I don’t think I realized it before I started messing with wood but wood and history have a lot in common. I’ve developed a sort of reverence for wood. Trees are incredible things and it sometimes seems a violation for me to use wood to make other things. Especially because often those other things fail to reach the threshold of “beautiful” that I also revere. When you look at wood, which is dead, you can see its life. The grain is beautiful because it took struggle to create. Every curve and every u-turn and every blemish was a fight against a human world that wants to destroy the life and spirit that animates the tree. Every new layer is a repudiation of that force. Yet in order to make things out of wood the wood I’m planning to use has to already have been killed and desiccated.
Everyone knows what tree rings are and how you can count them to figure out how old a tree is. I knew that too but I what didn’t know was what tree rings really were. The reason that there is a “light” and a “dark” alternation of rings is that the “light” rings are called “early wood” and that’s the growing the tree did in the spring and summer. The “dark” rings are the “late wood” and that’s the where the tree fought for not just life but growth in the fall and winter months. The early wood is usually broader and seemingly more robust but the late wood is dense and tempered by struggle. If you sand wood lightly, you’ll notice the early wood erodes away more readily than the late wood. If you stain a piece of wood, especially an evergreen wood like cedar or pine or fir you’ll see that the colors of the rings seem to switch places where the early wood actually becomes darker than the late wood. That’s because the early wood is less dense and more exuberant and so it absorbed more of the stain than the denser moodier late wood. I find that marvelous.
When you look at a tree’s rings you’re seeing its whole life laid bare before you. Every little tick and error is there, showing where something happened to it in 1983 or 2005 or wheneverthehell and how the tree survived. Now it’s dead. The only way to preserve that life—that struggle—is to turn the wood into something beautiful and useful that someone will want to keep and if you’re lucky cherish. The tree deserves that much from us after being destroyed.
I found my task as a historian to be not much different than that frankly. Humans interest me even more than trees but what I’m mostly interested in is struggle, which in my opinion is what makes life worth it. When I opened an archive box full of someone’s correspondence or a microfilm full of business ledgers, I was seeing someone’s life. Sometimes that person has been dead for centuries. Now part of my task was to take that person’s struggles and hopes and their very life and hopefully turn them into something beautiful. The person deserves that much from me after they and whatever they hoped for was destroyed and now that I’m spying on their life.
Why do I do what I do? Why do any of us do anything? Motivation is fascinating, not least because it operates primarily in the subconscious. Why does woodworking make me happy? I think it’s partly because it is another opportunity to display the beauty of a life lost through honest and honorable labor. I think I’m happiest whenever I’m able to do that. I struggle to do anything worth a shit. But to be honest in the struggle is where I find peace.
America in 2020 wants to kill you. Yes there is a pandemic and yes we have a murderous nihilist will-to-power regime in the White House and yes we have wildfires and hurricanes and derechos (wtf is that?). But that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that the people who run this country profit off our misery and our deaths. Here’s your work email they say so you can be available to make the company money even in your tiny sliver of leisure time. Please commit to this company that does not give a shit about you until you find a way to make it money. Success is money in America. So is any kind of comfort. So is survival. Money makes us tick. It makes me angry. That’s another thing history and wood have in common. Both are things that allow me to make something that is beautiful and something that honors life without the burden of making me any money. Despite my depression and anxiety disorders that swirl around my need to provide safety and sustenance for my family, I’m happiest when I’m not making money.
I think no one ever made any really good art without struggle.
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