The Craft of Work
As we move through life our way of acting in the world changes. Young children tend to act in compliance with the forces of their immediate environment and allow themselves to be shaped by them, thereby becoming a product of these forces. Their satisfaction is in the level of acceptance they receive from others. Adolescent teenagers tend to fabricate a persona according to how they wish to be seen. Their satisfaction is precarious because their desired self-projection is always changing. And then as older adolescents they necessarily arrive at a turning point where they wish to move beyond their self-centred needs. They seek to find their satisfaction as adults in doing something that feels right for them.
The transition into adulthood, however, can prove difficult and yet the stakes are high for a person’s future happiness depends on it. One way of looking at this transition is to focus upon what constitutes good work. The achievement of good work is a critical aspect of being an adult for self-worth and identity are intrinsically tied to it. Yet for many adolescents who enter high-hoped into adulthood, work proves to be a negative experience and they become disenchanted and quickly revert back to adolescent attitudes.
E. F. Schumacher points out in his book, Good Work, that “Traditional wisdom teaches that the function of work is at heart threefold: (1) to give a person a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; (2) to enable him to overcome his inborn egocentricity by joining with other people in a common task; (3) to bring forth the goods and services needed by all of us for a decent existence”. However, I think there is another important function and that is that good work allows a person (4) to discover a capacity of their being that only comes into play in the working process.
This latter function of work is best understood when work is considered in terms of craft. In her book, The Work of Craft, Carla Needleman states that craft is about one thing: “the secret of how to work.” Her thinking picks up on the idea of an analogy and this is what the practice of craft does, it introduces us to living analogically. “If I wish to live fully I need to put aside my one-levelled, exclusively mental logic and live analogically [author’s emphasis], or at least try to. The life of analogy is the life of levels of meaning. Explanation, on the other hand, is the attempt to coalesce levels. Explanation of symbols is the attempt to capture on one level the reciprocal exchange of energies between levels. And so, for most of us, symbol hardly exists. We live in our heads and symbol cannot be comprehended by the isolated intellect.
“When I look at pottery from, say, the Islamic world, or at even fairly recent American Indian pottery, I am so touched by it. It seems so real, so beautiful and so unaffected, so mysteriously good, and I don’t understand how they were able to produce such pottery when I – with access to far better clay, kilns, far easier to fire, and the electric wheel for goodness’ sake! – just blunder along.”
To work analogically is to engage our latent capacity for intuitive perception. In primal, pre-literate cultures it was through intuitive perception that knowledge came. But this knowledge was analogical or symbolic and it was knowledge that was not “read” but experienced at the level of feeling and it put a person in touch with a more expansive state of consciousness. This is what Needleman is referring to when she says, “I am so touched by it. It seems so real, so beautiful and so unaffected, so mysteriously good”.
Needleman also distances herself from the use of our “speculative imagination.” “The craft teaches precisely through bypassing the self-indulgent speculative part of the mind that would rather think about working than work. The craft provides the experience . . . The craft will lead me if I am able to put aside my impatience and follow.” The opposite to this is to dominate the work and to yank it into line, so to speak, and make it conform to some preconceived notion of how I think it should end up.
But how does one start to work in the manner of a craftsperson using intuitive perception? Here the example of the modern architect Louis Kahn is illustrative. In the book, Louis Kahn Essential Texts, Khan writes that “even a brick wants to be something . . . It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick wants to be something more than it is. It wants to be something better than it is.” And so the job of the architect is to open up a conversation with the brick: “You say to a brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’ And brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’ And you say to brick, ‘Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel instead.’ And then you say: ‘What do you think of that, brick?’ Brick says: ‘I like an arch’.” This may sound absurd but it’s not if it’s seen as a very rough translation of what occurs on the level of intuitive perception.
From this Kahn concludes, “what a thing wants to be is the most important act of an object [in Needleman’s language, this is to allow an object to express its full symbolic potential to become “so mysteriously good”]. It is for the architect to derive from the very nature of things – from his realizations – what a thing wants to be.” Kahn describes a realization as a fusion of “thought and feeling together”. I would define it as an intuitive perception. The implication here is that over time the craftsperson becomes more attuned to these realizations and senses them more freely and more often. And it is in this type of reciprocity between the adult worker and what is being made that makes work both satisfying and rewarding. It reaches such a point that the craftsperson comes to see, as the poet Francis Brabazon describes it, “The image is already in the stone, the bridge / in steel, awaiting revealment and spanning / at the word of God in a man’s hand.”
Intuitive perception is not something that can be explained or measured in any way. But when a craftsperson is working at this level it can certainly be felt or made tangible in the finished work. Meher Baba has beautifully affirmed this approach to work in his statement: “To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance and benefit of others, by expressing, in the world of forms, truth, love, purity and beauty - this is the sole game which has any intrinsic and absolute worth. All other happenings, incidents and attainments in themselves can have no lasting importance.”
This is really a fine summative statement of what is “good work.” What I think is needed if a person wishes to work in this manner is to approach work – any type of work – as a form of service to “truth, love, purity and beauty,” to an uplifting ideal that leads them out of themselves. This is the beginning of working as a craftsperson and the making of something “mysteriously good.”
© Ross Keating