Bowl |
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That's right, the bowl; the concave object into which you put stuff. An invention you've probably taken for granted since the time in your high-chair when you placed your first bunny trimmed bowl on your head, summarily dumping the contents all over yourself. The bowl is mundane perhaps, but where would we be without it? Think about it while you try to eat your favorite breakfast cereal on a plate some time. I'm not a bowl expert so I can't tell you when they were first invented (shame on me). Bowls are at least as old as Buddhism since it is said that Siddartha carried one around for years before he sat under the tree and got the big picture. So they go back a ways. It seems reasonable that the bowl is a form that has been highly optimized over thousands of years. One morning a clever primitive discovered that a broken piece of dried gourd made it easier to get water from the stream. The next thing you know, we're turning every material from mud, wood, bone, stone, bark and skin into bowls. For centuries we carved, wove, stretched, spun, annealed and pounded. Eventually, we cast, machined and injection molded. Thousands of years in bowl technology culminating in the plastic messiah from the 1950s, Tupperware®. We have bowls for containing most aspects of human existence and then some. From the typical start of your day - bent over a basin, splashing water on your face, squatting on a kamode, dipping bread into your coffee in Paris, or shoveling rice into your mouth in Okinawa - we are helpless without bowls. Sugar bowl, fruit bowl, soup bowl, salad bowl, toilet bowl; like American Heritage says, food and fluids. Look around and you begin to see the classic bowl form in unusual places, catching or containing unexpected things. We build them out of concrete to hold water for swimming, or on a massive scale for spectators watching sporting events. Orange bowl, Super bowl, the Coliseum. Even at our most technically sophisticated, we depend on bowls. It may be called a dish, but the cupped hemisphere on your roof top looks more like a bowl to me. You put it there poised at the sky to catch and contain your desired stream of information. Carefully tune that stream and maybe you'll find a bowl full of people watching Liverpool take on Manchester. Try this experiment. Take your hands off of the keyboard. Turn your hands, palms up, fingers together. Push the insides of your hands together. Now curl your fingers while turning your thumbs slightly upward. That's a nice looking bowl, and it comes in handy (ha!) on a thirsty mountain hike or when washing your face. So let's have a little special reverence for bowls this week. More likely than not, a bowl or two helped bring you here to read this. ***
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