Silencing the inner chatter
So I have a concussion and a black eye. Happy to report that I did not injure myself woodworking. It’s a little embarrassing to explain what happened, so instead I will present you with three scenarios, one of which is true, and you can decide which you think it was.
Scenario 1: I was taking the dog out for a walk, and I stepped on a shovel that my child had left outside the door and it whacked me square in the face.
Scenario 2: I was standing on the side of my workbench to reach a shelf in the garage when the workbench tipped and I slammed my face into said shelf.
Scenario 3: I was leaning down to scoop up a snowball when the dog—all 85 pounds of him—ran at me full bore and his skull met my face at 25 mph.
The upshot is that I can’t look at screens, and so my stalwart partner, Josiah, is typing this intro and sending this missive out on my behalf. And from now on I will be wearing a football helmet everywhere I go.
I hope you have a concussion-free week.
This week’s essay is read by guest narrator Josiah, due to my unfortunate medical condition.
1.
“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth,” writes philosopher and mechanic Matthew B. Crawford in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft. “Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgement of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.”1
I picked up his book at the library while looking for another and have since read a bit of it. Crawford’s style is too academic for me (I don’t like sifting through dense text to figure out the thesis), but occasionally he makes points I understand and sometimes agree with.2
Surely some form of “chattering interpretations” helps a person figure themself out? Don’t we need to bungle along a bit, like a rough cut curve, and use our spokeshave-sharp minds to slice away what doesn’t serve us?
Or maybe not. Maybe those stories can’t capture our essences, in their complexity, and their simplicity. Crawford isn’t wrong about the experience of working with one’s hands; there are times during my work when all analysis, interpretation, and observation falls away. There is just the wood in front of me. Then I am “quiet and easy.”
2.
I would argue that in those moments there is a disconnect from the relationships around me. While this is good for concentration (when I’m near sharp objects powered by motors, I like my focus on the task at hand), I wouldn’t want to exist in this bubble for longer than necessary.
But it is alluring, especially when other aspects of life are troubling. To slip into the altered state of “real work.”
“Doing something that is hard and real humbles you,” Brad Stulberg wrote in the Growth Equation in 2021. “You have to earn the successes. And when you experience failures, you can’t just talk them away.”
With woodworking, there are always mistakes. Some are big (getting the measurement wrong on a the width of a door), some are tiny (nicking the finished wood with the tip of a bit when putting in screws). Failure is when you don’t try to fix the mistakes. Leaving them so that the thing you’re making doesn’t work. Or the flaw isn’t hidden or incorporated (what my dad calls “intentionality after the fact,” a skill I’ve been improving).
Stulberg is getting to the same point as Crawford, which I’d boil down to you can’t BS a box joint.
3.
I was working on the lathe last week. I don’t have much experience with wood turning, only done it a bit. The lathe I’m using is a ShopSmith, a big metal contraption capable of all manner of operations, though it is only used as a lathe these days. It looks like something out of the Jetsons to me, all big round slope-y curves, ready to blast off the floor.
I got my little block of wood set up on the lathe.
Then I thought about everything that could go wrong.
I remembered another woodworker telling me about at the lathe and somehow his chisel flying up and hitting him in the face. He was wearing a face shield, so he didn’t get hurt. I don’t have a face shield (clearly I probably should at this point), but do prefer my face chisel-free.
I thought about my carnivorous appetite to learn all of it—not just how to build furniture, but also how to work at the sawmill, how to read the trees that have fallen or need to be taken out of the woods and how to use a chainsaw to cut them up. How to take apart and service my machines (that’s just practical, I don’t think any woodworker can function otherwise). How to curve wood and how to turn wood.
What is wrong with me? Why, I wondered, can’t I just be happy with practicing what I do know and not constantly have to exist at the uncertain edge of all that I don’t?
The machine ran while my mind chattered. Then I took a deep breath, let it go, and began.
4.
Those first efforts were crap. Later, Dad showed me better ways to work at the lathe (making it look effortless, which is both humbling and upsetting).
And then I began again and immediately it became clear that my senses weren’t fine-tuned—I couldn’t quite sense the tip of the blade touching the wood, as it cut in just enough to carve out material in the form of shavings and sawdust, but not so much as to gouge the wood.
But I persisted and all went well until it didn’t.
One moment I was removing small shavings worth of wood, and the next the tool jumped in my hands. It was startling, though the movement wasn’t terribly big. But it was a reminder that I can slip off the mountain of control in an instant, a tumble mere seconds after ascendance.
This particular loss of control wasn’t huge, but the result was that when I returned the gouge to the material, both tool and wood vibrated and chattered like rumpled bats. Turning the lathe off, we saw that the block had dislodged ever so slightly from its screw. Because it wasn’t held tightly anymore, it wobbled, making it impossible to turn.
We fixed this with a slightly longer screw (I needed to make a shallow dish, so there was space between the bottom of the block and the bottom of my bowl). I finished carving a good enough bowl.
At the end of the day, Dad recommended I reach out to some close family friends, a couple who both turned wood, and had more experience.
And so I spent Monday morning with one of these friends, a man who has spent years turning magnificent bowls of all sorts. Bowls with natural edges. With slender sides. With figure that would make you drool. If you’re the drooling sort.
He was patient and answered my many questions, but started the tutorial with one of his own: Why did I want to learn this?
Because, I told him, I’d made these charcuterie boards that have natural holes in them—rough circles where branches or the idea of branches had been, creating big knots of material that fell out, leaving holes in otherwise gorgeous wood—and I wanted bowls to fill them.
So I figured I should learn how to make them. Not because I thought it would be easy, but because it would make me a better woodworker. It’s another way of knowing wood.
He nodded his head.
Then walked me through his process from stump of green wood to finished turned bowl (a process that takes months), showing me what to look for in the wood, how to properly hold the tools supporting the end of the chisel with my hip (instead of my death grip), how to ride the bevel, close and open the chisel and when to do so. How to tell the quality of finished bowls apart (though I’m still proud of my first little bowl, it has all the markings of amateur ambitions; my friend didn’t say this, but I learned it and now knowing it I will have to do better next time). He showed me his awesome lathe and all the chucks and tools he had. He told me about finishes, which ones are easier to apply, which require more patience and a close attention to the finest details.
I left with a head full of new thoughts and a lot of humility and gratitude. Woodworkers don’t do this work because it’s easy or quick. It took this family friend years to gain his skills, and even now he’s still working to improve.
As master woodworker Gary Rogowski writes:
Handmade furniture is not a need. It is a desire. Those of us who try to make a living at it are stubborn, focused, and ill-suited for polite office company and its politics. We love tools and wood and to solve problems. We love wearing many hats, taking on all sorts of roles throughout a job.3
To be clear, I’m neither tradesman nor a man. While Crawford’s writing style (and possibly other beliefs and choices) are not for me, I was interested in his larger point about the purpose and benefits of manual labor.
Crawford makes a distinction between craftsmen and tradesmen (he always uses the masculine form) and I’d fall squarely into his craftsman category at this point in my life.
“We might say that craftsmanship, as an ideal, provides the standards, but that in a mass-market economy such as ours, it is the tradesman who exemplifies an economically viable way of life,” he explains.
As Josiah tells me, the difference between a carpenter and a woodworker is that the former makes what clients want, the latter what they want. He says it in a way that implies some difficulty in getting along with my character. I humbly dispute that.
This is from his book, Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction.