My online friend HarryC says that wood never lies. It tells you exactly how good your skills are at any particular type of woodworking, and it never delays in telling you. That’s why, as I make this Bent (a wooden frame that works with a saw-bench to stabilize one end of a long board while you’re sawing the other end), I’m documenting my process. Yesterday I rip-cut and planed the boards of the bent to size, and a few weeks ago I made the saw-bench it fits with. Both designs come from a book by Vic Tesolin, Minimalist Woodworking.
I am shit for marking, which is unusual for me as someone who practices geometry for fun.
What is Marking? Marking is the act of putting lines on wood, either with a pencil (poor), a sharp pencil (fair), a knife (better) or with a very sharp knife and accurate hands (best yet). Under ideal circumstances, the hands should lay out a series of lines efficiently and squarely, so there’s never any doubt about where or how you should place the chisel. In face, the chisel should slot precisely into the knife line, in such a way that there’s no doubt about where the chisel will cut, or what waste (the wood that you’ll chop out) is coming out of the piece of wood.
Ideally, you also know your depth, or how deep the chisel will dig wood out of the hole.
Marking is, in other words, at the core of getting accurate results. If you mark correctly, you’ll place your chisel accurately. If you place your chisel accurately, you’ll cut precisely. If you mark your depth (on your tools, with painter’s tape), your holes will be of the correct size and the correct depth.
There’s a range of tools that can help you be better at marking — a marking gauge is a tool for cutting lines into wood, that has a built-in ruler and knife, both attached to a fence. The fence presses up against one side of a piece of wood, while the ruler holds the knife a set distance away from the fence. The knife cuts into the wood at precise distances, and accurately sets marks in the wood that tell you where to cut.
At the moment, as I say, I am shit at marking.
The first rule of marking, though, is that it takes practice at getting better. I wrote to my Patreon supporters yesterday, and called crafts or artisanship a kind of poetry in the world of materials, after the Ross Nichols aphorism, “ritual is poetry in the world of acts.” The first rule of poetry, as I learned from Bill MacMillan is that sometimes you applaud because the poetry is good, and sometimes because it’s over.
But the first step of getting to good poetry is create a poem… and then to make another, and another, and another. Eventually, a good one emerges from such labors. Beauty is on the other side of practice.
Speaking of which, I have to learn to set my depths correctly. I still have another 3/4″ to chop out of this mortise, because I am shit at marking…. for now.
Is there a lesson for poetry, the literary kind, the poetry in the realm of words?
I think that perhaps there is…
If a woodworker marks correctly, nearly all the line-work laying out the plan of how the woodworking project is going to unfold, will be invisible in the final result. If a poet has marked out his work correctly, some of that initial plan may be visible — oh, look, it’s a sonnet, it’s a haiku, it’s a villanelle, it’s in iambic pentameter, it’s in heroic couplets, it’s in dactylic hexameter. But some parts should be invisible: did it take two days to write, or four? were the rhymes chosen ahead of time, or did they search through a rhyming dictionary for a couple of days? How long did they agonize over the fourth word of the seventh line? The drafting process vanishes into the finished piece, and — at least in some ways — the depth of study that the poem underwent also vanishes as the poet releases their piece without the drafted process undergirding it.
As I turn this piece of wood this way and that, trying to understand how my marking process must improve if I’m going to be better at working with wood — I’m mindful of the ways in which I leave the knife marks of my process in my written poetry, the geometry of my plan made evident to the reader in its entirety.
Will I be judged for the poor quality of my woodworking or the poor quality of my poetry, or both, in due course of time? Or will they be seen in due time as of a piece with one another — the knife-marks evidence of a mind and heart that wants to leave some evidence of my passage through the world behind?
