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Aug. 17th, 2005 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylik(This started out as a reply to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
k_crow's post here. But as I wrote a few lines here, and a few there in between rebuilding one of the protein indices, it got kind of long, and I've spammed her with comments enough this week...)
Gods, I spent a lot of time trying to make a decent dye, or ink, from berries when I was young. (I was particularly enamoured of our sumac tree, that grew these things that looked more or less like fuzzy hotdogs -- they seemed to be so completely useless, and yet they were an amazing bright burgundy, and when soaked in water they turned it an intriguing pink, and it looked so much like you ought to be able to do something with them...) We'll just leave out the early attempts at building a wood burning stove (my mother loved that one) at boatbuilding, at spinning...
I must not have outgrown the urge, though. And having eventually done a lot of these things (haven't built a boat on my own, yet)... goodness, I'm not at all sure that this hasn't ended up being a major theme of growing up for me. None of them ended up being difficult, and most of them ended up being less work than my childhood attempts would have lead me to believe. I like doing the work, but I like the knowing how even better. There are a few things that are part of my life in a daily sort of way -- I still make all our bread, and grind a bunch of the flour by hand, and rise it with yeast I captured and domesticated myself -- but most of it I did until I became proficient and then only did beyond then if I had something in particular in mind.
But... well, here's the reason I'm bothering to write this. If in general things were more doable than I would have thought, the flip side was that I have kept on finding, over the years, that a huge amount of what makes them doable is knowing how. And to some extent having the right tools, though in my general experience, if you know how you can usually *make* the right tools. And that part has just been incredibly humbling. A handspindle is a really simple tool. I've made any number of them myself (I taught classes on spinning, and provided simple spindles to everyone who took the class). On my own, I got as far as using a hooked stick, which isn't that conceptually far from a handspindle, though much less efficient -- but I know about handspindles, and how to make them and how to use them because I read about them in a book.
I've made usable ink a few different ways -- but in ways I didn't figure out for myself. Or at least not entirely on my own. I've made my own paper. I've built a stone wall, and done more building and remodelling type stuff than I can easily name or quantify. I've started with raw dirty wool and ended up with a finished, ornamented garment. I have refined clay and made it into usable vessels. And all of these things were perfectly doable and understandable, and didn't overburden either my brain or my dexterity. But at the same time, even doing these simple basic things, that in some ways are aimed exactly at demonstrating my autonomy made me realize how much of a creature of my culture and of the massive amount of knowledge that has already been accumulated I am.
Maybe working in a discipline that involves generating massive amounts of data and only the inklings of clues with what to do with it makes this seem funnier...
k_crow's post here. But as I wrote a few lines here, and a few there in between rebuilding one of the protein indices, it got kind of long, and I've spammed her with comments enough this week...)Gods, I spent a lot of time trying to make a decent dye, or ink, from berries when I was young. (I was particularly enamoured of our sumac tree, that grew these things that looked more or less like fuzzy hotdogs -- they seemed to be so completely useless, and yet they were an amazing bright burgundy, and when soaked in water they turned it an intriguing pink, and it looked so much like you ought to be able to do something with them...) We'll just leave out the early attempts at building a wood burning stove (my mother loved that one) at boatbuilding, at spinning...
I must not have outgrown the urge, though. And having eventually done a lot of these things (haven't built a boat on my own, yet)... goodness, I'm not at all sure that this hasn't ended up being a major theme of growing up for me. None of them ended up being difficult, and most of them ended up being less work than my childhood attempts would have lead me to believe. I like doing the work, but I like the knowing how even better. There are a few things that are part of my life in a daily sort of way -- I still make all our bread, and grind a bunch of the flour by hand, and rise it with yeast I captured and domesticated myself -- but most of it I did until I became proficient and then only did beyond then if I had something in particular in mind.
But... well, here's the reason I'm bothering to write this. If in general things were more doable than I would have thought, the flip side was that I have kept on finding, over the years, that a huge amount of what makes them doable is knowing how. And to some extent having the right tools, though in my general experience, if you know how you can usually *make* the right tools. And that part has just been incredibly humbling. A handspindle is a really simple tool. I've made any number of them myself (I taught classes on spinning, and provided simple spindles to everyone who took the class). On my own, I got as far as using a hooked stick, which isn't that conceptually far from a handspindle, though much less efficient -- but I know about handspindles, and how to make them and how to use them because I read about them in a book.
I've made usable ink a few different ways -- but in ways I didn't figure out for myself. Or at least not entirely on my own. I've made my own paper. I've built a stone wall, and done more building and remodelling type stuff than I can easily name or quantify. I've started with raw dirty wool and ended up with a finished, ornamented garment. I have refined clay and made it into usable vessels. And all of these things were perfectly doable and understandable, and didn't overburden either my brain or my dexterity. But at the same time, even doing these simple basic things, that in some ways are aimed exactly at demonstrating my autonomy made me realize how much of a creature of my culture and of the massive amount of knowledge that has already been accumulated I am.
Maybe working in a discipline that involves generating massive amounts of data and only the inklings of clues with what to do with it makes this seem funnier...
