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...