The green woodworking world is full of rabbit holes. Head off in any direction, and you might tumble into a shrink pot, or chase a fanbird, or take a good long rest on a sweet chair. It is a wonder we make progress in any particular discipline, given all the potential distractions. But for many of us, certain forms seem to tug on us, and for me, it's bowl turning and spoon carving. While I have tried my hand at a lot of adjacent projects, like basketry and casework, I always return to treen. Why exactly I can’t say, but part of the answer has to do with flow-state and the state or place in which I live.
When done well, both carving and turning demand a deftness and confidence of motion that you just can’t overthink. As I talked about in my previous post, you have to turn off the logical part of your brain and allow your body to make a motion, take a cut, define a curve, without a lot of chatter from your prefrontal cortex. It is like dancing with the wood; think too hard about the two-step, and you will trip over your own feet. Related to this is the fact that both carving and turning are subtractive arts. While the chairmaker and the basketweaver can always replace a janky rung or a weak weaver, the carver/turner has to really commit. Once a piece of wood is gone, you can’t put it back. When you execute a cut, you are relying only on your skill, dexterity, and judgement to see you through. As you let your body flow through the motion, it is sometimes hard to keep your prefrontal cortex from coming online and exclaiming, “Wow, I’m doing it!” If it does, you often mess up. Like driving at night, we can imagine where we can go, but we can’t see the destination and instead have to trust our skills to get us around the next turn. As David Pye points out in his essay on the “Workmanship of Risk,” the less we rely on tools for repeatability, the deeper we venture into the realm of craft, a place where deftness, serendipity, and creativity rule and where at any moment it could all go terribly wrong.
That creative “place,” if I can extend the analogy, often feels especially alien in my world. In college, one of my majors was comparative religion, where I became especially interested in how Eastern philosophies imagine the world in fundamentally different ways than we do in the West. I am reminded of those lessons when I think about how carving, turning, and the creative flow state feel cathartic for me. Take, for example, the notion of creation. In the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, creation occurs when an all-knowing maker assembles life from constituent parts, looking at the workpiece from the outside in. In many Eastern cultures, creation is not assembled but instead flows, grows, and divides into existence from a creative force found within a piece. Or consider language. In the West, we build meaning one letter at a time, like using a spotlight to pick our way through a dark room. In the East, folks see the whole meaning at once, in the flash of an ideogram that illuminates the whole space. We even see this difference in the way words and parts of speech work. English is exceptionally good at identifying, delineating, and classifying, possibly as a result of the trajectory of Western society: Renaissance--Enlightenment--Scientific Revolution. What English doesn’t do especially well is handle flow and change. As Alan Watts writes, “‘What happens to my fist … when I open my hand?’ The object (the fist) miraculously vanishes because an action was disguised by a part of speech usually assigned to a thing!” In Chinese, many words serve as both nouns and verbs, and as such, those who speak Chinese have an easier time recognizing that objects are also events. All things flow.
As I settle in to turn another bowl, I wonder if I am in part trying to correct for a sort of cultural bias. I am leaving behind notions of assembly, of delineation, of logic. I do not imagine a curve as a series of straight lines plotted on graph paper. Instead, as every woodturner knows, I envision the form in a flash of creativity and insight, and once I start a curve, the sweet sweep of the entire form has already been set, and the only thing to do is surrender to it and flow.
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