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...

Musical spoons

I met with a woman in Bangalore who plays clay pots - she had gotten my name from someone I had shown my "good energy spoon" to and wanted to ask me if I could carve her some musical spoons.  We sat for over an hour talking about wood.  We had various pieces of wood we listened to, trying to find the right resonance.

Finally, we got focused on a piece of honge - the tree that is growing out in front of our office.  I had taken a few pieces from a pile that the streetworkers had left when they had trimmed a few branches a few weeks back.

Honge, or Indian Beech, has a very nice density that emits a sound somewhere in between "sharp" and "dull".  Sharp would be something like Rosewood - a very hard wood that almost crackles when two pieces are hit together.  On the other end of the spectrum, "dull" would be something like Butternut, which is so soft that it sort of absorbs its own sound when two pieces are hit together.

I'll begin working on the wood within a few days - I need to find an axe to split it.  Someone suggested I take it up to the guy who sells coconuts - he has a very sharp machete that might be able to split the wood lengthwise.  But I think I'll wait to find an axe; I don't want to break the coconut guy's machete...  And then I'll begin drawing my knife upon the surfaces...

It's fascinating to think that this piece of wood will someday create music...

Driving

I keep driving
fog misting away
edges that might have been
in my memories of the night
things come around
and wheels hush away all worry
and sunrise tells the story
of the journey
that will never be done
will never be mapped
as your hair accepts
that first glint of morning
upon its tossle
as you sleep