The Makers

Every now and then I run across something that feels like it steals the thoughts out of my head and conveniently scribes them on paper.  Laura found this commencement speech given to a class of craftsmen.  I cannot recommend enough reading it (though some will find it more enjoyable than others).  It is located here:

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/06/1358

Some of the highlights:

-“A durable and beautiful built environment provides the best physical and spatial context for human life, and thereby supports the different kinds of inventiveness and daring that modern life demands.”

-“You, however, know that matter is real; you know and respect its properties; you know what good work is.”

-“Beautiful things judge us; they change us, and make us want to be better than we are. Beautiful things elevate us.”

And finally I’ll end with the poem by Dorothy Sayers:

“The Makers”

The Architect stood forth and said: “I am the master of the art;
I have a thought within my head, I have a dream within my heart.

Come now, good craftsman, ply your trade with tool and stone obediently;
Behold the plan that I have made—I am the master; serve you me.”

The Craftsman answered: “Sir, I will, yet look to it that this your draft
Be of a sort to serve my skill—you are not the master of the craft.

It is by me the towers grow tall, I lay the course, I shape and hew;
You make a little inky scrawl, and that is all that you can do.

Account me, then, the master man, lay my rigid rule upon the plan,
and that which serves the plan—the uncomplaining, helpless stone.”

The Stone made answer: “Masters mine, know this: that I can bless or damn
The thing that both of you design by being but the thing I am;

For I am granite and not gold, for I am marble and not clay,
You may not hammer me or mould—I am the master of the way.

Yet once that mastery bestowed then I will suffer patiently
The cleaving steel, the crushing load, that make a calvary of me;

And you may carve me with your hand to arch and buttress, roof and wall,
Until the dream rise up and stand—serve but the stone, the stone serves all.

Let each do well what each knows best, nothing refuse and nothing shirk,
Since none is master of the rest, but all are servants of the work—

The work no master may subject save He to whom the whole is known,
Being Himself the Architect, the Craftsman and the Cornerstone.

Then when the greatest and the least have finished all their labouring
And sit together at the feast you shall behold a wonder thing:

The Maker of the men that make will stoop between the cherubim,
The towel and the basin take, and serve the servants who serve Him.”

The Architect and Craftsman, both, agreed the Stone had spoken well;
Bound them to service by an oath and each to his own labour fell.

Sometimes Breaking the Rules – Dove Message 1

I am not a word person as most of you know but every now and then I can be irritated into verbally inclined creative outlets. Today I ate a Dove chocolate at work. On the inside of the foil wrapper there is written “promise messages” – usually just annoying, trite sayings – but the one today was so particularly ironic I had to do something with it. The message was “Sometimes breaking the rules is more fun”. What rules did Dove or Dove eaters ever break? So I just replaced “rules” and “fun” until I got four messages that I liked:

Like I said, unusually verbal of me but I liked the exercise so I plan on doing it again when I get another Dove message.

Pangur Ban

There is an animated movie that will be released in March (hopefully) that promises to be one of my favorite movies this year. “Secret of Kells” looks to be absolutely beautiful. See for yourself:

Also fun tidbit: in the margins of a 9^th century Irish Illuminated manuscript is a remarkable poem about a monk and his cat, Pangur Ban (which is the name of the cat in the film). The poem:

Pangur Ban

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

(translation copied from here: http://www.fisheaters.com/pangurban.html)

Oscar Haiku

I just caught the winners of the Oscars on my way to work this morning and was bored enough to write two haikus about them.


Host is Wolverine
Glad for Slumdog and Ledger
Wanted Rourke to win


Though Wall-E is good
Animated film should not
Be separate group

Bail Back In

I heard the finest (as well as sardonic) commentary on our country’s current turmoil on the radio yesterday. So I thought I would pass it along (you can also go listen to it read by the author by clicking here).

After the Bailout by Andrei Codrescu

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of 'em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I'm fixin' to make the thing run on plum brandy. I've got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it's the '70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can't exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can't squeeze even an extra penny out of them.

Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don't even think it's people from the '70s: It's people ... from the future!

It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn't pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn't worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn't drive, because they didn't have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.

Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I'm a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

"What did you do wrong?" I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

"Nothing," he said. "We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn't turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In."

"At least the Second Amendment is safe," I said. "Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn't say anything about TV."

And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:

make yourselves at home
you won't be bailed in or out again
you're safe in Second Life