Spruce

This could describe me:

While out walking I’ve formulated perfect phrases which I can’t remember when I get home. I’m not sure if the ineffable poetry of these phrases belongs totally to what they were (and which I forgot), or partly to what they weren’t. (1)

This too:

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I’ve sought—as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line—the longest distance between two points. I’ve never had a knack for the active life. I’ve always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I’ve always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. (1)

And I wish I’d been able to think clearly enough to say this:

It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins. Thus, the origin of life from inorganic matter is an infinite improbability of inorganic processes, as is the coming into being of the earth viewed from the standpoint of processes in the universe, or the evolution of human out of animal life.
. . .
Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” (2)

All the same, I do try to say things for myself, such as this:

In the spring and summer of this year 2006 I opened all my senses, not just the usual five, to Nature. I’m searching here for an adequate word, but Nature will have to do. I exposed myself to the sublime and intricate world of non-human life, its pathos and grandeur. (3)

But most of the things I want to say, and haven’t the ability to express, have been said by others, and I discover them in the authors I admire.

ADMIRATION, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves. (4)

Sometimes I read things that have special meaning for me, perhaps meanings adrift from the author’s intention.

. . . every animal is in the world like water in water.
. . .
Nothing, as a matter of fact, is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended. Nothing is more foreign to our way of thinking than the earth in the middle of the silent universe and having neither the meaning that man gives things, nor the meaninglessness of things as soon as we try to imagine them without a consciousness that reflects them. (5)

I’ve lived as a rolling stone, more Sisyphus than Jagger, and if I have gathered any moss it has been in the form of books: the love of them and sometimes the possession. In my youth I’d transport them in trunks and lay them out somewhere at my temporary destination; till a divine madness, as it seemed then, overtook me in 1972 & I gave away all I possessed. In recent years I’ve been avidly buying again, and keeping them in the cheapest option, IKEA bookcases each called Billy, till I realized how unsuitable and heavy these particle-board monsters really are. You wouldn’t bury your worst enemy in a coffin that plain. I won’t call them ugly, but a pig is still a pig, however pretty the lipstick, you may try to apply; no matter how precious the books you want to display. So I’ve been giving those Billys away to The Central Aid Furniture project, which offers them to its low-income customers.

That was the easy part. What to replace them with? I’ve scoured the world-wide web for ready-mades on sale or even pictures of what I sought. There are plenty of zany ideas, but I found none which truly respected their function, none which had a notion of the elegance possible. I even checked out bookshelfporn.com. Surely there’d be something there? But alas, Freud was right. Mankind is polymorphously perverse: that site drools over quantity with a dreary monotony. The truly erotic must have more finesse. Bookshelves are to books what clothing is to the naked human form. The one should draw you to the possibilities of the other.

So I had to design my own, from first principles. I’ve just completed Mark 5, the most advanced. The whole process, from design to model, from cutting to assembly, has been a major project. Mark 5 is based around a central spine or keel, as in a wooden ship from the long era of sail. One day I might add several layers of yacht varnish, but it’ll do as it is. And I hope when I’m gone the next house-owner will keep it there intact.

The 12mm spruce plywood from which it's built is rather soft, but surprisingly light. One thinks of Howard Hughes’ famous “Spruce Goose”, that huge flying boat which flew only once and became a museum piece in Long Beach California, where I missed going to see it for some reason when I went there in 1989, and lodged in the RMS Queen Mary. The plane is actually made of birch, and has been moved to another museum in Oregon.

And here I must digress and say how similar was the fate of the Saunders-Roe Princess, built in East Cowes, where I briefly lived with stepfather no. 2 who worked for that company. See http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-19279791 and also this post. And again, how similar was the fate of the R100 airship, not to be confused with the ill-fated R101, which I wrote about in this more recent post.

I’m glad in particular to speak again of Nevil Shute’s book Slide Rule, which describes his role in the construction of R100, because I thought of it during the design and construction of my bookshelf. Would its lightweight elegance be robust enough to bear the weight of Harrap’s French & English Dictionary, & various coffee-table books we’d been given that you can hardly pick up? In the end, I may have over-engineered it, to be on the safe side, but I don’t think it shows.

Here’s another passage from his book, the gist of which stays in my memory from reading it more than twenty years ago:

Sixteen steel cables ran from the centre of the polygon, the axis of the ship, to the corner points, bracing the polygonal girder against deflections. All loads, whether of gas lift, weights carried on the frame, or shear wire reactions, were applied to corner points of the polygon, and except in the case of the ship turning these loads were symmetrical port and starboard. One half of the transverse frame, therefore, divided by a vertical plane passing through the axis of the ship, consisted of an encastré arched rib with ends free to slide towards each other, and this arched rib was braced by eight radial wires, some of which would go slack through the deflection of the arched rib under the applied loads. Normally four or five wires would remain in tension, and for the first approximation the slack wires would be guessed. The forces and bending moments in the members could then be calculated by the solution of a lengthy simultaneous equation containing up to seven unknown quantities; this work usually occupied two [human!] calculators about a week, using a Fuller slide rule and working in pairs to check for arithmetical mistakes. In the solution it was usual to find a compression force in one or two or the radial wires; the whole process then had to be begun again using a different selection of wires.(6)

There is more in the same vein, but the above is enough, or more than. In my case, I’ve been aware that the bookshelf’s load is spread in a fashion I prefer to call “unquantifiable”; balanced and cantilevered in myriad ways. It seems rigid enough: you don’t see it flex or hear it creaking, and I don’t suppose it would fall off the wall in an earthquake.

There is a satisfaction in engineering, even on the miniature scale I’m capable of. Let Nevil Shute, though, have the last word.

When all forces were found to be in balance, and when all deflections proved to be in correspondence with the forces elongating the members, then we knew that we had reached the truth.

As I say, it produced a satisfaction almost amounting to a religious experience. After literally months of labour, having filled perhaps fifty foolscap sheets with closely pencilled figures, after many disappointments and heartaches, the truth stood revealed, real and perfect, and unquestionable; the very truth. It did one good; one was the better for the experience. It struck me at the time that those who built the great arches of the English cathedrals in mediaeval times must have known something of our mathematics, and perhaps passed through the same experience, and I have wondered if Freemasonry has anything to do with this. (6)

In my own case, I have been consciously building shrines of spruce in thanksgiving to a host of authors for their generosity in sharing “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”, and thus to be mirrors to the reader’s soul.

* * * *

(1) From fragment 399 of The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa (tr. Richard Zenith)
(2) From “The disclosure of the agent in speech and action” in The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt
(3) From this blog, post titled “The Human Condition”
(4) From The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce.
(5) From first chapter, “Animality” of Theory of Religion, by Georges Bataille (tr. Robert Hurley)
(6) From pp 72-73 of Slide Rule, by Nevil Shute (Pan Books, 1968)

scale plan; all pieces cut from 12mm spruce plywood 8' x 4'

paper model


assembling the pieces


Billy from IKEA and its new replacement


Mk5 shelf, freshly installed


This one is Mk 3


William Shaw, aged 16, my ‘apprentice’; at the end of 2 days building Mk 3. The old Billy looms behind


left: part of Mk 1, sitting alongside a three-tiered corner shelf, the original inspiration for all of them. I got it in a charity shop, added an extra tier and made a clone, building more shelves till the whole wall was covered in books. My camera won’t pan to show them all
right: Mk 2, at the side of my desk