by Mark R. DeLong
Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference. (Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge)
Eugene Russell, a piano tuner interviewed by Studs Terkel in Working, said with satisfaction that the computer wouldn’t be replacing him anytime soon, even though he mentioned electronic devices—“an assist,” he said, that helps tuners. Eugene’s wife Natalie felt otherwise, saying at one point in their conversation, “It’s an electronic thing now. Anyone in the world can tune a piano with it. You can actually have a tin ear like a night club boss.”
Eugene mixed elements of beauty and delight with the technical complexity of piano tuning, recalling how he would “hear great big fat augmented chords that you don’t hear in music today” and that he would come home and say, “I just heard a diminished chord today!” Once he was tuning a piano in a hotel ballroom during “a symposium of computer manufacturers. One of these men came up and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Someday we’re going to get your job.’ I laughed. By the time you isolate an infinite number of harmonics, you’re going to use up a couple billion dollars worth of equipment to get down to the basic fundamental that I work with my ear.”
The piano tuner feels and practices the tune, which is hardly reducible to formulae, perhaps because it is one of those things in life that’s approximated, but not unambiguously achieved. At best, tuning a piano is a compromise: “The nature of equal temperament makes it impossible to really put a piano in tune,” Eugene explained. “The system is out of tune with itself. But it’s so close to in tune that it’s compatible.”
I read this chapter from Working when I was in the midst of tuning the three SU carburetors on my old project car, a process that entailed setting screws to a certain position and adjusting them as seemed to make sense. You do this over and over and over and over—at least that was the gist I got from the car’s shop manual. I remember smiling, screwdriver in hand and already half defeated, when I read from the car manual that among the tools to use in tuning was a length of hose. How very analogue, I thought! You stick one end near your ear and the other near the intakes so that you can hear the rush of air.
Just balance the whoosh, the manual said. Easy.
While setting screws with ear to a hose, I came to realize that something like the nature of equal temperament makes it impossible to really put three SU carburetors in tune, as Eugene the piano tuner would probably have warned me. I also recalled that a chaotic system can arise from a mere three variables. My car had three very much analog SUs, each of which had a couple of setting screws, so chaos could easily ensue. Only something magical, like an experienced human ear, could apprehend an infinity of harmonics to tease out a balance: “The system is out of tune with itself. But it’s so close to in tune that it’s compatible.”
Grappling for mastery
Through the years of work on my Jaguar E-type, I struggled with such “handy” knowledge—the kind of knowledge embodied in Eugene Russell for pianos and the wizened and now rare masters of SU carburetors. Theirs is knowledge grasped by the hand, felt and “known” by the hand, and sometimes communicated by simple gesture. My struggle, I am convinced, had begun to teach me a single lesson—maybe even the core meaning—of my restoration. The work taught a way of grasping and comprehending experience. It provided an inkling of how physical work—and handwork in particular—impresses and shapes our inner lives. The work, a laying on of hands, expanded my understanding of mastery. Through my writing about the whole confounding process, those actions and their mastery crept into view—secondarily, as if reported.
An old shop manual guided the restoration of my old car. Its words and illustrations appear to describe the mechanics of the car, but more profoundly the manual set my mind, hands, and tools in relation to the car, or at least its many serviceable parts. We call these books of tips and ordered instructions manuals—a word derived from the Latin word manus, meaning “hand.” Certainly, we hold a manual in the hand as a “handbook,” but over the course of the years my old shop manual has actually conjured its manus on mine, guiding my hand as if manual were inching toward its adjectival definition. Gradually, the manual’s words more tellingly applied to graspings and motions.
In effect, my car’s shop manual was “of or belonging to the hand” because it trained and shaped my hands as well as the thoughts in my head.
I was surprised to see that my thinking about work and labor should begin with a consideration of the hand and—almost magically—its “wisdom” and a kind of sagacity and literacy of the body. I use the words wisdom, sagacity, and literacy metaphorically, of course, but the starting point of the hand and its meaning began a journey to mastery and craft, and those words apply best to what I experienced and what scholars have learned about skill, perception, and mastery. I haven’t yet become a craftsman, but work has placed what it means within my grasp. Its image and lesson is embodied, in motion, and somehow irreducible. It’s not the knowledge of books and explanations.
The resistance of things and their lessons
Unrestrained by the hydraulic dampers I had removed, the car’s swooping rear windshield fell and caught my index finger, which was pinched between a latch tab and the edge of the window frame. It bled, I cursed, and I thought to myself, “Well, this car has become a project now.” It was an untidy 1987 Porsche 924S that I picked up for $500; it still ran, too.
My projects begin in earnest once the thing draws blood. The rest I consider repairs. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have great fun with this curious distinction.
I have regularly patched up wounds with antibiotic ointment and carefully placed band-aids, though I have somehow avoided heading into the emergency room. I once set myself on fire and only discovered the flames when I saw my sons’ eyes grow wide as they looked at me. I escaped burns, but my grey sweatshirt turned into a scorched shop rag. I also gained greater respect for flaming-hot metal sparks streaming from the angle grinder.
Scraped knuckles, cuts, assorted scratches, alarming wounds: these are costs exacted in mechanical work, especially for the weekend mechanic. I have accepted them as part of the curriculum of the garage—a course of study that things teach the humans that touch them. Its lessons are more ancient than any school or university. They teach us how to dwell in the material world and how to become a co-creator in the world. They take us by the hands, put tools in them, and tutor use.
I watched my two boys come to terms with tools in the garage. Ease of grasping, positioning, and manipulating a pair of pliers does not magically nestle into human hands at birth. Gradually, the whole body learns to attend and direct the mind to foresight and action.
Tools teach their use through being used, their familiarity emerging by feel rather than by thought or some sort of cognitive understanding. The body learns, the tool teaches, and part of the lesson includes the matters of things—the stubborn yet plastic, durable material world. The tool teaches interactions with things.
When my eldest son first wielded a wrench, I had to restrain myself from guiding his hand with mine, for to do so would have meant interrupting the tool’s instruction. The tool required only his clumsy touch and his willingness to endure a scrape for the sake of tool-education. My younger son’s education at the hand of tools was gentler, it seemed, perhaps because he often played with them and grew with them. Always a car tinkerer, he became an automotive technician, race car builder, and eventually a mechanical engineer.
It’s not just that one learns how to use a tool with some measure of grace. The tool teaches a sort of extension as well. Through the wrench, I sense the bolt and feel its connection to the metal surrounding it. I can tell when rust has seized it or when an old bolt threatens to break. The tool extends and enhances my grip stretching my sense of the things it touches.
One night, as we attached nuts to a valve cover on a newly rebuilt engine, my son told me of a “master transmission guy” who said he could tighten a bolt to ten foot-pounds by feel alone. My son used a torque wrench to confirm his colleague’s accuracy. The bolt was tightened right on the mark.
The strangeness of this sense through the tool only becomes apparent when you think about it, since after all the tool—a wrench, a pliers, a hammer—is only metal and only touches a body through the hand. Of course, you don’t really, as in physically, feel through it. Yet, this feeling through the tool paradoxically feels natural. Polymath Michael Polanyi noticed it, too: “When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail.” He attributes this feeling to “focal awareness” which is merged into the feeling in the hand, as if we override, or more accurately redraw, physical boundaries of our own flesh so that they encompass objects we attend to.
“Hands are entangled in the world that they reach—touching objects, grasping tools, wielding instruments, managing matter,” Jürgen Streeck and Curtis LeBaron observe. “Hands are busy in many ways, shifting back and forth . . . between doing things, showing things, and showing how to do things with things. . . . To study gesture as only a feature of conversation is to obscure the embodied knowledge, the lived experience, that hands bring to their symbolic tasks.” The point is clear: hands shape objects and they also behold them. They hold “embodied knowledge” and have a role in the creation of thought and utterance.
LeBaron and Streeck are among scholars who study gesture, which is a “symbolic activity” and therefore distinct from movements of the hand or body that have “practical utility” as is the case in the actions of a blacksmith at work or a master transmission guy with his wrench. And yet, knowledge symbolically embodied in the hand also pertains to work and to actions with practical utility. Embodied knowledge tightens the relationship of body and mind. We witness it in the hands of a seasoned worker—or at least one who has made mistakes and scored successes frequently enough in grasping, wrenching, welding, grinding and the like to know “when something doesn’t feel right” or when work pleases.
For the experienced hand, it isn’t just a matter of perceiving success or finding fault. These are experiences felt and conducted bodily. Sociologist and photographer Douglas A. Harper observed how a car mechanic with “detailed working knowledge of materials . . . develops precisely the kind of tactile, empirical connection that leads to smoothly working rhythms, appropriate power and torque, and the interpretation of sounds and subtle physical sensations.”
Such a mechanic is a craftsman, whose body and hands embody knowledge and experience. Like my son’s fellow mechanic with the ten-foot-pound-tightened bolt, the mechanic “reads his body’s messages and measures out the appropriate force of a blow or a twist.”
This article is extracted from a book project of mine that examines the car, art, and culture, especially in the United States. The narrative uses a years-long car restoration as a springboard.
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