Jua Kali
It’s spring and that creates a fruitful restlessness in me, a primitive, profound and timely desire to die to my old self and be resurrected. It’s too inward, physical, dynamic and inchoate to be directly described, so I am left speechless.
It doesn’t make sense to call it writer’s block, for that would imply the pretension to be a “writer”. I’m a writer only in the sense of not being illiterate: which is achievement enough. It would also imply that I have something I want to say which I’m unable to express. I have nothing to say, only an urge towards creative expression, which, given free rein, has its own ideas. Free rein? Let me be true to my chosen icon of the centaur, where there is no hierarchy of rider and mount, therefore no need for reins. Chevalier and cheval are one, welded together.
As I commenced by saying in my last, I’ve missed the design and construction work which had turned this tiny house into a carpentry workshop in which you could hardly move for tools, sawdust and shards of offcut plywood. Not long after cleaning up, I started to suffer withdrawal symptoms, missing the creative high. I couldn’t write as I had nothing to say. A suggestion from K got me on another design-and-build project, modest in its pretensions but satisfying for the work’s sake as much as for the end product.
On the ledge which separates kitchen from dining-room, we’ve always kept a wooden basket holding soy sauce, hot pepper sauce, honey etc. It’s never been exactly right: too small and the sides too high. We’d bought it along with a batik wall-hanging of a Kikuyu gathering from a shop in Edinburgh stuffed with African & other crafts. It was originally designed to be packed and shipped in folded form, the main pieces being connected by little hinges for easy assembly, the carrying handle being fastened with turned wooden screws on the knobs. Unlike flatpacks from IKEA, it was crafted entirely by hand, using local hardwoods. I saw that it could be taken apart, modified and expanded to suit our needs. I had the advantage of leftover plywood and several electric tools, but as the work proceeded, a sense of admiration, harmony & kinship connected me with those unknown craftsmen, as if we were parts of a single team. They had done their job properly, now it was up to me to continue from where they left off.
Serendipitously, I was idling through the dictionary this morning in quest of a crossword answer and came across jua kali, a Swahili expression from Kenya meaning “small-scale craft or artisan work”. Literally, it means “hot sun”, referring to the outdoor nature of the work. And so I was able to search Google for an illustration of some craftsmen making stools in the sun, and resting on them for the photo.
Idling also describes the way I’ve been dipping into Hannah Arendt’s monumental Human Condition, in which I learn how the Greeks distinguished action from contemplation (considering the latter superior, as all the ancients did); how she distinguishes action (taking part in public affairs!), labour, work and fabrication from one another; and how the relative prestige of these things has changed across the intervening history. And when we speak of fabrication, i.e. making things, are we referring to the workmanship involved, or the product resulting from it? She considers this too, and how we might value one and not the other. Today, buying cheap factory-made things from sweatshops in the far East, we may find little to value in either.
Arendt’s ability to distinguish and rationalize, and create a magnificent apothecary’s chest of inter-related terms and meanings, marvellously complements my own manner of thought, whose favoured attitude is to respect inner impulses and treat them as divine guidance. If the purpose of philosophy is to explain and interpret, it’s not my thing at all, for I don’t really need explanations. If I speak of divine guidance, I need nothing to tell me where it comes from: neither theology nor psychoneurology. But I do need a language. Jua kali provides a metaphor for the fabrication I yearn to do, and ultimately my preferred medium is words and not wood; for they are more explicit and don’t spread sawdust everywhere.
And yet, increasingly, I have nothing to say. This soul is at rest, has no sermons to deliver, only songs of praise.
It doesn’t make sense to call it writer’s block, for that would imply the pretension to be a “writer”. I’m a writer only in the sense of not being illiterate: which is achievement enough. It would also imply that I have something I want to say which I’m unable to express. I have nothing to say, only an urge towards creative expression, which, given free rein, has its own ideas. Free rein? Let me be true to my chosen icon of the centaur, where there is no hierarchy of rider and mount, therefore no need for reins. Chevalier and cheval are one, welded together.
As I commenced by saying in my last, I’ve missed the design and construction work which had turned this tiny house into a carpentry workshop in which you could hardly move for tools, sawdust and shards of offcut plywood. Not long after cleaning up, I started to suffer withdrawal symptoms, missing the creative high. I couldn’t write as I had nothing to say. A suggestion from K got me on another design-and-build project, modest in its pretensions but satisfying for the work’s sake as much as for the end product.
On the ledge which separates kitchen from dining-room, we’ve always kept a wooden basket holding soy sauce, hot pepper sauce, honey etc. It’s never been exactly right: too small and the sides too high. We’d bought it along with a batik wall-hanging of a Kikuyu gathering from a shop in Edinburgh stuffed with African & other crafts. It was originally designed to be packed and shipped in folded form, the main pieces being connected by little hinges for easy assembly, the carrying handle being fastened with turned wooden screws on the knobs. Unlike flatpacks from IKEA, it was crafted entirely by hand, using local hardwoods. I saw that it could be taken apart, modified and expanded to suit our needs. I had the advantage of leftover plywood and several electric tools, but as the work proceeded, a sense of admiration, harmony & kinship connected me with those unknown craftsmen, as if we were parts of a single team. They had done their job properly, now it was up to me to continue from where they left off.
Serendipitously, I was idling through the dictionary this morning in quest of a crossword answer and came across jua kali, a Swahili expression from Kenya meaning “small-scale craft or artisan work”. Literally, it means “hot sun”, referring to the outdoor nature of the work. And so I was able to search Google for an illustration of some craftsmen making stools in the sun, and resting on them for the photo.
Idling also describes the way I’ve been dipping into Hannah Arendt’s monumental Human Condition, in which I learn how the Greeks distinguished action from contemplation (considering the latter superior, as all the ancients did); how she distinguishes action (taking part in public affairs!), labour, work and fabrication from one another; and how the relative prestige of these things has changed across the intervening history. And when we speak of fabrication, i.e. making things, are we referring to the workmanship involved, or the product resulting from it? She considers this too, and how we might value one and not the other. Today, buying cheap factory-made things from sweatshops in the far East, we may find little to value in either.
Arendt’s ability to distinguish and rationalize, and create a magnificent apothecary’s chest of inter-related terms and meanings, marvellously complements my own manner of thought, whose favoured attitude is to respect inner impulses and treat them as divine guidance. If the purpose of philosophy is to explain and interpret, it’s not my thing at all, for I don’t really need explanations. If I speak of divine guidance, I need nothing to tell me where it comes from: neither theology nor psychoneurology. But I do need a language. Jua kali provides a metaphor for the fabrication I yearn to do, and ultimately my preferred medium is words and not wood; for they are more explicit and don’t spread sawdust everywhere.
And yet, increasingly, I have nothing to say. This soul is at rest, has no sermons to deliver, only songs of praise.
Final product after modification
7 Comments:
I've no evidence that the piece is African in origin. More likely Indian. I've just realized that it was a portable wine rack, of the right size to hold five bottles: two inside and three across on top.
A fine looking end product! As for having nothing to say, I'm reminded (as I often am) of John Cage's words: "I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it".
Just read your post, and my immediate feeling is that I am somehow comforted (!) by your admission that you "have nothing to say". (Which I don't actually believe btw). It has the effect of removing the pressure that always seems to hover over me to frantically engage in writing, writing, writing...what about silence? Nothing wrong with it! Nice piece...
Spring?? Why do you "Northern Hemisphere" nincompoops keep assuming that the entire planet revolves around the Mediterranean Sea ....
(or the Atlantic?). While yep, sometimes might be able to come up with 'philosophic thought words' - until, or unless - you can argue from the Southern Hemisphere of this planet -- yer all blowin' up yer own podexes.
Sackerson, thanks for your remarks and for drawing attention to your blog, which is full of treasures and has to be examined from start to finish; and for drawing attention to John Cage.
Brian, I know, there is comfort in the words “I have nothing to say”—in the right context, of course. For that “nothing” is immensely pregnant, rich with uncertainty (or in John Cage’s words, swiftly harvested from Wikipedia, “indeterminacy”). There is almost a brutality about having something to say. It pollutes the silence. It drowns out the still small voice. It scrawls its disordered, ill-considered prejudices, its unasked-for graffiti, over the pure indeterminacy of the yet-to-be, and the simple act of observing the interactions already going on; or of listening to the sounds and silences of the present moment.
Permission to clarify, Mr Davoh? When I say “it’s spring” I am not speaking for the northern hemisphere, the mediterranean, nor the atlantic. Nor do I represent any nincompoops other than myself. I speak only for this little valley in the Chiltern Hills, where we see unmistakable evidence in the form of daffodils, primroses, forsythia and cowslips, to name a few yellow flowers now in season.
How is the mood Down-Under? Is it autumnal and melancholy? Thanks for the expletive. I did Latin at school but they never taught us that.
Sometimes you are too subtle for this reader. I wish I could keep up with you.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/
"In The Human Condition and subsequent works, the task Arendt set herself is to save action and appearance, and with it the common life of the political and the values of opinion, from the depredations of the philosophers. By systematically elaborating what this vita activa might be said to entail, she hopes to reinstate the life of public and political action to apex of human goods and goals."
Thanks, as always.
Thank you, Ellie.
I glanced through the article at your link and felt it does not do justice to Arendt at all. I never got the sense that she had an agenda to pursue, only to take pleasure in thought, and give the same pleasure to her reader; just as a master-gardener need not set himself any other particular task (such showing what can be grown in that climate, or preserving rare species).
The Human Condition does have a rational framework, it's true. And as for depredations, they are caused by everything in history; and it is her pleasure to trace them.
Or if we are convinced that she must have set herself a serious and not a frivolous task, it is to open our eyes, and see how intricate are the processes wherein ideas develop and change.
So you can come to her with your own reader's agenda, and not be disappointed. Unless she started and ended her book with reference to theoria (θεωρία), the Greek word meaning contemplation, I would not have bothered with it. Perhaps what she and the Greek philosophers mean by θεωρία is not the same as I understand from contemplation. But the book is written so intelligently that I can take away from it as much as I can absorb, leaving plenty behind, unexamined; and still feel that the journey through the chapters was worth the trouble. I'm sure I have skipped part of the middle chapters. But you can open at any page and get something from it; and I don't foresee dust settling on this book as it sits on my shelves.
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