Once upon a time in... hollywood (quentin tarantino, 2019)
Are they not cool enough for you?
For a while now I've had an idea in my head. Over the summer I tried my hand at carving a few items out of wood and I found it to be a very enjoyable process, and so I acquired a few pieces of wood to work on, but I quickly learned that getting the wood from its original 'wood shape' to the basic shape of the thing you want to make is arduous and blister-inducing. What I thought would be great is to have an axe.
If I had an axe, my brain thought, I could cut the wood down to the basic shape I was looking for far quicker, and then get to work on whatever the thing was that I wanted to make.
In what may have been an effort to call my bluff, Mrs Ben (tm) purchased me an axe. A Husqvarna, if you want to know.
So there I am, face to face with a piece of wood, an axe, and an idea.
Now if there's something I really like it's thinking about something a hell of a lot and then trying it out. If you haven't done this before then I highly recommend it. The entire process followed the pattern that I'd used to create it as a thought experiment, with the introduction of physical sensation and solidity - very satisfying.
And this brings me to the point that I wanted to talk about.
If you were to take a piece of wood, carve it into a shape with an axe, and then carve that shape down further with a knife into the form of a spoon, then sand and oil the spoon and give it to someone, you may hear words of surprise. The words all circulate around the idea of making something out of nothing. But that's not what happened here at all.
When you cook food, for example, you're not making something out of nothing - you're creating combinations, blends. Take the simple action of chopping ham and pineapple and then mixing them together. You end up with the same items that you started with - you continue to have both ham and pineapple - but the combination has created new flavours and textures that didn't exist before. But nothing new has been created.
Perhaps you use heat in your cooking, and by doing so alter the chemical make-up of food items - you physically alter the proteins in the food - and this in turn alters the flavour and texture of the food. But again, you're not making something out of nothing.
Presenting someone with a spoon that you've carved yourself is, again, not making something out of nothing (it's worth remembering that no matter is ever created or destroyed). It's something far more interesting than that.
The spoon is created by the removal of matter.
This might sound obvious, but it's something that never really hit home with me during the 'thought experiment' process of carving a spoon out of wood. But when you're sitting outside (or crouching) slowly turning a piece of wood around in your hands and looking for where to make the next cut, you become very aware that what you're doing is subtracting, you're taking away, piece by piece, to turn one thing into another thing.
And then there's the approach to the task in the first place.
There are probably people out there who are very prescriptive in this process (there are, I've seen them). They cut the wood and then draw the shape of the spoon that they want to make onto the remaining block, and then carve that spoon out - come hell or high water.
Now maybe I'm just a noob, but that's not what I did.
What I did was to look at the shape of the wood and think about what kind of a spoon the wood might want me to make. I didn't make any drawings, or any plans from the outset, I simply let the wood tell me what kind of spoon was lying inside it.
This 'letting the wood tell you what kind of spoon is lying inside it' is an ongoing process in the handling of wood that gets smaller as you go on if you pay attention to it, but never really goes away. The shape of the wood, the way it twists and bends tells you what the basic shape of the spoon should be. As you carve more and more of the wood away you encounter knots and impurities which further dictate what should be carved away and what should be kept. As you approach the end of each stage you become hyper-aware that removing too much at this stage could endanger the form that you are working to attain. Caution becomes paramount. Granted, the kind of caution that comes into play when you're armed with sharp knives, but it's still caution.
So in the end you hold something in your hand that didn't exist before, but you did it by removal - not by addition - not by bringing new matter into the universe - and not by creating combinations of pre-existing matter.
It's an activity that I'd encourage to anyone who is interested.
For a while now I've had an idea in my head. Over the summer I tried my hand at carving a few items out of wood and I found it to be a very enjoyable process, and so I acquired a few pieces of wood to work on, but I quickly learned that getting the wood from its original 'wood shape' to the basic shape of the thing you want to make is arduous and blister-inducing. What I thought would be great is to have an axe.
If I had an axe, my brain thought, I could cut the wood down to the basic shape I was looking for far quicker, and then get to work on whatever the thing was that I wanted to make.
In what may have been an effort to call my bluff, Mrs Ben (tm) purchased me an axe. A Husqvarna, if you want to know.
So there I am, face to face with a piece of wood, an axe, and an idea.
Now if there's something I really like it's thinking about something a hell of a lot and then trying it out. If you haven't done this before then I highly recommend it. The entire process followed the pattern that I'd used to create it as a thought experiment, with the introduction of physical sensation and solidity - very satisfying.
And this brings me to the point that I wanted to talk about.
If you were to take a piece of wood, carve it into a shape with an axe, and then carve that shape down further with a knife into the form of a spoon, then sand and oil the spoon and give it to someone, you may hear words of surprise. The words all circulate around the idea of making something out of nothing. But that's not what happened here at all.
When you cook food, for example, you're not making something out of nothing - you're creating combinations, blends. Take the simple action of chopping ham and pineapple and then mixing them together. You end up with the same items that you started with - you continue to have both ham and pineapple - but the combination has created new flavours and textures that didn't exist before. But nothing new has been created.
Perhaps you use heat in your cooking, and by doing so alter the chemical make-up of food items - you physically alter the proteins in the food - and this in turn alters the flavour and texture of the food. But again, you're not making something out of nothing.
Presenting someone with a spoon that you've carved yourself is, again, not making something out of nothing (it's worth remembering that no matter is ever created or destroyed). It's something far more interesting than that.
The spoon is created by the removal of matter.
This might sound obvious, but it's something that never really hit home with me during the 'thought experiment' process of carving a spoon out of wood. But when you're sitting outside (or crouching) slowly turning a piece of wood around in your hands and looking for where to make the next cut, you become very aware that what you're doing is subtracting, you're taking away, piece by piece, to turn one thing into another thing.
And then there's the approach to the task in the first place.
There are probably people out there who are very prescriptive in this process (there are, I've seen them). They cut the wood and then draw the shape of the spoon that they want to make onto the remaining block, and then carve that spoon out - come hell or high water.
Now maybe I'm just a noob, but that's not what I did.
What I did was to look at the shape of the wood and think about what kind of a spoon the wood might want me to make. I didn't make any drawings, or any plans from the outset, I simply let the wood tell me what kind of spoon was lying inside it.
This 'letting the wood tell you what kind of spoon is lying inside it' is an ongoing process in the handling of wood that gets smaller as you go on if you pay attention to it, but never really goes away. The shape of the wood, the way it twists and bends tells you what the basic shape of the spoon should be. As you carve more and more of the wood away you encounter knots and impurities which further dictate what should be carved away and what should be kept. As you approach the end of each stage you become hyper-aware that removing too much at this stage could endanger the form that you are working to attain. Caution becomes paramount. Granted, the kind of caution that comes into play when you're armed with sharp knives, but it's still caution.
So in the end you hold something in your hand that didn't exist before, but you did it by removal - not by addition - not by bringing new matter into the universe - and not by creating combinations of pre-existing matter.
It's an activity that I'd encourage to anyone who is interested.