The first post on this site (Feb 13, 2009) may not have been what you expected. The following will probably seem even more irrelevant to the craft of stone working, obtuse even. But hopefully I will get to the point, if there is one.
People involved in crafts have known since time immemorial that attention and a principle of non-effort, of intuition combined with incremental building of the task and our self within the task, is the key not only to work of beauty and function but also efficiency and balance. I will come back to balance later. From ancient times until very recently a workshop was a place in which a person worked on their self as well as a physical product. Many mystics were craftspeople, and the alchemists chose to focus in a laboratory for a central purpose in their master work on themselves. Again I will come back to this later.
Let’s get away from that esoteric stuff and down to some no less philosophical but highly relevant nitty scientific-mathematical gritty. A recent prophet of the self-in-system, Nassim Taleb, is a mathematical investment trader come iconoclast at all things classical and conventional. He has good reason to rail against conformists to conventional ideas about reality.
Taleb predicted that too much risk was being taken in financial systems. Between 2003-2006 he wrote a best selling book called The Black Swan which argues that excessive scientific classically based thinking was being applied in ignorance of a sea of unknown unknowns, a culture of epistemological arrogance which is caused by thinking that classical thought processes can cover all that is knowable. Classical thought processes are the basis of linear mathematics, assumptions about which went unchallenged (by those who considered themselves experts at least) until the twentieth century. Classical thinking is that which our primate ancestors handed down to us but, as you have probably guessed, ancient mystics always saw a problem with the obvious simplicity and arrogance of breaking a complex world into numerable parts and then then failing to deal with the multitude of processes that lie between those neat human imposed categories. Taleb invokes Mandelbrot’s maths of beauty and complexity in order to illustrate the gulf between classical and more realistic ways of looking at the world.
A Mandelbrotian way of measuring the world - the fractal
My own explorations into the way people interact with the world, their tasks, and each other follow the same maths of complexity theory and has almost nothing to do with the classical-statistical methods taught to social scientists. I have had the same reservations as Taleb about the way so called experts profess on the human ability to control in subjects based around social and earth sciences - from economics to ecology and the humanities. I would much rather trust the mystics than an expert, and I reckon most people deeply distrust the cult of expertise for similar heartfelt reasons.
Reality it appears, even the realities of human individual and social life and the arts and sciences which emerge from us come about in the same way that a seed becomes a tree, in the same way that a fractal builds on its strange attractors. We do not make the plan into the completed project, we are merely the rider grappling to maintain some semblance of control. Within this lies Taleb’s approach to the culture of the expert. The real expert is someone who can think within and without the box, to feel with the heart within and without the system. Successful people ride the system, ride the task as much by the seat of their pants and intuition as by the numbers.
So here’s my take on the world from a stonemason’s perspective (c.f. Taleb): do a little bit of what seems like the most relevant priority, stand back and check what you have done. Is it what you expected? Carve off a bit and feel the texture, build a large section and see the pattern of granularity. Now, what seems most appropriate to do next? Add that to the work. How’s it looking, is it what you would like to see? Is it appropriate for what is to be created, for the function and elegance or the piece? Add a little more. Repeat for a little while without checking. Build a large section based on the same principle that you used for the small section. Is it all still hanging together? Good. Now go sleep on it. Come back fresh (changes of perspective-context are crucial), now are there any adjustments to make? Make them. Now what seems the most relevant and appropriate priority? Are you heading in the right direction?
Small or large, do things incrementally, sow the seeds, see how they grow, water them, tend the soil. You are not in control, the gods are, be humble in the work. Ride the work, create and recreate, think and feel, make the labour a love. It needs no architect or expert, the developing work is the perfection, imperfections and all. Islam admits flaws not to offend the greater powers, knowing that specks of flaw in the work are preferable to a perfect design that will in the final analysis be found just the opposite - artless and failing in its function. The acorn grows into the oak tree which is an enduring thing of unique beauty and which will do what its purpose is to do. People cannot plan and make a tree but craftspeople can make things in the image of a tree. The balance between perfection and flaws, holding the equilibrium between extremes, is a key to life processes. Bringing balance into the workshop, onto the task, into the decision-maker’s office, onto the surfer’s wave or the snow-boarder’s ride is as much a process of heart as it is one of the analytical mind. The majority of people know this intuitively, and yet our over technologised, statistically systematised world seems poised to run off the extremes of balance into nothingness. Let’s put the grand plans away and get back to the small steps, do some arts and craft, get away from this Culture of Make-Believe and back to reality.
Onwards now to some economics: Ultimately my stone work is an economic activity, contributing in its infinitesimally small way to the merry-go-round of civilisation. Taleb’s argument in The Black Swan (the same as my own in 2006) is that in pursuit of control and perfection we are putting our eggs in too few baskets. A lack of diversity - caused by trying to standardise everything and remove flaws, but introducing the greater flaw of being not fit for purpose (or lack of resilience) in pursuit of classical concepts of efficiency, AKA economies of scale under ‘there is one best way to do it’ - is leading to a lack of global socio-economic resilience.
In pursuit of ‘perfection’ we are ironing out the very resilience that makes the human world safe. Black Swans are hiding between the neat and seemingly powerful and perfect systems of economic processes. The experts and the numbers they employ are leading us towards a work that is artless and which will ultimately fail in its function. My answer is to make your own things in the most appropriate way, incrementally, as most appropriate there and then. My stonemasonry is my attempt to make what best suits the here and now for me and my clients, it does not come off the shelf from some far-away place as a one-size-fits-all solution, I stack it up myself in the most appropriate way in each different situation. It is as near perfect for its purpose as imperfect human arts will allow, and in practising stonemasonry I am practising doing things the right way, practising being in equilibrium myself - as riding a mountain or a wave, and trying to lead the way back to a non-classical (aplatonic) way of human life.
And I’m trying to grow my own food, or more precisely my children’s food, for a time when our fragile classical systems no longer stack up.
