Lambs Loud

4.22.13 (Class and Shooting Board Shim)

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:59:52 -0400

Last four months have been traveling to VT on weekends for a woodworking class. 100% certain it’s the most concentrated learning I have ever done—most useful information per unit of time. I want to start writing about the class but to respect everybody’s privacy maybe it’s like best to call the teacher a letter instead of his name, like K.

A shooting board is a flat rectangular board with a small ridge at one end. It bench top hand planing jig for (often) jointing edges. You secure a piece by holding it against the ridge and then one of the piece’s edges hangs over the shooting board’s edge slightly. Then you can plane the overhanging edge by sliding your plane blade against it, running the side of your plane over the workbench top. The geometry of the shooting board, the workbench top, the plane and your gesture determine how the planed piece will look: if the shooting board’s ridge is at a 45 degree angle, you’ll cut a 45 degree angle into the piece; if the setup is square, the piece ends up square too. It’s a lot easier to rely on square tools and a flat bench than to rely on a steady freehand pass.

The problem with a shooting board is that it holds the piece at a constant height. Each time you run your plane past the shooting board, the piece meets the blade at the exact same place. The blade dulls quickly at that one place and you waste time and steel sharpening the whole blade. An heigh-adjustable shooting board would solve the problem: you could distribute the work all over the blade and slow the dulling.

K’s solution is simpler though: just shim the shooting board. He puts a block under one end of the shooting board and the piece is held diagonally to the table and the plane. I guess a visual image for it could be watching the rear of a tractor trailer pass by an on ramp, standing across the highway, on the shoulder, looking across as the truck passes. The highest point of the on ramp starts at wheel level and as the truck passes the ramp the ramp’s highest point “rises” with respect to the truck until it reaches the top of the trailer. The wheel to the top of the trailer is the plane blade, the truck is the plane and the ramp is the shimmed shooting board. A shimmed shooting board uses the entire blade.

Seems very hard to describe these physical and technique situations. What feels clear to a person who has felt and seen the technique is prob. not clear in the language he thinks it in. The language is like about memory more than creating I guess. For someone who has used a shooting board, “shim the shooting board!” is enough to capture the whole idea. So, worried that these posts are a little self indulgent but they feel really helpful to me, they help me feel kind of like smooshed up at the edge of what language is good at helping happen.

4.16.13 (R.P. Blackmur)

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:27:51 -0400

” … the poet meditating his job of poiesis, meditating as if making an aesthetic: unearthing, discovering, exploring, beseeching a skill which, when he has it, will do the work over which otherwise he has no control. This is the skill of inspiration, of invoking the muses by ritual, in short the skill of incantation. It is the skill of skills, the mystery of the craft. It is how you get through the mere skills of poetry (what may be learned or rehearsed) into the skill of language itself (whatever reality is there) without losing the mere skills of poetry. It is then that you find that the poetry no longer matters; it matters, but no longer.

R.P. Blackmur, “Unappeasable and Peregrine”, Form and Value in Modern Poetry.

4.14.13 (Eastern Arbor Vitae)

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:08:07 -0400

Given a hand size book called Trees You Want to Know by Donald Culross Peattie, published 1934. Each page has a tree drawing and description text. Here’s the text for Eastern Arbor Vitae:

“Shape a very compact symmetrical pyramid, up to 70 ft. tall. Trunk often forked and lobed, or buttressed, clothed to the base by the branches. Bark ash gray to light brown, separating into flat shreddy strips, spirally twisted. Branches short, horizontal, or the lowest down sweeping. Scales gray green, closely overlapping and thickly investing every twig to form a beautiful flat forked spray of foliage; each scale with a raised glandular spot which gives off a sweet camphor-like fragrance. Cones small, about 1/2 in. long. Ranges swamps from s. Lab. to Man. and Minn., and from Pa. s. on the Appalachians, where very rare. The wood, fragrant, soft and brittle but very durable is used for fence posts, rails, ties, spools and shingles. This is a superb tree, giving to the bogs of the eastern states much of their charm.”

4.12.13

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:02:13 -0400

“We don’t have art. We try to do everything well.” (Balinese saying, quoted by Mierle Laderman Ukeles in “Manifesto for maintenance art 1969!”.)

11.1.12 (Tea ceremony: Late April and the garden)

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:50:00 -0400

The window to the tea master’s garden is in a small preparation closet that the guests sit facing. During the ceremony a paper sliding door covers the garden window but when the tea master goes into the preparation closet she slides the door back and the room fills with sun. She kneels gathering her tools and the guests look into the garden. Always there is a beautiful attention place: first, going into the room, the scroll and flower arrangement; then, during the tea master’s preparation, the garden; last the ceremony itself—the performance and its tools.

The garden’s purpose is to display the seasons as they go and change. Always when I ask my Japanese friends how beauty in nature feels they tell me it is clarity, recognizing four distinct seasons. The garden is a map for the year or a calendar.

There is a five-tier stone lantern like a miniature pagoda. The lantern has five recesses for winter candles. Lit candles are dimmed by paper at the openings.. Itsuki-san told me: “Mild light, not direct light.”

Late April is the end of the cherry blossoms and the first willows changing. The cherry blossoms have been swept off the branches by wind and rain. They float and land on the ground and water like snow. Birds are audible in the tearoom over and around the preparation sounds.

8.6.12 (Techniques: Saw 3, guides)

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:21:00 -0400

A February post talks about saw teeth, how they are all set at a tiny angle, one to the left, the next to the right, off center. The teeth, then, are wider, just a little little bit, than the rest of the blade.

Some cuts are made with guides. Starting out, I used a guide for almost all my cuts. Now I use a guide for miter cuts only. Guides are wooden because it’s easy to run the saw into the guide, and a metal guide would dull or chip the teeth. The downside to a wood guide is that a wonky cut can tear up the guide and ruin it. That’s okay though, a quick pass on the table saw fixes it right up. I guess that puts guides in the long-term disposable tool category, like how edge tools get sharpened away to a handle. Very slow ice cream bars. All guides have two parts: a long flat part with an edge to ride the saw along, and a short, wide part to hold the guide steady against the work. The shape of the long flat part and the relationship between it and the short, wide part determine the cut.

When I started using guides I tried holding the saw firmly against the guide’s edge because I thought pressing would keep the saw’s path regular. The saws have flexible blades though, even the dozuki noko, with its metal spine—and the fact that the blade is flexible, together with the fact that the blade is skinnier than the teeth’s set, means that pressing the saw blade against the guide causes the teeth to curve. The blade bends away from the guide and the kerf ends up an arc or a diagonal.

The guide’s not for pressing I guess, it is more like a quiet suggestion. The saw almost doesn’t touch it. Almost? I don’t know. I think the saw-guide gap is like a magic place, it only exists a little bit, like maybe if you wanted to get to a fairy kingdom you could try going by way of sawing with a guide. (That sentence’s syntax is b/c my dad used to read me Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! by Dr. Seuss: “If you like you can go by lion’s tail, or stamp yourself, and go by mail!”) I guess you hold the guide at the line, position your nose along the saw’s path, hold your sawing arm at your side, place your hand near the saw’s handle’s end, go for it trying to keep the saw straight and bounding that crazy gap, and then hope for the best.

Ugh, I don’t want all these posts to just turn into like “Something about woodworking! A metaphor!” but that is how it feels a lot—sawing with a guide is a good lesson for me about how trying should be. My tendency is to think that trying harder will get better results, or pressing harder will keep the cut regular. I think what I am learning is—not profound!, simple and obvious but learning it is helping me…—strength and looseness can work together. Or, Taylor and Joshua both’d say, “Hurry up and slow down!” That sentence is like a line in a Donne poem I read this morning called “The Good-Morrow”: “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,”. I think there are four experiences in that sentence? He sees his face reflected in her pupils, she sees her face reflected in his pupils, he sees her face, she sees his face? Then though, there are four terms: my face, thine eye, thine, mine—and the four terms aren’t the four experiences. Maybe what I want to learn is like what that space is between the four terms and the four experiences, it feels a lot like the saw-guide gap.

8.2.12 (Techniques: Saw 2, transfer)

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 21:37:00 -0400

Sawing technique is transfer work too. The board has four faces to saw through: a far face and a near face, both vertical, a top face and a bottom face, both horizontal. Each carpenter has his own sawing algorithm, but all the algorithms have the same start. The cut always starts at the far upper corner and the first steps go: follow the drawknife line with a shallow cut on the far face and the top face, making two kerf lines, then cut diagonally, using the kerf lines as guides, until the cut is deep enough to connect the far bottom corner with the near upper corner.

Here’s where the algorithms diverge:

One carpenter pulls the cut down the near vertical face and through the bottom face from inside, without changing his position or the board’s.

One carpenter cuts shallow kerfs through the near face and the bottom face—it is hard to write about the algorithms with board turns because “near far upper lower” change when the board’s position changes—and makes a second diagonal cut through those new kerf lines. The two diagonal cuts meet in the middle.

The algorithm I am using, the one Tateshita-san taught me is: new kerf down the near face and a second diagonal cut connecting the far upper corner with the near lower corner. A cross-section here, looking at the kerf you’d see a capital w with parallel vertical outside lines and a horizontal line connecting the two highest points, or a rectangle, both diagonals drawn to divide the rectangle into four sections and the bottom section missing. The last step in my algorithm is to saw straight down through from above, through the rectangle’s last section or the little mountain shape in the w. Great white shark man surrendering, cut off his head.

I think there are two hard parts to sawing. The first is following the drawknife score: each tooth is pulling through and slicing fiber, there is a tooth-by-tooth feeling, plus each line is several saw pulls, pull-by-pull feeling—hard to regulate the line when the line is made up of pulls and the pulls are made up of tooth slices. That problem’s made trickier by the fact that the hardest place to stay regular is the cut’s start—later in the cut you can use the so-far kerf to guide the line to the end but in the beginning there’s no guide, just feel and looking—and the cut’s start is where regularity matters the most because a small mistake at the start gets projected through the line’s whole length, a tiny tiny angle waver can turn into a millimeter or more across the board’s surface. The transfer in the first problem is transferring the straight perpendicular drawknife line to your sawing.

The second hard part about sawing is transferring the perpendicular straightness from face to face. Concentrating on following the line on one face, it’s easy to forget that the saw is also making a shallow, shallow cut in the two adjacent faces. Say you turn the saw slightly to stay on the top face’s drawknife line—that turn might destroy the careful edge you made on the far face. Or, maybe you are making a diagonal cut in two kerfs to connect opposite corners: one mistake I make often at that step is, because I am afraid to slip and hit the kerfs’ careful edges, I draw the saw a tiny tiny angle away from the edges, the teeth and blade are not quite vertical—then, my diagonal cut is not flat, it is slightly rounded and I end up with a baseball bat top shaped board end.

I guess the whole algorithm situation is about how many cuts a carpenter feels comfortable maintaining regularity during. The more cuts you make, the more transfers and the greater the opportunity for error. Then, though, when you have more kerfs cut, accurate kerfs, they guide the saw into the board and the cut is neater.

I think for me thinking about the transfers feels like a dream about communication, communicating a geometry across distances and among tools, organized by knowhow and feel. Maybe part of that is thinking about how the saw’s business end is teeth. There’s also a feeling of being in my own brain and waiting to see whether the transfer worked. My muscle sensitivity isn’t accurate enough to feel the cut’s regularity or irregularity unless it is way way off. It is every time drawing my body back, then suspension and checking, then quiet happiness or quiet frustration. Vs., trying out a new Japanese construction or word and being 100% unsure it’ll be understood at all. I bought my friend a cake from a store called “Tomato Lantern” and I thought that that name was insane, like a dark at the edges wilting waxy melting wrinkly tomato lantern, not appetizing, not a good cake thought—until my friend pointed out that lots of restaurants here have red lanterns at the doors and then it was “Of course!” and “Great!”. I tried to tell my teacher that story and I think he thought I was telling him “I bought my friend a cake!” and then just like pointing out for no reason that a particular restaurant near where we were standing had red lanterns.

8.6.12 (Techniques: Sharpening 5, transfer)

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 21:33:29 -0400

Sharpening means transferring the waterstone’s flat surface to a blade’s bevel and ura. The stone starts out flat but cups quickly unless the blade is moved evenly over the surface. That is, good sharpening is a reciprocal transfer: the stone keeps the blade flat and the blade keeps the stone flat. The blade is much smaller than the stone, though, so to keep the stone flat, your body has to organize the blade’s path. I think it is a drawing problem: drawing curves with your muscles and bones to make two flatnesses. Emma told me about Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s photographs looking at workers’ motions: lights on the body and long exposures, the light paths track how the body moves. I like to imagine my sharpening motions are tracked that way, wild curvy light gestures organizing how the stone’s flatness transfers to the blade and transfers back to the stone.

8.1.12 (Techniques: Sashigane and shiragaki 1, transfer)

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 21:32:00 -0400

Feels like many woodworking techniques have in common a “transfer”. I think it is: projecting or communicating a geometry from place to place. Tool to tool, work to tool, tool to work, work to work.

Before sawing, you mark a line across four adjacent faces with the drawknife and trysquare. A line on all four faces has a double function: first, it allows you to see the line to saw, whatever the board’s orientation is; second, it checks the board for square. “Checking for square” means checking that these four surfaces are at right angles. The board is square when the fourth line ends at the first line’s start. That’s not important for sawing. It’s for construction, later. The sawline is an invisible way to check for square: when the cut is made, the saw line disappears under the teeth.

The drawknife line involves two transfers. First, you’re transferring the trysquare’s straight edge, perpendicular to the arm that meets board’s straight edge, to the board’s surface. Along that line the drawknife slices across the grain, cutting the board’s fibers. Second, you’re transferring the drawknife line from face to face. The drawknife line is three dimensional. It is a triangular prism, negative. You can put your eye level with the board’s edge and see into the drawknife line, through it to the opposite side. You’ll see light gleaming in a triangle. The triangle is the shape the drawknife’s bevel leaves: straight line down, sharp angle up to the right. The drawknife’s ura, its back, repeats that shape—the knife has two long parallel edges and a short, diagonal cutting edge. The repetition is not an aesthetic consideration. The shape is functional in both cases. The blade’s cutline is a sharp right triangle because the ura is flat. The bevel rises up from the cutting edge to form the knife’s thickness. Imagine that the blade’s shape is more like a chisel, less like an axe: flat face and a diagonal rise back from the edge. The ura has to be flat in order to ride flat along the metal trysquare. The trysquare’s arm is transferred straight down into the wood. The ura itself is shaped in the same narrow right triangle that the blade’s kerf traces. You hold the drawknife upright and draw the edge’s lowest point over the wood. The rest of the blade extends up and back toward you, a centimeter or two long.

The challenge transferring the trysquare’s arm line to the board’s surface is that the drawknife must be held against the trysquare with enough force to regulate the line, but not so much force that the trysquare moves left. The left hand holds the trysquare firmly against the right hand’s press, the drawknife’s. The gesture is: forcing your hands together, like praying or applause, except the knife and square get in the way.

7.16.12 (Tea ceremony: tea bowl)

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 18:18:00 -0400

The tea bowl’s diameter is about the distance from mouth to brow. To drink from the tea bowl you tilt it to your face and it covers your eyes, blocks the room from view. Everything inside the bowl, the glaze pattern and the tea, is too close for focus—and the tea touches your lips. I think the bowl’s size tells you: “Turn your vision off now, this is a taste experience.”

5.16.12 (Tea ceremony: Entering the room)

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:45:00 -0400

Tea ceremony in Japan began with Zen monks and spread to the samurai. Tea houses have small entrances, to force everyone to leave armor and weapons outside. That way, safety is ensured and, without external images of rank, the participants are equal for a time.

Everyone has a fan. Women’s fans come in a variety of colors but men’s fans are always purple, and are larger than women’s. The participants also bring white paper napkins, elegant Japanese paper that holds its form and makes crisp, clean sounds when you move it, and an implement like a small letter opener—it’s for sweets, for cutting to bite size and for spearing to carry. A gong announces the guests’ presence to the host.

The way to enter the room: place the fan on the ground outside the room, kneel in front of the fan and bow. Still kneeling, place the fan over the threshold and bow again. Then, move the fan in further and scoot, knees and fists, behind it into the room. Once in the room, stand and go to the flower arrangement and calligraphy hanging to admire them—in this tea room, the flower arrangement and calligraphy hanging were in the corner furthest from the door. Last, go to the stand where the implements are and admire them.

The objects in the room—implements, hanging and flowers—have been carefully selected by the host. Admiring them feels like a way to feel the host’s presence in the room preceding ours. Then, though, the guests arrive in the room before the host enters to begin the ceremony: we are here before her, she was here before us.

The guests place their bodies 16 reed woven rows from the tatami’s edge. It is tiring to kneel still for three hours—the tatami is hard and ridged. Itsuki-san tells me that tea ceremony requires exercise and that tea masters end up with knee injuries, like professional skateboarders.

"And a she-wolf, who with...

Sun, 06 May 2012 07:04:47 -0400

…all her cravings seemed laden in her meagreness, and already had made many folk to live forlorn,—she caused me so much heaviness, with the fear that came from sight of her, that I lost hope of the height, and such as he is that gaineth willingly, and the time arrives that makes him lose, who in all his thoughts weeps and is sad, such made me the beast without repose that, coming on against me, little by little was pushing me back thither where the Sun is silent.”

5.5.12 (Metonaphor)

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:57:00 -0400

Charles Sanders Pierce classified signs in three categories according to how the signifier is related to its signified: icon, index, symbol. The icon is related to its signified by resemblance. “Icon” corresponds to metaphor because both icon and metaphor work by resemblance. A photograph of R.M. Rilke is an icon because it looks like Rilke.

The index is related to its signified by physical or temporal contiguity, by association rather than by resemblance. The index corresponds to metonymy. Rilke’s gravestone is an index because it’s pointing to where his body is. It’s associated with him. The text on his gravestone is an icon too—it’s associated with him because he wrote it: “Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight / of being no one’s sleep under so many / lids.”

The symbol is related to its signified by an arbitrary convention. The symbol is close to how Saussure thinks a linguistic sign works—there’s nothing inherent about a linguistic signifier that links it to its signified. The reason “rose” means “the object rose” isn’t because there’s anything rosy about the word “rose”, the sign is an arbitrary convention.

“Rose” is tricky though because first you get “rrrr” and that sounds like an engine starting, like “getting ready to go”, and the lower case “r” looks like a stalk and stem with a still-closed bud hanging down; then you get “O” and that’s like what you would say if you saw a beautiful blossom and the letter “O” looks like a rose bloom; then there’s “ssss” and that sounds like water sizzling to steam, how the bloom’s petals dry and wrinkle, and the letter “s” looks like the loopy path a petal takes when it falls; then there’s “E”, the silent e, silence like absence and the upper-case “E” looks like the dark prongs at a rosehip’s head when the bloom’s gone, are those the flower’s sepals? To make the visuals work, you have to use a lower case r, then o and s can be upper or lower case, then you have to use the upper case E—the whole progression, small, then small or large, then large, is like growing as the word goes along. Another way to say the same idea is, everyone knows that to say “snake” you start out saying what a snake says.

There’s a feeling you get when an experience is working more than way at once. One version is when the experience is an icon and an index, or a metaphor and a metonym. I like to call that experience “metonaphor”. Here are a few examples:

1. A rake looks like bare trees. Say you wanted to know when to use a rake, all you’d have to is remember to look up: when the trees look like the rake, start rakin’.

2. Last January I made blue mittens.

3. You put on dark glasses to watch an eclipse and then you take them off, the moon passes over the sun.

4. Galvanized steel, coated with a thin layer of zinc, has a crystallized pattern called a “spangle”. You galvanize steel to make it resistant to rust. Good for outdoor applications. The spangle looks like rainclouds or like the dirt residue evaporated drops leave.

5. Breath is a metaphor for “spirit”. Like, a spirit moves in the way breath moves, or wind. It’s visible by its effects only. Breath moves objects—say, feathers: you can blow feathers and the feathers have a new form, grouping tendencies, body but it’s just motion. Then, breath is a metonym for spirit (I guess it’s helpful that “breath” and “death” rhyme) because one sign you’re dead is you stop breathing.

6. My friend spent too much on expensive shoes and told me about it, sheepishly. She used the emoticon “:-$” to mean “embarrassed”…I guess that’s supposed to look like when you move your jaw to the side without opening your mouth and your lips twist open?

7. Knitting mittens, knit stitches look like holding hands.

8. “Comma” means “cutting”, from Gk. “koptein” meaning “to cut off”—like, a clause is cut off from the rest of its sentence. “Comma” and “hatchet” are cognates. A comma looks like a hatchet in some fonts. When it doesn’t look like a hatchet it looks like a hatchet business end’s curved edge, or like the swipe you make with a hatchet, or like a hatchet’s cut mark. You can use a hatchet to cut down a tree and some trees are used to make paper. The tree traces a comma shape when it falls and there’s a pause between “Timber!” and the crashing noise. Paper’s involved then too I guess—so, turning the page makes a little pause when you’re reading and a page when you turn it looks like a comma, looking at it edge on.

9. “Etc.” has two motions in it, reaching back and extending forward. “Et” reaches back to what was just said and “cetera” extends forward, to as far as the listener can imagine. “Etc.” cuts off: the speaker’s done listing and has to trust that the listener can see how to continue the list (—it’s a little like, “And…see?”, or “&c.”). The reaching back part reaches back to what has been said—and the reaching back part is “et”, it’s been said in its entirety, it’s not abbreviated. The “c.” is the extending part and it extends into what hasn’t been said, into the abbreviated list region—it’s the part of “Etc.” that is abbreviated, too.

5.4.12 (Tea Ceremony: I am an American)

Fri, 04 May 2012 19:39:00 -0400

Mysterious to me is how the emphasis on transience, on a powerful moment, meets the tea ceremony’s 500 year tradition. My instinct is to think, “Make it new!” Make your own way with your own materials. Two months ago, the first time I was at a tea ceremony, my first thought was, “How can I make my own version? What about a coffee ceremony or a drawing ceremony or a knitting ceremony or a dance party ceremony?” I guess that’s pretty American, that reaction. My gut tells me that “ichi-go, ichi-e” is a problem for formal invention, not for received techniques.

One way transience and tradition meet here is at a cultural vocabulary everyone knows. People I meet here tend to be tuned in to seasonal changes as they happen—order of birds and blossoms, a change’s typical date. I think that that knowledge is rare in the U.S.

Knowledge about seasonal changes means attention to the moment and attention to time cycles generally: a plum blossom means “early spring, right now, the beginning of the change” and also “all past early springs”. The same knowledge works with the “kigo”, the seasonal term in a haiku. Here’s where I wonder if there can be like a social dimension to description. It’s not just that the scene happens at a specific time and is a generalizable experience about “Spring”—it’s also that seeing the scene is your individual experience and the cultural knowledge that it confirms is a social experience. You have a plum blossom experience and it fits into “all historical plum blossom experiences” and “everyone in Japan having plum blossom experiences”.

Then, though, the cultural vocabulary in the tea ceremony, the mechanism that allows these experiences to happen, has to draw on a tradition—otherwise it wouldn’t be comprehensible. I guess it could be comprehensible but it would be comprehensible for the host first and then later for the guests. You lose time communicating a new form. As it is, there’s a “now” and “then” experience in the tea ceremony, “the unique tea ceremony we’re at today” and “the long history whereby the unique tea ceremony today is rendered comprehensible to us”. That “now” and “then” experience, for me, is related to the “now” and “then” experience in seasonal knowledge (“this spring”, “springs in the past”)—and it feels like the form that the social dimension takes (“my spring”, “spring for Japanese society”) is repeating that “now” and “then” form.

4.29.12 (Tea Ceremony: "Ichi-go, ichi-e")

Fri, 04 May 2012 19:38:00 -0400

The organizing principle in the tea ceremony (“sado”, The Way of Tea) is “ichi-go, ichi-e”. It means “one time, one meeting”. The guests at the ceremony assemble in a unique configuration at a unique time. The circumstance can never be repeated. The ceremony, then, has to account for the people present and the day, the seasonal moment.

All sensations, all elements are brought to bear on that problem. Itsuki-san told me, “It’s a deep, deep world. Maybe, endless.” The utensils and containers, the type of tea, garden, the furniture, the flower arrangement, the hanging calligraphy scroll, the tatami arrangement, the sweets—these are the parameters that have to be considered. The practitioner’s technique organizes these parameters, together with a masterful performance (“How do you step from one room to another? How do you stand up? How do you fold the silk cloth? What sound do you make when you fold the silk cloth, skin on silk? How do you replace a container’s lid?”), into a full-body and full-brain experience that happens once only. I think the experience is asking everyone, host and participants, to feel at the same time the beauty at each moment and how that beauty fades. What the beauty is is hard to understand. Part of it is an overwhelming clarity that combines simplicity with craft rigor. Here, my brain says, “Oliver, no—that’s just your values and your values are just hopes.”

What I do know is, holding that intensity and that transience in your mind at once isn’t easy—and it isn’t an idea, it’s a practice, it’s all 100% available to the senses, people devote their entire lives to carrying it out. It asks you to bring your full attention, like all your Person resources, to the table (there isn’t a table, it’s all on the floor and so are you, as in “getting rid of the pedestal”).

One question that’s helping me feel it through is, like, why “one meeting, one time”? Why not “one time”, or “one meeting”, or “one”, or “once”? Plus the way the rhythm repeats in Japanese, “hm-hm HM, hm-hm HM”.

4.30.12 (Tea Ceremony: Room layout)

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:28:00 -0400

Tatami cover the tea room floor. A tatami is a mat of woven rush straw over a rice straw core. Tatami is Japan’s traditional flooring material. A tatami’s length is always twice its width and there are complicated rules for tatami layout, determined by abstract formal principles (“four corners must never converge”), the room’s function and the time of year. Tatami dimensions and layout determine the room’s architecture and function. A entrance might be one tatami length long. In winter, special tatami with square holes are used in tea rooms to make room for the kettle’s in-floor fire pit. A kimono’s dimensions allow it to fold over a tatami for wrinkeless storage.

The tea room I went to is an “eight tatami design”, a large square space. Each side is two tatami lengths (four widths, two widths and a length) long. The eight tatami are arranged in the following way: from the entrance—which is in a corner, second forward on the left—two tatami extend into the room to meet the opposite wall on their short sides; the tatami touching the opposite wall is met on its right long side by a third tatami’s short side. This third tatami’s short side in turn meets a fourth tatami’s long side, whose two short sides meet the opposite wall and a fifth tatami’s short side. The fifth tatami’s second short side meets the room’s the fourth corner and its long side meets the sixth tatami’s short side. The sixth tatami’s second short side meets the first tatami’s long side. These six tatami form a square with an square empty middle. The empty middle’s sides’ dimensions are all one tatami length long. The middle, then, is filled by two tatami whose orientation is like that of tatami one, two, four and five—short sides to the opposite wall and the wall with the entrance. I tried out alternative arrangements and I might be wrong but I think that this solution (or a rotation of it) is the only possible tatami arrangement for the room’s dimensions that fulfills the rule “four corners must never converge”. Going in a circle around the room, starting at the door and following the direction in the description there, we can number the outer tatami one through six and the two inner tatami seven (left from the entrance) and eight (right from the entrance).

The entrance is one tatami length long and it extends to the right from its corner, opening over tatami one’s short side and the left half of tatami six’s long side. It’s a “shoji”, a sliding paper screen in a wood frame and a wood lattice. The wall opposite the entrance is also a shoji. The right side wall has two openings, each one a tatami length long. One is the room’s alcove, along tatami four, where a flower arrangement and calligraphy scroll are displayed. One, along tatami five, is a closet that remains closed during the ceremony. The left wall has a one tatami length long shoji in the center that opens on the small tea preparation room. The tea preparation room’s left wall is a glass sliding door through which a garden is visible.

The room is nearly empty when we enter. We ring a gong on the left to announce to the tea ceremony master that we’ve arrived. On tatami two’s far half is a small stand for the tea container and cold water container. In tatami seven’s far left corner is the fire pit, where the water in the kettle is boiling over charcoal. Tatami eight is for the three guests to sit on and tatami three is for the teacher (ha ha). It is forbidden to step on the line between two tatami.

4.28.12 (Tea Ceremony: Sounds)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 08:54:00 -0400

Sato-san told me: “There is no background music. So, please enjoy these sounds.”

The room is quiet during the ceremony. There is low conversation occasionally, word word word word. A few actions during preparation make a sound. The silk cloth is folded—you can hear the fingers drawing over it, folding it and pointing to the fold. Next the kettle lid is removed and, after the focus has been at the pitch and amplitude of fingers on silk, the boiling sound is a shock. Pulsing very loud. Realizing then that the boiling was audible before the lid was removed.

Water is gathered in the ladle and poured into the bowl. There is no pause in the pouring: it is a continuous lean dripping, repeating, high and gentle. I think it is the sound twin of the tea’s taste: bitter, close, quiet.

Birds twitter from the garden. They aren’t visible. One call is a hovering tone that repeats the way the water sounds and conversation sounds repeat—all together, alternating and overlapping.

There is a slow hum, high, the birds’ pitch range, that the teacher explains is charcoal smoke and the iron kettle.

The host doesn’t look at the guests so the last sip’s sound is a signal that the bowl is finished: a sharp, low inhale.

The teacher replaces the cold water container’s ceramic lid, maybe 10 in. in diameter, at it does not make a sound. It must contact the container only once. It’s right there to see and there’s no sound, it is like the inverse of the birds—what is that experience?

Often one sense is active and another inactive. My experience is that that feeling emphasizes what is available to the senses and what is not. I guess that’s a way to feel that’s been on my mind for a while—I think it’s the concrete and the abstract, reality and the imagination, metonymy and metaphor. Another example is fitting joint: you can see the seam where the pieces meet but, running your fingers over the seam, you can’t feel it. That can be sanding, tearing up the fibers into a smoothness.

4.18.12 (Word order)

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 23:08:00 -0400

One dream about communication is that word order be sensation order. I think I already wrote about Bishop’s poem “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” in an earlier post, the lines that go, “…with outstretched arm and hand / points”. First the arm, then the hand, then the finger, pointing: you move down the arm as it stretches out, you experience the entire gesture in the order it happens.

Here’s an example in Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: “It must move / As little as possible”. My favorite example is the end of “The Man on the Dump”, by Stevens: “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.” “The truth” is “The the”, then “The truth”.

It happens in names too. “Ground floor” is one example: first your imagination makes the ground and then it puts a floor on the ground, just like the building being built. “Coke bottle”: once the Coke is done, you’re left with the bottle. “Baseball bat”. “One another”. “Train compartment”. “Alphabet”, like “alpha”, “bet[a]”, then the missing “a” starts the alphabet. Some names are in the wrong order, like “magnolia blossom” and “reading glasses”. The word “elbow” is like crossing your elbows: first L shapes, then a bow.

4.14.12 (Techniques: Sharpening 4)

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 02:23:00 -0400

Here is photo of a sharpened chisel. It took nine hours to sharpen, an afternoon and two mornings.

I have a lot to learn still. The edge could describe a more refined line, I need to speed up, I need to stop creating a mistake every time I fix one, my stone still ended up unevenly worn—but the blade I made here is a big improvement.

There were two fixes. The first one is a position fix: now, my L.H. pointer and middle fingers hold the blade flush to the stone and my R.H. pointer finger and thumb grasp the blade’s sides and move it over the stone. In the old position my R.H. pointer finger also rested on the blade. Both my hands were pushing and holding at once, so, in addition to maintaining the blade’s flatness and evenness, I had to worry about keeping my two hands’ motions equal. The new position separates pushing (R.H.) and holding (L.H.), and that helps keep my hands from interfering with one another.

The position fix also means I can draw my R.H. pinky around the handle’s underside where the steel meets the wood. The pinky helps register the angle between bevel and stone and it’s also possible to adjust that angle by strengthening or loosening the pinky’s grip.

The second fix is a procedure fix. The old procedure was to flatten the bevel completely, then, having ended up with a slanty edge, grind the edge completely even. The problem was, evening the edge would ruin the bevel’s flatness and I’d have to repeat the first step, and then the second step, forever and ever until it was time to go home or until I got so frustrated that I just gave up (I don’t like to give up but I need my chisels to practice the actual joinery exercises, so I have to stop eventually). The new procedure is to keep an eye on the bevel and the edge and move back and forth more frequently between flattening and evening. Each fix hopefully fixes a smaller problem and causes a smaller problem and eventually I can stop fixing and start chiseling.

With these two technique changes I felt the bevel flatten and stay flat, flatter than ever before, and I knew that I could keep it that way. It was one of the best feelings I’ve had studying here so far. The sound, quiet and even on the stone. The blade changing direction and staying flush to the stone.

The sensation is a kind of quiet listening. It is sustaining a regularity with my whole arm, my shoulders, my elbows, my wrists, my hand, my fingers, and, at the same time, registering in those places any irregularities in the blade’s motion. One mystery about it is, there is no flatness anywhere. My joints are all tracing curves and the stone is gently cupped, never perfectly flat. The blade isn’t flat to begin with. My body isn’t flat anywhere. I’m not sure but it feels right now like flatness comes from consistency or sustaining. It comes from repeating the blade’s angle to the stone many times. Then there are more questions, like, how can a person know what a consistent angle is? Where could that knowledge possibly come from? How attuned am I to consistency and flatness? What if I ended up isolated in the wilderness with no tools? Could I get to flatness? Where did flatness come from? From measuring? How would you have the idea to make a flatness? So much about how I want to learn to imagine an idea about what “spirit” is or could be is involved in sharpening: thousands of curves, determined by the body, that compound and, by taking material away again and again, draw together into new and useful geometry.

4.13.12 (Techniques: Sharpening 3, two rabbits)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:03:00 -0400

My teacher told me a helpful Japanese saying. I guess it basically goes, “Try to catch two rabbits and you’ll end up with none.” He told me the saying because I asked about what’s been giving me trouble recently and that question basically goes, “Sharpening, how much can your technique attend to at once time?”

For me right now, it feels like there are three dangers to pay attention to when sharpening. First, there’s keeping the bevel flat on the stone. That’s tricky because the blade changes directions, back and forth, as you draw it over the stone—changing directions is almost always an opportunity to change angles as your muscles change jobs; because your arms’ motions draw curves, not straight lines; because you have lots of joints that get involved in those motions and they all have different sizes and tasks and strengths; because the bevel might not start out flat. Second, there’s my personal body habit: the blade’s left side (holding the blade business end up and looking down at the top of the bevel) tends to get ground down faster than the right side. I end up with a slanty edge. A chisel needs a straight edge for clean and even corners. I am almost unable to correct problem number two while I am sharpening. The best I can hope for while I am sharpening is to rely on a dream that visualizing evenness will translate into a muscle fix. The problem is uneven pressure, I think, but I am not ready for a sure fix. I tried adding pressure to the side that grounds slower but it did not help. The edge stayed slanty and I broke the skin on my middle finger’s pad pressing too hard on the chisel’s right side edge. The good news is that I can correct problem number two after the fact. The after the fact fix is running the right side of the bevel, the slant’s upper side, where it’s less ground down, alone over the edge of the stone. The right side is being ground and the left side is riding on air—it’s a way to direct sharpening at the problem area only and flatten out the blade. The third problem is keeping the sharpening stone flat. As the chisel is sharpened dulled grit breaks off the stone’s surface and mixes with water and steel to form a slurry that speeds up sharpening. Breaking the dulled grit off, though, also wears the stone away where the chisel is moving. Where the blade meets the stone too often in the same place the stone will end up grooved or cupped. That’s a problem because when the stone’s cupped the angle the blade meets it at is constantly changing. Changes angles in the stone get transmitted to the blade and you end up with a wonky bevel. The best fix for problem number three is changing where on the stone sharpening is happening. In emergencies there is sandpaper over smooth, flat glass that you can run the stone over to flatten it again but that wastes grit on the stone.

So, there are the three places to focus: flat bevel, straight edge, cupped stone. They need three separate techniques: respectively, sensitivity to how body movements affect the bevel to stone angle, evenness of pressure and/or incorporating fixing after the fact, changing where the blade meets the stone so that the stone wears away evenly. Each of these three techniques takes concentration and marshaling all of them at once is what I’ve been having trouble with. When I manage a flat bevel, the edge is slanty. The after the fact fix for a slanty edge means that a tiny sliver of the bevel is meeting the stone and the smaller the surface area on the stone, the harder it is to feel and maintain the correct bevel angle: I almost always end up with a wonky bevel when I grind the edge flat. Then, it’s back to flattening the bevel, then it’s back to grinding the edge flat and so on and so on. Concentrating on either the bevel or the edge means that keeping the stone flat goes right out the window. Actually the stone itself almost goes right out the window because it gets real frustrating.

I guess the experience is not having the body and mind resolution match the tool resolution. The tools are responding to variations that I’m not even able to feel, let alone able to control. The idea that I have a “body habit” sharpening is like totally mysterious: where did it come from? How can I recognize it and not be able to fix it? It’s my body. Having your body be totally unresponsive to what you want from it, maybe that’s like mortality and all sensitivity, desire. It feels like being introduced to everything physical about myself, as a stranger, everything that dies and fails but also everything that allows me to interface with the world. James Wright calls his body “my poor brother my body” and I think I understand that better now.