The Dust of Fathers

No. 104

These potters whose hands are deep in clay,
If wisdom, reason, and awareness upon it they convey,
How long with fist and kick and slapping hand they strike?
It is the dust of fathers — what do they think this very day?*

Philosophical Reflection

Khayyam’s potter quatrains usually run in the other direction. The clay speaks, or the wheel is the heavens, or the potter is the maker of the world and the poem is an argument with him. Here none of that is in force. The potter is a tradesman, the workshop is a workshop, and the clay is clay. What makes the scene unbearable is not allegory but description: the poem simply reports what the material is, and the reporting is the whole argument. Nothing needs to be symbolic, because the claim is already literally true.

The second line sets a condition, and it is worth noticing how much mind it asks for. Not attention in general but three named faculties in sequence — intellect, wisdom, and waking awareness — the full complement of the rational soul as Khayyam’s tradition inventoried it. He does not ask whether the potters are good men or pious ones. He asks what would happen if the entire apparatus of human cognition were turned, for one moment, onto the substance in their hands. The question in the third line is the answer: the hands would stop. They have not stopped, therefore the faculties are not engaged. This is a diagnosis of attention, not of character.

And what those hands are doing is not cruelty. Fist, kick, and slap are the actual motions of the craft — the wedging, the throwing down, the striking that drives air out of the body of the clay and makes it workable. The potters are not brutalising their material; they are working it competently, as they were taught, as it must be worked. Khayyam has chosen the vocabulary of assault to describe skilled labour done well. The indictment lands somewhere more uncomfortable than cruelty: an ordinary competence, carried out by people doing nothing wrong, becomes an atrocity the moment someone says out loud what the material is.

Then the line that supplies the fact: it is the dust of fathers. This is not sentiment about ancestors. In Khayyam’s physics, matter does not leave the world; it is redistributed. What a body was composed of remains in circulation, and the only thing that changes across the centuries is arrangement. The workshop is therefore a cemetery in the middle of being processed, and no metaphor is required to say so. He devoted a treatise to determining the hidden composition of an object without breaking it open — weighing it in air, weighing it in water, and calculating what could not be seen. Here is a man whose hands are inside a substance whose composition he has never once thought to ask about.

The closing question is a real one. What do they think — what model of the world would have to be in a person’s head for this work to feel unremarkable? The answer is a model in which matter is inert and the body doing the handling is somehow exempt from the category it is handling. Khayyam does not correct the potters, and he issues no instruction to stop; he seems to know that the work will continue and that pots are needed. What he has done instead is make the exemption impossible to hold. The hands deep in the clay are made of the same thing as the clay. Whether the three faculties, once engaged, allow the striking to go on is left where he left it — as a question, addressed to people who will put the poem down and pick up a hundred objects without asking what they were.

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Footnote

* Source: Tarabkhaneh, Homaei, no. 104, translated by Kam Austine for Philosophy in Verse.

Related Treatises: Risāla fī Mīzān al-Ḥikma, Risāla dar ʿIlm Kulliyāt-e Wujūd

Internal Themes: #KilnOfCreation #Metaphysics #Folly #Existentialism #Nihilism #Mortality #Materiality #PersianPhilosophy

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Published as part of Philosophy in Verse — The Omar Khayyam Project