maker's guilt

over the last few months I have started in on a side project making musical instruments, the beginnings of which I wrote about here.   I have started a side blog about this project, which I am calling "Salt City Found-Object Instrument Works" and which can be accessed at that link.  Syracuse got its start because of the salt flats here and so is informally known as Salt City, which I really like.  It is gritty, just like the town is, and utilitarian, just like the town is.  The new blog is really just a place for me to chronicle the instruments that I make, it is not too terribly deep an exploration into what they are conceptually, but that is okay, that is the kind of thing I reserve for this blog.

As I have been making more and more of these found object instruments out of tins and cans and sticks, I have been trying to approach the whole process by applying an absolute minimum of "woodworkeriness."  Whenever I pick up a hand plane I stop and try to come up with a different way to accomplish what I am doing.  Before I go to the table saw I ask if that is really necessary.  The idea is that I want to make these instruments as accessible as possible, right down to the manufacturing of them.  If I can really make a twenty dollar guitar using only the most rudimentary hand tools, then anyone can.  Which means (I hope) that the ability to make music could be at anyone's fingertips.  I have been working lately on a commission for a banjo, which I will write about over at the Instrument Works at some point, I think, that has turned into quite a wood working project, and I feel myself slipping away from the original roots of this endeavor.  The next one will be  more direct, I hope, and a little more basic.

The part of these that I have not tried to make yet is the tuning pegs.  There are friction-fit pegs in fiddles and dulcimers, of course, but I have not yet broached that, instead going to the local music store to buy tuners that actually I can get on line.  I have a couple of problems with this:  one, that I should probably just order these, since it would be cheaper and more convenient, and two, that I am just buying pre-packaged tuners and that feels like cheating.

I have been noticing this phenomenon occurring more and more in my life lately:  what I have started to call maker's guilt.  Whenever the subject of buying something comes up, I have started to instinctively recoil and think "but I could make that!"  It has started to seem counterintuitive to me to buy something that I could make myself.  This is a relatively new phenomenon in my life and it has not started suddenly.  Rather, it has been a slow washing in of a tide over several years as I learn the processes behind bringing objects in to being.  Not too many years ago I thought nothing at all of buying Ikea furniture, as I like the æsthetic and it was cheap.  Now the thought of doing that really gets under my skin, even though there is no way I could ever make it as cheaply or get it into our lives as quickly.  Knowing that I know how to do it and that it is only a lack of will or desire that stands in the way of me making everything in our house sits poorly with me.

Obviously this is unrealistic.  Obviously I can not make everything in our lives.  It would take the fervor of an extremist to try to do so, and even then, I would not make very good shoes, probably, or particularly flattering clothes.  Or a car that works.  Or a stove or a computer or a bike.  Or even guitar tuning pegs, really.  There are things that it has to be okay to have other people do, there are objects that it has to be okay for other people to make for me or do for me.  I have no trouble, for example, hiring electricians to do electrical work on the house, or plumbers either.  And doing so keeps money in the local economy and allows those people to help provide support for their families.  So it is not reprehensible, it might even be socially and economically necessary.

That knowledge does not change how I feel, though.  I have felt maker's guilt rising more and more strongly in me in the last few months, and I have had to be pretty thoughtful about quelling it.  It takes a real effort to let go, to not cringe when I buy something that I could make if I tried, even if I could not do it very well.

None of this is intended to be an apology for being a consumer.  I think it is more that I am trying to figure out where I sit relative to the things that I consume and more importantly how to talk to my sons about that.  They are coming in to a world on a precipice, and their generation will have to be so much more thoughtful about what and how they consume and about their responsibilities as denizens of an extremely rich country.  I hope that I can help them find a meaningful and less damaging way to negotiate their world by thinking about how I negotiate mine.