With Hurrican Matt bearing down at a Force 4 storm, we decided to evacuate. Going to Hood River for some R&R. If you’ve chosen to stay, maybe hold a hurricane party, good luck! Check out some earlier blogs, swill champagne, hunker down. We’ll catch you on the back end.
Our fiddler in the South End String Band is a fiddle maker as well, meaning, he builds violins and violas and cellos. You maybe don’t run into luthiers a whole lot in your neighborhood, but down by us, we got folks who build everything from boats to banjos. I suspect there are a lot more of us than you realize, people who find it necessary to create things. I bet you only know a few, but believe me, the woods are full of them.
Our fiddle maker had quit making instruments about 15 years ago, just stopped out of the blue to pursue a career as a fireman, make a steady paycheck and support his family. At the time he had clients waiting, violins going for $10,000 and cellos for $19,000, not bad in our neck of the wilderness, the South End. I didn’t understand it, this dropping a fairly lucrative trade just when his reputation had grown to the point most of us artists would have celebrated, but then I don’t have a family so maybe it seemed strange to give up a creative career for a guaranteed wage.
A few months ago he rented a studio space, lugged in his tools and his 50 year old woods, mostly flame maple for bottoms and sides and the neck and straight grain spruce for the tops. He built a fiddle for working out the kinks after a 15 year hiatus, then he took the best wood he had and built a violin the beauty of which would knock you out same as it did us bandmates. The craftsmanship, the detailing, the wood — Stradivarius himself would have nodded his approval. And the sound, well, I’m no judge of classic instruments, but it does seem amazing. Now he’s building a cello, same exquisite workmanship, just as nice a wood selection.
I like to think there’s an irresistible urge to create in most of us, whether it be a poem or a garden or a badly made banjo, some spark that demands a bursting into flame. I meet folks all the time who say they haven’t got one artistic bone in their invertebrate body, but I don’t believe them. We might not build a Stradivarius or write the great American novel, but we humans, like God Herself, bend the world to our own imaginations and the music we make changes everything.
Every blue moon or so I stop loitering in our gardens and tune in briefly to the world at large outside our gates. Actually I don’t so much go searching for it, it intrudes on me. Folks who say the world is shrinking, well, from my foxhole, it seems more like it’s expanding, same as some of the invasive weeds that come creeping in the night, magically appearing next morning.
Try as I might, hoeing isn’t all that effective. Technology, once unleashed, is pretty much an onslaught. Everyone I know walks around with it strapped to their belt, parked in their purse, stuffed in a pocket, carried in their car, enveloping them in a cyberbubble they now feel uncomfortable without. No cellphone, no laptop, no I-pad — they feel naked and vulnerable. Doesn’t matter I don’t attach the umbilical myself, the digital electromagnetic pulses lap at my brainpan anyway. The engineers, aliens to me, have won the battle for our consciousness. More and more we are ruled by technocrats, those busy little beavers intent on morphing their rules and parameters and metrics onto our flesh and bones. Or simply working 24/7 to create Artificial Intelligence… They imagine a future of exponentially increasing efficiencies. They argue this will be good for us humanoids, a gift from the scientists and technicians. Even quite a few of my fellow artists have begun to believe this.
Lately I’ve been hearing the drumbeat to scale back Humanities in universities, substituting more degrees that lead to high paying jobs, degrees in programming, coding, engineering, all those ‘practical’ careers. But I think we need more impractical degrees. We need musicians, sculptors, painters, writers, dreamers. We need to tether ourselves through them to what makes us human, not cyborg.
A sea change is coming, a digital tsunami, a revolution that will implant its seed in all of us. Technology is easy now — being human, soon that’s going to be very hard. Soon most of us won’t know the damn difference. The difference may just be Art. Humanities, well named. And I may be forced, reluctantly, despite a lifetime of self-deference, to admit we artists are somehow special after all.
The rains of September came last night ending the long drought of summer, a welcome relief for our parched plants. Course, when I got up I discovered new leaks in the old roof. Leaks are nothing new for most of us in these monsoonal regions, but nevertheless, they’re as welcome as a shingles attack. And as hard to get rid of.
You can see where the drips come into the house okay, but finding their original source, that’s entirely another matter altogether. Water zigs, water zags, but it rarely comes straight down from the hole in the roof to the place you see it dripping onto the floor. Leaks are mysterioso, enigmatic, almost supernatural — which is to say they are outside the purview of observable science. They might leak one drizzly day and not a drop on a wild windstorm, what we South Enders call paranormal. Although, really, seems normal to me.
The old shack had a leak I spent years trying to fix. I figured it came through some flashing by the dormer so I slapped enough tar on that valley to build a two lane blacktop to Elger Bay Store. But to no avail. I tore off shingles and put in new flashing. Still leaked. I bought more tar. I doubled the flashing. Every rain my little creek ran like a dagger across the front porch floor. I half expected salmon to return every year to spawn in the living room.
The mizzus got real weary of buckets in the room, but she was gracious enough not to nag an old roofer. Finally I built the roof up a full foot and a half to eliminate the valley, the flashing and hopefully the eternal leak. It worked!
Well, it worked for a few years. Now I got the buckets back in and the Department of Natural Resources wants me to widen my ditch to create better access for salmon trying to return. At least I plan to eat well, plenty of salmon barbecues, but I’m not sure I’ll buy a license.
Can Jimmy Come Out and Play
When I was a snot-nosed kid growing up in Georgia, we pretty much made up our own games, indulged in shooting marbles, rode bikes, made soapbox cars, played hide and seek, sardines, kick the can, hailey-bailey over and lots of sandlot baseball. The days were unsupervised and unscheduled — they just unrolled in our lazy summer daze depending on weather and the kids we could round up from the ‘hood. Everybody got to play and nobody was excluded. Summertime … and the livin was easy.
Apparently those days are part of a nostalgic past long ago lost to my friends’ kids whose play is as managed as tightly as a NASA space launch. Ballet lessons, soccer practice, judo courses, violin classes, little league baseball, soccer camps, swims at the YMCA, karate classes, polo lessons. So much for spontaneity, hello discipline.
We got the kids on a fast track from pre-school to graduate PhD’s, the little tykes don’t have much time for free-form fun. Our moms would say be back for dinner and off we’d scatter to the four corners of the neighborhood and beyond into the woods. I don’t know if we learned self-reliance out there beyond parental leashes, but I suspect it taught us independence and probably stalled the adolescent urge to revolt. We didn’t have much to rebel against unless we didn’t want dinner served up same time same table, not much of a revolution stewing there.
We camped out in the backyards, we hiked across bogs and woods, we built shabby treehouses and put playing cards in our bike tire spokes. We were the Wild Ones, but … not really. We were kids, grass stained with torn shirts. We fought, we got in trouble, we lived through it. Mostly it was fun. All the time.
I wouldn’t want to be a kid now. Hell, you CAN’T be a kid now. Your parents got you scheduled, signed up, coached, monitored, pushed hard and expected to succeed, no time to waste, certainly not in childish tomfoolery. Fun? Hey, kid, fun is for losers.