By the Work of My Hands

My friend Willfulmina (her blog handle, not her real name!) writes a wonderful blog about her doing and making.  She spins and knits, bakes, cooks, and sews, and generally works hard to surround herself with handmade or craftily re-purposed things.  One thing I really admire about her approach to crafting is that it is in service of the life she has made with her family, rather than something outside of it.  It is very much an older approach to making and doing; one that seeks to serve the needs of the household and to enhance what is already there, rather than simply add to the "stuff" in the household (not that there isn't a place for this sort of making, but sometimes, the means don't serve the ends).  

She writes:

"The life I have cobbled together is full—of delicious babies wearing handmade clothing, of creating—every which way, all day long, of a husband who is proud to wear the things I make him out in public— then texts me when people compliment them.  I really love my life and I am proud of it.  I want to share more of it here.  So to the man who said I had my hands full—yes!  They really are.  And I like them that way."

I really love thinking about creating in this way--as a service to the family, as a way to support the life you lead.  I always struggle to find the balance between creating for the sake of having busy hands or closet variety, and creating in the service of adding something to the world or learning something new. 

I recently finished reading Matthew B. Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft.  I have his next book in my stack, and am eager to read it, especially after finishing this one.  He writes about the ways in which trade work is undervalued in our current economic system, and how (the vastly more popular) knowledge work is so devoid of human agency and meaning.  

"What follows [this introduction] is an attempt to map the overlapping territories intimated by the phrases "meaningful work" and "self reliance."  Both ideals are tied to a struggle for individual agency, which I find to be at the very center of modern life....Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces.  We worry that we are becoming stupider, and begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense." (7, emphasis in original text).

I think there is goodness in conquering a craft, in taking the time and attention to learn and learn, and learn some more, and to continually plumb the depths you do not know and still want to learn.

Writes Crawford:

"This seems to capture the kind of iterated self-criticism, in light of some ideal that is never quite attained, whereby the craftsman advances in his art.  You give it your best, learn from your mistakes, and the next time get a little closer to the image you started with in your head....Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right" (13, 20).

He writes about how trade craft is something that is visceral, creative, and integrative, as well as being soul-satisfying at the end of the day:

"We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so that we can be responsible for it.  This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home.  Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy" (8).

Another point he makes is that tools are something integral to the human experience, and that to remove agency from tools (and the wielder of said tools) is to remove meaning, creativity, and to objectify or monetize everything.  He notes that so much of what we think of as "creativity" is really just "choosing", and that those choices are largely dictated to us by a bevy of marketing executives whose purpose is not to foster the creative self, but rather to make money (68).  He notes that as our society has become monetized, so too our wants and needs become disordered and chaotic, and we lose our ability to create, to have agency not only over our stuff, but over the doing in our lives.  He takes his argument a step further in his discussion of tools and technology:

"Countercultural people on the Left and Right alike complain about "the problem of technology."  The complaint usually centers on our alleged obsession with control, as though the problem were the objectification of everything by a subject who is intoxicated with power, leading to a triumph of "instrumental rationality."  But what if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down, and the use of tools is really fundamental to the way human being inhabit the world....If [Anaxagoras and Heidegger] are right, then the problem of technology is almost the opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not "instrumental rationality," it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodied kind that is original to us.  We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar" (68-69, emphasis in original text).

There is so much good in this book, I can't say enough about it.  I think his cosmology dovetails very nicely with my friend's way of making and doing.  It is what I aspire to--that the work of my hands would be in service to the life of our family, of our ethos, of our household, and that, at the end of the day, I would find it all very satisfying and soul-feeding. 

Sometimes I get in my own way, overthinking, over-analyzing everything.  And sometimes the reality is that I can't do all the things I want to do when I want to do them because the reality of modern life is one lived largely in isolation.  I think what is hard is the sense I have that what I make is optional, or just a hobby to do when the household tasks are complete.  I want to really take in this mindset that what I make is part of the tasks of the household, and that it is all integrated somehow.  There is also a kind of internal tension for me, in that I primarily make things for myself (although I am constantly fixing or repairing things for others in my family), and the making feeds me, but when I make for others, it doesn't; energy goes out rather than coming in. I do occasionally make things for others, as a favor, or the odd commission, but I can't make a habit of it because of how much it takes out of me.  I can't explain it, and wish I could.  

It is true that my children are still at an age where they demand a ton from me, at all hours of the day and night, and there are the health issues and so forth, so there isn't much going into me outside of my own (admittedly selfish) creating.  I do hope that as we all get a bit older that I will be able to better integrate my making into the needs of the household. 

All book quotes from:
Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft. New York: Penguin, 2009.