kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Madam, may I take your coat? It is with some sense of amazement that I have been slowly realizing of late that I am being perceived more as a creature of hands than head. I come from a geeky family—it’s a fact. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read, and I know that by the time I was done with first grade my mother had finished trading off chapters of “Little House On The Prairie” to be read aloud with me. The library was less than a quarter of a mile away, and my mother absolutely put her foot down with the library staff when they tried to issue us children’s’ library cards—with their two-book limit. If we could stagger home with it, we could check it—or them—out. None of us were particularly athletic, and academic pursuits were encouraged. Yes, my mother taught us various crafts and skills as well, but we were definitely brought up to live more in our heads than any other part of our bodies. (Ironically now, I’m the last couch potato in the family, but that’s an irony to be examined another day.) Both my sister and I chose rather intellectual courses of education—my father offered each of us an electrician’s apprenticeship, and we both turned him down, albeit for different reasons. We both graduated college, and my sister achieved her Master’s many years ago. Throughout my twenties (and indeed, into the present) I’ve retained a rather scholarly approach to things. More in the Chinese sense of “a well-educated person can do ANYTHING” than a dusty Oxford don sort of approach, but there you go. “Let’s look it up” was the war cry of my childhood. It’s still natural to me to run and look it up—the search engines were perhaps the first thing I learned to use on the Internet, far in advance of dealing with email or chat boards or journalizing or even pop-ups. My passion for information has led to reams of printout and home-made books full of information I find interesting and am afraid of losing in the ephemera of the net. All of my hobbies through most of my twenties were geared towards that life of the mind—even the craft work I did was making blank journals, for heaven’s sake! As much as I never could resist being an attention-hungry public person, well, gosh, I was a poetry slam champion. Esoteric, to say the least, and well in keeping with a life of the mind. Somehow, sometime, it morphed into a life of the hands instead. It’s a little funny, in a weird kind of way—I’m aware of my own education-snobbery, and my bias towards white-collar jobs and “not getting your hands dirty”. After all, it’s what I always expected to do –have a very white-collar (if low-paying) job and not do anything in the course of my workday that would get me dirty or make my hands ache or get physcially tired. I'm aware a bit sometimes this sea change in the reactions of others--those who know me more as an artisan than a thinker. I wonder sometimes if I may have sacrificed some part of my life of the mind, swapped it for a pair of pliers and a chunk of wire. Somehow, I do not seem as erudite as I once was. Sometimes I wonder if I'm losing my words. It's a fair cop, really-- I certainly don't write poetry with the speed and passion that I once did. Instead I create with speed and passion things of wire and stone. Do I think it's fair to value one mode of expression over another? Yes, in the sense that if we are alive, we are exhibiting bias-- you cannot observe without also becoming part of the observation. The painter, after all, does hold the brush. To make judgements, to value one thing over another, is one sign you can tell you're living, short of checking your pulse. In another-- no. I think my poetry equally valuable to my jewelry--although I've certainly made more cold hard cash off the latter. It's certainly not part of me to value one occupation over another in trying to apportion intrinsic worth. Having run into some stunning examples of Old New England Money Snobbery when I was young, and having run into the pitfalls of my generation trying to earn a living as I grew older, anything that makes you an honest buck is an honest living. Actually, I feel fortunate in that while I did expect to pursue a white-collar profession, I never expected to make buckets out of it. People within a mere couple of years of my age who first were in exaltation and then despair over the dot-com boom--"they're making money and history, so COULD I, why CAN'T I..." who had, held up to them every day in the news, examples of people with their own levels of education and ability, who were in the right place at the right time and who pushed a little bit harder get rewards all out of proportion to what could reasonably be expected. I think it's even harder for them in the wake of the dot-bust because not only did they never achieve that level of prosperity, now even the chance of it is gone. But in the context of making a living or not, here I am, this...anachronism. An artist attempting to make her way as an artisan. Publishing essays on the Internet and collecting antique typewriters. Making jewelry out of materials that have only been on the market for fifteen years, using techniques that are a thousand years old. A creature of all head trying to live in her hands and see where they go. And with that artisanship comes the perceptions of others, that as an artist, I am somehow less a creature of intellect. With my art, my education has come to mean less. And somehow, I've become a truck driver in the intellectual world of jet pilots. Reams of writing and thousands of words are unseen in the shadows of the glass and wire. I look down and I don't really have an intellectual's hands any longer. I have a busted-up warped thumbnail, still purple all down one side. My fingernails are all six-year-old-girl short, and on the days I've been working more with copper, there are grayish-green stains across the broken skin and calluses. The vast number of funky silver rings are my attempt to distract the viewer from the faint traceries of black copper scars that thread across the fingerpads of both hands. Wire isn't always kind, but the bites are at least small. But I have chosen this--the early mornings hauling pounds of equipment out to the car, the callouses from my tools, the visible signs of my apprenticeship in wire. It's as unmistakable, if more visible, than the marks that my poetry left permanently imprinted in my skin--the bump on my right hand middle finger from gripping a pen. I suppose you could say that as deliberately as I have marked my hide with the signs of my tribe--the earrings, the clothing--I have marked my hands with the signs of my profession, so I have no one but myself to blame for the preconceptions of someone who only sees me with a steel bench block and a hammer in my hand. It is a growing, a stretching out, to reclaim parts of my body that I hardly ever lived in--I think of myself as more whole now than I ever was. And, well, if you make your judgements about me by the state of my fingers, you passed the check-in desk for your assumptions out in the main hall, and it's not my fault you didn't get a claim ticket. 9:49 p.m. - 2003-03-13 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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