The fume kiln is emptied.  There is brickwork to be done, but we said that last time. 

    There is a difficult moment, after the kiln is opened, when the ware is first seen.  A sense of disappointment, which I know is a contingent of hope and of wish and of those lovely fairy places that live in the mind.  And I sometimes think imagination itself has to do with hoping and wishing, rather than the bricks and chimneys and mortars of what is the apparent of 'creative is'.

    This sense of disappointment has to be allied to a purpose, so the question should reflect an understanding of purpose.  To say "what will be, will be" seriously lacks imagination.  That giving up.  That comfortable surrender that comes so easily, and which is sometimes so necessary.

    When the fume kiln has personality.  When it is a he or a she.  When it is stubborn and cantankerous.  There is hope and there is wish and we live in the river as contented pebbles.  But each of us is the aedicule and if we lived in the river we would have no imagination.

    Then the ware takes on its personality.  Its little bits of difference, that some might say are a consequence of circumstance.  Which is why we calculate purpose around 'creative is'.  The bricks and mortar develop in the river of provenance, and one senses belonging.  Which this time is a surrender to the portly God.  The congratulation, the "well done for joining us".  A place beyond which Hegel traveled to find something perfect, but which Nietzsche, my hero, saw through, and which Marx had already given away to material.  It is a place I one day may understand.

    Meanwhile the fume kiln is honest, mostly we are not.  But without imagination we are emptied vessels.  We are lumpen.

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