 8 inches. Collection of Grace Ann Peysson.

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Chicken Vase, no date, glazed stoneware, 6 x 4.5 x 4.5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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M.C. Richards’ Ceramic Legacy

by Jeffery Sphan

Gallery Owner

M.C. was a ‘Source’…(pointing to his chest)…in here, deep.

— Attributed to Peter Voulkos

I never knew M.C. Richards personally. As a gallery owner, I specialize in 20th Century sculpture and ceramics, and of necessity my perspective on work is often formed decades after it was made. I wish I had met her in person, but I assure you that her voice comes through loud and clear in the work. Her writing and her ceramics stand the test of time. They are still M.C. Richards at Black Mountain College, 1946. challenging and progressive today. It seems fitting to look at M.C.’s ceramic legacy upon the centennial of her birth.

In my work I frequently become a repository for ceramic lore, told by many potters and ceramic artists through oral tradition and story telling. Many clay artists have made clear to me how important M.C. was to them — as innovator, visionary, and pioneer. She had an enormous influence on others. By challenging assumptions and breaking norms, she freed others to explore new territory. Almost every potter and ceramic artist I know has a copy of M.C. Richards’ book, Centering. Unlike most ceramics books of its day, her words were not focused on techniques; rather, she focused on the central meaning of making and on the challenging opportunity for artists to become integral people. Her goal was to help others find their own personal ‘center’ and let that inner knowledge inform their work.

Reflecting on the birth of the modern studio craft movement, there were very few artists and thinkers who went beyond technique and aesthetics. M.C. Richards was a pioneer who delved deeply into the importance of integrating daily life and creativity, resulting towards a path to self-discovery.

— Peter Held, Director Emeritus, Ceramics Research Center, ASU

Having read most of M.C.’s talks and writings, I can imagine she would bristle at words like, visionary, innovator, and pioneer, but they are verified by the influence she’s had on ceramics today. “Source” seems the most accurate term to associate with her; it has been used time and again by her peers.

Let us imagine ourselves back in 1949 or 1950 when M.C. first encountered clay. Robert Turner, who was to become her first teacher, had just been hired to start a ceramics class at Black Mountain College, although his formal training was as a painter, mostly portraits at that time. Turner created The Pot Shop at BMC but left after just one year, and was eventually replaced by Karen Karnes and David Weinrib. M.C., an English professor at the time, had been exposed to all types of literature including Antonin Artaud, the French theorist whose book, The Theater and Its Double, she would later translate into English. Her primary experiences with art were outside of ceramics, consequently her initial exposure to clay came without “ceramic rules”. With no inherited context she set off on the adventure she called pottery, free of tradition and its ‘good manners’. Clay, in the early 50s, was mostly limited to functional pots, cups, bowls, and teapots were the norm. Yet, M.C.’s initial attempts were purely sculptural. Free of the usual “ceramic rules”, some of her early pieces barely held together; that wasn’t what interested her. She was

facing:

Collaboration with Peter Voulkos, 1997, stoneware with acrylic paint, 4.5 x 7.625 x 7.625 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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far more focused on this new and exciting material that could give form to both feelings and ideas. She later apprenticed and learned her craft well from Karen and David among others, (at Black Mountain and beyond) with whom she shared a studio in Stony Point, N.Y. for ten years. She and Karen even invented a new clay formula called “Flameware” which allows cooking pots to go directly on the open flame of a stovetop. It’s interesting that she moved fluidly between functional and sculptural objects at a time in the ceramic world when artists were usually boxed into one or the other. Thinking outside the box was the norm for M.C., and it often lead to new forms of expression.

An early sculpture exemplifies these innovative expressions. It’s often hard to date M.C.’s work, so we can’t exactly say who did what first, but this piece could have been made anytime from the early 1950s until the mid 60s. It depicts what she sometimes called ‘totems’ — stacked elements on top of one another. The pieces are loosely attached, meant to just stack, balancing on each other. It is possible this was a very early attempt at stacked sculpture, perhaps created at BMC or in Berkeley, where she later re-connected with Peter Voulkos. It’s easy to see the direct influences on, and shared ideas with, her old friend. In fact it was M.C. and Karen who initially invited Peter Voulkos to BMC in 1953. There, M.C. encouraged him to use clay as fine art — as poet and Craft Horizons editor, Rose Slivka, and others would do later. Prior to BMC, Voulkos made exquisite functional pots, but after meeting M.C. both at BMC and later in NYC, he confidently moved into sculpture.

In the mid 80s, M.C. began painting acrylics directly on bisque fired ware, breaking another “ceramic rule” as clay was typically finished with glaze. Ignoring this she dove headlong into the pleasure of painting on clay. Paint gave immediate expression to her love of color, and the clay allowed her to experience it in three dimensions. Artists like Ken Price had also just begun similar in-roads. We forget that it often takes a renegade to break the rules, someone who comes to clay from other disciplines and can move the field into new realms. Voulkos began painting on clay in the 50s. He too was a renegade, but these acts do not occur in isolation; they are often a part of a larger zeitgeist, and M.C. was a major part of the mix. Today young clay artists use any material they wish to give form to their ideas, epoxy, paint, plastics, but it was M.C. who did many of these things first, proclaiming them the province of art. In collaboration, M.C. took a tea bowl thrown

by Peter Voulkos and painted it with exuberant bright colors.

There are, of course, many different kinds of artists, those who epitomize trends, Totem, no date, unglazed stoneware, 32 x 14 x 14 inches. and those who buck them purposefully, whether as a reaction or to riff on something else Private Collection. they’ve already seen. Then there are the ‘intuitives’, those with inner focus who follow Pinched Box, no date, stoneware with rutile glaze, 4.25 x 5 their own muse and make art because they must. M.C. was one of the best of those x 5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills. working from an inner source. By nature inquisitive, she asked difficult questions of herself and of those around her. M.C. looked inward, inspired by her own rhythms and intuition, she broke taboos and created new ground. She boldly told us we are all creative beings who simultaneously possess great intellect; both should be explored equally, and we shouldn’t have to choose.

That confidence to not choose one side of one’s self over any other side allowed her to live in what she called the ‘crossing point’, the infinite place of possibility. Women were especially forced to make choices in her era, and her confidence inspired others to live their own ways and exercise all aspects of their greatness.

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Pinched Low Bowl, 1984, stoneware with cream glaze, 10 x 10 x 2 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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I learned about M.C. Richards’ book “Centering, in Poetry, Pottery and the Person,” and began exploring her writings and life after getting together with Karen Karnes back in 1965. I was sorting out what to do with my life, set up a studio, what it would cost, etc. M.C.’s “works” definitely had an influence on my life. What was so magical about this amazing person was that through the creativity of her poetry, her writing, and associations with clay, M.C. Richards was inspirational as she made the essence of the inner significance of life tangible.

— Roberta Griffith

Her words and works gave permission and freedom to others to explore their own individuality. In her eyes no one person was more creative than any other; all had unique gifts to uncover, to share. M.C. often gave workshops on creativity Souvenirs from Collaborative Opening (M.C. Richards, Karen Karnes and David Weinrib), ca. late 1950s, bisque-fired stonethat included work with clay. In these sessions she was fond of a particular exerware, 2.25 x 1 x .625 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + cise. She’d distribute balls of clay in equal portions, about the size of a baseball, Arts Center Collection. Gift of Ursula Powers. giving one to each person in the class. Everyone was encouraged to make a pinch pot, a simple hand formed bowl or vessel without tools, just using their fingers and hands. They were encouraged to take their time and to “listen” to the clay with their fingers. Soon the table was filled with the unique pieces of each participant. This was not about object making or ‘pots’; it was about discussion afterwards that was the focus. It was seeing that even though each person started with essentially the same material, they had created vastly different and unique pieces. Participants saw a visual representation of their uniqueness, their individuality, and as their teacher M.C. validated each person. She emboldened them to pursue their inner core, with joyous permission, a radical act in today’s society.

Perhaps her most lasting gift to ceramics is found in the works being produced by young artists today. For example, the vigorous resurgence of pinch pots that delight in the mark of the maker, reminding us that these objects were made by human hands. Artists such as Lilly Zuckerman, Scott Parady, Sam Harvey, and Emily Schroeder Willis, just to name a few. M.C.’s sculpture also opened paths to allegorical works that use clay to convey ideas not just forms. Almost all ceramic sculptors today use clay to convey ideas; we just expect that as if it’s always been that way. On M.C.’s 100th birthday it’s important to remind ourselves that this was not always the norm, that it took a renaissance woman like M.C. and others, to move us into a new understanding of what could be possible.

Hazel Larsen Archer, M.C. Richards at Black Mountain College, ca. late 1940s, gelatin silver print. Courtesy the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer.

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Stoneware Pottery, flyer. Collection of Julia Connor.

M.C. Richards at Stony Point, ca. late 1950s. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Alphabet #3, 1994, acrylic on paper, 60 x 40 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Ada Lea Birney.

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M.C. + Rudolf Steiner

by Deidra Heitzman + Sherry Wildfeuer Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, Kimberton, PA

There is a danger in writing about M.C., because she was so much to so many, and her many facets and talents contained many paradoxes, necessarily defying categorizing or explaining. It is best, simply, to read what she has written. She embraced those paradoxes, whether they caused her pain or taught her something new or both. There is always more, there is always something new, and there is always the pulsating and grand and unsatisfied and uniquely satisfied person we experienced. Here is an opportunity for us to give you her words and to ruminate on this outstanding personality—to imagine how what she did, understood, and said revealed her.

Rudolf Steiner believed that freedom and unpossessive love are two practices meant to be developed by human beings. They will affect everything we know and feel and can do. I enjoy thinking that as we invite these qualities into our hearts and imaginations and bodies, we are hosting a transformation of art, science, and religion…I write from the point of view of a person who has made a deep connection with Waldorf practice and philosophy for more than 20 years…I write out of participation, observation, study, and a long and cordial inquiry.1

The word HOME comes to mind. M.C. found a home in the work of Rudolf Steiner. She found a home in the way he articulated ideas about life, art, philosophy, education, agriculture…introspection, drama, and the Word.

His work reminded her of the essences of life, of her self, and of what is needed in the world. It made sense to her and helped her make deep sense out of life.

In describing her life, M.C. recalls that her then motherless mother had, at a very young age, to go searching with her young sisters for a home. M.C. later describes many physical homes she herself found in life, and their dissolution into the next phase or next places. Yet, like many of us, her search was less for a physical home than a home within herself and in the society of others where she could find and be herself.

Of course, she sought a physical home—where her writing, her inspirations, her work with clay, her teaching, her exuberant love and her developing spirit could be at one, where being embraced, she could be heard, confirmed, widened, expressed, given berth. She glowed with joy when she felt the ecstasy of being at one with her deeds, with her words, with her friends. That glow made the most mundane an event. She gave that freely to others.

It must have been that at-one-ness that she felt as she explored the work of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), because all of her life from that time on, she was, to the best of her ability, a living expression of what she experienced from his work. It is not that she was his student, although she probably would say she was, but that she felt that sense of “coming home” to his anthroposophy, of a fairly immediate recognition that who she was united her with Steiner’s world view. He confirmed much of what was in her—her approach to the arts and education, for instance, and of course agriculture. And as Steiner would undoubtedly have deeply appreciated, she gave expression to all of this through her own deepened and personal understanding. She didn’t quote Steiner as much as confirm him: less talk about and more taking her intuitive understanding to a new level about which she could write or speak or out of which she could act. She consumed his ideas and incorporated them as a part of her being, because in many ways, they were already in her, waiting to create purchase on her path. above:

Studio Sign, no date, glazed stoneware, 5 x 10 x .5 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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She was a polymath—who would have guessed a young person planning to translate Chinese poetry and later translating Artaud from the French would also have her “I AM” clay plaques hung in New York’s Church of St. John the Divine? Or that her book on “pottery, poetry and the person”, Centering, would become a counterculture bible? Everywhere she went, from Reed College to Berkeley to the University of Chicago to Black Mountain and onward, she was exploring, learning, discarding, questioning, searching, moving on, connecting.

While in England in 1949 with her then husband Bill Levi, she discovered material about the Michael Hall Waldorf School. Waldorf schools, now a large Unglazed Pinch Bowl, 1990s, unglazed stoneware, 4 x 8 x 6.75 inches. international school movement, were envisioned and begun by Rudolf Steiner.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Mary It clicked. This was the kind of education she felt at home with. When she later and Edward Phillips. “came upon Rudolf Steiner’s work in America, it wasn’t surprising to [her]. It was like picking up a dropped stitch, then knitting it into the fabric.”2 David Tudor gave her

…a book of collected lectures of Steiner in translation. I found my own way into the substance of Steiner’s philosophy of education which then became an independent interest.”3 M.C. would always have found her own way.

It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who we are. We face surprises. And disappointments.

The crucial fact is that we are different from anybody we know or admire….This is hard to accept in a standardized society like ours….It takes all one’s courage to be the person one is, fulfilling one’s odd and unique possibilities.4

The more she learned about Waldorf education, the more she experienced it as important for America. To that end, she wrote Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America, first published in 1980, when her involvement with Steiner’s work was well over 20 years old. In the Preface she writes:

I am interested in Steiner’s work and the schooling that has grown out of it because of the totality of the vision—and because everything is connected with everything else. This spirit reflects the direction in which modern consciousness is evolving. The grammar of interconnectedness is a new discipline of our age.5

In her book, Centering (1962, 1964, 1970), she writes of Waldorf education,

It is the closest thing I have found to a centering impulse in education….Rudolf Steiner’s mind was open to the most difficult questions, and he was prepared to go very far indeed to listen for answers.

He perceived man as both historical and prophetic, standing between the effects of the past and the instreaming of the future, an evolving organism of body, soul, and spirit; part of a vast world of being, in which the earth and the sphere it inhabits are likewise an evolving organism. This sense of organism was embodied then in an educational method. The rhythms of that education are the long rhythms of our growth, inner changes corresponding to the physical changes of the developing body. Curriculum becomes the image of the metamorphosis of…capacities. Since everything is part of an organism, everything is related.6

Although one can trace elements of her life that could be said to have led her to Steiner’s work, a good question is, “why were those things interesting to her?” As her interest in the psyche grew, finding her “own way into the substance of”7 Jung’s work opened to her the arena of the unconscious, of dreams and images. Rudolf

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Dawn Dancer, 1986, watercolor on paper, 11 x 14.625 inches. Collection of Irwin and Barbara Kremen.

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Steiner’s concepts of the spiritual were natural next steps. They were gloves into which her hands easily fit.

After describing her interest in the Chinese language as pictorial—as drawing, she writes,

I did my doctoral dissertation on the theme of irony in Thomas Hardy….Both writing-as-drawing and irony are interesting forerunners of what came later to be my journey through Zen and the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner.

She then describes her dissertation work on Thomas Hardy and reading Hardy’s The Dynasts:

What’s relevant here…is that Hardy had a lot of choruses of spirits—The Spirit of the Furies, the Spirits of Time—as real drama, cosmic drama. I was struck by it, I just took it as being what it was, but later when I got to reading Rudolf Steiner’s work about the Time Spirits—the Spirits of Form and of Movement, in other words, ‘the spiritual world,’—where other people might stumble over that kind of language, the language itself didn’t produce any tension in me. When I would read a Western philosopher like Rudolf Steiner who talks about Time Spirits, it seems plausible I would be drawn to that stream of reality.8

The understanding of interconnectedness is alive in Steiner’s lectures on agriculture and the biodynamic movement that has grown from it. M.C. became interested in Olive Whicher’s work in projective geometry and its relationship to plant growth in 1964-5, and after taking Whicher’s course at Emerson College in Sussex, England, a school actively teaching Anthroposophy and its applications, M.C. continued to take metamorphosis, morphology, and growth into her innermost vocabulary and her outer work. The seed became a metaphor for the miracles of generation through darkness, light, cosmic forces, water, chaos and manifestation. Likewise the imagination of “egg’ informed her work. Each imagination she enriched by attention and exploration, sometimes in clay, sometimes in paint, and often in poetry. She taught young biodynamic agriculturalists, emphasizing the meaning of culture to its study.

M.C.’s discovery of working with material substance was fully in sync with Steiner’s interest. Steiner described that while we are on earth we have an opportunity and perhaps even an obligation to interact with substance, transforming it, while also transforming ourselves. She writes in Centering, …and thus do I now understand Plato’s saying, over which I puzzled so many years as experiences did not seem to bear it out, namely, that to know the Good is to perform the Good. To know means to unite with in the flesh. Having beheld the world in its ultimate physics, one will have beheld Wisdom. It is by one’s warmth that one takes it into oneself. Thus do freedom and obedience marry in love.”9

To perform the Good... In the leading thought of the Camphill Community, a worldwide movement of intentional communities sprung from Steiner’s work, is the phrase, …”wherever there is quarrel and discord, to bring the Good to earth…” M.C. was to find a physical, soul, and spiritual home there.

She describes a first meeting which led her from Steiner’s work to this community working out of his ideas.

During a summer conference, Karl Konig, founder of the Camphill movement, came to give a lecture cycle on sensology. Not of the five

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or six or seven, but of the twelve senses. That caught my attention more than just a little. The next year he returned to give a lecture cycle on The Word, and again it was an extraordinary experience. Koenig was a medical doctor and a musician.

He introduced Steiner’s work in curative education, working with…handicapped children. And then he turned to the gradual development of communities for adults…The concept of the village as a working community…was first described to me at those summer sessions. It contained another feature. That of a new social impulse. The Camphill movement was meant to represent another kind of social impetus. A living and working together of human beings not only of different color, or race, or gender, but of different developmental capacities, giving to each what was needed…What was it that so enlivened my interest again? There was that approach all the way through to the wholeness of the human being in Steiner’s education, and the Camphill movement reconnected with that fundamental search in my life—the hunch that there was still the possibility of connecting our learning and our living with more accuracy to the human being. And to our mutual need, not only in community but also to the individual in relationship to the Earth, in relationship to the heavens.10

Memorial Celebration Program, 1999. Collection of Julia Connor.

Mary Caroline Richards was to join Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, in Kimberton, Pennsylvania, first as a visitor and guest, and later as a resident volunteer coworker. Her quest to integrate her many loves, clay, poetry, social life, teaching, agriculture, deep ecology, mystery, knowledge, and later creation spirituality—all that her creative genius could expand to incorporate, found welcome. Sherry Wildfeuer, friend, housemate, co-worker describes this best:

M.C. moved to Camphill Village Kimberton Hills in 1984, but before that she visited often, staying in the guest room in Sycamore House, where I lived. We developed a friendship that comfortably spanned our 31-year age difference and talked about how she was coming to the end of her then current lifestyle as a traveling teacher. She needed to establish a home base for the final phase of her life. Having spoken enthusiastically about new forms of community as she traveled, she had not lived communally since leaving the Stony Point Artists Cooperative in 1964. She knew she would have needs as she aged, but she certainly had lots of vitality and much to contribute for the foreseeable future. We imagined what her life might look, and it was not a hard decision for Kimberton Hills to welcome this already beloved and respected characterful friend into our midst. M.C. was adamant that she join as a co-worker—whatever money she earned while living here would go to the community while her own needs would be met by the work of the others, according to the fundamental social law which Rudolf Steiner had articulated.

Of course there were challenges of adjustment in lifestyle and cooking style—living with small children was especially hard for her at first—but we were all resilient, and if humor was temporarily lost it could always be found again. She soon became thoroughly integrated, running a pottery workshop, helping with the land work, teaching in the agricultural training course, helping in the house and with the festivals.

During her years in Kimberton M.C. took up the art of painting with profound absorption. The free style of pottery and poetry flowed in the confidence of her brush strokes as from the hand and eye of a master.

I remember a conversation we had around her 80th birthday when she shared that she was saving some projects for when she would get old. She looked at me and asked, “So when am I going to get old?” We had a good laugh.

As fellow students of anthroposophy, devoted to the Archangel Michael, she and I shared many questions and experiences over the years. As an artist she was of course fascinated with the process of creativity, and there was a lecture in which Rudolf Steiner spoke of “creation out of nothingness” that meant a great deal to her. It confirmed

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what she had intuited, namely, that the great spiritual beings who have in the course of evolution given each of us our unique individuality are, in our time, in need of nourishment arising from our own creativity. Rudolf Steiner characterized the source of this gift to the gods as that which extends itself from our thinking, our feelings, and our willing beyond the bounds of necessity. What we create as thoughtful, heartfelt, moral responses to the world—our relationships. M.C. took this realm of relationships seriously.

She lived her life as one who knew her inner life mattered. Her participation had meaning, and as a teacher she tried tirelessly to awaken that awareness in others as well.

Old age did eventually lay claim to M.C.’s health, and as a friend I tried to accompany her on this leg of the journey with equanimity and love. I was at peace with the transition right up to the small ceremony prior to the funeral of the closing of the coffin. Suddenly, as the lid irrevocably shut away the precious body which had borne her active spirit so sensitively, I felt the rush of my own personal grief and the tremendous loss for the world. The pain seared my heart and opened it to receive a powerful image: M.C.’s head resting on the breast of Rudolf Steiner with her ear to his heart. Oh…yes. I could see now what an intimate pupil she had been. This was what Rudolf Steiner had hoped for—free individuals who could grasp his meaning and live out of their own authentic, original response creatively.

ENDNOTES

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1

M.C. Richards, Towards Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America, Wesleyan University Press, 1980, x.

2

M.C. Richards, Opening our Moral Eye, Lindisfarne Press, 1996, 54.

3

Ibid, 54.

4

M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person, Wesleyan University Press, 1964, 125.

5

M.C. Richards, Towards Wholeness, Rudolf Steiner Education in America (second printing), 1982, ix.

6

M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, Wesleyan University Press, 1970, 101.

7

M.C. Richards, Opening our Moral Eye, 54.

8

Opening our Moral Eye, 1996, 25.

9

M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person, 132.

10

M.C. Richards, Opening our Moral Eye, 54-5.

Alice Sebrell, Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, Kimberton, PA, April 2016.

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Snow, no date, mixed media on paper, 8 x 9 inches. Collection of Julia Connor.

facing:

Snow, no date, letterpress on paper, 5.5 x 4 inches. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Untitled Bowl, ca.1990s, stoneware with acrylic paint, 4.25 x 6.75 x 6 inches.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Mary + Edward Phillips.

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Black and White Drawing, Trio, 1971, glazed stoneware, 3.625 x 9.25 x 9 inches (black bowl), 7 x 4.625 x 4 inches (cup), 4 x 8.625 x 8.75 inches (white bowl). Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

Cinder Cone II (Homage to the Goddess Pele), 1995, stoneware and acrylic paint, 6 x 9 x 9 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Polarity: Fusion of the Opposites, no date, bisque-fired stoneware, 7.375 x 7.5 x 7 inches. Collection of Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

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Two Small Figures, 1988, glazed stoneware, 4.5 x 4 x 2 inches. Collection of Grace Ann Peysson.

Small Plate with Zigzag, no date, glazed stoneware, 6.625 x 6.625 x 1 inches. Collection of Grace Ann Peysson.

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Stone, 1994, acrylic on paper, 21 x 26.5 inches. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Stories + Anecdotes with M.C. Richards: Nineteen Snapshots of a Vigorous Life

by Matthew Fox

1. In Ireland. On hearing Norin ni Rian sing at a gathering of a creation spirituality summer program, she poked me in the ribs and said: “We must invite her to my party for the 25th anniversary of my Centering book.”

Which we did. As I recall M.C. herself volunteered to participate in the rendering of the “Song of Songs” as a choral piece—a task that I and David Granville, a graduate of our program, had created to reignite the ancient teaching of sexual experience as a mystical experience. It so moved the crowd of several hundred that no one responded for three days. David and I thought our efforts were a complete flop. Then the Irish began to speak. “It so blew our minds, our culture and religion are so imbued with Jansenism,” said one person, “that it took us three days to get our tongues back”.

— M.C. and I took a ride on a cart led by a donkey with the dog of the leader on its back.

— M.C. brought along paints and we stopped several times along the raging ocean and she pulled them out, along with paper, and we painted on the spot. A first for me while traveling, certainly.

— We also taught together at Schumacher College in Devon, England, I leading a seminar in the mornings and she doing poetry and clay in the afternoons. We went out to a local village and had their special “heavy cream” with strawberries sitting outside in the sun. M.C. knew all about this special “heavy cream.” I was a follower.

2. In Australia. I brought M.C. and several of our faculty to Australia for a one-week summer program. She taught clay and I attended her classes. I remember vividly her exercises where she put everyone in a circle around one very extended piece of clay and instructed us to make shapes while heeding the energy from our neighbors.

Lots of fun! Lots of community building!

— She and Victor Lewis (another faculty I brought with me) flew on a tiny plane—a “mosquito plane” she called it—to Uluruh, Ayers Rock, the Navel of the Universe, the sacred site of in the indigenous peoples of Australia.

She fell in love with the place and I believe she returned to it her next trip to Australia where she did an “outback” walk. This place had made so deep an impression on her that when she took up painting a few years later her very first paintings were three pictures of Ayers Rock—“no one of the versions looks like the Rock, but each was inspired in its own way,” she wrote.

3. Speaking of painting, she would spend many hours in the art lab at Holy Names College painting away. “It’s too late for technique” she would say, having taken up painting at 70 years of age (for her 70th birthday she went out and got her ears pierced. I promised her I would do the same but have not kept that promise). One Saturday she invited me to join her and we spent the day painting together. “More color” she would shout.

“Lots more color. One never has too much color!” She said: “This is what painting is for me now: freedom of movement, energy of the brush, sensitivity of the colors.” Her paintings often “brought me to an experience of ‘the other side’” she confessed.

Matthew Fox, M.C., donkey, dog, and unknown man. Collection of Matthew Fox.

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4. Speaking of Holy Names College, for several of her years teaching there we arranged that she could live in the convent with Holy Names Sisters, some of whom were retired but many of whom were professors at the school. She said to me, “Imagine that! Living in a convent! Who would have guessed? Certainly not me. But you know, I really like the atmosphere and the respect for privacy and space and I’ve made some real good friends among the sisters there.”

5. When I was silenced by the Vatican she wrote the following poem:

Silence!

SILENCE!

demanded the Pope.

Silence! echoed the judges Silence! pleaded the teachers

Silence murmured the clergy

and still the UPROAR

continued…Of the free and passionate spirit.

— For Matt Fox, Equinox, 1993, Bravo!

6. While teaching at our ICCS program at Holy Names College she took my class on Meister Eckhart and she was taken by Eckhart’s teaching “isness is God.” Thus, for Valentine’s Day, she wrote me this poem which she housed in a giant red heart:

Valentine for Matt 1995

Baby, you iz!

As God iz, So iz you.

As you iz, So God’s iz iz.

— A Haiku after Meister Eckhart, M.C.

7. I first encountered M.C. Richards when I read her classic work, Centering and I was so moved by it that I published a lengthy interaction with it in the spirituality journal published by my Dominican province named Spirituality Today. Later I published it in my book, Wrestling with the Prophets. I sent her a copy and soon heard back from her so we began a correspondence. My reading of her book was most synchronistic as I had just launched my ICCS program at Mundelein College and as usual we were receiving flak for the prominent role that “Art as meditation” played in the design of my curriculum. I felt that Centering was the ultimate philosophical ‘rootings’ for my intuition to give art its due in a program of spirituality. Nothing I have done or learned since has mitigated that insight. When I lectured on the East Coast she would often show up, usually with a few friends in tow. She was an attentive listener. Always. Eager to learn. Always. As well as to teach.

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8. I in turn enjoyed attending her poetry readings which were invariably fun to behold—she would fuss over them, which poems to read, which to leave out, which order to read them in, what to wear. One such reading took place at Cody’s bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on March 11,1998 which she shared with her friend, poet Julia Connor. M.C. invariably read, among other well chosen poems, two that always stood out to me: One on her pet goat; and another one on “The Poet” which included a passage on ‘what clothes to wear’. Her outfits were memorable, her painted shoes or sometimes her cowgirl boots, often her leather cowgirl jacket with hanging ribbons of soft, tan leather. Dress was part of her poetic repertoire.

9. And when we would go out to dinner together, there was always her margarita on the rocks with salt. She enjoyed it deeply. As she did most of life’s offerings as far as I could tell.

10. We celebrated a grand event on M.C.’s behalf on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of her classic work, Centering. We called it “Freeing the Imagination” and held it at the Fort Mason Center on the Bay in San Francisco. It was a beautiful event that filled the house with about 350 people in attendance among whom were her good friends from Black Mountain College days, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Irish singer Norin ni Rian offered her special musical gifts including a brilliant rendering of the ancient “Alleleuia” from the Gregorian Chant tradition. Merce was having trouble dancing at that time with advanced arthritis but he performed nonetheless a memorable dance with his hands that he called “Hands/Birds.” And it worked. He also read a piece he wrote about his knowing M.C. since their first encounter in 1948. It ended this way:

Holiday card, no date. Collection of Julia Connor.

We see each other rarely, something always to look forward to. Not just an old and dear friend, but someone whose passage through life is a way to know about. It puts one’s own world in perspective, and shows you another way of courage.

One time, when we met, after we had not seen each other for a long time, she asked me how I was.

I said I was ok, except my feet hurt. “Don’t you think they should?” she replied.

It so happened that that was the year I was silenced by the Vatican—forbidden to teach or speak or lead workshops or lectures. But I was not forbidden to write a letter—so I wrote a letter and had one of our special faculty, Sister Jose Hobday, a Seneca woman and Franciscan sister, read my letter to M.C. publicly. Unfortunately, I did not know that Jose was dyslexic and every time she came to the phrase “M.C.” in my letter she read it as “C.M.” M.C. was sitting next to me and each time her name was mispronounced she would 1) poke me in the ribs hard with her very bony elbow and 2) leap from her chair in objection. I was sore for several days afterwards but it was all part of the fun and the celebration and the happy memory.

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Black Madonna, ca. 1990s, glazed stoneware, 5 x 4 x 4 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Suzi Gablik.

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11. In my book called A Spirituality Named Compassion which I wrote while teaching at Mundelein College, I lead off the chapter on “Creativity and Compassion” with a quote from M.C. that has always remained important to me. She says: “We have to realize that a creative being lives within ourselves whether we like it or not. And we have to get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do.”

12. When M.C. was dying she asked me what of her artifacts I would like to have. I said: “The seven “I AMs.” I was struck years ago, when I was contemplating a book on the Cosmic Christ, by M.C.’s “I AM” tablets, which I saw in an exhibit she held in Carmel, California (included was a string quartet and some classy finger food). They moved me, and I was awakened by them to look more deeply into my own tradition as there might be more there than I had thought. M.C. writes about the “I AMs” as images of the “SELF.”

A project I have been working on for years came to a happy culmination on March 19, 2016, a timely year since it is the centennial of M.C.’s birth. I call the project the “Stations of the Cosmic Christ” and I have co-authored a book with Bishop Marc Andrus, the Episcopal bishop of California in which we employ the 7 “I AMs” created in clay by M.C. along with 9 other images created by a local artist from El Salvador, Ullrrich Javier Lemus, that depict Cosmic Christ events in the life or teachings surrounding Jesus. I love the story M.C. told of how she drove the 7 tablets around in her car and would display them “on the running board” (yes, there once were running boards on cars) wherever she would stop.

Her seven “I AMs” hung at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City for two years and in my University of Creation Spirituality for nine years. Now they are displayed at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and our hope is that the 16 Stations of the Cosmic Christ will soon be gracing churches and Cathedrals all over the Christian world as more and more artists come on board to the kind of vision M.C. saw and effected. They are integral to the book, The Stations of the Cosmic Christ, and to the set of cards that accompanies the book and they contributed to the inspiration of my previous book written twenty-eight years ago, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ.

13. The night before she died she wrote a handwritten letter to me whose contents I reproduce here. It speaks to her lack of self-pity and self-preoccupation even at the time of her dying and with it the authenticity of her love, her genuineness and generosity in thinking about others at the end as she reached out to say good-bye to friends.

Friendship was important to her—as one person put it, “M.C. had at least 500 best friends.”

Matthew, you are the very pulse of my heart and life. Our friendship has been my knowing light. You are a wonder!—You are trying your best to reinvent the world. Doing the good! I will always see you there, like the new moon,—slim, luminous, filled with mystery and beginning again.

Inspiring! & beautiful!

M.C. all love!

14. Also, when she learned she was dying and at our very last meeting she said to me: “I believe that UCS is the re-incarnation of Black Mountain College—it is the nearest thing to it I have ever participated in. I just hope that when it ends it does so in a more gentle way than did Black Mountain College.”

15. When my dog and spiritual director, Tristan, died in early 1993, M.C. composed a poem but first I should recall the circumstances of his death. He collapsed on a Friday afternoon and on Monday the vet told me she could not save him. “Prepare him for his death, then,“ I said, “I do not want him to suffer.” Twenty minutes later when I entered the vet’s office she said to me, “your dog is dead.” I was upset: “What is the meaning of this?” I exclaimed.

“I wanted to hold him and thank him and say Good Bye.” The vet responded: “You and Tristan must have had an amazing communication. For he died the moment I hung up the phone with you. He was waiting for your permission to die.” Now that made all the sense in the world—Tristan was very independent and he did not need humans to end his life for him. M.C. understood and she gifted me with this poem. (see next page)

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Tristan

This snow-white dog

With a wooly coat and

Coal black eyes,

Pert ears and plumey tail—

Wise old owl,

Gave one last gracious gift

To his friend:

The timing of his death!

He was old and failing

But no day was set.

Yet when he went

it was at just that moment

when Matt let him go—

the mutual surrender

of lovers so attuned:

Tristan the mythic eros

and Matthew his disciple.

Oh on what trails you two

will forever walk,

what beaches ever scour.

I hear him bark in urgent joy

as one who calls the way to go:

“This way,” He says, “this way is ours.”

M.C. honored both Tristan and myself with a portrait of Tristan which she called a “birthday present” for me and a “celebration” of Tristan.

16. Following is a tribute from a colleague of mine, Dan Turner, who was editor of Creation Spirituality magazine to which M.C. often contributed and which was published by my Oakland non-profit, Friends of Creation Spirituality. I think it speaks directly to the person we all knew as M.C. M.C.

The first time I saw M.C. Richards it was ten years ago at the airport in Sydney, Australia. She came striding into the airport clad in browns and khakis as if blown in from the South Australian deserts. A vigorous woman….I expected grey hair and some diffidence. How foolish! What I got was adventure, energy, bright wicked eyes and…oh yes…grey hair! M.C. did not walk, she strode. She sang the song of the universe in a full throaty growl. She had no time for delicate harmonic notations. M.C. loved with a purple romanticism: fully, deeply and with womanly pain (the Earth’s suffering) when it wasn’t returned.

She did not die before her time. She died at the very moment it was her time to go! And she left us her life: in poetry, in pottery, in wisdom books. And for those who were fortunate to have known her and contend with her…she left us her soul.

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— 9-11-99 in appreciation, Dan Turner

Freeing the Imagination brochure, 1989. Collection of Julia Connor.

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17. One of the memorable events we underwent with M.C. was to surprise her one day at a workshop at Fort Mason with the “Pelting with Beauty” ceremony that Sister Jose Hobday, a Seneca story teller and faculty member at UCS, had instructed us in. It consists of people being given flowers and stems and green things (none with thorns) and who, on a given signal, throw them at one another, picking them up from the ground and throwing them again.

A great way to deal positively with aggression! At the end of the ceremony the leader of the community is dumped upon with a whole bushel of flowers and green things. It is an honoring—for who should receive the most beauty than he or she who is leader of the community?

We did this ceremony for M.C. who was utterly surprised and rendered ecstatic by the happening. She comments on the occasion: “At its climax, a huge basket of flowers was poured over the poet’s head, engulfing her in their multifloriate rapture. It was she who was being celebrated in this ritual, and it was she therefore who had to be most deeply pelted, nay, pulverized by beauty! It was a magical ecstasy, moving, as the poem sings, through the body into a new behavior.”

So moved was she that she wrote a poem about it, “Pelted by beauty (after an American Indian Flower Ritual).”

A few stanzas from that poem follow.

In my flesh I feel it still,

The surprise and awe, the joy,

warming and swelling in my lungs and belly.

O miraculous conception O angels tumbling through the air!

How real it is, the Christscript branded across our lips:

that we shall love one another—as if the world could ever be the same.

Over the edge, into the well, the abyss,

idiotically amorous,

nibbling at the green fronds and flinging them!....

Now truly are we god’s fools,

lilies of the field, no thought for the morrow,

feeding strangers and comforting the fearful,

doing good to those who hurt us,

carrying blossoms to beat beauty and peace into our bones.

18. Among her public lectures at our Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality was one titled “Creativity and the Practice of Awe” and another titled “Imagination and Authenticity as Doorways to Creation.” Her contributions were deep and wisdom-filled and appreciated. As M.C. wrote: “All the arts we practice are apprenticeship.

The big art is our life.”

19. One detail that I always noticed about M.C. was this: When we would take walks together whether in America or England or Ireland or Australia, she would always know the names of plants and flowers. This struck me deeply—I could scarcely remember names of my students—but she had memorized a litany of botany titles. I was impressed. She truly loved other creatures with whom she had an intimate and on-going I-Thou relationship. Her love of the land and its creatures was embedded in her soul.

Thank you, M.C., for your many gifts and your sparkling eyes bespeaking a mischievous and eager and ever-creating Self! For your “big art.”

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M.C. Richards, ca 1990s. Photograph by G. Williams. Collection of Julia Connor.

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Untitled (Sun Is Yellow), 1967, silkscreen on paper, 19.25 x 23.125 inches. Collection of Julia Connor.

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