Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (100 page)

“I started workin’ steady at it when I was thirteen. I picked up a hammer and went to drive in nails. One man I learned a lot from was a janitor, who didn’t risk the ebb and flow of the carpentry trade. You can learn a lot from books about things like this—how nails work, different kinds of wood
.”

He dropped out of high school.
“
It’s a good way to go. Take what you can stand and don’t take any more than that. It’s what God put the tongue in your mouth for. If it don’t taste right, you spit it out
.”

 

Let me tell you where the grief bites you so much. Who are you working for? If you’re going to eat, you are working for the man who pays you some kind of wage. That won’t be a poor man. The man who’s got a big family and who’s needing a house, you’re not building a house for him. The only man you’re working for is the man who could get along without it. You’re putting a roof on the man who’s got enough to pay your wage.

You see over yonder, shack need a roof. Over here you’re building a sixty-thousand-dollar house for a man who maybe doesn’t have any children. He’s not hurting and it doesn’t mean much. It’s a prestige house. He’s gonna up-man, he’s gonna be one-up on his neighbor, having something fancier. It’s kind of into that machine. It’s a real pleasure to work on it, don’t get me wrong. Using your hand is just a delight in the paneling, in the good woods. It smells good and they shape well with the plane. Those woods are filled with the whole creative mystery of things. Each wood has its own spirit. Driving nails, yeah, your spirit will break against that.

What’s gonna happen to what you made? You work like you were kneeling down. You go into Riverside Church in New York and there’s no space between the pews to kneel. (Laughs.) If you try to kneel down in that church, you break your nose on the pew in front. A bunch of churches are like that. Who kneels down in that church? I’ll tell you who kneels. The man kneels who’s settin’ the toilets in the restrooms. He’s got to kneel, that’s part of his work. The man who nails the pews on the floor, he had to kneel down. The man who put the receptacles in the walls that turn that I-don’t-know-how-many horsepower organ they got in that Riverside Church—that thing’ll blow you halfway to heaven right away, pow!—the man who was putting the wire in that thing, he kneeled down. Any work, you kneel down—it’s a kind of worship. It’s part of the holiness of things, work, yes. Just like drawing breath is. It’s necessary. If you don’t breathe, you’re dead. It’s kind of a sacrament, too.

One nice thing about the crafts. You work two hours at a time. There’s a ritual to it. It’s break time. Then two hours more and it’s dinner time. All those are very good times. Ten minutes is a pretty short time, but it’s good not to push too hard. All of a sudden it comes up break time, just like a friend knocking at the door that’s unexpected. It’s a time of swapping tales. What you’re really doing is setting the stage for your work.

A craftsman’s life is nothin’ but compromise. Look at your tile here. That’s craftsman’s work, not art work. Craftsmanship demands that you work repeating a pattern to very close tolerances. You’re laying this tile here within a sixteenth. It ought to be within a sixty-fourth of a true ninety degree angle. Theoretically it should be perfect. It shouldn’t be any sixty-fourth, it should be oo tolerance. Just altogether straight on, see? Do we ever do it? No. Look at that parquet stuff you got around here. It’s pretty, but those corners. The man has compromised. He said that’ll have to do.

They just kind of hustle you a little bit. The compromise with the material that’s going on all the time. That makes for a lot of headache and grief. Like lately, we finished a house. Well, it’s not yet done. Cedar siding, that’s material that’s got knots in it. That’s part of the charm. But it’s a real headache if the knots falls out. You hit one of those boards with your hammer sometime and it turns into a piece of Swiss cheese. So you’re gonna drill those knots, a million knots, back in. (Laughs.) It’s sweet smelling wood. You’ve got a six-foot piece of a ten-foot board. Throwing away four feet of that fancy wood? Whatcha gonna do with that four feet? A splice, scuff it, try to make an invisible joint, and use it? Yes or no? You compromise with the material. Save it? Burn it? It’s in your mind all the time. Oh sure, the wood is sacred. It took a long time to grow that. It’s like a blood sacrifice. It’s consummation. That wood is not going to go anywhere else after that.

When I started in, it was like European carpentering. But now, all that’s pretty well on the run. You make your joints simply, you get pre-hung doors, you have machine-fitted cabinet work, and you build your house to fit these factory-produced units. The change has been toward quickness. An ordinary American can buy himself some kind of a house because we can build it cheap. So again, your heart is torn. It’s good and not so good.

Sometimes it has to do with how much wage he’s getting. The more wage he’s getting, the more skill he can exercise. You’re gonna hire me? I’m gonna hang your door. Suppose you pay me five dollars an hour. I’m gonna have to hang that door fast. ’Cause if I don’t hang that door fast, you’re gonna run out of money before I get it hung. No man can hurry and hang it right.

I don’t think there’s less pride in craftsmanship. I don’t know about pride. Do you take pride in embracing a woman? You don’t take pride in that. You take delight in it. There may be less delight. If you can build a house cheap and really get it to a man that needs it, that’s kind of a social satisfaction for you. At the same time, you wish you could have done a fancier job, a more unique kind of a job.

But every once in a while there’s stuff that comes in on you. All of a sudden something falls into place. Suppose you’re driving an eight-penny galvanized finishing nail into this siding. Your whole universe is rolled onto the head of that nail. Each lick is sufficient to justify your life. You say, “Okay, I’m not trying to get this nail out of the way so I can get onto something important. There’s nothing more important. It’s right there.” And it goes—pow! It’s not getting that nail in that’s in your mind. It’s hitting it—hitting it square, hitting it straight. Getting it now. That one lick.

If you see a carpenter that’s alive to his work, you’ll notice that about the way he hits a nail. He’s not going (imitates machine gun rat-tat-tat-tat) —trying to get the nail down and out of the way so he can hurry up and get another one. Although he may be working fast, each lick is like a separate person that he’s hitting with his hammer. It’s like as though there’s a separate friend of his that one moment. And when he gets out of it, here comes another one. Unique, all by itself. Pow! But you gotta stop before you get that nail in, you know? That’s fine work. Hold the hammer back, and just that last lick, don’t hit it with your hammer, hit it with a punch so you won’t leave a hammer mark. Rhythm.

I worked at an H-bomb plant in South Carolina. My work was building forms. I don’t think the end product bothered me so much, ’cause Judgment Day is not a thing . . . (Trails off.) It doesn’t hang heavy on my heart. It might be that I should be persuaded it was inappropriate . . .

They got that big old reactor works with the heavy water and all that. This heavy equipment runs there day and night, just one right after another, going forty miles an hour, digging that big old hole halfway to hell. They build themselves a highway down there, just to dig that hole.

Now you’re gonna have to build you a building, concrete and steel. You ship in a ready-mixed plant just for that building. A pump on the hill. It starts pumping concrete into the hole. It’s near about time for the carpenters. We’re building forms for the first floor of that thing. I was the twenty-four-hundredth-and-some-odd carpenter hired at the beginning. That’s how big it was. There was three thousand laborers. Each time we built one of these reactors there would be a whole town to support it. We built a dozen or so towns in this one county.

We all understood we were making H-bombs and tried to get it done before the Russians built theirs, see? That’s what everybody thought. It was one of those great secret jobs where you had guards at the gates, barbed wire around the place, spies, and all that kind of foolishness.

Some people call it the hard lard belt, some call it the Bible belt. Mostly just farmers who stepped from behind the plow, who had tenants or were tenants themselves. It was a living wage in that part of the country for the first time since the boll weevil had been through. And boy, you can’t downrate that. It seems like the vast comedy of things when a Yankee come and got us to build their H-bomb, part of the fine comedy that she should come and give us the first living wage since the War of Northern Aggression—for this.

In Bloomington, Indiana, I saw a lot of women make their living making bombs. They had a grand picnic when they built the millionth bomb. Bombs they’re dropping on people. And the students came to demonstrate against the bombs. Maybe these women see no sense in what they’re doing, but they see their wages in what they’re doing . . .

Some people will say, “I’m a poet. I’m better than you. I’m different. I’m a separate kind of species.” It doesn’t seem to me poetry is that way. It seems to me like mockin‘birds sing and there’s hardly ever a mockingbird that doesn’t sing. It’s the same way with poetry. It just comes natural to ’em, part of what we’re made for. It’s the natural utterance of living language. I say my calling is to be a carpenter and a poet. No contradiction.

(Chants) Work’s quite a territory. Real work and fake work. There’s fake work, which is the prostitution. There is the magic of payday, though. You’ll say, “Well, if you get paid for your work, is that prostitution?” No indeed. But how are you gonna prove it’s not? A real struggle there. Real work, fake work, and prostitution. The magic of payday. The groceries now heaped on the table and the new-crop wine and store-bought shirts. That’s what it says, yes.

Jobs are not big enough for people. It’s not just the assembly line worker whose job is too small for his spirit, you know? A job like mine, if you really put your spirit into it, you would sabotage immediately. You don’t dare. So you absent your spirit from it. My mind has been so divorced from my job, except as a source of income, it’s really absurd.

As I work in the business world, I am more and more shocked. You throw yourself into things because you feel that important questions—self-discipline, goals, a meaning of your life—are carried out in your work. You invest a job with a lot of values that the society doesn’t allow you to put into a job. You find yourself like a pacemaker that’s gone crazy or something. You want it to be a million things that it’s not and you want to give it a million parts of yourself that nobody else wants there. So you end up wrecking the curve or else settling down and conforming. I’m really in a funny place right now. I’m so calm about what I’m doing and what’s coming . . .

 

Most of the night he wouldn’t go to bed. He’d pull out sermons by Wesley or Spurgeon or somebody, and he’d sit down until he fell asleep, maybe at three ’ in the morning. Reading sermons. He just never stopped
. (
Laughs
.)

 

I paper the walls of my office with posters and bring in flowers, bring in an FM radio, bring down my favorite ceramic lamp. I’m the only person in the whole damn building with a desk facing the window instead of the door. I just turn myself around from all that I can. I ration my time so that I’ll spend two hours working for the Institution and the rest of the time I’ll browse. (Laughs.)

I function better if they leave me alone more. My boss will come in and say, “I know you’re overloaded, but would you mind getting this done, it’s urgent. I need it in three weeks.” I can do it in two hours. So I put it on the back burner and produce it on time. When I first went there, I came in early and stayed late. I read everything I could on the subject at hand. I would work a project to the wall and get it really done right, and then ask for more. I found out I was wrecking the curve, I was out of line.