The Consolation Of Craft
Commonplace Newsletter #51
Work and love. That’s the formula as far as I can tell, the recipe, the blueprint. Something to do and someone to love. Something to spend the days and the years pursuing and someone to share the joys and the worries and the spoils of that pursuance with. Twin projects to spend this brief lifetime building- a body of work and a repository of memories.
This is what provides consolation in the twilight years. This, as far as I can tell, is what provides shelter against the storm of terminal, deathbed regret. And regret in the last days strikes me as perhaps the worst of fates.
It terrifies me. I have seen it in the tear-reddened eyes of the palliative. Heard it in the tremble of their voice, muffled by analgesia.
Something to do and someone to love. Today, if you’ll join me, we’ll sketch out a few thoughts on work and life.
The Weight Of Time
I was working in a kitchen at the time. Espresso and cigarettes all day, stout and whiskey at night to induce the dreamless darkness of unrestorative sleep. Thirteen hour days, six to seven days per week. The split-shift break a blur of refuelling and watching the boats skim along the surface of the tea-brown Thames. Of reading olsome plastic-covered library book, a mere blur of words, none of it going in.
In the end it broke me, this routine, or came near enough. I remember being alone and prepping my mise for the evening rush- the other chef must have been on his break- when the weight of death hit me like an ocean wave. It stopped my breath. The crushing weight of time, the realisation of its rapid passing, seeped through the barrier that the repetitious days had built, and the stopped breath turned in an instant to dizzying hyperventilation.
I was going to die. Not in that moment, not because of the rapid heartbeat in my ears and jaw, but I knew death was coming. The thing you spend your whole life turning away from had its hands around my neck and was forcing me to look at it head on.
I started doing obsessive rapid-fire mental arithmetic, mouthing the numbers.
I have fifty years left. Fifty times three hundred and sixty five is-. No three hundred and sixty five times one hundred is thirty six thousand, five hundred divided by two is eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty. So that’s eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty days left. And that’s assuming I make it that long. Which with the way I’m living is unlikely. Eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty days times twenty four is z. Four hundred and thirty eight thousand hours until the end. Four hundred and thirty eight thousand hours. Eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty times twenty four is four hundred and thirty eight thousand. Yes. Until nothing. Eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty days. Four hundred and thirty eight thousand hours. And what do I have to show for all of the years so far? Nothing. I’m as close to thirty as I am to twenty. Nothing. Eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty times twenty four is four hundred and thirty eight thousand. Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh.
This was a long time ago. The calendar says I’m closer to forty than to the age I was on that day when the weight of time bore down on my unsuspecting and complacent psyche. But recollection of this, even if counting-on-fingers arithmetic says that the number until oblivion is now significantly smaller, does not bring about the same dread, the same nauseous panic.
Why? Because I have found my work.
Now, Cheffing is a noble profession, an honest trade. It makes sense in a world where few jobs do. People are hungry, they come to your establishment for food, you and the team feed them, the people pay, you and the team are paid a wage from the proceeds for your labour. Yes, we can quibble and debate all day about what the pay should be, what the menu should be, but the actual thing itself makes sense. Everyone’s gotta eat, but not everyone can be bothered to cook every time the stomach demands sustenance.
There’s none of the confusion of meaning that comes with a button-pushing, paper-shuffling job. In the kitchen you have a definitive logical sequence of tasks to do, after which you leave and belly up to the bar where your man starts pouring your usual before you even have time to ask.
Honest work, a noble profession, ancient. But it was never my work, not really. I went through the motions- average knife skills, average palette, average presentation. I owe a thousand apologies to a thousand patrons for a thousand mediocre meals. Good is not good enough.
I met the set standard and did what needed to be done. But no more. Which is fine, I suppose, if the job is just a job. But if it’s work, if it’s work with the definitive article, the work, your work, then it won’t be like this.
Find your craft and you’ll start acting like a craftsman. That’s how you can tell.
The Never-Ending Apprenticeship
Towards the end of my cheffing sojourn I developed a strange habit. I started writing little ideas, little lines of dialogue, little outlines of scenes on the back of the discarded, greasy pink order chits. I squirrelled them away in the pockets of my checkerboard chefs trousers. And on breaks and on those shockingly rare days off I would smooth them out and add further scrawlings to them, squinting with concentration all the while.
The craft that I barely knew I was seeking had been seeking me. The vague teenage dream of a life of words and stories was reintroducing itself. It was made more insistent by all of the long years I had spent giving it the cold shoulder.
This was different, this growing obsession. I wielded the pen as crudely and as semi-effectively as I wielded the tomato knife and the searing pan, but with this I was hellbent on getting better. Journal entries, poems, stories, even whole novels were written and then consigned to the shredder as I outgrew them. Cringe-inducing novice work, but the foundation.
Life got in the way but I persisted. Money troubles, job searches, moving across the country, health issues, all of that stuff got in the way but I persisted. I got sidetracked a dozen times, got discouraged, got drawn into the dopaminergic distractions of audience building, but still I persisted. I never abandoned writing entirely. It wouldn’t let me go even if I wanted it to.
It’s like that when you find your craft. You always think in terms of it, everything becomes a metaphor for it, everything reminds you of it like you are some lovelorn teenager fresh out of your first serious relationship.
You’ll never be quite the same again. And it’s a beautiful thing in its way. The weight of time lightens. Every day is a blank page to write upon, a new block of marble to chip away at, a fresh silent space waiting to be filled with your music. The prospect of tomorrow elicits hope and not dread. Possibility and not apathy.
The crushing weight of time becomes the soothing reassurance of time. Because maybe if I keep at this thing, maybe some day in the future I’ll get pretty good at it. And when the end comes it all won’t have all been for nothing.
Excellent as always. I need to write a full piece in response to this. I could write about the craft for days.
All things in nature thus retrace
The paths acknowledged as their own;
They gladly then regain their base.
Assigned to them is this alone,
To seek as end their starting-place,
And make the world a stable zone.
(Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy)