The Cup
Posted on 05 January 2010
Some days go well. Some days don’t. Interesting that they usually aren’t all that different from each other. The news rises. The news falls. Wars drift. They build momentum. They deflate. Someone in the distance dies. Someone nearby is born.
There never seems to be enough money. We get by, though.
But why is it that on some days we just feel better, happier? Other days we don’t. Sometimes it’s quite explicable – you’re fired; there’s a death close by; no sleep…
But then there’s a day that isn’t so clear and it’s that kind of day, the inexplicable one, that intrigues me at this moment because that kind of day implies that perhaps there’s something much more going on with us humans than meets the eye or meets the deadline or meets whatever goal we had set for ourselves that we achieved or (more likely) didn’t.
And I find that if I allow myself to speculate, the answer may just rest in something as simple as, say, washing the dishes well. Or not. Or walking down the stairs and feeling coordinated. Or not. Or feeling sexy. Perhaps my shoes feel right. Or they feel dead wrong.
Maybe for me – today – it was this cup that I’ve had for years. It got cracked. Not a big crack – a chip, really. I think it can even be fixed with some good glue.
But I have loved that cup, in my way.
It’s quite tall, off white. It’s had this problem, though, which is that its insides took on a little of whatever fluid was filled inside it – green tea, black tea, a homemade cappuccino, thick coffee. There was something porous about its surface, but this also gave my cup a kind of soft and gentle feel, almost wood-like, silky.
It has been very familiar to me, this cup. It has sat by me and my computer’s side far more often than my cat or any person, but it’s not alive. Perhaps because it’s not alive I have been able to imbue it with whatever I have wanted. Not so, my cat, she is quite clear that I am in no position to imbue her with anything.
But maybe it isn’t this cup at all.
More than likely this sad, strange, irritated feeling I have been wrestling with most of the day comes from some place far deeper. I hope so, despite these ruminations because I think it would be nice to believe that, though this cup matters and I have loved it in my manner, I am deeper than a cup.
8 responses to The Cup
Nothing is “perfect” by your “The Cup” is very close.
Have you ever got the odd idea to cleanse your beloved cup from its almost wood-like, silky coating or as on teeth “film”.
I have a Chinese cup, very Chinese. Red with a lot of ornaments and Chinese letter-symbols that I have not cared to get translated, although I have in my friends a journalist who even reads Chinese detective stories.
I have had it for more than ten years now. I use it every morning. Last year it got its first crack. Right in the bottom.
It looks like this: * . As a star, “Stella Polaris”
“Tea of the Dragon” I drink ever morning to get my system going. “Drakens te” in Swedish is its brand name. It is green. No caffeine. But you must not drink milk before, otherwise it doesn’t work. And it does work, every morning.
It is made from Holly; “Ilex Paraguarenisis St. Hilaire”. Better known as Yerba Maté. This brand is ecologically certified, a “green” product. From Argentina.
But at the brim of the beloved cup it has left a coating, brownish, sort of. It doesn’t go away when washing up, no matter how hard I try.
But I know how to remove it. With all our other teacups it is the same procedure. I use coarse salt. Just a little wetness, a drop of water or two, and then half a teaspoon of salt. Then rub it with kitchen roll paper. Perfect. I suppose you could use toothpaste as well, but that is a little too expensive.
But not with my Tea of the Dragon-tea cup.
If I have ever forgotten to take some of the tea with me when going somewhere overnight I get “angst”. If in a town, I go to the next Co-op chain supermarket or to a health food shop.
Usually I succeed. If not depression comes over me. It has happend once or twice. The memory of that is enough strong to keep me from not remembering.
If I one morning, sleepish, put some milk in my mouth before drinking my Dragon tea, I spit it out, as if poisonous.
Tics? No. Compulsive acts?
Maybe I should use some salt to get that coating on the cup away. And I will get a clean, new beginning of my mornings, of my life!?
I dare not. Do you?
Herman G.
Once I glue the cup, yes, I will try the salt cleansing (maybe even toothpast. But I may do one other thing. There was a potter that I found and really liked. I had talked with her about making me a few more versions of this cup (her pottery had the same “silky” quality).I may track her down now and have her make a few cups (like the one I love). Maybe in a few colors. (And maybe she can fix my old cup better than me.
Change — maybe it can only happen when something goes wrong and we have to adjust.
You are on the right track; I am so glad I could strike a good note. You will find her soon, I hope.
One of my first cousins, Carin Gyllenhaal, is married to a former teacher. He has built his own pottery out of centuries old thick beems from old derilict farm houses next to their house in West Vermland, next to the Norwegian border.
There he shapes the most wonderful or odd kitchen-ware or decoration pottery. We got two mellow-green coffe-cups. They do not look much but they are nice to hold in your hand and feel the surface in the palm of your hands. We do not want to drink from them but they are wonderful to own.
He does it just for fun. My cousin told me secretly that she was happy we accepted to take them home with us, because the shelves in the pottery is overfilled with his works, and she dares not to tell him to stop turning more earthenware!
H.
The cup is a kind of carrier, isn’t it? As such it obviously carries whatever we put within it, including, as you’ve suggested above, ourselves. But it seems from what has been said here, that the maker of the cup is also carried within it–and perhaps, the secrets of making as well.
When I was in Kolkata 2 years ago visiting Incognita, whose comments have appeared here, she took me to her favourite little tea stand on the street outside her flat. Tea on Indian streets is sold in little clay cups–delicate earthen thimbles which are then dashed against a tree, or a plot of earth, as soon as they’ve been used.
Since my cup had carried not just its tea but the memories of my time in Kolkata, I wanted to carry it home with me, and I did. In that sense it became a traveller, a yatri, a kind of companion on my journey. I wanted to preserve its company, its visible sign of the ways in which our wanderings had become bound up together.
But those who dashed their cups and so returned them to the soil, to be scooped up and made and re-made once again, had really understood more about what cups ultimately carry. They carry the secrets of their making and ultimately, the code of the creative process–ours and theirs. In that case, letting them go is perhaps our greatest affirmation of them.
Very positive thinking, I believe.
But how does one re-make a dashed cup?
Is it a symbol of the rebirth of the human soul in a new vessel?
“Is it a symbol of the rebirth of the human soul in a new vessel?”
Herman you are indeed right. It evokes rebirth of a continually evolving soul (or relocation of a growing “self”) in new and more suitable vessels at each stage.
“But how does one re-make a dashed cup?”
I will let Kim elaborate on that in the unique light of her understanding. And I promise to fill in the gaps if any!
But meanwhile this link will explain a lot of things.
http://chaipilgrimage.com/2008/09/14/the-indian-clay-cup/
Enjoy!
I would say the answer to that question is yes. A new form. Cool, the way the universe seems to work…
Stephen, not only are you deeper than a cup, indeed cups are deeper and wider than the bounds of their physical shapes and forms. They are imbued first with the energy of the maker and then with our feelings as we use them day after day. Your cup “took in” your thoughts and held them. Just as it did the energizing liquids that filled it and stained its surface, and held them for you. The cup was a mirror of you and responded to your will, unlike your cat.
Maybe, your need to free yourself and and make room for renewal is now greater than the need to hold on to the associations around this cup and to keep them alive. That’s what your faithful companion was trying to tell you when it chipped.
I have quite a collection of chipped, cracked, even broken pottery and glass. They have stories around them, associations and emotions. Some have been put away carefully. A few still carry on as if nothing had happened. When a cup cracks or breaks, maybe it’s a signal that we have achieved a goal, only we haven’t taken note of it. A hint that we’re getting overburdened by the past or even by here and now? Could it be a message that we have outgrown it and are ready to evolve beyond its confines? Which suggests it’s time to get another cup, a new one. To dream new dreams, stretch our frontiers.
I’ll quote a line from your response to an earlier comment of mine “And Happy New Year to you as well. ‘New’ perhaps being the most important word…” Yes, “new” is the active ingredient. My New Year actually started with a lovely new cup I received as a surprise gift celebrating his first earning, from the son of a beloved school friend.
One part of me wants to hold on to my precious gift and treasure it as a symbol of affection and nurture (his nurturing of me now that he’s grown as I did him when he was a child), as well as a symbol of a brand new year and decade of hope and opportunity unfolding before me. Another part of me doesn’t want to limit its existence to the symbolic but would like it participating in my daily life, a companion to my thoughts and emotions while I sip beverages out of it.
Perhaps by being more mindful I can get to use my cup and have it too! I might get a signal that it’s time for a new one and give this one its well earned repose in the showcase as a symbol of fulfilled(hopefully not abandoned) dreams, marker of a phase. Yielding place for new hopes and aspirations as I seize the future and grab another cup