European weeping beech

Reverse-engineering restfulness

It's interesting how the thought of a particular aspect of a particular spoon gets into my head sometimes for instance in the early mornings like nestling into a soft space of warmth of half-waking and then lingers there throughout the day, nudging towards awareness, subtly blending in with the day's ongoingness like a shadow that for all practical purposes should not be there, but creates a nice kind of presence within all of the other plays of shadow upon the day.

The thought that got into my head today was about the bowl portion of a spoon I'm working on - what I call a thought spoon, whose sole (presently imagined) purpose will be to be held in my hand, meld into my hand and allow for simple moments of its not having to be anywhere else as I mentally, emotionally, sense-fully take in its shape of naturally melding simplicity of flow that, I'm imagining, will allow my thoughts to wander within a similar, parallel, maybe enmeshed sense of its own, or maybe a cojoined simplicity of restful flow...

From a certain perspective the spoon can be seen as the outcome of a process of reverse-engineering a hand-induced sense of restfulness...

Yeah, go that.

There's a bit of a challenge with the bowl - the wood presently stops at a point where I'm thinking it could so very easily have continued - that is, there does not seem to be enough wood at one particular point of the curve that arches from the handle down to the spoon's concave inner surface.  I've been thinking about that space of lack of wood for most of the day - not in any festering urge of constant bothersomeness, but in wash of breeze sort of way.  It keeps coming and going in that lingering nudge way...

So now I have a few free moments and will go explore that emptiness, which is also the sense of a potential for a smaller imagining.  What is my thumb meant to be doing there?  Can it rest elsewhere, which will be the where of a smaller space of flow?

I love my knife

Intention is like a child

I did not intend to carve two "musical spoons" for anything more than to have them be spoons for making music.  
I did not intend for them to take off on their own, like children, like a child - like their sound made together, their resonance, their way of being their own sense of musical creation - like a singularity, as if a child, heading out into an unknown, wondrous landscape that no parent can ever prepare them for...

But like children, like a child, the intention of their music has taken off.  It is beyond my grasp, even as I want to have some sense of it being something I can still feel close to.  But I am not close, but I am...

I received an email today from the woman who I had carved them for:

I just returned this morning after a wonderful concert in Trichy. It has been a wonderful experience not just for me, but for my whole team. While individually the spoon sound was great, neither of us was sure how it would complement the other sounds on stage. But it was simply beautiful. A very subtle yet very grounded sound. 

The concert was part of an initiative called 'Svanubhava', that takes classical music to children. So our audience comprised mostly school and college children. So it was an amazing opportunity for me to open out their imagination to a new sound and the possibility of imagining new instruments. This is the first time anything like this has been used in Carnatic music. The children showed a lot of interest. I seem to have had some influence on them. Many kids came and told me after the show that they wanted to go home and try. I also signed some autographs for the kids. The mridangam player's 6 year old daughter collected all forks and spoons from the dinner table last night and said she wanted to do a concert. It's just so heartening.  

उत्साहवर्धक   utsahavardhak

Passing them on

Well, it's happened. I've passed the spoons on to the woman who will use them in a concert in a few days.  When I met with her, she tried them out and didn't feel completely comfortable with them.  The handles were a but too wide and thick, the bottom of the spoon was a bit too thick, one of the handles was slightly too long...  So I got my knife and sandpaper and went to work.  She sat there patiently - not once fidgeting, not once taking out her mobile phone to sneak a glance...  It was impressive to see her serenity.

It took a while, but finally, everything was smoothed out and I handled them over to her.  "Are you sure you're ok giving them away?" she asked.  "They are like your babies."  I told her that they were not like anything that I felt I was giving away, but that they were just some aspect of the journey we are all on.

She played them for a while, tentatively trying them out in different ways.  And then she took off, the sounds took off, their future took off, the future took off...

Sweeping

Some will say that sandpaper is unnatural and that what is necessary is to smooth wood down with the edge of a blade - they will say that sandpaper tears at the fibers of the wood, creating an unnatural violence.  My feeling is that with sandpaper, the wood fibers are massaged, similar to how our muscles are massaged where well-practiced hands dig into those surprising points they discover...  Sometimes there is a feeling of a bit of pretty deep, unrelenting pain, but we make our way through it even as the hands continue to explore the grains of our body's muscles structures to eventually smooth them and finally sweep away the last final touch.

With wood, with sandpaper (and yes, with a blade also) the grains are explored in a similar way, but with sandpaper an interesting thing begins to happen especially when you get past 320 grit.  For some reason, 320 grit is another one of those defining moments, the end of a particular phase.  At 320, the surface is pretty much defined and all irregularities and imperfections are either there or not.  It seems that no amount of sanding with 400 onwards will completely take away a split or crack or ding, or nick or scratch...  You have to turn around, go back, revisit the heavier grits and once again make your way to that moment, and then continue onwards to the last sweep of the smoothest sandpaper, maybe cloth, maybe a hand itself.  Like waves washing upon a shoreline, as if exploring the smoothness of sands as they sweep upon their farthest reaches...

Just before sanding

It's always an interesting moment when you realize that an activity has reached its logical end.
The end of a phase, the end of a step among many.  It reminds me of canning fish in a pressure cooker - you pack the jars, you set them in the pressure cooker, you seal them in, you build it up to the proper pressure, you wait the 90 minutes or so, and then there is that moment when it's done, and you shut off the heat and call it good.  From that point on, there is nothing more you can do except to sit back and wait for the pressure cooker to cool and the temperature to drop to the point where the lids seal with a snap...
So, in a similar sense, the point is reached when a spoon is ready to be sanded.  All that's left is to sand it...

Onwardness

Once a shape is taken up it will remain a part of the journey towards a final sense of solidity, but its solidity will always change as the route is re-imagined at every moment...
The shavings tell their own story of their own journey as they form a peripheral solidity, taken up within their own sense of journeying...
Leaves from the tree fall upon the shavings that rest on the porch.  They are from the same tree.
What solidity is more or less solid as they all carry over into this seemingly so solid world?...
The spoons will fly like leaves, like wood shavings, like all of us, off into their own onwardness.

.

Points of fissure

Right there, right across the middle of the spoon on top, is a crack.  It's not a very big crack, and might for all practical purposes not even be thought to be anything even to consider, but it was there, and I considered it.  Because I have this rule of sorts - I will use everything that happens to and within the wood I'm exploring as a catalyst to lead me into that wood further.

I began to go back into the wood to the point where the crack disappeared.  It was quite a ways back, but I kept going.  At one point I began wondering if I would end up carving away the whole end of the spoon.  But if that happened, that was what was meant to happen.  The fissure was not just there within the wood, but set upon a whole landscape of potential that the spoon was moving upon.  Sometimes you just cannot get across, sometimes you don't even want to get across, and sometimes there is really no need to even think about getting across.  You move where you move, and the landscape, which to a large extent is your perception of your placement upon it, adjusts accordingly.

It's like so many points of fissure in our lives - we discover them, or maybe we don't, we explore them, maybe we don't, but sometimes they cannot be denied, like rifts and tears across what we set as concrete plans, maybe dreams, maybe hopes, maybe just a day to day expectation of things working out in one way rather than another...  If we "track them up", follow them in, it might be that we readjust everything around them, and us, and all of those plans and dreams...  Why do they appear?

Maybe the wood had been drying too fast, and the crack had formed when the wood could not be as resilient to its reshaping as it would have needed to be. Likewise, maybe we head into certain spaces too fast, or with an "off" sense of perspective...

I finally reached a point where there was no more crack - even as I knew that a crack doesn't really ever just end.  It's movement within the wood carried well beyond the physically seen evidence of its existence.  I was careful to be gentle at that point where the crack seemed to disappear - it remains there, a point of fissure, somewhat invisible, somewhat not there, yet always there...

Tokens

The shavings pile up, the spoons begin to take shape, and I begin to think about the sounds, the energy, the way they will be used over the years... and at one point I have to admit that I caught myself thinking what might be a reason or context or situation or excuse that would have me not give them away... as if they would be something to want to keep... but it was only  for a brief moment and then I sent the thought away towards where all those kinds of thoughts can just float on towards their nothingness... because as with so many things, giving is only the beginning, a release of something that is beyond even that sense of physical "stuff" entering into that space of potential, because the stuff itself is maybe never anything more than a moment in time of a perception of something able to be held long enough to suddenly not hold it... and it might not really even be giving if it is within a mindset of stuff not being there to be held, but only there to be passed on from one moment to the next... like tokens of energetic tendencies that we share among ourselves like whispers, like songs, like looks of reassurance like smiles like a kiss that does not even have to happen but is nice when it does...

Is it what it is?

I've thought a lot about what I do when I take a piece of wood and begin exploring it, and wonder if my predilection towards envisioning spoons within that piece of wood is founded on anything more than a need to just be looking for "something"?...

Is it possible to carve a piece of wood with absolutely no sense of a feeling that even a peripheral aspect of the act of carving is to create a "thing"?

To take up a piece of wood and a knife and to run the blade upon the surface of what is there to run along, or to hold the knife and run the piece of wood along that sharpness - what happened when there is nothing more than that?

Well, actually, I've done that exercise many times...  I have taken a piece of wood, spend a long time looking at it trying to get a sense of what its innerness holds... the way the grains flow, how various aspects of its growth have affected the way the grains veer from straightness, how some woods just don't have that straightness anyways...  And to move with the blade, two hands holding two aspects of this supposedly so solid world and effecting movement, the knife like a ship plying the endlessness of seas that fold their fluidity around the plying bow...

What has tended to emerge within these exercises have been various curves.  Maybe because the grains of wood (at least the pieces of wood I end up using) do not tend typically towards straightness, and what naturally emerges is its own curving presence.  Maybe because the way I move my hands tends towards a curving sort of movement just naturally evokes curves.  Maybe because I like the beauty of the feel, of the sight, of those flowing curves.

And then to translate all of that over into an actual "recognizable thing" like a spoon - does it do justice to that whole mindset of exploring a naturally emerging innerness?  Does it preclude any true presence of the wood's own essence being discovered, manifested, celebrated?

I think life is balance - conversations with the potentials of balance.

A lot of people have asked me, "why spoons?"  Well, here's how it is - many years ago, I chose "spoons" as my symbol of all of the things we take up and use during the course of our days, our lives...  Every spoon I carve, every piece of wood within which I search out a spoon is a conversation with this physical world - about I, as the physical human being I am, searching for beauty within every moment of life, and exploring my physicality within the various concrete solidities of wood that I work with, converse with, discover beauty with, discover innerness with...

Back a step (2)

I went outside to the street, to revisit the place where I first caught sight of the pike of branches...  There is no more pile of branches there.  The street is relatively clean.  It's Saturday morning and things are fairly quiet.  I stand on the opposite side of the street and look at my balcony, at the honge tree growing up towards it, hovering over it, extending beyond it.

I think of the phrase, "The present is just the residual effect of what you have thought."

I think of what I have thought in the past to be here within this present.  In India, standing out on a quiet street in the early morning looking at a tree whose branch is becoming two spoons that will create music.  I think that these thoughts, this present, will be the residual effect of some future.  I envision beautiful music.  I envision beauty emoting from this whole series of presents of thoughts of where things might tend towards.  I think of people who will hear the beautiful music.  Even these thoughts in this present create a sense of beauty, I can feel it, it feels good, it makes me feel good, and I can imagine the good feeling that will be within a future because the good feeling of this present cannot be any more beautiful but will, I imagine, carry over and just be as it is.  Is that how it works?

Back a step (1)

I realized that I haven't been thinking about where these musical spoons began, where they emerged, what they emerged from...  I got thinking about this yesterday when I was out on the balcony carving: the wood that I'm working with, honge, is actually from the tree whose branches are hanging over the balcony.  The tree is full of leaves that shade me when the sun emerges from around the building.  There are little seed pods that fall off the tree onto the balcony.  The bark is the smoothness of elephant skin...

I had been walking along the street one day and saw, on the sidewalk, a pile of branches that had recently been cut from the tree - maybe they had been hanging down to low to the street.  I could see where they had been cut off, circles of white like buttons.

I went into the building where I'm staying and got the handsaw, came back out and cut a few of the branches down to a size that I could carry around to the back of the building.  And so the journey began.

But are we ever able to say where a journey really begins?  Well, we can always present our sense of such a concept, but if, as some might believe, our memory of a past is all only a sense of what we are experiencing at the present moment, then to create an idea of a beginning is really only an activity in the present...

"The only evidence you have of last week is your memory.  But memory comes from a stable structure of neurons n your brain now...  The point is, all we have are these records and you only have them in this Now."

I maintain my memory of the day I got this one particular piece of wood from the sidewalk.  I maintain my memory of the tree being there, overhanging my gaze.  The piece of wood has now changed into a pile of wood shavings and two nearly-formed spoons.  The tree is still there, seemingly the same as I remember it being in another Now...

Extension

I almost did it...  I almost opted for the trajectory of the easy multiplicity...

There were two pieces of wood.  I saw that I might cut each in half lengthwise and thus be able to create two sets of spoons.  I took out the saw and began making the first cut, pulling the teeth against the grain trying to find the exact center of the thickness.

But then I stopped.  And right at that moment it was like I had a conversation with myself, within myself, with a voice within myself...

"What's the purpose of this whole exercise anyways?"
"It isn't about quantity, it isn't about getting the biggest bang for the buck, it isn't about trying to short-circuit a process..."
"And what's that process by the way?"
"Maybe something like experiencing how I can extend beyond any rational sense of "creating something out of something"?..."
"The exercise," the voice (or was it me?) went on, as if simultaneously continuing the thought, challenging the comment, answering the question, and answering its own first question, "is one of exploration of the extension of my own supposed surfaces into and within the supposed surfaces of other physical elements of this physical world...  There is energy, there is perception, there is feeling.  There is a hand and a knife and a piece of wood.  There is sweat, there is pulsing blood, there is sight.  There is breathing, there is thought, there is movement, and stillness, solidity and fluidity...  There is an image, or maybe not, of something to emerge, there is the moment of emerging, there is the memory of what was once assumed to be the thing that was to emerge..."

And within it all, there was, and is still, that moment when I stopped moving the saw blade, took up the piece of wood, saw the gap of materiality that I had just effected, and decided to continue with two spoons.

Becoming-surface

This morning I just wanted to see what was what...  I sharpened my "Grandmother's Tooth" knife to do a little bit of an exploratory flow...  I wanted to move through the roughness of where the machete had split the seam, where, I imagined the crackling had been - it was like entering a zone of tension-passed, a landscape of brutality-gone-to-sleep.  The slumber of a yet-to-be awakened surface transmutated out of all that crackling-tense harshness of strands of broken heartwood into a world of becoming-surface...

Oh yeah, so there I go back to those heady days of Deleuze and Guattari, something about becoming... the sense of losing self...  What was that all about?  I'll tell a little secret...  I used to carry "A Thousand Plateaus" in a zip-lock bag in my kayak when I took month-long paddling trips in Southeast Alaska...  On various evenings, on various shorelines, I'd settle in and open the book up to a random page.  I probably never got close to understanding even a rudimentary sense of what that book was about, but it would allow me to travel through so many levels of thought and contemplation...

Becoming produces nothing other than itself...

Anyway, where was I?

First sounds

The cook brought a machete today. I sharpened it a bit and then went out to the deck behind the building, positioned the machete on the piece of wood and, using another piece of wood as a hammer of sorts, started to work the machete into the wood.  It was surprisingly tough but the machete blade slowly worked down along the wood grain.  It was amazing how the wood crackled - if I stopped for a moment, I could hear the wood grains pulling apart, sounding a bit like a bowl of Rice Krispies soaking in milk...
Finally, the machete got down to the last threads of grain and I pulled the pieces apart.
I set the two pieces aslide, thinking that I'd work on them a bit the next morning -  but in the evening I just needed to hear what they sounded like.  So I tried.

Resonance

The woman who comes to cook lunch was sitting out by the back door of the office separating wheat grains from their dry casings.  She was sifting them on a square, flat woven grass plate.  When I stopped to say hello and watch her for a bit, she asked about my piece of wood.  I said that I has still not found an axe, and she told me that she has an axe and a hammer at her house, and would bring them tomorrow.

I decided then that I would not use any electrical tools on that piece of wood - I wanted it to be free of that kind of noise and vibration.  And thinking about that, I got wondering if there's really any sense to the thought that every bit of energy that moves around, and that we move around, affects the surfaces they happen upon.

But maybe it's not just the surfaces; maybe it's also the depths.  And I got thinking about wood and its resonance...  From dry and woody to rich and bell-like, wood has different ways of singing - and who can say which wood sings the sweetest?  I guess it largely depends on the person listening for whatever specific "tap" is just right for the occasion...

Like a woman walking across a wooden floor in high heels, tapping wood upon wood creates a sound that emerges not only from the surfaces, but from within the wood itself - a character of sound that changes from one piece of wood to another not only because of the character of its surface, but also because of the wood grew, its imperfections, dimples and all the various ways that alter the inner vibrations passing through the "density" (the amount of space of passage) and stiffness (the ability or lack of ability to move those passages back and forth). It's like within a piece of wood are thousands of seashell mazes of space within them. Like organ pipes within, wood has its own way of creating its own personality of character of sound.

Less dense wood is less stable, and thus moves/vibrates more, creating a sense of dull softness.  Dense, stiff wood has an almost harshness of "ring".   Every piece of wood has its own natural frequency of vibration when noise of the collision of two pieces of wood send waves rushing through the wood...