handmade small things
03 October 2011 02:08 PM Categories: Quotidian existence | On writing
We sacrifice the wood, the clay, the stones for our own pleasure, take tool to make tool, indent the surface with hammer strikes, slash our signatures in yielding earth. The items are useful (the bedside table, the chair, the bureau) or pure whimsy (the feather sail on a sacrificial boat). But all are art.
Handmade things, old things, have the texture of life, of the personal. Sometimes I imagine my grandfather working in his shop, running a sander over the surface of what is now a bookcase. I see the ghosts of workmen lightly tapping in our living room mantel. I see Kevin, 65 years old now -- I see his apparition everywhere, on a bike shimmering down Shattuck, walking distractedly past a restaurant, a shadow piloting a beaten-down truck. He defies space and time, is again driving posts into soft Smith Island mud or putting up drywall in a West Street townhouse.
It is the small movements, the bit by bit and nail by nail, that create something new. My living room fills up with the past, with carpenters and painters and potters. They swirl around me, busy assessing the smoothness of a plaster curve, the pattern of lace on clay, whether a surface is level or slanted. They are totally in the moment, lost in creation.
Writing is a form of creation, of making something again and again until it works in some indescribable way. But the point most of the time is to make it look effortless, unlabored. There is nothing of the handmade to it, even though hands are intimately involved in the effort, stretching across keyboards and plunking down heavy typewriter keys.
I could make a pocket-sized book with pithy sayings in my blue scrawl, my loopy g’s heavy over the blank spaces below, obscure epigraphs for the pretentious. Perhaps I could make it my confessional, a place for true secrets complete with illustrations and discursive footnotes. I would sew the binding with big stitches, mock up the cover. The mockup would become the real thing, the final version, a touch of creation in progress.
I would leave my message to no one out on the curb or would toss it into the air along a busy street, pure art for art’s sake. My book would become an infiltrator, a bit of me in someone else's hand, someone lost and lonely. Who else would grab at crazy scribblings on the ground? We touch through the page. My thoughts enter the other's mind. The intimacy goes one way. Still, the stranger contains me. Absorbs me. Transforms me.
The handmade small things were ideas once. They lived in someone else's mind until the someone made them real. I am buoyed by the invisible creative process of others.
How can I be lonely surrounded by so many minds?
Image of my scrawl on the recipe box my grandfather made, propped up against a ceramic piece probably pumped out by machine (but made to look handmade -- this was a 30th birthday present from my husband that came from the British Museum), with pictures of my paternal great-grandparents on either side.
This could use more work ... feels very draft-like. And so expandable. What about cooking as art, for example? Temporary, sensual, life-giving.
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