I know I'm being preternaturally wordy - even for me - today, but sometimes something grabs me and shakes me and I HAVE to talk about it before the mood passes.

Do you remember that article on Shop Class as Soulcraft I linked to a couple days ago? (The original link must be credited, I found it at Mental Multivitamin and many, many thanks to her for posting it. I think Lynn at A Sweet Familiar Dissonance - one of the few non-knitting blogs I read daily - linked to Mental Multivitamin's comment on it, and that's how I originally found it.)

I'm reading the article now. And it is making me cry. Literally, cry. Because it SO PERFECTLY states things I have been thinking and been unable to articulate in any way that makes sense to me.

A couple of quotations from just the first few pages:

"Craftsmanship might be defined simply as the desire to do something well, for its own sake." Oh yes. Oh HELL yes. Oh amen, that is absolutely it. That is why I get up every morning and agonize over new ways to present material in class. And that is why I experience a special burst of joy when I find a research article that speaks to something I am working on and I can use it as a reference that will make what I'm talking about stronger and make more sense. It's why I care about how colors work out in the quilts I make and it's why I take extra special care to weave in ends on my knitting.

And that is perhaps why I experience some mental agony when I've put in the effort to do something in a way that I think of as "well," and no one seems to notice or everyone seems to be so wrapped up in their own lives and their own tsuris that they can't see what I am trying to do, that I am sometimes well-nigh killing myself trying to do a good job, because it MATTERS to me to do a good job.

but it still MATTERS to me, even if no one notices. And so, that's why I almost never "phone it in." Oh, I do when I'm sick or I'm really tired or when something else is eating my attention. But I feel guilty when I do and I feel most myself when I'm working as hard as I can to make something as good as I can.

"Craftsmanship might be defined simply as the desire to do something well, for its own sake."

It is the kind of statement I want to silk-screen on a t-shirt. It is the kind of thing I'd made a needlepoint sampler of if I did needlepoint, just because that sentence makes so much sense to me, it resonates so deeply. If I were a carpenter or a house framer, I'd want to carve that on the beams of the house I was building.

That sentence is almost like a prayer to me.



The author also quotes Alexandre Kojeve (and I am embarrassed to admit I don't know who he is):

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself

Which is a much more erudite way of saying what I was thinking: that my work is my way of saying "I was here!" to the world.

Oh, this is a BEAUTIFUL article. And very persuasive to me. We need shop class. We need people to learn to make stuff with their hands because it actually affects their souls and their self-esteem and other things. The writer speaks of working as an electrician, and the feeling he got after completing a job and having it done well - and how that satisfaction is very different - so much realer - than any of the hokey 'self esteem" exercises so many schools seem to do now.

Oh, how I recommend you read this article. It is not even as hard or as philosophical as I first thought.