becoming

carl sandburg wrote: "...the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,/a rudder under the sea, a steering gear in the sky,"

Today in the studiodio I was assembling the drawers for this little cabinet I am making. Nothing fancy, just a small maple carcasse, dovetailed at the corners, with four drawers (what up here are called "draws," but down where I am from are called "drah-wurs"). I needed a place to keep my hardware. For a furniture maker this does not mean hard-drives and monitors and keyboards but instead hinges and bolts and screws. Hardware, you know? Real hardware.

So I had this maple salvaged from someplace, I forget, that is not too interesting, really, but certainly served the purpose. And I made a little chest of drawers.

This morning and afternoon I assembled the drawers, and as I was gluing them up I started thinking about becoming. In the sense of parts becoming a whole. This wood was a tree, of course, at one time, and if I had experienced it then, I would have thought of it as a tree. Then it was felled (or fell in a storm, I don't know and wish I did), and became lumber. Which is how I experienced it, so I think of it as lumber. Now I have made it into a cabinet, a chest of drawers. But I am conflicted.

I tend to anthropomorphise objects, assigning to them personalities and desires which I am convinced they have. I do not like to go too long without using one tool or another, as I am dead certain it will feel neglected. I often stroke pieces of furniture that I have made, telling them how happy I am that they are made and will have a new life. But then, I also do that with the chunks of wood that litter my studio, talking to them, listening to them, spinning yarns about what they will be, one day, and also nodding in agreement if they tell me that is not what they want to be.

I had this sudden thought today about this little chest of drawers. It was material. It was a pile of wood. Now it is a little chest. I hope that is what it wanted to be. I think it is. But now I am unsure how to address it, whether as a collection of parts, or as a finished piece. I have never had this particular problem before. So far, all of the pieces I have made have seamlessly become a finished piece, and have ceased to be a bunch of parts.

I am not sure what this means, to be honest. Maybe it is a momentary flight of fancy. I certainly think of the boat chair as an object. I think of my guitar "Johnny" as an object. I think of the dining tables I have made as objects. This is how I talk to them, how I listen to them. For some reason, this unassuming little cabinet has thrown a wrench into those works, and is still a group of parts clamoring to be heard.

I think maybe I was not as sensitive as I should have been to the desires of the material, and that I have forced these parts to be something they did not want to be. I certainly hope not. It felt so good to finish the project, maybe I was too intent on barreling ahead, and forgot to listen to the material.

But it has gotten me to start thinking about the moment of becoming. When do a few parts become a piece of furniture? When do some words strung together become a poem or a song? When do a group of like-minded people become a movement? There is no answer, I guess, but for every object or poem or song or movement or relationship there is that moment, that turning point when a new reality is obvious, when it becomes necessary to use a new vocabulary to describe what is going on. Often, that moment goes unnoticed, and the new way of thinking becomes the norm without fanfare. I think what is jarring about my little cabinet is that that moment has not happened yet. So I am not sure how to think about it.

Maybe that was the purpose of this piece, to make me think about my role as a maker, and about how important it is that the materials speak through me, instead of speaking because of me.