The
secret, enduring purpose of craft is to disturb our
sleep with an elegant riddle. Deep within the body
of a craft an enigma curls and uncurls. There were
odd hints all along--little moments when I sensed that
craft may not be such a simple, practical pleasure.
I saw that I understood tools wrongly. Tools are not
only for acting on materials, but also for seeing,
listening, and reflecting. With practice even a hammer
eventually becomes a kind of combination microscope/stethoscope/mirror.
In my approach to the wood, something of my own condition
could be seen. Now and then, I sensed that some old
tools radiated a rare intelligence from another time
and another place. After a few years I realized that
craft even had something of astronomy in it. I had
to gaze, stalk, study, wait, suffer, gamble, and speculate.
Craftsmen, and all lovers of craft, finger secret questions
in their hands.
I
have come to believe that the fire in the heart of
craft is an ongoing search for a connecting bridge
between the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of life,
between the material and immaterial concerns. At first
the potter's questions seem simple enough: "What kind of mud makes
for good clay?" "What is the temperature that
will vitrify without slumping?" However, as the
questions pile up, a metaphysical quality appears. Mud,
a most "ordinary" thing, touches on the most extraordinary. "What
must be brought to the clay, if we are to make a vase? Tools? Skills? Ideas? Love? Clay plus
what makes a teapot? How can I prepare for
the day I will be asked to shape an urn to hold ashes
of the beloved dead?"
Can
the practical and ordinary things in life ever reflect
the terrible and delicate beauty of life? Isn't
this the riddle that genuine craft always poses and
attempts to answer? Craft is object and spirit,
machine and mystery, and so are we. Craft, like us,
includes this organic mixture of stuff, spirit, and
latency. I believe craft haunts us because of this
resonance with our human condition and the way in which,
in some respects, it seems to surpass us. The process
and products of serious craft not only remind us of
our flaws and limitations but also open our eyes to
the surprising stardust glittering throughout.
All
fields of knowledge raise or need to raise this question
in their own way. Architects concern themselves with
the puzzle of space and shelter. Philosophers persistently
contrast and link the paradoxes of appearance and reality.
The distrust between religion and science happens precisely
to the extent that there has been a mutual failure to
formulate an organic expression of this riddle. A real
craft not only distills this concern into a fairly pure
form, but it may be unique in offering the riddle within
enough of a physical and functional context that we may
explore its strategies with some degree of protection
against wishful thinking. In other words, craft offers
us real friction in a way that thinking, writing, and
drawing cannot. This friction requires of us an obedience
to the truth of things. Regardless of our hopeful thinking,
our talking, or our creative sketching, a poorly imagined
or poorly executed mortise and tenon joint will eventually
be seen for the failure it is. In our imagination we
draw a chair we think might be comfortable, strong, and
elegant. But the actual building of the chair is an instruction
in truth--a lesson often uncomfortable and inelegant.
The
practice of a difficult craft seems to me to offer
insight by analogy into the esoteric problem of meaningful
human life. Time and again, work in the shop has offered
clear parallels to the muddled conundrums and conflicts
of my own life. When something in life is not working,
we can study the corresponding moment in craftwork, where
the consequences and links are more clear. Life is often
felt to be in the teeth of opposite forces and opposing
perspectives. We rush to align ourselves with one opinion,
opposing another: striving or letting go, trusting the
elders or trusting personal experience, the parts or
the whole, action or contemplation, compassion or truth,
tradition or progress. These apparent conflicts used
to concern me deeply. I felt I had to make global, final
choices. In the shop, however, I see that a strong passion
for one tool is often the beginning of poor judgment--in
craft or life. Imagine a furniture shop equipped only
with tools for cutting and another shop across town equipped
only with tools for assembling. Imagine them in cutthroat
competition with each other and spending most of their
time disparaging the use of the glue and joints in the
first case and the use of saws and chisels in the other.
Not only is it likely that the products of both shops
would be bizarre and impractical, but time and energy
has been wasted. A funny, unlikely picture, and yet,
in life we all engage in corresponding enterprises of
both a personal and political nature. On the other hand,
craft approaches its difficulties practically and precisely,
handling a saw in order to make a joint-- each
aspect supporting the whole. The glues are kept fresh
and the blades always sharp. The mastery of a craft is
concrete and relational--not abstract or argumentative.
Yes, there are highly critical choices to be made, but
they seem to be driven by something more nimble. For
the craftsman all tools are needed and ready, but each
decisive moment has its own requirement. The craftsman
honors action and contemplation equally. The moment activity
becomes thoughtless is seen just as readily as
the moment when contemplation becomes evasive. The thread
of honest craft guides one through these moments.
During
the process of imagining and building a table out of
the tough, fibrous heart of an old tree , a craftsman
manages despair, evasion, anger, obsession, and all the
other fractured psychic and spiritual materials of life.
When the hand plane is brought to the wood, the craftsman
can literally taste the flux of despair and aggression
obscuring the process. The hardest lesson is that difficult,
scrupulous work pretty much always begins this way and
that it is helpful to see these clumsy forces at work
in your own self. The public doesn't realize that, far
from sailing merrily through these difficulties, the
veteran craftsman has endured this ugly lesson many,
many times and accepts it as a condition of mastery.
There is, of course, an opposing element--a strong hope
that the wood might be transformed without violence into
the start of a table. This element of hope must be firm
but not emotional. If the hope is too passionate the
craftsman will talk himself out of important facts that
must be seen accurately. The natural, very human, disinclination
to suffer the truth in each moment of craft, on every
level, is a shadowy thing that haunts the path along
the way. In the development of a craftsman--from beginning
disasters to patchy accomplishments to excellence and
beyond--the surface issues change as time and experience
change. Even excellence is only a means. The inner question
remains. A willingness to endure the truth (above all
about oneself, but also about one's circumstance and
product) may ultimately erode this notion of excellence
to allow for something even more elusive--something that
has been called a "transparency to Being." But we have
gotten ahead of ourselves.
What
is needed are moments when both the frustration on
the one side and the hope on the other are reconciled
in an unswerving dedication to the actual situation.
With a little attention, the craftsman may witness the
specific sequence of inner struggle and relaxation that
prepares the way. There has been a necessary struggle
and a necessary giving up of the struggle, maybe back-and-forth
several times. Finally there is a movement, a kinesthesia
of thinking, feeling, and physical action, which is inwardly
gentle and fluid regardless of whether the craftsman
wields a ten-pound sledgehammer or tiny camelhair brush.
This in turn seems to persuade the wood itself to relax
its beautiful but contrary structure--just enough. Sometimes
in using a traditional hand plane it has seemed that
microscopic gaps became perceptible so that the particles
nearly slipped apart. Before the table is complete, this
exchange of energies has been endured and witnessed many
times.
Over the course of ten years the craftsman witnesses
other versions of the same exchange as he works toward
technical mastery. Aesthetic mastery may take longer
to play out. We have moved over on the keyboard and the
same difficult notes will be played in another octave.
With the right emulsion of honesty and desire, the transformations
become subtler. As the craftsman learns to manipulate
wood, he slowly relaxes to the inner beauty and fractal
intelligence of the wood. The craftsman is increasingly
impressed by the character of the spaces of a room to
be filled and by the human need to be met. The engineer
and the poet in him are usually at odds, but in this
moment they seem to calm themselves and turn respectfully
toward each other. Now new projects are engaged and the
results seem a little more truthful and a little more
helpful.
Why
do we make tables? Why do we value decorous,
carefully made tables? Why not a couple of sawhorses
and a piece of plywood? In part, the answer must
be that a table is a significant place of work and gathering.
However, it is also much more. I believe the table embodies
the vertical and horizontal elements of life itself.
This is suggested not only by the table's obvious vertical
and horizontal structural aspect, but also by its final
culmination in a plane that is at once parallel to the
earth and shifted toward the sky. It is earth ever so
slightly displaced--the x-axis ratcheted up the y. A table
is the geometric sum of up, down, and sideways. The tabletop
is accessible and yet somehow up and out. It
represents a place between heaven and earth, a place
where the things below may come into contact with the
things above--a place of magic and miracle. Like a theater
stage, the table defines a smaller, more intense space
where we might observe life more closely. To set something
on a table is to bring it up out of the dark earth to
the light of attention. The table in structure, form,
and function sustains the fragile moments of inner and
outer attention. It does this not only by helping us
pay attention to the things brought to the table, but
more importantly, by ceremonially demonstrating the invisible
act of contemplation.
This is part of an inner way rarely taught in schools
of design, and, when finally stumbled upon, creativity
seems less like a work of imagination and more like a
grace of discovery. Any table's function , structure , form,
or imagery are only resultant elements which, after
a time, have cooled and precipitated out of an original,
primeval heat. It is the unseen work of the craftsman
to hold the cold material of their own culture
and their own imagination once again to the fire .
For more than 50 years, itinerant basket maker Hiroshima
Kazuo worked his way back and forth across an isolated
area of rural Japan. All his many and varied baskets
are highly functional and exquisite. Recently, I wandered
through a museum hall full of his life's work. By the
end of the first display case, I was under a marvelous
spell. Virtually every element of every basket was at
once functional, structural, and formal. After I had
made my way around I actually walked back through the
entire exhibit, basket-by-basket, mischievously bent
on finding something decorative that was not also structural
or something structural that was not thoroughly charmed.
I had absolutely no success and this fact shook me to
my craftsman's core. I do not believe we can even say
that Hiroshima blends these elements seamlessly--for him
I will say the separation between function and form or
structure and ceremony does not even exist.
The
amazing and clever assemblages of visual fun and function
which fill so many gift shops and magazine pages pale
before such raw, organic alchemy. Every day I face
these questions--often without a clue. I think we might
each (craftsman, collector, and aficionado) begin as
we can to examine the rash of distracting devices on
all fronts of the current scene. I believe that among
these distractions may be an unprecedented focus on
irony, visual slapstick, private narrative, illustration,
surface, the dysfunctional, the clever, the alluring,
and the historical reference. Do not these devices, though
interesting and savvy, distract us from the real and
direct work of alchemy? I do not mean to suggest
that irony or depiction is always wrong-headed but that
we might develop in ourselves a slowly escalating question
about gratuitous form, reference, and cleverness. Perhaps
we would benefit ourselves by taking a more respectful
look at the anonymous artisans of the world who continue
to meet physical and spiritual needs in their own communities--sometimes
roughly, sometimes elegantly.
The
examined life is confined to a narrow path that winds
carefully between contentment and discouragement. The
good craftsman endures this in a way that is utterly
physical and expansively metaphorical. On the one hand,
craftwork affronts us with danger, failure, and corruption--subverting
our innate denial and grandiosity. On the other, it awakens
memories of Arcadia, a Garden--subverting the accumulated
despair. Every apprentice must begin by recognizing the
alternate violence and avoidance in his or her way of
working. Task by task, the early errors of too hard or
too soft, too little care and (yes) too much care, give
way to a completely new thing. This new thing is not
halfway between this and that, or an average of anything.
It is something alive with its own sap and current.
In
my walking search through nearby museums, I pass numerous
exquisitely crafted objects. Many evoke both the gross
and subtle dimensions of my life. A few things actually
shimmer as if straddling a threshold between this world
and that. My inner argument and grief subside. The
simplest thoughtfully executed bowl reveals a sly alternative.
My breathing slows. A candle is lit. I am reminded
that maybe, after all, there is a way in life.
