Rivendell
Workshop Reverie
Curtis BauerAt the beginning of summer I carry my drafting table to the garage behind my house--the workshop of the carpenter who once lived here--and put it inside, under the north facing window. Early mornings I fill a thermos with coffee, take a book, a pen and some paper out for a few hours of work. There is no clock or radio; the dust from the previous afternoon and evening peppers the drafting table; maybe there's a cobweb or a sparrow feather that sags or lifts in the morning breeze coming through the windows on the east or south wall.
I come to write letters, make poems, find images and lines, and look around when I can't. I watch the dust hang in the light above the work worn bench I sanded clean--I thought I might draw there--, or I imagine the tools I could hang on the empty brackets or stuff in the cubbyholes on the south wall. This is the space I've wanted, a space I can fill with saws, hammers, and a miter box; walls where I can hang butcher paper and draw; the work bench where I can make frames and boxes like Joseph Cornell; this is where I can remember the rules of craft.
I try to keep my books and papers out of this room. I want it to be simple: a desk, chair, a ream of paper and a pen. Unfortunately it slowly fills with what I need to fix the storm door, cut planks for a shelf, make a table or desk or frame or book stand. I buy the tools because I can; I'll use them to cut costs, because I like to work with my hands, but I'm not fluent in their language like Carl was.
Carl was one of my teachers; he was the German giant who spoke with a cocktail of his harsh native syntax, a lifetime of smoking, and drinking piestengel (rhubarb wine); he was the shepherd of the tools in his shop--hand saws, hack saws, wooden twist clamps, lathes, hand drills, punches, bevels, chisels, levels, miter blocks, boxes, squares, the table saw, climbing rows of hammers and planes--; he cared for and respected them. He lectured unwaveringly on keeping life in the wood and capturing the angle in the bevels; he had reverence for tools like my grandfather had for religion, like I have for women.
My father had a small apartment and studio in a town thirty miles west of here. When he needed to make a frame or cut down a panel he'd walk down the street to work in Carl's shop. It's here that I first played with dust, noticed the elaborate crimping on the dangerous end of shotgun shells, and fell in love with the twang and danger of a table saw blade, the slow exacting tap of the craftsman's hammer, the perfume of sawdust, and the silent chaos of a workshop inhabited by a lifetime of tools.
Carl was the man my father trusted to build the frames and cut down the paintings he would later drive to New York and sell to Allan Stone. He'd meet us at the door eager to start so we could finish and still have time to drink before lunch. In the shop boxes of wood scraps, newspaper, broken dowels and tin cans, one on top of another, leaned into each other forming an island down the middle of the L shaped room. The fluorescent bulbs cackled above the cedar, oak, cherry and pine saw dust and shavings scattered over the benches, the plank floor, the grime-caked windows at the back, the hammers, saws and endless other nameless tools hanging from hooks and nails on the walls around us. This was a curious child's paradise, a woodworkers dream, a library of tools waiting to be used, a place in which I spent Saturday mornings wandering from bench to work table, fingering wood chunks, sweeping saw dust into piles, or trying to hide that I was filled with splinters.
My father and Carl spent most of their time next to the table saw, Robert's exact measurements, his meticulous scale drawings on the paper pressed under Carl's enormous hands. Carl would select the wood, check the measurements again, slide out the tape and breathe a soft mark on the side of the board. While he'd set up the saw, Robert would check his mark. They'd check the measurements, the saw and each other two, sometimes three more times before Carl would lift the square from its hook, align it across the board and slice a dark line across it. Finally, Carl would pull out his tape again and measure the blade height, the spacing, the pieces he'd cut, then line up the first board and tell Robert to hold it in place. He'd flip the switch, squint and ease the board into the blade. I loved to see the hard wood suddenly turn tender, divide, and only sigh at the cut. Quick, steady, immediate, ceaseless: zing, zing, zing, zing; then the slow falling pitch when the blade clicked off, the sudden sea of dust hanging in the air around us. Here again Carl would stretch out the tape, squint at the numbers, then back at the measurements on the paper; he'd stand and sigh, We did something wrong because it's exact, or I suppose it's close enough for the size of town we're in. I always laughed because I thought he was funny. Robert could have laughed out of a business-like obligation--it was, after all, the only workshop in town, the price was reasonable and most importantly, Carl's meticulous nature matched his own--but I think he too must have thought the same jokes, told at the same time were somehow funny, something one could count on.
Back then I was an impatient boy; I hated exactitude, was annoyed by my father's disappointment in my unconsciousness of detail, and was indifferent to his art, books, the museums, the galleries. Now I've learned to wait, to measure, to see, write, listen, stop, measure again, return to the marks and let them lead my pen. Now I can't help recalling Carl's attention to the measurements, his corrections, his detail, and how both my father and I-whether we're in his studio near Boston, shimming the final playing cards into place so the space between the portrait and frame is precise on each side, or I am sitting out in this shop watching the light come across the yard and new lines come across the page, and he's a thousand miles east-refer back to those Saturday mornings. I'm aware of the rules of craft, the patience I need, and I still laugh at the same bad jokes I say to myself when my work turns out as it should. Then the dust, or the passing car in the alley, a sound or the light pulls me out of the memory and back to the poem or letter.
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