Truth, Beauty and the Unseen Craftsperson

I think of Bill whenever the breeze brings his chimes to life.

Today I want to honor Bill Murath, a friend and fellow craftsperson who recently passed away from AML. (Acute myeloid leukemia). Like the vast majority of those I have come to know through countless emails, Bill and I never met in the physical world, but we bonded in the realms of spirit and craft. Bill was a unique spirit and gifted craftsperson.

Bill was a father, husband, business owner and musician, and in his younger days, a surfer who lived on the North Shore of Oahu and worked in a pizza shop to fund his surfing. I know the North Shore well and when I see a photo of him on his board, in my mind's eye I am swimming beside him.

Bill and I go way back.

When he read my post When an Old Friend Takes Her Own Life (December 1, 2007), he responded by making two wind chimes of craft and beauty, which he mailed to me in remembrance of my dear friend.

That Bill understood my loss and responded by investing his time, skill and artistry in making a gift that continues to enrich my life every day--how can I express my gratitude?

I asked what I could do for him in return, he shrugged. It was a gift. When I asked him to explain how he designed the length of each chime to achieve the various tones, his explanation went over my head.

I've learned to avoid discussing beauty in my public posts because it inevitably draws the ire of those anxious to accuse me of elitism, as the mainstays of American culture are "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," i.e. entirely subjective; "only elites can afford beauty," i.e. fine art / costly objets d'art that serve as signifiers of wealth and status, and "aesthetic sensibility is snobbery," so to recognize beauty is verboten.

This is a misunderstanding of the meaning of craft, which is an expression of truth and beauty that is not subject to fads or opinion.

I too am a craftsperson, but of a different sort than artists like Bill. My craft is purposefully unseen, invisible, as my skill is in doing work that goes unnoticed because it blends in with what is already there.

Bill understood the Tao of craft. If you read Zhuang Zhou (Chuang Tzu in a previous era), you'll find stories of butchers whose blade never dulls because they never hit bone, and masters who catch birds with sticks. These stories reflect that the Tao flows as skills mastered by years of discipline and effort, as the result of experience with unique situations with uncertain solutions--precisely what is beyond the reach of machines and AI, despite overblown claims to the contrary.

Though our culture claims to glorify beauty, it actually glorifies ugliness. This is why it's so verboten to even discuss beauty, for that would inevitably lead to a recognition of the sea of ugliness.

To those imbued with the Tao of craft, there is immutable truth in the materials we work with. This truth is not subjective; we feel it as our second nature. The same holds for beauty: if the work is done right, it has beauty on multiple levels that is not a matter of opinion.

This immutability is offensive to those who claim equal rights to "decide what's true and beautiful." The craftsperson knows from long experience, in a way the opinionated non-master-craftsperson cannot.

A machine can mix pie crust dough, and the result is low quality because there is a craft mastery to a truly wonderful pie crust. The master baker knows just how much water to add by the feel of the dough, which is partly based on the humidity and temperature of the environment. The feeling of rightness cannot be measured by instruments or taught online; it must be acquired by long experience of trial and error in unique circumstances with uncertain solutions and outcomes, what author Donald Schon called "reflection in action."

This training is never complete, of course, but the practitioner reaches a point of natural confidence that the ignorant mistake for pride or superiority. The practitioners sense the truth of the materials and the path to beauty.

My own experiences this year illustrate the point. I replaced several delaminating interior doors in a 50-year old house. I had to trim the doors to fit the opening, drill a hole for the existing lockset, and so on. The tricky part wasn't the carpentry, it was the finish. The existing doors had been "blonded," a process of rubbing white paint over the veneer and quickly wiping it off. The same technique had been applied to the tongue-and-groove redwood wall boards.

The technique looks easy, and it is, unless you're seeking to match an existing set of doors that have aged with time. Then the trick is to know how long to let the paint soak in and when to wipe the excess off so it looks like the older doors. If you wait too long, the paint dries and the finish is uneven. If you wipe it off too soon, then it's visibly lighter than the older doors.

The goal is to replace the doors in such a way that casual observers don't see the new doors as replacements.

In the same house, an old pipe had been removed long ago in the bathroom and the hole had been filled with an ugly wood plug. There is no way anyone could claim this plug was anything but ugly. So I used a couple of tricks and mixed up several shades of paint to match the existing linoleum flooring. The casual observer won't see it.

A spot of dry rot on an exterior window frame turned out to be a fist-sized sponge of rotted wood that included some of the siding, frame, sill and trim. A robot would have opted for the "obvious" solution which was replacing the entire window frame, window and siding--a job that would cost a lot of money. I knew this was unnecessary and so I set the blade depth of our wormdrive Skilsaw and free-handed a surgery which I completed with a hammer and chisel.

Firing up a Skilsaw to free-hand cut away parts of the window sill, frame, trim and siding of a single-wall house demands a certain level of experience, as each such job is unique. It's not a factory environment. The saw weighs 13 pounds, it's threatening to rain so there's a pressing time element, the ground is uneven and the tool is inherently dangerous. A YouTube video isn't going to give you the skill that only experience provides. It boils down to the feel you have for the blade and the wood.

This is the craft. It becomes part of you, a second nature called up as needed, for your hands do the work "all by themselves," without conscious guidance. Your mind isn't wandering, it's observant, but no more than that. You let the work get done by staying out of its way.

Again, the truth is in the materials: you sense the density and soundness of the wood by the feel of the chisel. The beauty is in the invisibility of the repair, which required fashioning three small complex multi-cut pieces of new wood with a chisel and a hacksaw, as the blade is finer than our handsaw.

I think of Bill whenever the breeze brings his chimes to life. My craft is not up to his, but given my 50 years of experience, I can recognize and honor his achievement, and admire the truth and beauty of his craft and life.

I miss you, Bill.

Here are photos of his chimes, and a brief recording of one.

One holds court in a corner of our kitchen, where it catches the tradewind breezes from the dining nook windows. It is a musical "kitchen god" for those familiar with Chinese traditions.



The other holds court in our living room, where it comes to life in the tradewinds wafting through the windows overlooking our yard. That it shares the space with our very old embroidered dragon seems appropriate.



This book helps us understand Bill's level of craft. The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (1972)


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