If all tools express a natural law, then the saw enunciates. It is preexistent, delicate biology translated upon the anvil. We set and sharpen and polish its teeth ‘til the metaphor gleams. The saw has a long and surprisingly fabled history. This is the first in a series of posts retelling various mythologies of The Saw.
Part One: The Treatise of Lu Ban
“Heaven and earth don’t need the compass or the angle board to make a circle or square.” — Lu Ban
Lu Ban was born on a Spring afternoon in the Warring States period in the era of the Hundred Schools of Thought. At the sound of his cries, cranes flocked together and a cloud of incense filled the house. But as he grew, people took these signs for a mistake; the misjudgment of some aging god. He was a lazy child, and slow to learn. He spent his days chasing birds, tumbling to sleep in a meadow and waking to start again.
Suddenly, when he was nearly a man, he ran off to study with Duanmu Qi, disciple of Zixia, disciple of Confucius. Together they lived in a hut near Confuscius’ grave. Lu Ban wanted to contemplate nature and learn the subtleties of virtue. Instead, his master made him practice carving and cutting, painting and engraving, and every technique of carpentry.
Eventually Duanmu Qi died, and Lu Ban returned to his village a skilled and useful man. He built stables and ladders, homes and carriages, and his reputation grew. When the dynasty became divided and warlords began seizing power, Lu Ban turned his energy to weaponry. It was Lu Ban who, by observing the sophisticated methods of a troupe of marionettes, built a wooden bird that flew into battle and rescued the King.
His name a murmur in the courts, Lu Ban was commissioned to build a palace for King Yuan, twenty seventh sovereign of the Zhou Dynasty. He had no choice but to accept, though to him a palace was as foreign as the pyramids. He laid his plans, gathered his crew, and determined to build a palace so great it would transfigure all who looked upon it.
Intent on using only trees of the finest hardwood, he sent his disciples to an ancient, undisturbed forest at the top of Tianmu Mountain. Day after day, they dulled their axes on the rocklike giants. After a week, Lu Ban climbed the mountainside of long grass to see their progress, but not one tree had fallen.
He became anxious; a palace requires a forest. Careless with worry, he tripped and slid down the mountain, but narrowly caught a blade of grass before plummeting to the rocks below. Opening his hand, he saw a fine cut; blood rose in beads, like ink from the scribe’s pointed brush.
Lu Ban studied the blade. He flattened himself on the earth and dug his nose in the grass. He lay there examining the small hairs that coated each narrow leaf, clearly visible in the midday sun. They angled this way and that, overlapping like peasant’s thatch.
Lu Ban lay there all afternoon, like a lizard on his rock. He was so deep in concentration that he merely blinked when a grasshopper landed on his nose. He watched with renewed attention as the grasshopper began to eat. It spread its jagged jaws then closed them on a blade of grass, leaving behind a sharp outline of teeth. It ate quickly, slicing a patch of tall grass down to the dirt. The grasshopper hopped on, leaving a neat clearing beneath Lu Ban’s jealous gaze.
He was a child again, mindless of himself. Nature surpasses all man’s methods, he thought. I may strain the power of my eye to the utmost, yet only glimpse the spirit of construction. If I made a tool with an edge like this grass, or a teeth like this grasshopper, he wondered, would it be sharp enough to cut through wood? And rolling the rest of the way down the mountain he rushed to his workshop to find out.
At the dedication of the palace, King Yuan paid honor to Lu Ban for his speed and craft. Prepared for the King’s praises, Lu Ban answered, “The universe and its works are already in the Tao, but human beings walk away from the Tao. Thus human beings need the compass and the angle board to make the circle and square.”
The palace had taken many years to complete and Lu Ban was now an old man. He returned to his master’s hut, happy to be at rest. But he could not stop the stream of craftsmen coming to seek his wisdom. He gave them each the same advice: “Learn to concentrate, learn to cultivate your mind, to harmonize your mind with the heart.”
When he died he left only his saw behind. It is there now, though the hut fell away, though the palace crumbled.
This is a very special two-part edition of Tools. I sent Rachel Jendrzejewski an essay, and she rearranged it to make a play. Amazingly, she used every word of what I sent without adding a single letter of her own. Below is the essay, and here is Rachel’s play.
• • •
What kind of tool is the funnel? You don’t work it. Don’t wield or heft or operate. You set and put and place. Feed its mechanism, then stand aside. Look: It behaves. Action implicit in its form.
I own a red, plastic Back to Basics 176 Wide Mouth Canning Funnel, purchased for five dollars at Wegman’s on my first trip to New Jersey. It is cheap, unattractive and new—wholly lacking romance—but it works. A well of oil drains into a bottle. A heap of beans rain into a jar. Watching, some store of memory spills out. My body recalls the sensations of loss.
Indeed the funnel was first conceived as an aid to meditation. Paleolithic Shamans convened round a curl of bark and watched rainwater cling and disappear endlessly. Their funnel was a medium—a votive to unknown gravity. Why, they pondered, does loss surprise us, every time? All things disappear as easily; even our disappointment cannot be contained.
The transformation from mandala to kitchen accessory was gradual. Perhaps the ever-resourceful Emperor Liu Hu fashioned a funnel from mulberry paper to measure out his tea. Davy Crockett relied on one made of tinware, and used it to fill his musket moments before his disputed death at the Alamo. The arrival of industrial manufacturing sealed the funnel’s fate in glass, plastic, and stainless steel. The funnel abounds. And it’s precisely this abundance that now makes it, categorically, a tool.
Still, the funnel’s mystical conceptions are not entirely lost. We see them echoed in Gothic paintings, and the Land of Oz: places where inverted funnels are symbols of madness. Robert Creeley—the old poet who died in Odessa—called into the funnel of the dark and found another, resounding inversion: a church bell. And Duchamp gave funnels a figurative association with sex—just see their muscular depiction in “The Passage from Virgin to Bride.”
Stare into the sinking pit of flour, of rice, of popcorn kernels, as you transfer them from bag to jar, and see if your heart isn’t sucked down as well. We’ve all felt the terror of vacant spaces; more terrifying still is the vacancy that moves. The vacancy that wants to be. Look: the funnel makes way.
Of course, most who look will see very little. A mere slip of dull material—it’s hardly there. At any given moment, the funnel performs its supporting role in kitchens and laboratories the world over. Men and women exploit physics and casually take a bow. Nestle its nose in a bottleneck and pour unruly liquid down.
What kind of tool is the funnel? The kind that emerged, fascinating, without invention; Critical in its simplicity, and essential in its abundance. One of the rare few for which passive observation is fundamental to its use. And what of the funnel unobserved? I find some comfort in the thought of them—millions—as they rest in drawers and on shelves. To think of all the space quietly protected, right now, in their open, breathless mouths.
There was a time when a wooden spoon might be a girl’s only worldly belonging. If afforded some clarity before death, she might will it to her daughter, or tuck it quietly in her waistcoat.
In 1608, shortly after disembarking the good vessel Mary and Margaret at the banks of the James River, Martha Forrest took inventory. The New World in her nostrils. King James a minor, weightless, somewhere planet. An ocean three-months long behind her. She caught her forehead in her palm and whistled. Then she vomited on the shore.
Martha called for her barrel of goods and saw, with satisfaction, its weight mark the sand. Inside the barrel, dug amongst blankets and candlesticks, a stew pot and iron wedge, was a small spoon; A chip of sentimental wood. Her husband, already ashore, carved it for her when his first wife caught the Scarlet fever.
A month later, knowing they would bury her naked, she gave her clothes and spoon to a young maid called Anne. Now the only woman in the colony, Anne married a carpenter who gave her spoons of her own, and Martha’s slipped behind a bureau, chewed to dust by anxious mice.
–idiom
I can smell the future. Bread before its baked, as a reminder to make it, is strongest. A train from Brussels moans to a passing cyclist to remind her to call her mother. Mine made challah for Thanksgiving. Rope after rope, dough dyed yellow with yolks, waiting to be braided and brushed to glisten with egg and water. Another two breads-worth is rising in the kitchen-aide bowl. I tease her. Laughing, she smacks my ass with a wooden spoon.
The house hadn’t been renovated yet. The kitchen was a butter yellow showbox with one square lace-curtained window that faced the grass. His mother, thinner then, was no cook but loved to sit in a stool and make mayonaise by hand. An open soup bowl and a whisk moving in slow concentric circles, just slower than a resting heart beat. Adding oil one spoon at a time, chin leaning on a hand whose elbow rested on the counter.
In the spring I saw her in rubber clogs, calico skirts gathered in one hand, a wooden spoon raised high in the other. Racing toward the line of laundry, which was by now completely on fire.
Some 40,000 years ago, a volcano erupts in southern Italy, sending a blanket of ash as far as Moscow. Along the way it dusts the people of Kostenki village and all their effects, including bones, shells and teeth pierced by hand-spun drill. In Neolithic Pakistan, a hand drill made of green jasper bores into the astonishing hues of lapis lazuli. A little later, in pre-Roman Egypt, scholars abbreviate the bow drill to three lines, creating the determinative hieroglyph for all words related to carpentry and crafts.
Leap past the Iron Age, over the Middle Ages, to the early industrial United States. A farmer in Goshen, Pennsylvania pries open a crate containing the township’s first hand-crank drill press, ordered through a catalog and shipped to his barn door. He can now put holes in steel and cast iron within ear-shot of the supper bell. In another hemisphere, two Australians are first to slap an electric motor on a drill. Before long, a German takes it portable, and Black & Decker makes it look like a gun.
The 9.6-Volt Cordless Ryobi ZRHP496K is the Y2K dorm room incarnation of man’s indispensable friend. Spindle, Augur, Gimlet, Brace and Bit: the drill has been exploited for centuries under more memorable names, and found several classic forms. The plastic hard-case and rubber overmold may mask its elegant pedigree, but beneath the 24 position clutch, variable speed trigger and built-in level, the Ryobi is faithful to its essence.
My Ryobi traveled 3,000 miles in the trunk of a 1998 Honda Accord to find me. My little brother unloaded the surprise five months ago, just in time for me to install two curtain rods, four shelves and a wall-mounted desk in my new apartment, in a new city, at the start of a new school year. It was then–my belongings in piles on the laminate wood–that I discovered the drill’s unadvertised utility: catharsis.
The rechargeable battery and trigger switch of a cordless drill are refinements we now take for granted, obscuring its critical function: to grip and rotate a cutting tip, while applied force presses it into otherwise unyielding material. Likewise, a cathartic experience pierces our grief, and drains the excessive heartache. The sting yields ecstatic relief.
I took clean screws from their 8 and 12 count packages and pressed them into the wall with only momentary resistance. Kneeling on my unmopped floor, I felt that I was young and I would do the things I said I’d do. My lingering anxiety was a weightless, white dust escaping the walls.
A long time ago, sensing a great upheaval was at hand, we stepped outside and took a few measurements. These would help tidy our confusion. We used only degrees of height and dispersal: how high the stars, how scattered the children. And armed with these dimensions, we tried to defend our there and then-ness.
But dimensions, it so happened, are subject to limits. No god was threatened. Our babies were still toothless and exposed. We had to do something about our position relative to earth and sky. The foreman’s instructions were simple: Let us make brick and burn them thoroughly.Let us make brick upon brick upon brick. And from our tower, he shouted, we will look back over many small and aging replicas to that thin territory of origins, and catch our breath at the destruction. We’ll exceed measure and forget we ever needed brick in the first place. We were all appetite and no intestine, a craving without store, and that’s why the first tools were disposable.
But that was long ago, and early. Down in the skyless ruins we became craftsmen. Anticipating life with useful, outlasting things. Each tool was stamped with a year and a few significant letters; made to be a silent, surviving witness to its own event. Haven’t we watched a knife shrink? Tool by tool, the long history of human desire is serialized.
Was it a need or an ache that gave us the hammer? And how long before it’s satisfied? When undressing a plastic straw with your teeth, which is more interesting to consider: its purpose, or its duration on Earth? What about its abundance; its far-and-wideness? And which is more intimate: the comb or the plow?
But a tool can’t feel. It has no imagination. No focus, gaze or intent. It cannot guess what you are thinking; It cannot think. You will never roll over, open your eyes, and catch it watching you as you sleep.
A tool is nothing if not deaf. It has one answer and no questions. It translates the world into strikes and blows; shavings and dust; a language bent or bowed. It resonates only as far as the fingers–a simple fluency that softens, like any word, with every iteration. The blade stutters; the edge rounds; the hinge acquires a darker tone. Tool by tool, and so on.
