June 13, 2009
“work forms us, and deforms us”
When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.
—Matthew B. Crawford, “The Case for Working With Your Hands,” New York Times, May 21, 2009
(via Dervala)
Dear Clusterflock, what kind of work do you know how to do with your hands? Is it work that you now or have ever made a living off of? Is the work that you do now the kind of work that you like to do best?
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The summers before and after my freshman year of college, I worked for a friend of my mom’s, a contractor, in the Bay Area. Mostly I just did demolition and ditch-digging and sweeping, but I also laid tile and taped sheetrock. Most of the people I worked with had master’s degrees—the foreman, in city planning; the plumber, in French literature. They’d learned a trade to put themselves through school but then found that they preferred the trade to whatever it was they’d been schooling for. My mom’s friend had been a sculptor; now she builds schools and public housing. I loved doing that work, and I loved working with those people, but I didn’t want to blow my elbows out, and it didn’t seem like something I’d enjoy doing for any company except that one.
Two years after college, I did a little work in a kitchen, assisting a friend of my family’s who was a chef. I liked doing that work, and I love cooking, but I’ve always been pretty sure that I wouldn’t like doing it for a living.
That’s about it.
Book design is a little bit like working with your hands—you produce something, eventually; you think about space; you can get it done faster if you’re dexterous; you solve concrete problems. But you’re sitting at a desk all day, and most of the problems you solve have to do with software, not objects; it’s not at all like setting lead type, where you’re working with immediate physical constraints. It’s all hypothetical until somebody else manufactures the real object and ships it to you.
There’s a big emphasis on making stuff at my school, on building actual things that move and make noise, and on taking stuff apart, as well. Soldering. Fabricating. I suck at it. I feel like my brain doesn’t do that anymore. I believe I can relearn it, but thinking in terms of handling real objects is harder than I’d have expected, had I had the clarity of mind to anticipate such a difficulty.
And it’s likely that I didn’t have the clarity of mind because I wasn’t doing anything with my hands while I was thinking about such things. Do you know what I mean? Do you, too, feel like you’re having your clearest thoughts when you’re doing something physical, like cooking, or sewing, or washing the dishes, or gardening? It keeps the chatter down in the rest of your head so that you can focus better, or something.
Yeah, that makes sense. Or just actually doing nothing is also a very good space for good thoughts to come. But I think it’s also a question of having a varied day; of having varied tasks and ways of working, that keep the whole mechanism fresh. Always encouraging and fostering beginners mind in whatever way it can come about. The idea of specialism is probably a great idea in some respects, but I think probably only up to a point. It leads to a lot of lopsided humans.
I was just talking the other day about the business of having a number of varied careers and kinds of education in one life. It seems to me that this is more commonplace in Europe, not so much in the US, but I think this also varies quite a bit depending on where you live. I know people who are having a number of careers or are moving between professional fields without having to justify the changes in their professional lives. I have a number of aspects to my own working life, and I find that I tend to concentrate on one at a time, but this seems to only freshen my perspective when I come around to one of the others again.
Another thing that I notice especially about New York is the number of fantastically talented people doing something like making music for instance, to an intricate and deep degree, but who are not working professionally in music, in other words, not making their living at it. This does seem to be endemic. Some of these people wouldn’t want to, but I think plenty of them would love to be earning their living from their music/art work, but that is not how New York is set up. A person with perhaps equivalent skills or talent in Dublin or Copenhagen, for instance, would probably be working fulltime and professionally in their field in some way. It seems to me that people are more likely to keep their art as a hobby in New York, and do something else to pay the bills.
And this has repercussions, because they actually end up spending a huge amount of their ‘non-working’ lives on their music or painting or whatever it is, and often, especially if they want to make records, a huge amount of money too. I see this all the time, and at some profound level it bewilders me. I just never met this kind of phenomenon before I came to New York.
Of course, some people choose to use their skills in transferrable ways. There are a lot of graphic designers of various sorts about, for instance. And some people prefer not to work close to their art at all, because it creates a kind of friction to be working so close to their art but not actually at it.
But to answer your last question, I hardly think about anything at all other than cooking when I am cooking, and the same would be true of dishwashing and other tasks of that sort. Cycling has always been a rich source of thought for me, and sitting around is probably the best.
I don’t know how many of my poems have begun while I was walking or driving on long rural highways and my mind could attend to the task at hand and still have energy to ‘wander.’ I don’t think my mind wanders in the same way when I am drawing, even though the drawing resides in a different part of the brain.
As for useful work, I have a deep sympathy for people who work with their hands and have many times thought I could enjoy just running a gas station if there were still gas stations in the sense there were when I was a teenager working for my grandfather–with service, not self-service, and without a convenience store. In addition to my “thinky” jobs, I’ve done that–working at a service station, pumping gas, checking tire pressure, checking batteries and radiators, washing windshields–plus delivering late newspapers (papers the paperboys missed or forgot), putting newspapers in the box-racks you buy them from, taking care of a sizable church lawn. I don’t know why Americans despise manual labor. I think a retired guy like myself might have fun being a school custodian in a small town, working at night when the building was closed.
Coop, an actor/director friend of mine does just that, he’s the cleaning man in a very fancy private boy’s school. He has also acted in Angela’s Ashes and Gangs of New York, and most recently directed a Macbeth.
Ah, just saw your “Dear Clusterflock” questions now… So let’s see. Work I have done with my hands and made a living from: theatre lighting, stage managing (though these are a combination of mind and hands – and legs – but are hugely physical), cleaning, very occasional gardening, taking care of old people, taking care of children, animal care, playing guitar in the street. I have been paid to write and also to edit. I am currently singing a fair bit and I love it. I love working in music. It is again, both physical and mental.
Pretty much everything I do and have done has little to do with physicality. I worked as a secretary and typed like blazes, but I consider that more of a mental ability than a physical one. I worked in bookstores, but my least favorite activity was shelving the books–I liked helping people find them, or, when I worked in the huge bookstore, working the customer service desk and matching the customer with the best employee to help her. Even cooking, which I love, I love mostly because of the mental creativity that goes into it–the puzzle of making something delicious out of often oddly-matched ingredients that happen to be on hand. I do enjoy the physical aspects of cooking–the aromas, the colors, even the chopping. But the reason I like it is the way it engages my mind.
I make a living as the director of an academic health sciences library. Yes, this is what I do best. In terms of information management, my mind works very much like an index or subject tree–I have an innate understanding of information structure and can apply it well. I’m also very much suited to management–I like to be in charge, and people like to work for me. So, as long as I need to make a living, this is a very good way for me to do it.
The ideal, for me, is to wake each morning without plans or responsibilities and see where the day takes me. I have occasionally thought of how I might go about making a living at that, but nothing has presented itself as yet.
Like Lucy, I sort of overlooked the Dear Clusterflock questions while sort of answering part of it anyway. I’m now retired and one of the things that is different about my retirement is that I draw (or paint) almost every day. I love doing it. It’s physical and mental both, but in an entirely different way from writing. And I have made a little money at it–though I’m certainly not supporting myself. (I’ll have more ‘news’ about making a little money before too long, I think.) I’ve also been writing a good deal more than in the past decade. Partly it may be having energy again; partly it may be having a place to work with–Malta; partly it may be not much caring what people think about it.
In the RV park in El Paso I spent a fair amount of time with my plants, but I don’t do much plant/gardening stuff here: stuff grows so easily that one almost doesn’t need to do much. I do have several aloes I tend, some hearts and flowers, a hibiscus bush, and a rosemary. I love rosemary.
The first summer I was in college I came home and got a job throwing hay. That is as a team we pulled hay off a wagon, put it on a conveyor, and stacked it up to the rafters in barns. I grew up in a rural area but never worked on a farm before, so the entire situation was new to me.
My first day on the job I went to work with two egg sandwiches and a pint of milk in my stomach. That was a mistake. We did half of one wagon and I threw up behind wagon. We covered it with loose straw. After day one I took to wearing a hat and bringing nothing but a half gallon of ice water in a coleman jug and a bandanna to wipe the dust off..
I wouldn’t mind doing it again. I was in such good shape that summer.
Such is the world I work in, the work I do, answering customer calls to do work in the field of landscaping, whether maintenance or installation of oftentimes fabulous gardens. (Upon completion, the place where it might be wonderful to sit and think and perhaps put a word or a brushmark on a page.) I’ve considered working in the field in some limited way. I’ve tended to the grounds of the church on Saturday mornings for three or four hours. And come away, the day after, stiff and sore. (What if I did such work for eight hours a day for a week of five days? Or for the entire summer? Such is the work our folks do.) If I did so, I would be much better in shape than I am. Still, I perform a function in the role I fill. If I didn’t do what I do, there wouldn’t be work for “them” to do. Still, on occasion, I am called to work with my hands. And I love when the opportunity calls. I love “letting go” of the larger picture. I love burrowing down into some task that largely requires my hands and heart instead of my head. There is a handsomeness and worthiness in the work of the body.
My recollections wander back to my father’s construction company where I, for one very LONG summer, was proclaimed to be the “gopher” for a local bridge construction site. My duties included mowing the grass around the banks of the bridge, keeping my grandparents company, and running errands (most notably, the refilling of oxygen and hydrogen cylinders). Watching me (at 130# and 5’10) trying to maneuver a single 5′ tall gas cylinder (weighing over 60# when empty) towards the brawny, toothless attendants makes me cringe to this day. Naturally, one attendant could wield 2 cylinders, filled with gas, simultaneously by merely twirling them between his beefy mitts. As for me, I might have been as likely to cause an explosion with all of the friction and dropping of the cylinders en route to their destination (my father’s El Camino pick-up). The phrase “baby foot” might could be used appropriately here by Mary Jeys to describe my minuscule physicality at the time.
The work I do now is also as a practitioner, although not with my hands. Still, it is not “knowledge work” per se – yet there is a physical presence I must maintain in order to be productive. My “practice” is to help individuals and groups explore the ways in which they effectively work with one another how that process might yield greater benefit. It continues to feel as “hands on” as the twirling of an oxygen tank, and yet the heavy lifting is done by my clients rather than by myself. My constant focus is on preventing “explosions” – unless they might be otherwise productive.
Danny, Mary Jeys might agree, explosions are part of the territory. Sometimes they are quite required.
Yes, Rick. You’ve got it. I believe in explosions as restorative processes to some better newer thing. This applies to physical things as well as emotional catharsis.
As for me and my hands. I think one of my favorite jobs was as a barista. Going around to a bunch of different machines and making things happen to result in this consumable was really really fun for me. Kind of like washing dishes, except my dishrack doesn’t tip (is anyone working on that?) I’ve had a lot of weird jobs, once as an office temp, I was tasked to highlight certain passages of a report for some big future meeting. That was it, the job was essentially coloring. I liked that one a lot- especially because my manager kept praising me for my “good attitude.” The work was deemed gruntish, but I do believe I smiled the entire time, gleeful at how many highlighters I got to play with that day.
Many archival job listings, in addition to specifying X years of thus-and-such experience and a degree or degrees in Y with a concentration in Z, include the qualification “ability to lift 50 pounds”. Yes, my work has a strong physical component. In fact, a student whose work I supervised once said to me, “You know, being an archivist is more like being a warehouse manager than I would have thought.”
She was right. There is a lot of loading and hauling and shifting and estimating of volume. If ever you need someone to eyeball a shitload of stuff and estimate cubic feet, I’m your girl.
In fact, it is the stuff-ish aspect of archival work that I get off on. I’m all for digitizing documents and photographs and such and getting them out there, but I love the fact that the stuff in the archives can never be pure information. (Okay, I’m not talking about born-digital records here, as I’ve not worked much with data archives.)
In addition to the moderately heavy labor of hoisting boxes and loading vans, I do some craft-ish archiv-y handwork as well: simple conservation treatments (paper mending and repair), construction of protective enclosures (custom boxes), and all manner of things to do with exhibit preparation, fabrication, and installation. In fact, after the mental and imaginative wear-and-tear of developing a historical exhibit (especially the strain of trying to please others as well as myself), I find few things so satisfying as matting and framing or arranging and hanging pieces. You either cut something to exactly 9 3/16″ and it works, or you miscalculate and have to do it again. You drill holes in the wall and hang a piece and it is either level or it ain’t. It is all very straightforward and immensely satisfying.
I am a goddamned anomaly.
The physical aspect of many of my gigs has to do with working so much on my own and doing pretty much everything. Still, even when I supervised a staff that included strapping young men, there was plenty of physical labor to go round.
I use my hands to take photographs, well, my hands push the shutter. I have never done it as a job and have never made any money at it.
I have never had a job that I loved probably barely liked. I can tolerate them as long as I like the people. Liking the people kinda makes it like I’m going to see friends rather then leaving to do a shit job.
Since I left the police I have had quite strict conditions under which I will take a job. They must allow me to wear shorts if I wish and they must allow me to take unpaid holiday if I wish as the allocated holiday is always crap.
At present I only work part time so making the job bearable. Just as I’m getting pissed off it’s time to leave.
India, I kinda envy you when I look at your Flickr documentation of such projects as The Glove. But that is probably because I’m looking, not doing. Electrical and electronic realities exist for me in some borderland between the physical and the mental, and I tend to revert to magical thinking when messing with them.
I do not understand electricity. At all. And it makes me miss my dad intensely, because I know how much he would have loved explaining it to me.
India, do you understand radio waves? I mean, really understand them?
I can offer up analogies and all that might hoodwink a child, but I truly do not understand.
This is true of many things.
If one were to “Ask Cindy”, I wonder if she might explain electricity to the satisfaction of all.
[...] you explain electricity so that once and for all and at long last both India and I get [...]
Sheila, how ever Cindy were to explain electricity I’d believe it.
Y’all, this thread is making me really fucking happy. I’ve been filming all weekend (an activity that is both extremely physical and on the other hand almost makes me feel like I don’t exist, at least not physically, a hovering, emotional, psychological, visual entity; I think hovering is the right word).
I counseled at summer camps throughout high school and parts of college. I led wilderness trips and rock climbed. I worked in group homes and in special education and in most of those fields and experiences there was a strong physical component; there were also aspects of community, care giving, paying attention, shepherding, protecting, taking care of. Community.
I wiped asses for a living at the group home and in special education. I’m speaking literally. I perceived it as a role, a function, that needed to be done, and I enjoyed — was proud of — my neutrality.
I cleaned bathrooms at the group home. I gave kids medication. I got people dressed. Once, I replaced a maxi pad. All these things fill me with a sense of pride, looking back at them, a strong sense of satisfaction.
I have almost singlehandedly renovated our house. With the help of one other, I renovated, top to bottom, a single family home and a duplex (a two story home). We transformed all of these buildings, saw what was beautiful in them, brought them back to life until they shone.
I know the work I did in both instances, although it didn’t return the financial investment I had hoped, made the neighborhood I lived in better, established sections of the community that have become hubs for further renovation; I’ve watched the spaces around those areas become beautiful again, and I took care of those buildings.
Before I injured my hand, I was strongly considering devoting myself to furniture making. I love to build, to learn, to figure things out. I love to make. I designed and produced a series of handmade books for elimae. The work was divided into conceptual / emotional / intellectual and physical / detail oriented / construction.
I loved every part of that: watching the ideas I had on the computer, form into smallish pieces I then bound together and made a whole.
The same is true of writing; the same is true of documentaries.
I love that I can paddle a canoe through white water. I love that I can commandeer that vehicle, keep it from capsizing, guide it through the appropriate channels.
I loved, in rock climbing, figuring it out.
I would lie in bed at night, thinking through the sequences of moves necessary to master a section of rock, how to piece those sections and sequences and challenges together in my mind so that the next day, after I woke, I could stitch together the sequence of moves with my body until it was complete.
I have done many kinds of work–restaurant, yard work, construction, retail clerking, motel maintenance, military, meat packing, truck driving, printing (pressman), martial arts instructor, teaching at a university, and, through all of this, writing. Working with the hands can be great or really bad, and the same is true of the other sort of work. There will always be days when you long for the other, and when you get it you will long of the other other. The longest term of any of my jobs was 17 years. I ran a sheet-fed printing press for all of that time, in a financial documents company (checks, deposit slips, and so on). The whole stint was largely a torment, with daily production quotas set by people who didn’t do the work themselves and couldn’t understand that a machine running at 6,000 RPM couldn’t spit out 7,000 sheets per minute–no matter how much one might be motivated to make it do so. That job saved me in many ways, with its good benefits and good pay, but it was also draining in a big way. But I did put myself through graduate school during that time, and also wrote quite a bit. The next best thing about that job was that it was over when it was over–no work to take home or even to have to think about–which made my time my own. Teaching is a lot less physically tiring, but it, too, is draining. These days I find myself seeking to balance out the vague challenges of teaching with working in my garden. I like digging in the dirt the best. Oh, harvesting is good too, but gardening has taught me that being happy with the whole thing is allowed. If bugs or rodents (!) eat the produce, I turn the whole plant under to enrich the next effort. The dirt smells good.
I was just smelling dirt in a garden here in brooklyn. It smelled good.
Daryl, I spent 5 hours in the garden today, digging, pruning, cutting, scrubbing around on my knees. I ache like hell, but, it is the most wonderfully rewarding activity. Mindless and yet that clears the mind for everything else.
I moan that I have to do it and yet wallow in the solitude that it brings.
I worked intensely with large quantities of electricity when I worked in theatre, and never really understood it. But I learned how to locate what was wrong, and sometimes even how to fix it. My parents live by a hydroelectric power station, which is really epic and magnificent. I think I will take a tour there when I go back and ask them if they can explain electricity to us (via me) once and for all.
I was a busboy and dish cleaner (and waiter, which is a different sort of physicality) and hated it. Mainly because the management treated us exactly like the disposable labor we were.
The past two summers I ran a construction non-profit in rural Appalachia and got immense satisfaction out of repairing the homes of people I had come to love. I enjoyed solving the construction problems (which was mental) and also the varied pains that come with different jobs: roofing, framing, foundation work.
Most recently I’ve been setting up the cameras in the Dean Dome before UNC plays basketball. Possibly the most dangerous thing I’ve done as a job, and definitely the most terrifying: holding ten thousand dollars of someone else’s equipment while 6 stories up.
[...] up on my post of last week that started with a quote from Matthew B. Crawford’s article “The Case for Working With [...]