Mondaugen's Unknown Architect

A Wheel Not a Ladder

"I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time."

Paraphrased from Voltaire, it's a lovely encapsulation of how often we write to understand what we want to say, and rarely edit for the convenience of our reader. As my writing tends more towards the siphonophoric, in which each sentence, even parts of them, are more like individual complex animals, connected loosely in an endless, undulating chain of ideas, than they tend towards efficient transmission of succinct ideas, I wholly own Voltaire's self-critique. It's on purpose.

Who am I to explain architecture to anybody? I am a student, green about the ears. I bring the complaints of a life-time user to the desire to practice an art brut, aiming to change a few bricks at the profession's foundation. Empathy is my touchstone. I am here to wander and think aloud in this cavern-complex of words-before works.

I understand concision and its benefits to the impatient, practical reader. As a woodworking magazine editor, I spent years soaked in the wisdom of Strunk and White: the clearest words, the fewest words, the shortest sentences, death to adverbs. How-to writing has a single goal: to help people understand how to do something. Meandering, complex and unresolved thoughts just make readers angry, frustrating their attainment of the goal of understanding.

Wander in a forest of words, and it's easy to get lost, encumbered, frustrated; but stand in an open field the sky broad above, and we feel free. Much great fiction, from Hemingway to King, tends to the sparse.

And yet we keep Proust, Henry James, Robert Burton on our shelves, among so many others. They take our time, whereas Hemingway gives us time. Each is a taste, a preference.

My writing here is yet different. The meandering incompleteness of my process is not to test your patience, but to invite you to slow down and create your own. I write towards insights, knowing many blind spots go undisturbed, many terms used loosely, many aspects forgotten, following digressions as they come up. I don't write to explain anything to you. If I make a definitive statement, how simple or complex is your response? As much as I use these essays to understand something, I hope that you can create your own internal essay about the same topic, as rich and subtle as you have the time and interest to make. I'm not after your approval so much as your engagement with these ideas.

So, here is a summary of my thinking about the Architecture of Empathy, no more concise than before, but a bit more distilled in time and space:

Through the Architecture of Empathy we can live and work in buildings that contribute to our lives and help us thrive in ways we cannot now imagine.

It is not a new direction, or a school of thought, or a design concept, but a process. The Architecture of Empathy cannot be designed, it must be crafted.

The Architecture of Empathy is not an artistic creation. It does not originate in the highly educated mind of an individual. It does not prioritize the aesthetic and cultural statement of the building over practical, or human, needs or considerations. Its aesthetics and functions are not intellectually challenging. Its process does not depend on a hierarchical organization with the paying client at the top, and power/influence moving down through the architect, engineer, contractor, tradesmen, and laborers. It is not impersonal, or international, or regional.

The architecture of empathy is the result of the mastery of architecture as craft, which is necessarily beautiful. It originates in the synthesis of design thought with hand-making. It grows from the traditions and approaches developed across many individual practitioners. It prioritizes practical human needs and considerations, letting the beauty and art of the project take care of themselves. It's spaces and structures are easily intelligible. It is not beholden to the past, nor to any idealism of what humanity should or could be. It is personal, in that each role understands the end user intimately, respecting them for who they are. It depends on a heterarchy of contributions, in which the roles of client, architect, engineer and tradesmen are arranged like spokes on a wheel of which the project is the hub.

The Architecture of Empathy is a process not an end. It will lead to as many different forms as there are people and needs. It requires practice, repetition, listening, adapting, understanding, and selflessness. The Architecture of Empathy is nameless, and does not strive for fame, rather competence.

For it to work, grow, and lead to actual buildings, each member of the project must think unconsciously in these terms. If not, the result becomes intentional art, and a performance, a strutting about a stage.

The closest I've seen to this process is when friends or communities gather to build something none could do on his or her own.  When "you just need a shed," and friends gather to help put it up, its success depends in part on your collective knowledge, mastery and craftsmanship, but also in how well you now one another, what need the shed serves, and what works in your lives. The design vocabulary consists of what you know, what you like, and what you can build from the mix of competence and economy. I think Emmanuel Pratt practices something akin to this in Chicago.

It's hard to be empathetic with a total stranger: a generic client, businessman or factory worker. Factory design rarely involves the architect spending a year on the floor with the manual laborers to understand how they work, what they need, what would help them thrive. Human thriving should be relevant to the building's brief.

If you disagree categorically with everything hee, will you still admit our buildings are not what they could be?

And if so, what is your path forward?

Art is for Visiting and Craft is for Living

I don't think I could live in Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington.

 

First, there's no roof. Secondly, well, everything else. I need rooms, heating, windows, lots of things in my home. Maya Lin's memorial offers none of these amenities.

But it sure is a powerful, beautiful, even necessary artistic statement. Though I was 5 years old when the Vietnam war ended, and none of my family served there, when I watched a vet stare at the wall, his red eyes brimming with tears, I nearly cried with him. I felt the named gash in the earth with him.

--

Now consider the intellectual idea that

The application of individual artistic approaches and goals

are the means by which

the built environment can become better.

Isn't this essentially right? Don't you agree?

What? You don't like this pretentious, awkward, and-yet-precise academic-speak? Then let's rephrase it in a more intuitive manner:

Building + Art = Better Building

Right?

Yes for monuments and other places we merely visit. No for every type of building that we live in. Art is for visiting. Craft is for living.

--

If the last 150 years of modernist architectural design, with its cacophony of schools, practitioners, movements, reactions, anti-reactions, and theory has any single thread, it is that great architecture comes from great artists who can articulate an idea. Craft is lower on the hierarchy, a question of details. The Beaux-art undercurrent, or the continuation of the forms of the past, offer some respite, but these new-old buildings are consciously designed reinterpretations of less-consciously designed originals, and their inherent dissipation is the motive for the modern movement.

In my albeit limited reading in general histories of architecture, I have not found a single voice within the profession to take this equation to task and ask, why is a habitable structure better if it is an original work of art? Why is craft a secondary consideration? If anyone is asking this, they are restricted to the kiddie's table and not important to the history of great modern architecture.

For without art, what would we have? Without the visionary architect, what would we be living in? Bricks piled haphazardly on bricks for mere economic or practical ends? Living in the past? This would be soulless living, no?

In part, possibly yes.

But--

-- by abandoning the pursuit of art in our dwellings, we could create so much more beauty in our lives -- this is the idea I've explored earlier, from Soetsu Yanagi, that the greatest beauty and usefulness are an unconscious byproduct of the mastery of craftsmanship. This is th spirit, I believe, that also fueled the creation of the greatest ancient architecture, what has endured from the past from the Pyramids to the Taj Mahal. If we try and name the artist or architect responsible, the answer is diffuse, and in short, we can't.

--

How architecture, of one of the most practical of all human fields--concerned with protecting us from the elements and wild beasts, helping us work better, store things better, socialize more easily, and even think better--wiggled its way into the realms of "pure" art such as painting and sculpture and music, boggles my mind. Architecture concerns the buildings and environments in which we work and live, sleep, socialize and worship. The practical considerations should be no less important than they are in transportation -- architectural practice should dwell in the same realm as car, bicycle and airplane manufacturing -- the tools by which we move from place to place, whereas architecture is the tool of abiding in one place.

Of course, the NHTSA and the IBC both do pretty good jobs of setting practical and safety standards for their respective industries. But when it comes to comfort and use, even the cheapest cars are far more adapted to serving human needs than most buildings. Transportation seems to have the customer in mind, whereas architecture has the aesthetic critic in mind.

Even cheap cars have heaters and air vents, windows that roll down, door seals that keep the rain out, trunks to carry things, windshield wipers so you can see outside while driving. More expensive cars have far more of these features, and they are a priority in the design. How many tall buildings have I lived in with windows that don't open? (I was once told it was to cut down on suicide attempts). Rooms with no closets? heating systems that make the ceilings above my head hot and the floors I'm standing on cold. How many HVAC systems bring smells from one part of the house to all the others? What basements in wet climates do not flood? In rocky areas that do not fill with radon gas? The flat roof in a wet climate creates leaks by design.

Consider how advanced today's cars and airplanes are compared to ones built 100 years ago. Consider our current flush toilets are pretty much the same as they were 150 years ago. We really can't do better?

Why is our architecture so blindingly incompetent to the basic functions of a building and human living? We would never stand the same levels of practical deign incompetence in our cars or airplanes.

I argue that most luxury homes are nowhere near as comfortable or useful or beautiful as they could be, if we prioritized their design towards living, not art. The design focus has been elsewhere, on statement and expression, on the purity of the line and resolution and rationale. Practical considerations are treated as minor and somewhat inconsequential add-ons -- leave the material of the countertops to the interior designer, and the drawer sizes to the cabinetmaker.

The successful built environment, for me, is a place we want to live, not just visit.

--

For a truly successful built environment, let's ask a different set of questions, and pose a different set of ideas.

What is the realm of Art, and what does it give us?

Art is of the special, the unique and individual.

What is the realm of Craft, and what does it give us?

Craft is of the everyday, of the common and of community.

Art is aesthetic and beautiful. Craft is purposeful and useful.

Craft is for living. Art is for visiting.

 

These realms overlap, almost entirely, and are better thought of as a continuum from a near pure art at one extreme and near pure craft at the other. No man-made object is either purely useful, or purely artistic, but some of each.

Art is the application of skill to subjects of taste, the perfection of workmanship, the perfection of execution as an object in itself (thank you OED). I will add that all art is an aesthetic exploration of how the human soul and mind engages the experience of reality.

The value and meaning of art is mediated by a caste of intellectual critics, without which there is only expression. We all can say something and claim it is valuable and meaningful, but it is not art unless an audience agrees. The role of the critic is to learn the skills necessary to understanding art better than the rest of us (who are not paying as much attention), then point us to what is good, and perhaps help us understand and appreciate it. That modern critics mostly talk among themselves is a tragedy.

Art at its most pure extreme is deeply engaging, exhilarating, and therefore exhausting. We should come away from the experience of art deeply moved, perhaps changed.

We all have art in our lives, and while we enjoy it, the more powerful it is, the smaller the dose we can take at any given time. This is often simple enough, for we can look at the painting on our wall, or not. We can listen to a symphony, or shut it off. We can get up from our seat in the movie theater and leave.

We visit art the way we visit memorials, for the experience of a moment.

At the opposite end of this continuum is Craft.

Again turning to the OED, craft is simply a branch of skilled work; ingenuity in constructing; and a trade or profession. Craft is the work that goes into everyday objects, the products of the full range of trades that create the tools of our living. We build and make these objects primarily with usefulness in mind, from forks and knives to cars and space rockets. I will add that craft is the practical exploration of how the human soul and body engages the experience of reality, and shapes it to our needs, thereby integrating us with the world.

Tainted by its lowly status association with the common, everyday, and usefulness, the meaning and power of craft is not mediated by intellectual critics. Tradesmen and craftsmen, you could say, are not artists, because the products of craft are not "subjects of taste", e.g. music, poetry, sculpture, painting, and other objects created as objects-in-themselves, not with any particular "use" other than existing for our contemplation and pleasure. Craft is instead mediated by the markets: its value and success based in what people will pay for it, based on what they get out of it, without any special training or guidance to understand it better. It appeals to something untrained and universally human.

We engage with craft differently than with art. In well-made craft, there is no sublimity, no mental exhilaration and no exhaustion of the mind. There is simply pleasure in the use. The well-made fork gets food to our mouth, the well-made car gets us to our destination. Successfully crafted items all have some art, but it never interferes with or distracts from the object's function. Because craft is integral with our everyday, we do not really have the option to look away. We must get back into that car to go somewhere. We must return to our house.

But designer forks? I recall trying unsuccessfully to balance peas on a $300 designer fork, and giving up. Cool-looking fork, however. It has its place -- in a frame on a wall, in a critic's book of "Best Design", just not next to my dinner plate or in my hand.

--

How much art is too much art in the buildings we spend our lives in?

The trouble is: I know what I like, but not what you like.

Posed as a question of degree, and depending on the opinions of some imaginary "people", we create a horrible seesaw, in which Mrs. Farnsworth loves the glass house she alternately sweats and freezes in, while another person is appalled that a modern building can be less comfortable than a Neanderthal cave. Who is the architect supposed to please? The client of today? The client of tomorrow?

The vast majority of architects would rightly claim to be perfectly "sensitive" and "responsive" to client "needs", that they design with human comforts and amenities in mind, and that this division between art and craft is artificial. I would in turn argue that the majority of components in modern homes are strongly influenced by the artist-architects past and present, and their comforts and discomforts simply taken for granted. We simply don't ask how much more comfortable, or useful a building can be, because it doesn't seem to be a pressing question. We don't lose our jobs if we fail to consider it.

If an architect has ambition today, it is likely towards making an artistic statement, and not questioning why we have the elements we have, from flat walls to rectangular box rooms, rectangular flat windows, utilities hidden in walls, and so on. Questioning these things is crazy. They're just the best solutions we have today, so let's work with them....

This question of how much art is best in architecture becomes less slippery, though, when we pose it an entirely different way.

Provided we desire architecture that accomplishes all we want of a building-- accommodating all levels of Maslow's pyramid -- and thereby reflecting all that's good in our hearts and spirits, and not forcing us to accommodate the building, what can we change in the current process that would lead to this outcome.

In the 1920's, Walter Gropius wondered if craftsmen couldn't be "initiated into the needs and means of the modern era", couldn't then manage on their own, without the oversight of "self-conscious designers", produce honest buildings reflective of the age. This is similar to Yanagi's concept of the unknown craftsman who attains beautiful production largely because he is un-selfconscious. But a tea bowl is not the same as a skyscraper, and many hands must somehow be coordinated at some level towards some common goal. The approach sounds an awful lot like herding blindfolded cats.

What if we redefine the job of building, NOT to represent any age, NOT to be all things or anything, but as true craft -- no "initiating" craftsmen into the burden of understanding the age, but just let them be a part of their age, which they already are.

Give a craftsman the tools, they'll finish the job. Or more often, give the craftsman a job, and they'll finish the tools. They will still want guidance. Whaddya want? Craftsmen can make a lot of different things. Is it the client's desire? Maybe they don't know what they want until they see and live it. The answer is in the process, to avoid conscious design guidance. If this is unsatisfactory as an answer, it is because I intend to ask questions, and make statements that lead to questions.

--

All architecture should be thought of as building for someone -- creating a tool for them to accomplish specific tasks. Making tools for other people to work with. The built environment is a tool for the business of living.

Maya Lin created the greatest of war memorials in Washington. I thank her for it. The craftsmanship was perfectly good as well. The walkway to the memorial is flat and does not cause tripping. The names on the wall are legible. However, I would not want to live in something of equal power and artistic representation. I would spend all my days crying. I have work to do. I need a quiet space with even lighting, not too cold or hot. Then I can focus on things other than the architecture I'm in.

I don't want my buildings to capture anyone's imagination, but to allow it.

Beyond Design Rationale, Does Craftsmanship Have Anything to Say?

Years ago, when I began teaching woodworking, an old friend tried to pass along some wisdom.

"When I was starting out, a year or two in, I could teach anyone how to use a jointer. I knew three rules, and that's what a jointer was, what everybody needed to know, and all there was to know. The tool was simple."

"But now, after using one for forty years, I scarcely know where to begin. The process feels complex and beyond words. Every board gets a different treatment -- where I hold my hands, and why, seems to depend on a range of factors I can't even point to.

When students ask why I did one board one way, and another another way, I feel I can only tell them a small fraction about my decision process. So I say cryptic things to the kids, such as 'listen to the board, and feel it. You'll know when your hands are in the right place.' And they can't understand, because they don't have the experience or the feel yet."

"I was a much better teacher when I didn't know anything about craftsmanship."

I see a common pattern in all craftsmanship, whether considered handwork or mindwork. Learning begins with verbal instructions, the conscious mind guiding what to do. Over time, much becomes ingrained, habit, and unconscious, and the conscious, verbal mind has a lesser role. In some arts -- consider juggling -- you might argue very little is controlled consciously.

"The more we learn, the less we know" is an old, but perceptive joke.

Please ask any professional sports player to tell you "how they do it." Please attempt to master any discipline, from business to medicine, by just reading the book. Learning by verbal instruction simply introduces the elements, while mastery comes from practice. Mastery is a hands-on phenomenon. Books are for the school children of every discipline.

The questions I draw from this concern how relevant language and conscious thought are in our lives. The older I get, the more they seem to be a tiny, though privileged, part of our complete engagement, and survival and thriving in the world. They are doorways, but they are not the realms beyond. They are tools, but not the work.

This is no insight on my part: religion maps it, philosophy names it, psychology charts it. Fate. Genes. We think, but our thinking is not as free nor as powerful as we imagine or hope. Only a very small part of our brains is devoted to the production and maintenance of conscious thought and language. It is a deep illusion to think they are the omniscient and omnipotent controllers of a perfectly responding mechanical body and self.

We admire and revere the ivory tower of academic institutions, and only the uneducated denigrate them. Still, we also denigrate the application of learning if that application cannot be articulated consciously, and verbally. The design rationale is everything to the career of the aspiring creative spirit, whether the artist can articulate it, or a critic in his or her stead.

The scientist without data is a crank. The philosopher without learning is a mystic. The artist without learning is a folk artist. The psychologist without learning is a hippie.

My old friend didn't do much teaching because he couldn't address our collective need (lust?) for educated, verbal rationale. So, he left the door open for others who could, so to speak. But their mastery is, by definition, more verbal. While they can teach what they can put to words, and much of that is valuable to the beginner, I wonder if that capacity blinds them to the true nature of mastery, which resides in our unconscious, in our hands, in the habit of our actions. And, to be clear, I'm not sure there are words to address the mastery of creation, both practical and aesthetic except to point a finger outside the door and beyond our acceptable, rational intellectual discourses of the matter by any discipline.

For me, the interesting question is simple:

By removing the privilege of language, conscious thought, and design rationale, while privileging non-verbal craftsmanship and mastery, do we gain anything towards a better living in our made objects?

The Arts-and-Crafts movement was nostalgic, trying to preserve a prelapsarian vision of the quaint craftsman's shop in a quixotic fight against the industrialization that has brought us our modern prosperity of things and inventions. It was helpful to a privileged few to hide away in their cleverly-appointed bungalows and pretend the smokestacks did not blur the horizon. While I admire the aesthetics of many arts-and-crafts designers, putting cats back into bags has worked precisely never in any way in human history in any enduring way. So I don't see an erasing of what we have accomplished in design to be a way forward. I wonder towards a breaking of the hierarchy, a disassembly of the privilege of the consciously designed aesthetic, and a heterarchy with craftsmanship and mastery.

As some famous Roman thinker once suggested, there nothing is new under the sun. Where can we find an architect like my old friend? One who has no conscious, intentional, aesthetic design rationale? One who creates towards something infinitely more complex and fully human--design that doesn't search for and use concepts governed by language, whether verbal or mathematical, but derive from the practice and knowledge of a life lived intentionally well?

By definition the word isn't out on this kind of builder. They must exist, and we have all seen their work. Can we understand it? Can we feel it? Can we appreciate it? Do we denigrate it, and prefer the work that the critics can study and perceive endless symbols, references, aesthetic and social commentary and even beauty?

--

Not many architects work with their hands, and more do than build the buildings they design. It's simply not practical in the modern world with our specializations, divisions of labor, and the sheer scale of the things we build.

It is nostalgic, mythic and utopian thinking (fun for dreams and books, but enters in the real world only with violence) to imagine a world in which the rationale of the head and the mastery of hands are united in all we do. It is useful only as a great and naive question to ask. Where it takes us, and what other questions it raises, are the point.

Few of us study, but we all learn. We simply get better at what we do. By dint of repetition, ability quietly develops, sometimes quickly for 'the naturals', but eventually for all of us.

But a paper designer becomes better at paper design after a lifetime of designing on paper. So with Autocad or Rhinoceros. But nobody lives in Autocad or in Rhinoceros.

So what non-verbal mastery would lead to the creation of truly great built-environments? What head do we remove to reveal what hand? And would that work?

Today, single building projects involve a cacophony of siloed professionals, each bringing a shard of mastery to a collective effort. A rough hierarchy of architects, clients, structural engineers, interior designers, general contractors, project managers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, gardeners, roofers, painters, drywallers, and laborers each contribute. Each can master what they do in a lifetime of work; but none are professional masters the art of living in the spaces they create.

And isn't that the point of a built environment? That it's an environment? Where people work and live?

This is perhaps the collective responsibility of each professional and tradesman, but it is rarely part of the conscious rationale of their work. Whether a building is enjoyable, easy or even appropriate for its use is too often a secondary consideration to its expression, it's concept, its aesthetic design. Some may argue the aesthetics are key to the enjoyment and ease of use. But please ask the Mrs. Farnsworths of the world whether fogging glass walls, unbearable heat, and a canoe to get to her front door are key to their enjoyment and use of their built environments.

Much of a building's design already comes from the professional's and tradesman's personal, amateur, non-paid (and private) lives, is relevant to the lives of the future occupants. It comes though the assumptions and habits we each have. The electrician with OCD might lay out wires in the basement with such symmetry and perfection of installation as to greatly please the homeowner with OCD, but puzzle and terrify one without. Haphazardly installed wiring could be irrelevant to one homeowner, and cause for great anxiety in another, lying awake at night wondering if the building will burn down due to sloppy work.

No interior designer is hired for their pure connection with client desires, spoken and unspoken. They are hired the way all others are: through connections, locality, chance, price, etc. So the designer will impose their vision to some extent, from the limits of their experience and training. If they like comfortable chairs, they will recommend them. If they prefer the aesthetic statement of an uncomfortable chair, they will recommend them. The easy client will go along with whatever. The difficult one may challenge the price. The client may not be able to articulate what they prefer in any rational way, even to themselves. So they buy what other people half-guess they will accept, with little regard to the day after they move in, perhaps assuring them they will learn to love it.

And so many of us have learned to love the built environments we have--for a wide range of reasons that rarely touch on how we could live our lives.

We might decide that professional "mastery of creative or work disciplines" from architecture to carpentry and roofing are all professionally desirable. Then we might decide that "mastery of living life" is entirely separate, and something that only monks and other sages are capable of, or really wise people in private. But do we yoke the professionally creative disciplines to the art of living?

--

That our environments contribute to the quality of our lives goes without saying. We may not chose a palace over a prison, but we still would not chose the prison. Over a hundred years ago, the writer of speculative fiction and fan of architect Bruno Taunt, Paul Scheerbart wrote:

We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character of the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass -- of coloured glass. The new environment which we thus create must bring us a new culture.

I love that he desires a better life for all of us. I admire that he feels the power of our environment over us, and that we have, in turn, the power to choose how we create our environment. Here we have a prescriptive vision of Better Life Through Plastics, I mean Architecture, from a man has thought things through.

I do ask, though, if he proposes rose-colored glass, through which we should always see the outdoors when inside. Or different colors for different rooms? I marvel at the idea of glass walls everywhere. Where would we hang our pictures, and could I ever read a book, what with all the distractions of the ever-changing weather outside?

I then imagine Paul sitting at a desk in a small flat in Berlin, window closed to the street noise below, writing these ideas. It works. he finishes them. He is published.

I then imagine Paul trying to work at a desk in Mrs. Farnsworth's house. I imagine him leaping to his feet in frustration, his manuscript incomplete, complaining that he is endlessly distracted by every change in the weather he sees through the glass walls,

at the lack of privacy as Mrs. Farnsworth, whether inside or outside, can always see him, as there are no separate rooms. I hear him complain that the bright sunlight makes him unbearably hot at his desk, and that the condensation from the windows pools on his desk and makes the ink run on his papers. wind in trees, of lightning, or passing cars, or shooting stars. I imagine Paul Scheerbart in Mrs. Farnsworth's house losing his temper over how he can't possibly get any work done with no privacy! The hot sun on his neck unbearable as he tries o

An architecture that fits all our intellectual dreaming, and its desires and needs, into its appropriate place, while also fitting all our Maslowian bodily needs and desires, can't come just from the conscious, verbal mind alone. It has to come from a certain empathy, and from an understanding of the art of living as we each, privately experience it.

If that impulse already informs the work of designers at every level of the built environment, we are fooling ourselves as designers.

But what would an architecture of empathy look like? No one thing, I think, or even a defined set of outcomes. It is rather the product of a different process, a different approach, a heterarchical one from all hands that contribute to it, towards all that a built environment can be to a full human life, within the limits of materials and their context.

Like all good design, when it is good, it does not call attention to itself as anything. It simply fulfills its intended role.

The empathetically designed and built environment would be a joy in every way, no matter who uses it.

Now, that's utopian, isn't it?

But maybe progress in this direction can be made just by loving a little more what our hands know, and lessen our reverence for what our brains can do.

 

4: The Castle Bed, or What You Make of It

30 Objects in 30 Essays

From the objects that I have made, objects other people have made, objects that I live with, and what they have to say. The products of hands and brains. The obvious differences between things and words. The tangible and intangible rewards of effort. Use and beauty as the two primary qualities of objects, words, hands and brains. For through objects we make the stories of our lives: a life made, a life bought, a life well-used, a life beautiful and useful.

---

You must be exhausted by The Coronavirus by now. It has brought us all both tedium and inconvenience, probably worry and fear as well, if not financial ruin, loss and tragedy.

The only value of despair is that it disengages from life for a short time, forces us to step back, look at what we do and ask who we are, with a doubting heart. As from a conscious sleep, we should wake from despair with new vigor towards better uses for our lives, or a renewed understanding that our path has always been right. We don't get to choose the age we live in, but we do get to choose what we do in it. This may sound like a pretentious call to heroics from a Peter Jackson movie, but I appropriate it more humbly as a simplistic reminder to use bad times to reassess what we value, and why.

So here we are.

We have all instinctively turned to friends and family, to ensure their well being, and to seek help with ours. They have greater value than our work, our belongings, or anything else. It's a value, I believe, that informs the rest.

All objects have relationships at their core.

A cartoon shows an irate wife standing in an empty apartment telling her husband "You're the one who got rid of everything that didn't spark joy, so don't blame me that you get to spend the rest of the quarantine folding the same 7 t-shirts!"

How many marriages will be destroyed by sheltering in place? How many strengthened? Truths come out in close quarters, when there is no where to hide.

We can hide in our things, but for only so long. Getting rid of old ones and buying new ones can work for a while, as a simple distraction. But pause a moment and look at your things -- the ones that have persisted, through moves, donation purges, and received repairs rather than being tossed -- what they have to say back at you, about why you keep them. Take a single object from your belongings. What value do you find in it? Something practical? Something sentimental? A memory? What have you invested in it? If it is something you made, is its value different in kind from the things you buy?

For me, one of those objects is the Castle Bed. It is not someone I love. However, it is an object that speaks directly to those relationships, how I have negotiated them, and especially how I have failed them. This is the the main reason I keep it.

My joy in objects, primarily, it to design and make them by hand. From there, I am most happy when they find new homes, giving me room to make more for other people. My other great joy is not in objects, but in writing: specifically in ways that challenge, require effort, and thereby (in theory) lead readers to rewards not easily obtainable otherwise. (Who has the time to read long, complex shit? I know, I know. You've got Shit To Do Places To Go People to Love! My work would be more accessible if I delivered in cheeky succinct tweets, but here it is, in a long, sinewy meander).

If The Coronavirus reminds us that our loved ones matter most, is the value of any one thing mostly an illusion, an imposed and transient worth, or just a lesser degree of attachment? Are all our close belongings memory palaces of the people we have known? The bed below reminds me of who I was 25 years ago. I find it useful to be reminded of that person on occasion.

 

---

Here is the story of this bed through layers of digressions, questions, and apparent irrelevancies, such that you can ask your own, better questions about the objects in your lives, perhaps your own bed two, if you are close to it.

 

 

All you fans of Rene Magritte will note, correctly, Ceci n'est pas un lit.

This is a photograph of a bed, and not the actual bed (cue soundtrack, tish, boom).

As I want to talk about my bed, I ask you to use this picture to put yourself in mind of it (but not actually in it). Before we put the point to bed, I wish to note that this intangible representation of the tangible bed that resides in Chicago, Illinois, in my third floor bedroom, makes an intangible discussion of the tangible possible.

Setting aside the anomalies in quantum mechanical observations that deny reality is independent of mind, please believe me when I say that this bed exists.

I know, because I made it. My memory tells me so --not just putting the sheets back straight, you wag, but the bed frame itself--

This bed started as an idea, in my head, then became a reality, you see. The intangible became the tangible. Like every creator, I had a rich future planned for my creation-- all it would mean, all it would do.

But really, this bed is a complex object: a complex set of ideas, reactions, connections and uses, both in the tangible world and the intangible world. The older I get, the less I believe there's a sharp distinction between the two.

Fathom the concept.

And yes, I am seriously making fun of myself with serious thoughts, if the tone doesn't come through in internet prose.

Ahem:

I do not boggle my own mind, like some teenage stoner, realizing that I made something, any more. That happened the first time I made something, which was probably a clay ashtray for my mother in 1974, for Miss Chris's Second grade art class. She pretended she was a child like us, and in an exaggerated soprano, told us that day we were "Mmmmmmagical" and could make Anything We Wanted in the Whoooooole, Wiiiiiiide Wooooorld, out of clay, for the next hour. If we cleaned up after ourselves. So I made an ashtray for my mother. I used my finger to make indents on the side of the bowl, where the cigarettes could rest while my mother talked loudly during parties waving her hands around. I had seen that feature on other ashtrays, and copied it. By making it, I realized where all those other indents came from. The makers' fingers. The world lost some of its mystery that day.

The ashtray sat on my desk until the final bell while I practiced my multiplication tables. I made that, my little brain reeled. Without me, it would not exist.

I did Fathom the Concept that day, as best as my Second grade brain could.

On the bus home, it broke in half in my jacket pocket. I might have sat on it. The clay seemed to crumble the more it dried out. Raw materials have such unexpected and annoying qualities! So I hid it from my mother by throwing it under a bush in the yard. I picked the bits of clay out of my pocket as best I could. I didn't want her to note my failure and make a scene.

I thought about telling her that I made an ashtray for her. But decided against it. There was nothing to show. Why would she believe me?

I didn't even have a photograph of it.

That day I learned a second secret. Nobody knows you made something unless they can See it. Touch it. Feel it. Use it. (Jump on it and make love in it, if it's a bed). That's the only way people really believe it exists in a way they can't Will Away into an intangible lie. Doubting Thomases are we all.

Without the actual ashtray, I had no connection to my mom. In that way, at least. The idea wasn't enough to make the connection. The way to hell is paved with good intentions.

The made object is a relationship, at heart, between the maker and the user.

Fathom that concept.

No wait.

Not yet. I haven't begun to make my point yet (this is exhausting reading, isn't it?)

Ahem:

First, bring to mind something you've made. Who did you make it for? And why did you make it for them? Maybe it's a pie for your family. Maybe it's a gokart for your kids. Maybe it's a birthday card for your best friend. Or maybe it's a bookshelf for your office. In each instance, the person you made the object for colors your understanding of the object. A meal you cook for yourself is not the same as a meal you cook for your boss, or for friends or for your family. Each depends so much on who you make it for.

Obvious, right?

I largely forgot that early lesson, though, learning instead to make things for a wide variety of reasons other than the people who would receive or use them.

This bed is a case in that point.

In 1996, I was recently married and trying to get a solo furniture business off the ground. I had worked in an architectural cabinet shop, but it had gone bust. Firstly, I needed a bed, recently married and all. My wife and I were sleeping on milk crates and plywood at the time. Sitting up against the wall would often cause the mattress and plywood to suddenly slide forward. Secondly, I had to prove to potential customers that I wasn't all hot air about being able to make things well. I needed a spec piece that showed off my skills, or so I thought. So I sat down to design a bed.

What it is, and what it isn't....what we make and what we don't

Is this bed a triumph? A disaster? Functional? Something that no one would ever buy?

Unlike a skull, this bed was made by human hands. The questions it raises are far more down to earth than the eternities of life and death. It really just presents the question of human work, and why we do it.

By now you've already had twenty reactions to it. It looks good. It looks odd. It looks fancy. It looks impressive. It looks like nothing I'd ever want in my home. It looks...

But! But! But!

To paraphrase Dr. Frank N. Furter, I didn't make him for YOU.

The problem is that I didn't make this bed for anybody. As an aesthetic design, I think the bed is a disaster. It speaks to no one.

The design concept started with frames and panels, which I knew how to make. It was to be a homage to my previous work in the architectural millwork shop. I played with angles, because they're harder to do. I was afraid of curved work--too hard--but liked the idea of curves and wanted to suggest them. I liked sleigh beds. I wanted the bed to be sturdy. A stronghold for sleep. I made it imposing, loud, so people would take note. I used Honduran mahogany because it was fancy, and I had scored a bunch of it cheap. Following this design brief, the bed is a total success. It shows off difficult mortise-and-tenon joinery. It is a homage to my former work. It is fancy. It is sturdy.

The trouble is that it's visually offputting. Friends saw New England Anglican Church in it. I gave it a number of pretentious names, such as Lily Pond Bed. The name Castle Bed finally stuck when I set it up in a huge photo studio. For the first time I could see it from 20 ft. away, and it began to look right, not claustrophobic. If it has a home, it's in a futuristic Tudor castle in a bedroom at least 60 ft. by 60 ft.

I have yet to meet a Tudor Futurist, but if I do, I will show him or her this bed, in the hope of making a sale. Until then, I sleep in the bed I've made, literally and figuratively.

So it's not beautiful. It is also not as useful as it should be. While it's solid and will never collapse, it has several faults. The interior is 6 inches too big for a Queen size box spring and mattress. They slide around inside, so they need blocking. I did this with the ide to give space for big blankets to be tucked in, but I gave them too much space. The edges are high and the mattress I bought sits too low. When you sit down, the edges of the bed catch your thighs. And it is hard to vacuum under. 

Objects, once made, live their own lives. The maker only has full rights to the memory of the making.

This bed not a representation of anything else than what you see. No matter what I intended, it is not a symbol, or a gesture, or a statement, at least that I have any control over. I see futuristic Tudor. You may not. So the bed cannot be a play on anything, or a poem to anything. It never was a vehicle for a relationship, because I made it for no one person. It could become one, under the right circumstances. It is not an agreement, or a promise, or a decision. It is not an accounting, or an asset, or money in any form. I used to think it was some of these things, but now I know better. This bed is an object, an undeniable, tangible reality. It exists independent of anyone's thoughts or opinions of it. If you were never to think of it again, it would still exist. Peeking through the curtain, it would still be there, same as before, apparently unchanged by whatever changing thoughts you've had about it. Certainly what thoughts I've put into it have drained out. It just is what it is to you, as it is to me.

That I didn't make this bed for anyone, was precisely the problem. It was a solution to no problem. An object with no opposition, a transitive verb in a sentence with only a subject, no object. There was no person at the other end of my efforts.

It continues to remind me, to this day, of a particular ability to get inside my head and stay there, and ignore the people around me. I play with ideas, in solitude. They make sense to me, but do not resonate with others. This bed is a kind of momento mori for design, a consistent reminder of a play without an audience.

The etymology of "object" points in two curious directions. The first is the end to which the effort of the made thing is directed. All "objects" are directed outside of themselves, to something external. They need something to push towards and against in opposition to earn their existence.

I object, your honor: speaking against a judgment to establish our independence in opposition to a law.

What thoughts do you pour into the objects you own? Who are you really talking to?

When you try to Marie Kondo your objects into the trash bin, do they push back? Does anyone call out? Does what they represent speak to why you keep them? Or are they mute.

If I left this bed in the alley next to the dumpster, it wouldn't speak back to me.

I keep my bed to firstly, give me a place to sleep. secondly to remember what works and what doesn't in design, and thirdly because I have a delirious desire to befriend a Futuristic Tudor. Henry the VIII stepping out of a plate-armored hovercraft wielding a dark walnut ray gun. In payment he would hand me a leather bag of gold coins minted on Neptune.

This photo of a bed and all these words has no presumed connection with you. Even if you read all of them, you can hold them at bay, not let them inside. They are meaningless until you use them to ask your own questions about your own things, especially those you made, and what little bit of you they speak to.

When you make, who do you talk to?

3: 12-in. Starrett Square

30 Objects in 30 Essays

From the objects that I have made, objects other people have made, objects that I live with, and what they have to say. The products of hands and brains. The obvious differences between things and words. The tangible and intangible rewards of effort. Use and beauty as the two primary qualities of objects, words, hands and brains. For through objects we make the stories of our lives: a life made, a life bought, a life well-used, a life beautiful and useful.

...

I bought this 12-inch Starrett combination square in 1986 when I was 19 years old. Now, after 34 years of use and abuse at my hands, this square remains dead-nuts accurate. It is useful. It is reliable. It is beautiful. It is an extension of my hands capable of work my hands can't do alone. It is everything a tool should be, and nothing it shouldn't.

If my cheap, blue snorkeling mask opened up an alien world and expanded my universe, this well-made square opened up a world of work. But unlike the mask, it is inward-facing -- it speaks to my daily life, what I do and how I do it, and thereby what I am.

P.S. I don't mean this essay to be an advert for Starrett against any other precision manufacturer. I write simply from my blinkered experience.

 

Tools as Membership in a Tribe

I was working as a semi-apprentice in an architectural millwork shop. My boss told me it was time to stop using the shop tools, to buy my own tools, and to make a toolbox for them. He gave me a list -- a marking gauge, a deadblow hammer, a backsaw, a set of Japanese bench chisels, a block plane, and a Starrett 12 in. square. For the toolbox, I'd use shop scraps.

I looked up the costs and turned a shade of pale. Earning $4.25/hr., the total was far more than a week's work. The square in particular seemed expensive. I forget how much (they now cost $134 retail), but it seemed too much. The square was the only item he specified brand. I had used his, and it was nice, but I doubted why a cheaper one wouldn't do. All squares were 90 degrees, right? They all measured the same angle, right? Was this the only one that was 90 degrees? all the others at 91.3 or 89.5?

So I talked back.

"Why the Starrett?"

"Just buy the Starrett," he said, with that angle of head and look-in-his-eye that suggested other options were idiotic, and any further questions just revealed my blank ignorance. Which was true.

"Why?"

"Well," he sighed, "if you're going to do this a long time, you will regret cheap tools. They take more time and effort to use, they're not as enjoyable to use, and in time, they will cost you more," came the reply. "Furthermore, if you learn with cheap tools, you will likely learn cheap work."

These prognostications of an uncertain future sounded daft. Cheap costs more? Our entire economy was, and still is built, on making things cheaper, and more affordable, to 'save us money.'

I wrinkled my nose at him, especially over the last bit, and probably rolled my eyes.

"Look, you snot," he grabbed me by my shirt. "A cheapshit attitude leads to cheapshit work. And your Joy Division T-shirt and those torn jeans makes you look like you don't give a shit about what you do. If you want to show respect, put on a coat and tie. Or something at least clean. Clothes make the man."

"Yeah," I replied, reclaiming my shirt, "but that's got nothing to do with the inherent value of the..."

I dodged the smack.

"'Seems' and 'Is' go hand in hand. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck... Your goal is to do work that not just looks the shit, but is the shit. And if it isn't the shit, it won't look like the shit. If you can find a square that is the shit, but doesn't look it, then buy it. But you can't find that square. You can't find that work...." Ok, maybe my boss didn't say that at the time. But that was the core of his attitude towards work. Details matter. There are no true shortcuts, only efficiencies. Cheap is as cheap does.

So, at the sacrifice of a couple of movies and dinner at a good restaurant, I bought the Starrett -- perhaps mostly afraid of the ribbing I would get if I arrived at work with a cheap Chinese knockoff, or worse, a carpenter's Stanley. I was joining a tribe after all, and very much wanted to be a member. And in my shop, the Starrett was simply the price of membership.

 

It is Useful

Over the years, I have used this square every single day I've been in the shop: to set up and adjust my machines and other hand tools, and to mark out, check and adjust joinery in a hundred ways, at a hundred points in the process of building. I could list the specific uses and turn this blog into a tedious nightmare of length (isn't it already?). In short, the straight line and 90 degree relationship is at the very foundation of the modern world, not just the things we have and make, but also the tools we use to make them. Wooden boat builders you can all shut up right now. Your exception is noted. 

We all have a natural sense what looks "right." Our eyes can see level, plumb and symmetry in objects, to greater and lesser degrees. If a hanging picture on a wall is off plumb and level by millimeters, we can all see which way it leans. Symmetry is also easy to spot, though so uncommon in manufactured goods that an example is difficult to find. In handmade work, it is a sign of "room for improvement" -- the child's lopsided clay pot or the amateur's first sweater with one sleeve longer than the other. We can even see symmetry in a person's face, though we tend to recognize it as an aspect of beauty. Cut a picture of your face in half, copy one side and flip it, and you can see how symmetrical your face is. It's a disturbing, if giggly, photoshop exercise.

The square's use, however, extended beyond giving me the ability to create and detect these symmetrical relationships with far greater accuracy than my untrained eye. Without paying much attention, it taught my hands, my eye, and my head an appreciation and ability to see more precisely. And though this precision, a certain insight into our values and relationships with objects.

To some eyes, the perfections of manufacturing are good and right. Every iPhone is precisely the same as every other, the machined aluminum and glass surfaces clean, symmetrical, and "perfect" in a pleasing way. The variations between phones are imperceptible except, perhaps to their quality control managers.

Competently made handmade objects, especially in wood, also have these positive features, but to a different degree of perfection. The individual hand will be evident in their "imperfections." To some eyes, this is pleasing because each imperfection reveals the story of the person behind the making. To others, it's just imperfect.

The Starrett's precision is a manufacturing-level precision. Using it is with wood, which moves and swells and shrinks with humidity levels, is a constant reminder of degrees of imperfection, judgments of what is acceptable and not, and acceptance and appreciation for variations and what they say.

Working with a reference beyond my ability to ever attain adds to the enjoyment of the process itself, for the square has taught me details of how much wood moves and in which ways, how much is visible to the trained and untrained eye. The use of these insights.

The process of using the square evolved over the years.

At first it gave me flat, straight and square. I didn't understand them well, but knew they were necessary. It enabled me to find and use them. I was merely doing what I thought I should, as best I could.

Then it helped me get flat straight and square. I began to understand why surfaces (especially in joints) needed the type of precision the square could get me. The square and I worked on the same team, to the same goals.

Then it began to remind me, as well as help. In some circumstances I began to see and feel these relationships without the square.

Over the years, its usefulness has grown from simple use, to training my eye and sense of how things can and should go together, to stay together, and to look right. Without it, I would not have built those things as well.

 

It is Reliable

I have bought and used many other cheaper squares over the years. With the exception of the engineer squares, all of them eventually went off 90 degrees. Oce they do that, I don't pick them up again. I won't try to adjust either, because I know that I will be endlessly adjusting. That the Starrett is still spot on 90, in spite of wear parts, and having been repeatedly dropped (one corner was broken off by a student who dropped it, after I asked him not to use my tools; the other corner was broken off by me, after I told myself I was too tired to keep working and should stop), is nothing short of miraculous. I have never once had to re-true it. I wouldn't know how.

When I first got it, I would check the angle every now and then. (Take a board with a straight edge, mark 90 with the head facing one direction, then with the head facing the other. If you get two lines that converge at the edge, your square is out. The Starrett always gave me one thin line.) After a while, I'd check it once every six months. Then every other year. I now can't recall the last time I checked it. It has become a pointless exercise. It always gives me one thin line.

Other expensive tools in my shop are not reliable. Among hand tools, I have a dial caliper that drifts. I have to remember to zero it before every use. Sometimes I forget, and I get spanked: two different thicknesses for boards.... Among complex tools, my Felder planer-jointer must be checked and adjusted before every use. It is a high quality tool, but it does not hold settings. When I am in a hurry, it requires extra steps that I feel it shouldn't. It is consistently unreliable, and as such, a consistent burr under my saddle. Had I the time and money, I would keep buying and finding tools that were more reliable than these. But I don't, so I live with the burrs.

The exceptional reliability of the Starrett makes it a pleasure to use. (Perhaps mine is unique among them--perhaps other wood and metal workers haven't had my luck--but perhaps they have other ultra-reliable tools, to know this relationship). I just pick it up and use it. I trust it inherently. It always helps. It never hinders. I always understand what it tells me. I never have an argument with it. I am never frustrated by it.

All of these reactions are emotional -- to an inert tool, you could ask. But really, these reactions are to my own hands, and by extension to myself, and to my work. They describe the perfect relationship, in which there is no static in the communication. It is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between all other tools for all other work. For instance, a soccer player who loves a specific pair of shoes that feel good, give a sense of control, and never skew a kick in an unpredictable way. Or a motorcycle rider, who loves a specific tire for all the grip and feedback they give about the road. A tennis player and a specific racket. An editor and a specific laptop keyboard.

And through this perfect communication, I gain a wider range of control over my environment. Seamlessly, it gives me the foundational building blocks of 90 degrees, 45 degrees and straight lines in my work.

 

It is Beautiful

The blade has precise measurement markings that are easy to see. It has a satin finish that is easy to see in low light, but doesn't reflect bright light. The measurement marks are finely etched and darkened for an easy to see contrast. The color has not faded in 34 years, so it remains easy to see.

The level is a joke. I have used it once in a pinch, and regretted using it. I probably used it wrong. I lost the scratch awl fitted in the base about 32 years ago. I never use a scratch awl to mark, so have not missed it.

The head has a slightly rough, black surface that makes it easy to grip. The working surfaces are smooth.

While the square looks old, it does not look beaten up or in bad shape. It had an appealing patina on all of its surfaces.

The S-curve support in the head is Hogarth's 'line of beauty', the classical ogee.

It is a beautiful square.

But what use is beauty? What does that matter? Oh you wag, you.

Remember what my boss didn't say when I challenged him while wearing my dirty Joy Division T-shirt. Seeming and Is are not that much different when it comes to work. If it looks good, it is good. It can sometimes take a refined eye to spot poor work, but the evidence is always there. And it can sometimes take a refined eye to spot good work, but the argument is always strong (if there is disagreement, the argument isn't strong, and the beauty isn't universal).

All tools should be beautiful.

The beauty of a tool is not just a matter of being pretty or a pleasure to look at. The great part of their beauty is in the pleasure of using them, in the performance of their design.

Good design does not bring attention to itself (bad design does). A well-designed object simply does what it should without being noticed for that work. And in this seamless performance is beauty.

You pick up the square. You use it. You put it down.

It doesn't slip from your fingers. You don't squint to see the markings. A sharp edge doesn't cut your finger. It doesn't break when you drop it. It doesn't annoy or distract from your task in any way. This makes it beautiful.

The design of the Starrett accomplishes all of these things. The visual appeal of these features, our more common sense of beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I know what the satin finish means and does, so it looks good to me. To an untrained eye, the finish has no value, the precision of the markings no reference to judge them by. 

With use, the relative beauty of every tool becomes evident. If it's beautiful, we integrate seamlessly into our work, and into who we are and want to be.

30 Objects -- Essays on Work, its Effort, and its Results -- 1: A Deer Skull

30 Objects in 30 Essays

From the objects that I have made, objects other people have made, objects that I live with, and what they have to say. The products of hands and brains. The obvious differences between things and words. The tangible and intangible rewards of effort. Use and beauty as the two primary qualities of objects, words, hands and brains. For through objects we make the stories of our lives: a life made, a life bought, a life well-used, a life beautiful and useful.

...

1: A Deer Skull

It's an essentially precious exercise to hold up a skull and contemplate eternity. Lend a hand and make yourself useful, Mr. Idle Princeling. Or at least get out of the way of us gravediggers. There are bodies here that need to be planted before they begin to stink and spread disease. That's useful work. And we can talk and have our wit while we work, rather while I work and you talk. In fact, when you're not around, I can work and create wit through my work. Wit just as valid as yours, better even, as it's grounded... What all your thinking and nothing-doing is going to get us in the end...

...More Death, as it turns out, in Hamlet. Premature death for a bunch of people, including good-guy Hamlet. Could have been avoided if he had just done something early in the play....

Who wins? Well, the gravedigger is the only character who can (and does) say a grave is his, and yet not lie in it. It's a minor victory for the working man, not to be run through by a sword to complete an orgy of plot twists and turns, the fate of his betters. Looking over the mess, he will make a big sigh and scratch his head, then go down to the scullery, fetch the maid and an extra mop, help clean up, lug the bodies to the graveyard, then spend his vacation time digging more holes for them. Not much of a win, really, except he gets more life than they do, and can perhaps appreciate it better.

Am I a frivolous prince? All talk and no action? Or am I a gravedigger? What work do I own, not just for myself? What have I created, that others may live and die? A life of questions is a life well-led.

I have several skulls, collected over the years. Several are from whitetail deer that I have shot. One is a raccoon skull I found in a field, and another is South Indian gaur I found in a river. I do not pick them up and sigh quietly to myself, intoning Alas poor deer... But I do think about them. I find them beautiful and expressive. How I got them, though, is what they mainly have to say.

There is little practical use in any of them. They hang on my walls and sit on shelves.

At a distance, a skull is a Halloween joke. Up close, it is a marvel of engineering, design, dreadful beauty and unanswered questions.

Raccoon teeth are strikingly large in proportion to the rest of the head. Alive, raccoons look like delicate creatures, washing their food in water, trash pandas up to some amusing mischief. Hidden under their bandit mask, under skin and fur, a certain edge of serious carnivorous business comes to the front. The raccoon becomes more complex. Big eyes to see prey. Big teeth to rend prey. A capacity to be a vicious little bastard. That bite would hurt.

Modern man did not design this object, could not have, and would not have: the smoking gun is the absence of a single straight line, the imperfect symmetry, the dents and shapes without design rationale. We humans love straight lines for reasons that still, after years of contemplating the matter, escape me. They're not really found in nature except for the horizon, perfectly still bodies of water, and in our imaginations as the shortest path between two points. In the last few thousand years, we have fetishized the straight line. It is pure, it is perfect, it is geometrically useful, etc. We use it everywhere and in everything (with notable exceptions). Still, our tools are mostly designed with straight lines to create straight lines, so they have become the easy standard. The curve, somehow, remains suspect, not perfect for not being straight, the dark partner of an ideal. Straight - Curved, Right - Left, (Dexter - Sinister), Good - Bad, Sky - Earth, Male - Female, Man-made - Natural, Perfect - Imperfect, etc. in which the first items of the pairs are somehow connected, and thus the seconds with all the seconds.

The bones around the brain are joined along the most intricate of wiggly and uneven lines. No person would or could ever join things like this. It's overly-complicated. Surely there is a simpler way to do it? Where is the clarity of intention? These unthinking bones joined together in a manner frankly alien to our sensibilities.

It amuses me to think of Mies van Der Rohe and other modern architects, and their unflinching dedication to the purity of straight lines-- all of them having these thoughts directly under the squiggly little skull-bone lines that hold their heads together.

The Meat says "I Am Not Meat!"

What part of my humanity do I resist in the name of some pure ideal? Truth? Justice? Honesty? Goodness? Or am I all wiggly, meandering, conjoined and blurred thought, just like my skull bones? Is this a fair or useful contrast?

Skulls are evening light. They illuminate the darkness inside and thereby the darkness to come.

They are made objects, but not by any hand or machine. Growth is perhaps the most noble kind of making. The common metaphor is that we're "made by the hand of God" (But I can't really see Him in his dusty workshop, fashioning us out of clay, adding sugar and spice...). What drives the stitching of those skull bones? What effort drives the DNA? You can push back to the first blob of algae, back to the ignition of our star, back, back, back and you just find another lovely question under the first, of what drives its precursor. It's tortoises all the way down, what holds up the universe.

Answers that aren't, are the best answers. Like parables, these answers distract only the dull, and inspire a hundred questions in the sharp.

The skull is what the meat has left behind. The skull tells us of the end of thought, of agency, and the arrival of our distant 'reward,' whatever that may be. They are the traditional memento mori. One day our skulls may sit on a desk. One day our dust will serve as bungs for barrels of beer. It is a humbling thought, a useful lens to reflect on our current pretensions, our pride, our system of values that too easily weighs our accomplishments and status heavily, and our quiet gestures of love and friendship lightly. Geological time erases these pretensions. A skull can be a lens to focus our lives, remember what time we have and ask what we do with it, towards that strange question of what can we take with us? and What can we leave behind that endures?

What do we build in our minds that lasts?

Nature does not know extinction, it only knows transformation. I think this extends to the information collected and processed by the mind. What does it turn into? Anything more than the specifics of our actions and efforts, and their results? What do we carry away, if the conscious sense of self is any part of what survives the transformation? The question is delightfully unanswerable without leaps of faith. It's a good question to have at hand in daily life.

That raccoon had a life. It was born. It grew up. It ate and drank, shat and slept. Maybe it had pups. It then died one day, in a field near my house. What was that raccoon's experience? What of it endures? Sure, I am a more complex animal than a raccoon, but the same questions apply. I know nothing of the raccoon's life, though the right nostril is slightly deformed, just like mine.

...

Another skull is from a South Indian gaur, a type of bison. I found it while on a school hike in the Palni hills. The gaur had died in a river, and the entire skeleton, undisturbed, rested on the bottom up against a rock. The 10 ft long and 6 ft. tall skeleton was undisturbed and visible through the clear water, as if the bison had laid down for a rest and turned to bones.

I waded in and pulled up the skull. The stink hit my nostrils instantly, like a spike to the brain. Bits of decayed flesh fell off it, much of the brain and nasal tissue remained within. Wearing only a bathing suit and a hat, a sense of vulnerability washed over me. What had I done? I had desecrated a grave. I will pay in disease and madness. But in a moment, I came back to my senses, and brought the prize back to the hiking group.

"Why did you take that, Mr. Purdy?" a student wrinkled her nose in horror at me.

"Isn't it amazing? It's beautiful!" I replied with glee, feeling doubtful, covered in slime and filth as I held it up.

Several students complained about the smell during the bus ride back to campus. I had stowed the skull below in the luggage compartment, so it was my smell they noted.

"One day, we will all smell like this," I reasoned with them, to no effect.

After much boiling and bleaching, the skull hangs on my wall. Huge. Impressive. Somewhat threatening. Beautiful to my eyes. It doesn't smell.

Very few people ask after it, perhaps worried there will be a long and intimidating or boring story. Perhaps disgusted by a dead animal on the wall. Perhaps they think I'm a trophy hunter, displaying my conquests? What each of takes away from any object-- its associations and meaning--is uniquely theirs, not mine. I get more questions about Princess Leia. I don't mind being misinterpreted. Much.

But the ultimate topic of this essay is this deer skull.

For me, this object comprises everything the others do, from intricate, graceful beauty to the questions of a life well-led, with an important complication: I shot this deer. She was the first I ever took in a hunt.

Some hunters hunt in uncomplicated ways for uncomplicated reasons. I am not that kind of hunter.

I started to hunt when I was in my 40's. It began as a question of principle. I eat meat. I like meat. Beef, lamb, chicken, fish. Some are mammals with limbic systems, with emotional lives perhaps as sophisticated as dogs, which I love, and would never consider killing or eating because they are "too close" to me.

I know that killing and eating an animal is, at some level, an awful business. But if I am going to eat and enjoy meat, I needed to know what it was to kill an animal, not let other people do it for me, to not cheat what it means to be an omnivorous human.

Secondarily, I finally had enough free time and extra money to be able to. I took a hunting class, took a test, and got my license. I bought a tree stand. I bought an orange vest and clothes detergent and soap that left no scent. I bought a rifle and ammunition. When all was said and done, I figured the venison I could get in a season would cost about $50 a pound.

The main expense, though, was time -- to hunt successfully, you need a lot of time. I never had that as a parent, a hockey dad, a husband, a self-employed woodworker. There is always something to do with the kids, fix around the house or do in the shop. A good friend had described the strain his hunting put on his marriage, as he was mostly away during hunting season. I didn't want that in my life. So I put it off until the kids were older and more independent, the shop a bit more under control, the day a bit more loose.

The first day in the field was one early December. I woke before dawn, got dressed, went out to the stand and climbed up in the dark. I waited. I got cold. My feet and ass hurt. My fingers got numb, The cold steel of the rifle burned a cold line across my lap. I waited. I watched and saw nothing. I got impatient. I wanted to check my phone constantly. I thought to go get a pillow to sit on, and another to rest my rifle on. I didn't move. I didn't speak. The light rose, then the dawn came, breaking through the leafless forest. It was utterly beautiful. Silent. Cars in the distance and planes overhead were a distant annoyance. I was alone. The forest was empty. The wait became rich beyond anticipation as scattered thought quieted into simple being.

Then crunch crunch crunch. I hear the impossibly loud sound of steps on leaves. I look, my heart beating a million miles an hour. It must be some giant deer, the crunching is so loud. It's a squirrel. Crunch crunch crunch echoes through the forest. Another squirrel joins and they chase each other. Crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch. It's an unbearably loud racket and I want to tell the squirrels to beat it, they're a distraction, frightening away deer and the quiet of the woods.

One races up a nearby tree, gets about eye level, and shakes his tail at me making a chirrup sound. I gather he doesn't approve of my presence. I talk back at him, and he takes offense and runs up and down the tree chirruping. I am an outsider and I have been outed.

Five hours later, I climb down and go home. My body is stiff. I have seen nothing but the glorious shift of light from night through predawn gloom to brilliant morning. And a few playful squirrels. I am hooked and cannot wait to get back in the stand. The meaning of the forest has begun to shift.

Each time in the stand, I see and hear nothing but the forest, the emerging light, squirrels, birds of every stripe, deer at great distances, running in groups, moving closer then away. One morning after two hours in the stand I suddenly feel a presence and look to my right. Fifteen feet away in the next tree is a barn owl staring at me. He has been motionless and staring at me for two hours. I stare back. He doesn't move for another hour except for the occasional blink. Then he flies away.

After five days in the stand, I am despairing to ever get a shot. I should move the stand, I should wash my scent off better. I should be quieter. I need glasses. I have to think like a deer. I have to think like a hunter. I am thinking too much. Then a little yellow bird alights on a branch nearby. It looks at me sideways, then chrips loudly. It chirps loudly again. I smile at it. It hops about and chirps repeatedly. Within about a minute, I am surrounded by fifty small yellow birds all chirping very loudly at me. The little fuckers. I'm not supposed to be there and you're the forest alarm bell, eh? Well fuck you for exposing me. I am an outsider and I have been outed again. I see no deer that day either.

With no chances for a shot, the hunt became a glorious exercise in meditation. I learned to be still, outside and in. I listened. I watched. The beauty of the forest, the beauty of the changing light, the incredible silences and the peculiar ways it would be interrupted. A few hours alone in the stand would transform me from my usual anxious wreck to solid on my feet for the rest of the day. Thoughts would spend their courses, come to conclusions, and leave me. I began not to care if I ever got a deer.

Perhaps my seventh time in the stand, in the predawn gloom I see the silhouette of a deer perhaps 100 yards away. My rifle has open sights, I need glasses but don't have them, everything is slightly blurry, and the distance is ridiculous. I level the rifle at the tiny profile, hearing a voice in my head say 'this is not a good shot', with rising frustration and anger in my throat that this is the only shot I have had so far. BANG I fire the gun. I get down off the stand and go look where I shot. There is nothing. I missed entirely. I tell myself I am a fool, not a worthy hunter. What if I had injured the animal? I will never take a shot that is not perfect, that is not sure to give the animal a very quick death. I hate myself and do not hunt for a week.

My tenth time in the stand, after a dawn of beautiful clear light, I hear crunch, crunch, crunch, again, for the millionth time, as there are squirrels everywhere in the woods. But this time it is slow. I look and see a large doe moving carefully across the woods, 50 yards away. My heart pounds. The shot is too far. It is no good. I master the reptile brain inside and quiet it, and I wait. Watch. Learn. I abandon desire and hope. The doe looks around, flicks her tail. Sniffs the ground. Roots for acorns. Looks up. Moves a few steps. Looks around. She moves left, then right, but in a pattern that brings her slowly closer. I watch her. I can nearly feel her thoughts, when she tenses, when she relaxes. Her tail is expressive, shaking off her fears after she listens. When her tail is still, she is tensed to detect a threat.

She moves closer. 30 yards. 25 yards. 20 yards. Then 25 yards, 30 yards. Then 15 yards, 40 ft, 35 ft. She is walking directly towards me. My heart pounds harder with each step closer. I can hear it in my ears and wonder if she can't hear it too. I quietly raise my rifle and take the safety off, the click impossibly loud, but she doesn't move. If I am going to be a hunter, this is the time, it is now. 25 ft. nearly under the stand. My breath is slow without having to consciously slow it. My hands are not shaking at all. I am holding the heavy rifle with a deer plainly in the sights, with no other awareness whatsoever, and I am waiting, waiting for the perfect shot. She has to turn to show her side so I can send the bullet through both of her lungs at once. She turns to face me and stops. She sniffs the air. Does she smell me? Will she bolt? I don't move. She puts her nose back down and roots again. She moves to her left offering a perfect side view, but then steps in front of a tree. I wait. She takes another step away from the tree. She is 20 ft. away and I can hear her breath in the forest silence. Can she hear mine? She pauses. I stop thinking about the distance, the angle, all the technical aspects and I simply feel that the moment is right, as if time stutters and a gap opens. My finger moves against the trigger almost beyond conscious will, in a gray area of half-thought. The moment feels right BANG.

The painful sound is irrelevant. I watch the doe leap up and try to run as if in slow motion. My heart stutters. I see her stumble after the second step and fall. She gets up, then falls over again. My heart beats again.

I climb down the stand and run over to her. She hadn't moved more than 10 feet from where I shot her. I see the hole in her chest and I hear her trying to breath, gasping through her mouth, bubbles of air in bright red blood oozing from the hole in her chest. She is lying on her side. I put down my gun and kneel next to her. She doesn't move and I put my hand gently on her side, her killer to calm her. She takes a few more breaths, then stops. I watch her eyes go from quick to glassy. For a moment, I am not sure if she is dead or not. But then it becomes obvious. Of course she is dead. I keep my hand on her, feeling the warmth of her body, her recent life. A strange sense of awe at what I have just done, the animal's grace in death, the strange irony of trying to comfort her, all washes through my head. Then comes jubilation. I have just shot my first deer! Not bungled! A clean kill! Then comes gratitude and promises. I find myself thanking the deer, thanking her for letting me have her life, for the many meals I and my family will enjoy from her. I promise her I will not waste anything.

The next job is the Stupid State Paperwork. I must fill out forms in the field immediately, or risk a lifetime imprisonment and social shame for causing a bureaucrat's files to go wobbly.

Once done, the horror comes.

I have to gut her in the field to get the body temperature down to save the meat from spoiling. I have never seen this work done in person, only watched a video and read about it. I make uncertain, tentative cuts through the skin. I make a long incision and start pulling out organs. A large stomach, coils of intestines, what could be a liver or a pancreas I don't know, a heart, all steaming in the winter cold. There is blood everywhere. It is up my sleeves and on my pants, soaking into cloth and drying sticky. The fur clings to the blood. Bits of fat and skin attach to the fur. My face is cold but my hands are warm in the doe's wet interior. Trying and mistaking, I cut parts that I shouldn't and end covered in half-digested acorn mash and deer shit. I cut more parts that I shouldn't and parts come one bit by bit, whereas in the videos, it all comes out together. My hands slide in blood, I suppress disgust.

I have to reach up from inside her chest cavity to pull her esophagus down to cut it out. My arm is inside a dead animal up to my shoulder and I can barely grasp the knife inside. It is a practical problem of competence, the only thought is that I wish I knew what I was doing. All emotions have fled.

Finally, I must cut the anus away from the carcass without cutting into the scent glands. I don't know what they look like, or more appropriately what they feel like, as everything is inside the pelvis where I can't see. I jab, I cut, I pull, I tug, I cut some more and finally cut away the large intestine and the anus. They lie in a steaming awful heap next to the bloody carcass. I exhale and almost see myself from a distance -- a baseline human experience tens of thousands of years old: killing another animal to eat. It's a strange feeling of kinship with my full humanity.

Eating is, at heart, a desperately disgusting proposition. Killing. Cutting. Chewing. Digesting. Shitting. The Anorexic has simply thought it all through, and taken it too close to heart, felt and thought it through fully. To survive, we have to be deaf and dumb to some parts of existence.

I drag the body from the forest back to my truck. I drive it home. I hang it upside down in my garage and spend the next four hours taking the hide off, cutting the head off, cutting the limbs off, then dressing the meat on a table into specific cuts, wrapping them in paper, labeling them, and putting them in the freezer. I cut up the skeleton for dog treats. I hose out my truck. I hose out the garage. I hose off the driveway. I peel my bloody, fat and hair encrusted clothes off and put them in a bag. Then I shower, the dried blood and fur slowly coming off, the tallow fat taking a lot of soap, scrubbing and hot water to come off, the scent lingering nevertheless.The horror is apparent everywhere if I want to think about it.

The curious reminder, the true, humbling memento mori, comes when dressing a deer carcass: how similar hers is to mine: meat, bones, and guts. This is where PETA perhaps chimes in to say, Yes, and as nobody should hunt and eat humans, so we should not hunt and eat animals-- we are the same. I come to a different conclusion, that we are all part of a single cycle of life and death. My role is simply as apex predator, as hers was of prey. One day, I too will die, perhaps young, perhaps old. Once buried, my body will be devoured by the proverbial worms. The deer and I have different fates, but the same ultimate destination. I hope to be as gracious about my fate, as the first doe I shot was. I hope to accept whatever chance, opportunity, and my skills give me for my life, from beginning, through all of it, to the end.

The venison tenderloin with Bernaise sauce I made that night was one of the best meals of my life, certainly the most meaningful as it was accompanied by a broad range of emotions and thoughts.

Hunting and dressing a deer is a lot of work.

That doe fed me and my family. Her body kept us alive.

The simple adrenaline excitement of the first hunt took a long time to wear off. When it did, I was left with an appreciation of the hunt that I could never have imagined. It is beautiful. It is thrilling. It is horrifying. It is useful. It is deeply disturbing. It is deeply satisfying. From animal to dinner plate, it is not a straight and simple line of thought and deed, but one fraught with a hundred thrills, a hundred horrors.

By my tenth kill, the awe was no longer a thunder strike, but an abiding sense of gratitude, connection and respect that overlays the enjoyment of achieving something both difficult, satisfying, and delicious. Supermarket meat remains offensive to me, for I know how those animals live and die in comparison to the wild does and bucks I have taken. The act of handing $5 to a teenage checkout for a pile of hamburger under plastic is a modern travesty.

I preserved her skull. Her skull is now mine. I own it in a number of ways. It is not so much a trophy, or a memento mori, but a reminder of a responsibility. It is an ideal, the straight, perfect line that I impose on my hunting: not to waste, to be grateful, to be responsible to the role of being human, to appreciate the beauty and usefulness of the animal, to find humility in our similarities as living, breathing, thinking animals.

This is certainly too much thought in a deed, the learner's process towards comprehension. Over time it is all now no big deal. The skull reminds me of when it wasn't, when the Facts of Life were a revelation, and how insulated I lived by simply buying meat.

Maybe I should bequeath my skull to a troupe of Shakespearean actors to use as a most-believable Yorick prop. Actors using an actual skull? One that used to be covered in meat? Maybe help them put meat on the bones of their words. That would be useful.

Jaws: Hands versus Teeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You've got City Hands, Mr. Hooper. You've been counting money all your life."

- Quint

 

Would you agree that the measure of a man is best had through the feel of his hands?

Chances are good you do not. Hands are out of fashion. Social justice and environmental stewardship are in. These issues shouldn't be mutually exclusive; in fact, I believe they are mutually supporting. But if you ask around, um, No, Hands are not a big deal these days. Donald Trump's small hands don't even make the news. They are irrelevant. Fox News and MSNBC would even agree on this point.

Hands have been on shaky ground for at least two or three millennia, and in the last three hundred years suffered a catastrophic decline in reputation. As soon as the architect stopped building with his own hands, but found other people to do it for him, the value of hands began its inexorable decline in favor of words and other symbols, and with them, the fine art of theory, and with it, bullshit.

(You're wondering if I'm being serious or joking. Good. I have you right where I want you -- in an uncomfortable spot feeling uncertain whether you should be enjoying this or not, be thoughtful about it or flippant, and how on earth to respond or not. Your instinct is to stop reading, and go find something easier to engage with, such as a self-confirming post on FaceBook, or a pandering Netflix comedy. My essays are distillations of our engagement with real life -- they are both a bitch to find a footing in. You have to work at it, and the reward is uncertain. The question you're not asking yourself is why this is a problem. In either my writing or life itself. Now answer that question: I fear being thought a fool by _____, even though nobody is looking. So when you stop worrying about judgment, you can begin to enjoy my writing as superimposed fragments of serious thought, frivolous humor, and the absence of an authorial parent telling you how to enjoy it. Now, get on with the question of teeth versus hands in the movie Jaws). 

Jaws is not a movie about Hands so much as Teeth. Wondrously Large and Super-Bitey Teeth. Of course by Hollywood Rules, the movie has a happy ending. The Shark doesn't win, People win. And of course they use their hands to win. They have to do things to kill the shark, and hands are (almost) always involved in people doing things. This is all quite obvious.

But what kind of hands will win the day against the Shark? Jaws plays with this question in a light-hearted but powerful manner.

Blue-collar Quint crushes a beer can -- Quint has all of his fishing tools at hand on his boat. 

White-collar Hooper crushes a Styrofoam cup -- Hooper loads up the boat with his scientific equipment. 

Brody looks on -- He doesn't bring much, except a change of underpants and his policeman's service pistol. 

The shark crushes surfboards, boats, people, etc. -- The shark has all of its tools in its mouth.

What? you ask yourself, and consider switching the channel to Real Housewives of Televisionland. This list makes my brain hurt. It is supposed to. Get used to it. Just remember it for the moment.

First consider what hands can do.

Hands are strong -- they can crush a beer can, and turn the lid off a jar. They can throw a ball accurately at 100 mph, break the nose on another man's face, and hold onto a rope around a wild bull for 8 seconds. Hands pull the rest of the body up a cliff face, and hold a rope for another.

Hands have fine motor control -- they can braid hair and screw in a light bulb. They can thread a needle and handle tools to saw and drill. They can open a car door and make teeny-tiny watch parts with teeny-tiny screwdrivers. They can tickle, they can touch.

Every mammal has a brain, some bigger than ours. But whales have fins, elephants have trunks, bears have paws, sloths have claws (and, yes, sharks have teeth -- see where I'm going?). But none have hands the way we do. They define our relationship with the world. Hands make Humanity. OK, and our brains. Together. With language. It's a menage-a-trois of capability. Other primates have equal hands, but not the same brains or languages.

Back to Jaws: it's three sets of hands against one set of teeth.

Our three heroes: each of them wields tools for a living -- (the ultimate product of hands is technology: Tools!)

Blue-collar Quint crushes a beer can -- Quint has all of his fishing tools at hand on his boat. 

White-collar Hooper crushes a Styrofoam cup -- Hooper loads up the boat with his scientific equipment. 

Brody looks on -- He doesn't bring much, except a change of underpants and his policeman's service pistol. 

The shark crushes surfboards, boats, people, etc. -- The shark has all of its tools in its mouth.

Neither the extensive fishing tackle nor the extensive scientific equipment defeats the Teeth. But Brody sees his shot, and, from a sinking boat, and under tremendous pressure, takes it and makes it.

The point of this essay? You ask for a point? You ALREADY HAVE IT. You should be making it on your own.

I like to think that Brody has spent years at a firing range learning how to shoot accurately; he takes his job seriously, and policing skills include handgun control -- fine motor control in his hands and the ability to place a shot under stress.

The lesson of Jaws, which every astute viewer must conclude leaving the theater, is that Hands Win -- not in direct competition, but through their deep capacity, not just to make, but to master complex skills.

Used un-intelligently, hands will always lose against teeth (everyone we see being eaten by the shark slaps ineffectively at the shark's nose or something). These are lessons for our children: you see that victim slapping helplessly at that shark's nose? That person never spent time learning a specific skill, mastering something, whether it's fishing, oceanography, or simple marksmanship.

These are important life lessons, available even in mostly-mindless summer blockbuster Hollywood movies.

And yes, I'm writing a book about the human hand, a celebration of the its amazing versatility, and an invitation to learn and master a skill that requires fine hand work as a way to find a durable happiness in life. And also winning when pitted against super-bitey sharks.

 

The Pride of Craftsmanship: Hands talking to Hands

Not a single piece of Sung ware, as everyone knows, bears the signature of its maker: the potter never signed his work, however beautiful it may have been. One explanation that has been put forward is that in those days the custom of signing a work was still unknown. The true explanation, however, may be simpler still. Sung craftsmen were not self-conscious artists, they were not learned men, they were mere craftsmen making articles for daily use; most of them were probably extremely poor and had to work hard from morning till night, most also were probably badly educated and uninformed. They were not privileged people who could choose to work only when they were in a creative mood. Yet, despite all this, potters in Korea as well as in China were able to produce objects of consummate beauty, such as Sung ware and Koryo celadons: works of art that have endured through the ages.

-Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman

 

My first job in woodworking was with an architectural millwork shop. An uncertain 17 year old, I was hired to sweep the floors and move lumber. Soon, I was put to the task of hand-sanding moldings, then jointing lumber, finally cutting the joinery and assembling the paneling. I took to it with joy, and over five years I learned to do most of the work. I simply loved making things with my hands. And I got pretty good at it. And with that, I got pride--look what I did!

One day, we installed an ornate Colonial-style mahogany corner cabinet in a living room high up in a Trump Tower. When we finished, the client commented how good it looked, “even with all of you in here.” We blinked, thanked her and left, check in hand, job done. In the freight elevator on the way down, we laughed so hard we cried. “It’s your shoes!” “No it’s not—it’s your nose!” Our client’s comments didn’t hurt our feelings so much as amaze us. Instead of recognition and thanks for nice work, we were an aesthetic blot on her life.

We were nobodies making beautiful things.

The moment was stunningly obvious, and yet soul-crushingly disturbing for a 22-year-old kid who had just gone along with life thus far. Get a fun job. Make things. Learn cool shit. Get paid. Hang out with friends. Get insulted by a rich woman. Wait—what?

The encounter brought on a hand-wringing, self-involved crisis of my purpose on this planet (yes, I was an English major). Why do I make things? What’s the purpose? What’s the point of it all? Of course I was an insignificant speck in the universe. I just hadn’t been reminded of it, or realized it on my own. The woman’s insult brought that into sharp focus. The process of understanding and accepting that insignificance took some time. Perhaps it’s not entirely done, as I don't plan on going gently into that good night quite yet. However, I now understand that self-insignificance is the most necessary capacity to be a great craftsman. To be nobody opens up the ability to understand and create beauty, even if you still want to be somebody. And I do. Doesn’t everyone?

It was shortly after the Trump Tower “incident” that I read The Unknown Craftsman. Yanagi presented the idea of the anonymous-great-artist. I loved it. I hated it. I recognized how I participated in that economy—the Trump Tower client would show off our work to her friends: “Darling, look at this Mahogany corner cabinet I just commissioned. The beautiful grain! Made in Connecticut by real Artisans. All by hand!” Maybe she would mention the company name, or the owner’s name, but not mine, or any of the rest of the crew who had actually made it, whose actual hands had worked the wood that was now part of her life. They would run their fingers over the finely-sanded surfaces and comment on how silky they felt. They would open the drawers and enjoy the smoothness of operation. They would talk about how "inviting to the hand" beautiful wood was. Our hands were important—they were the hands of the “hand-made” she found appealing and had spent so much money on—but our persons were not. In fact, our persons were offensive, and needed to be out of her apartment ASAP.

We were not people of any value, our individuality was irrelevant. This part I hated. The white collar – blue collar divide in America seemed to be an ancient prejudice of the worst sort, the kind that led to strikes and revolutions. The faceless, exploited laborer, my hands a commodity, not anything individual, valuable when disembodied, sold for $4.50 an hour.

And yet for Yanagi this was not social injustice. He had something far more insightful to say. Sung potters did not consider themselves artists. They were not attempting to make anything according to a personal vision. They were not attempting to be famous, or be appreciated for “who they were”. They were not attempting self-expression in an egoistic effort to find themselves. And they were not even aiming for “beauty.” They simply made pots the only way they knew how. That’s what they did.

This isn't to say that Sung dynasty potters did not want to be famous, just that they invested no personal desire into their work. Look at the bowls at the bottoms of the page. Do they look like they are the product of a striving artist or artisan? They look pretty humble to me, pretty simple. The Kizaemon bowl looks like it was made in a hurry with little attention to detail. And they are greatly prized for their beauty.

I won't address what beauty is, except to suggest it is the experience of an intuitively harmonious perfection. Have you ever felt a gut punch in beholding something that takes your breath away? You feel unworthy in its presence? In awe of its existence? No matter how you contemplate it, you couldn't imagine it any other way to be better?

The most famous bowls, ones used by the masters of Tea, betray no desire to be anything other than a bowl—no artistic statements, no gestures or mashups or commentaries—just utilitarian and everyday for use in a humble home. This part – the simple focus on making something useful, and what that led to spiritually  – really appealed to me. It felt noble, pure, and somehow right. It was also what I had done, willingly and happily, before I read Yanagi. At no point had I ever wanted to sign the paneling and furniture I made, to be famous for them, sell or promote them as art or any kind of individual expression. I simply enjoyed the casual compliments I received from friends and customers, which I would imagine Sung dynasty potters enjoyed as well.

While artists are full of self, and aim to express self, craftsmen have no self, at least in their work. So what do craftsmen express through their work? Beauty is Yanagi’s answer -- specifically an expression that artists are incapable of achieving, as self always gets in the way of beauty, obscures it, distracts from it, replaces it. Does self endure? No. Beauty endures. The individual is always unique and the exception, while beauty is always universal. What we remember from the past, what endures, is the beauty that wasn’t obscured by the self. We may give it a name, such as a Leonardo, or a Michaelangelo, but we do not know their individual characters any more than a collection of life facts can conjure a person. We only know the surviving beauty they created.

Consider how some people suggest that Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare, and that all the plays were written by someone else. How does it matter who wrote the plays? How does knowing the person of the author, or not knowing it, make the plays any better or worse? How much does that personal knowledge affect the characters of Macbeth, Hamlet, Beatrice or Rosalind? What if William Shakespeare the person was really obnoxious, difficult to engage in conversation, and never bathed?

Suddenly, I find it possible to say “Thanks for the plays, William, I like them a lot -- even with you here.” What was he pursuing? Fame? Or money? A bit of both? Did he try to write “the best” plays and want to be known for them? Or did he just write plays in the only way he knew how? And that’s just what he did, and what endures.

It’s said of old houses that “they don’t build ‘em like they used to.” This isn’t true. It’s that the poorly-built houses built 200 years ago have all fallen down. Only the well-built ones from the past survive. There was a lot of bad drama in Shakespeare’s time. We just don’t read or remember it because it doesn’t give us joy. At the time, like much art today, it was new and interesting and perhaps had something relevant to say about that moment. It may have made money and been celebrated. But it had no lasting beauty, so we quickly forgot it.

I’ve not met any woodworker or other tradesmen who “pursues beauty”. That would receive a laugh on any jobsite, no matter how much any one of us might think about these things. But I have seen a lot of beautiful work done by tradesmen—the work that endures. The pride, as I often hear it described, is in the satisfaction of a job well done, a job done right, with no glaring errors or awkward bits. It’s professional. It’s quality. And no callbacks! These encompassing terms don’t point to any one aspect, but to the whole of the job done. It just works. It doesn’t even call attention to itself except as a whole, a beautiful, complete whole. And I think that’s key to the sense of craftsmanship. Yes the details matter, but only as they contribute to a whole.

I once stumbled across the idea that in good design, no one part calls attention to itself over any other. If you don’t notice or appreciate the design in any particular way, and the object fulfills its use in a perfectly unobtrusive manner, then it is successful. As soon as the eye is distracted, the hand uncertain or impeded, the use obscure, the design is imperfect.

Of course, craftsmanship is more closely aligned with the use and beauty of practical objects, and the artist more closely aligned with objects created for purely aesthetic value, but the overlap is substantial and blurred. Every object has a use, a purpose, whether quotidian or luxurious. If a portrait of a politician meant to impress you with handsome resolve, wisdom and integrity (and all these are recognizable in the face), but the odd angle of a lifeless hand in the foreground makes you giggle, then the portrait has failed. You will remember the giggle.

On good days in the shop, none of these thoughts plague me. The problem is that woodworking is a solitary pursuit, hearing protectors on most of the time. The mind can wander not just towards lunch, but also to these larger questions. What giggles am I making now? What lasting beauty, if any? How can I get better if Yanagi's best is unconscious? Just keep working and stop thinking...

Ten tears after the encounter in the Trump Tower, I started my own furniture company, and named it after myself. I wanted to make beautiful things.

I didn’t advertise but I answered the phone. I made spec pieces but rarely sold them. Except for one time, I didn’t present my work in shows. I didn’t strive for prizes or recognition. I relied on word-of-mouth, and it was enough to make a modest living. The phone always rang. I always made. I was happy. Mostly.

Was I intentionally hamstringing the growth of my business to achieve some kind of pure approach to work? Not intentionally, I wasn't. I think I just wasn't a good businessman. I had no drive for self-promotion, or even the promotion of my work. I could have approached fame and self-promotion the way Banksy does-- anonymous fame. I love the idea that he or she goes to art shows and talks to critics who have no idea who he or she is.

Eventually I found my niche in custom work, designing and building furniture like a bespoke tailor, fitting pieces to people and their homes. I designed and made Craftsman-style furniture for clients who loved the Craftsman style. I designed and made Art Deco furniture for clients who loved Art Deco. I designed and made Colonial, Art Nouveau, Biedermeier all styles. No piece was a copy of anything. All were “original” designs, but none were “me.” I signed a few of them at first, then stopped the practice. Some customers insisted that I sign them, as that was part of what they wanted. A word my clients often used was “beautiful.” It is still the word that makes me the happiest to hear.

When a client says my style is unique or recognizable, I get wary. Frankly, I feel as if I’ve failed in some way. I am happiest when my hand in the design is quiet, the piece looks like it fits the client’s home seamlessly, and no one could ever guess I made it. And I am happiest when I am recognized for this quiet approach. When I’m gone, out of the room, so to speak, the work can speak for itself, and “my story” of the anonymous hand-crafting artisan can remain in the room with it.

Some days I worry that I have pride in trying not to have pride, a pretense and false humility. People smirk at me when I shrug off a compliment. On these days, I wonder what kind of privileged intellectual game I play at, and why. Other days I feel I have pride in just making things that work for people, do the intended job and thereby give them pleasure.

For Yanagi, awareness of beauty is a burden that will prevent its full achievement. My work can never attain the level perfection in Sung ware as I intentionally pursue beauty in my work. Investing personal desire into one’s work is the mistake. It harms the work, and thereby frustrates the maker. You work with what you got, they say, and what I got is a conflict.

My work is not artistic, looking to achieve self-expression and fame – I did not invent Art Nouveau or Arts-and-Crafts, the most common styles I work in. And yet, this essay is all about my pride in craftsmanship and where it comes from.

Not too long ago, a friend and fellow woodworker put it perfectly: “I’m not famous, but my hands are. Among other hands, that is. And I’m really happy for them.”

I like the idea of a wordless kind of fame and appreciation between the hand that make things, and the hands that use those things.

 

The Kizaemon Ido tea bowl,16th century, and a national treasure in Japan

 

This 11th century bowl recently sold at auction for 37.7 million dollars. The maker, I don't believe, got a cent.

 

Oh, No, Art Nouveau!

When Le Client, C’est Moi, it's L'Art Nouveau

I design and build furniture tailored to a client's desires and needs, a bit like making a bespoke suit. I measure the space it will go, note the client's taste in other furniture and art, and talk through all the options of style and features. 

Over the years, I’ve had customers ask for original designs in nearly every style. I’ve made Arts-and-Crafts buffets, Art Deco armoires, Bauhaus bookshelves, Ming Chinese tables, Colonial chairs, Adirondack dressers and even Biedermeier jewelry armoires, supposedly the least-liked of all period styles and so uncommon that nobody wants it or has even heard of it.

Clients also ask for something “different,” so I’ve mixed design elements to create Art-Deco-Craftsman (Arts-and-Crafts trying to be suave), and Colonial Contemporary (Shaker with Computers involved). These pieces usually are often very insecure and need therapy, but in the end they work, and make the new owners happy.

But the one I get the fewest requests for is Art Nouveau.

I love Art Nouveau. It's the Absinthe of furniture design. Heady, dreamy, electric, a bit threatening, it melds the organic with the practicalities of civilization in an over-the-top decorative style.

When clients ask about my favorite style, their ensuing silence is sometimes hard to read. Maybe, with their passion for Biedermeier, they've never heard of Art Nouveau, and are mystified that I would enjoy an imaginary style. Or maybe they find the style so offensive, it's a deal breaker. That happened once. One client, when I designed a distinctly Art Deco piece for her, all streamlined and simple and very 30's, she rejected it, declaring "I see you sneaking in that Art Nouveau stuff into your design! I don't want it! I want Art Deco!"

I do admit, Art Nouveau is not a Budweiser style. Or a fine wine style. Or anything that fits any house I've ever been in except a few built in Brussels and Paris around 1901.

So, in the absence of Absinth-oriented furniture clients. I just have to build Art Nouveau for myself. 

If you're taking a quiet but distinct step backwards to avoid being grabbed by this bookshelf, I understand.

It has bones. It has claws. Sort of. Maybe it has a bit of Giger’s Alien to it. But it's also a bit modern in its simplicity. So perhaps it’s a Shaker interpretation of Art Nouveau, or “Shaker Giger.”

And I’ll bet you’d never put it in your house. Where would it go?

A bookcase that looks like it might slither off the wall of a sudden and lunge at you with hooked tentacles doesn’t contribute to that home-and-hearth feeling that, say, Arts-and-Crafts does. Even the severe lines of Shaker are more welcoming. It’s far easier to negotiate a stern Shaker side table looking at you judgmentally. But that Art Nouveau thing may kill and eat me. Or at least require an herbicide to stay in the hallway. And we can't have that with children around.

But for me, I do want it in my home. I do want to come home late at night and feel threatened by my furniture, that it has grown out of the floor or wall, or may continue growing. And might need pruning in the Spring. I think straight lines and square ends are all fine and nice, sometimes even interesting. But the organic curve is what inspires me. There's life in those lines, and good life at that (Hogarth called the S - curve “the line of beauty,” and I agree).

I prefer a desk that looks like it scuttled out of the sea, and may go back at any time, with my laptop and pens. I like hte idea that my desk is scanning what I write from bulbous eyes on it's drawers, rendering mute judgment. It is saying "do not pander, but challenge." This keeps me on my toes as a writer, though it is hard on the reader. Sorry.

But within Art Nouveau there is space for life that isn't threatening with tool, claw or tentacle, rather soothing with wing. Sometimes life isn't a challenge, and that's all right too. Beauty can still be found in what we have always found it in, without dissipation. A folding shelf on a wall, perhaps a mundane and practical consideration for a small dining room, doesn't have to be mundane and practical only. It can come from human hands and experience and never try hide that fact with pretensions to the perfections of the mind, concepts that are not part of the natural world, such as lines and points and flat planes, except when distilled or translated into cold numbers. Even symmetries in nature are rarely perfect. But how we strive for them, to out master the mastery of our own hands.

I end with a monolith of a tall clock. For contrast. An exclamation point of presence and feigned perfection. It tells time, the chronos of which I hate as much as I embrace and the kairos of daily life. Call me pseudo-Zen.

How is modern design loved? There is nothing natural in these lines. We love them the way we love the "perfection" that Martha Stewart sells us. It precludes criticism, for all lines have an answer and are clear. All aspects have elegant math showing through the veil. Modern design is the end of thought and engagement. We do not have to worry about it. It brings up nothing in us, so we can escape ourselves. It is quiet, is it peaceful. For me, these words are also the tomb.

I made this clock from solid hickory, a ridiculously difficult wood to work. And yet that is the one feature that lightens this modern design, though a pun, for who of a certain age does not remember "hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock"?

 

I am not telling if I hid a mouse in it. Such irreverence towards such a perfect modern design might be considered rude.

Then and Now -- or, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Doormaking but Were Too Busy to Ask

You see, I’ve written a new book about making doors, available here, and, of course, that process got me thinking.

On the shelf in my shop have a copy of Henley’s Twentieth Century Book of Recipes, Formulas and Processes: Containing Nearly Ten Thousand Selected Scientific, Chemical, Technical and Household Recipes, Formulas and Processes for Use in the Laboratory, the Office, the Workshop and in the Home, published in New York in 1907.

Intended for the general public, Henley’s tells you how to make everything from your own acid-proof wood finishes to food preservatives, foot powders, even zinc contact silver plating. But in close to eight hundred densely-packed pages, there is not a single image or illustration, and there are few how-to instructions. To make the acid-proof wood finish, for example, the book simply tells you to boil copper sulfate and potassium chlorate salts until dissolved.

To many modern Americans, the directions in this book are dangerously incomplete, perhaps criminally. Will boiling these crystals give off noxious fumes? Do you add water? How much? Can they be boiled safely in a steel or aluminum pot? Where can you even buy these crystals? Henley’s is mute. While I’m sure that some readers in 1907 did not know the answers to all these questions, many more did. Henley’s was a popular book and went on to revised editions.

In 2016, we no longer have the same foundation of practical knowledge or hand skills (or understanding of risk) that our ancestors did. The efficiencies of mass manufacturing have allowed each of us to focus on specialized professions— many of us simply don’t need to build or repair our own houses or furniture anymore; there’s someone else or some company who specializes in that and we make enough money to pay them to do it. And yet many of us lament this loss, nostalgic for earlier generations of DIY enthusiasts, amazed by their ability to do so much on their own, and forgetting that they did not have the internet, heated toilet seats or inexpensive Asian manufacturing integrated with global markets and high volume low-cost shipping capacities. With these things, we are far more productive, far less burdened by the work necessary to simply survive, and have far greater freedom to pursue other opportunities. We are now far less independent and far more interdependent. We are not worse—we are just different.

Well, most of us. Some of us still make our own things. I make my own doors. Now, don’t get me wrong -- I don't believe we should all make our own doors. We should make them if we want to and for the right reasons. I have made my own front door, bedroom doors and bathroom doors. And I make them for customers too. I’m not so much a Luddite as have a different economy of value. I don’t really know what motivated people to buy Henley’s and make things from it. But I made those doors because it was satisfying work to integrate something of beauty and usefulness into my life, and for others.

Why would you make your own door (or anything else?) You can’t save any money: a manufactured, pre-hung hollow-core at Lowe’s costs about $67, while the raw materials to build a similar door would cost about $300. You can’t advance your career in selling widgets: doormaking is not much of a resume builder. And you can’t make influential friends: try introducing yourself as being "way into doors" "You mean The Doors?" "No, just doors." You will, however, create beautiful, unique and useful objects -- thereby acquiring the traditional skills of craftsmanship that have shaped our humanity: a main advantage, and consequence, of the opposable thumb.

If we share anything with our handier ancestors from 1907, it’s the need for understanding and mastery of our daily environment, or at least a part of it, and shaping it to our liking. We may live in a world where merely opening the back of a phone voids the warranty, but we still can find deep satisfactions in creating and thereby understanding some of the things we use.

So this is indeed why I’ve written a book on making doors. Published by the Linden Press, it is available now on Amazon now for preorder (to be delivered in the early months of 2017). It’s for every skill level. Maybe you'll read it. Maybe you'll make a door from it.