The work in which head and heart and hand participate, at once, yields the only objective knowledge. It employs the ratiocinative capacity, the ability to discriminate and choose. It is driven by the wish to know. It is corrected, tempered and given form by work with the resistant materials of this world.
I saw José Ramón Juaregui make an axe. He talked about what he was doing. The sound of the metal in the forge gave him clues. The changing color of the metal did too. The number and kind and quality of the sparks that rose were important. When he took out the blank—the unworked metal—to hammer it, he set it at angles that took advantage of the deep pocket of wear in the center of his old black anvil. He had certainly measured the metal blank carefully before he put it in the forge, but the shape it took was made not by calculation and measurement, but by experienced perception. The size and shape of the tongs and the bits helped him eyeball the curve and volume of the head. He tried to explain how hard you had to hit the metal and just where, but words—even Basque words—failed him. The whole man had acquired this knowledge.
This I would say is knowledge of objective truth. It is not thinking. It is not feeling. It is the training of perception in the face of resistant materials. It is need and thought adjusting to the real. It is a new participation in the world of relationship, one through which a strange kind of flexible precision emerges unbidden.
In a nearby town lived a shepherd named Patxi Barriola. When he was fifteen, he first went up the hill to the shack and the fold, the borda, where he cared for a herd of about a hundred sheep. When he was younger, he had learned from his father and mother. He lived in the chabola, the one-room shack with its flat stone roof, for about eight months of the year. He decided every day whether or not the sheep would go onto the mountain pastures, stay in the closed pasture, or feed inside the fold. He cultivated ash trees all around the stead. Every year he pollarded some of them, only during a waning moon. He cut and dried the stems, to feed to the sheep on the cold snowy winter days inside the borda. If he needed to, he rooted a few cuttings and started new trees. In spring, he manured the small pasture with the winter sheep dung. His dogs managed the sheep. Each sheep had a bell whose sound was made by his herd alone. (The ironmonger made each shepherd’s bells to a particular and unique length and girth.) He took the sheep down to a barn at the edge of town when it was time in March, around San José Day, for them to lamb, and brought them up again in May as the lambs became hardy enough to travel.
When I met him, he was eighty-eight. He had retired the previous year. He had spent seventy-three years at his job. He and his wife sat in their kitchen/living room with a big wood stove and a large television screen. I asked him if, in his working life, he had grown tired of the same routine. He seemed not to understand what I meant by “routine.” “I was happy there,” he remembered. “Really happy. No radio, no TV, no nothing.” He paused and looked into the fire. “What a good place it was,” he continued. “It was a good life. It fitted me.” It was not routine work to him, but a way of life that never stopped bringing him into the real.
We still have this kind of knowledge—we can drive a car at 80 mph without a crack-up and make the coffee measuring the water by its heft in the pot—but we seldom value it. Yet for most of the world in most of human history, this way of knowing was a crucial part of every person’s daily life and work, no matter how exalted or how mean their position. It was creative work.
My stepson recently helped me learn to sharpen my Juaregui axe. We set it up in the shed on an old worktable that I inherited from the last owners of our house, who very likely had inherited it from the previous owners. I had always wondered what the unusual wooden clamp on the forward edge of the table was for, and why there was a little wooden knob protruding from the table edge about two feet along the front side, three inches below the top. When we put the axe head in the clamp, it all came clear: the end of the handle came to rest on the knob, leaving the crescent-shaped axe blade in the jaws perfectly vertical and solidly stable.
Our sharpening tool was a disc about the size of a hockey puck, sized to fit comfortably in the palm of the hand, with a coarse side and a fine side. The coarse was about 120 grit, the fine about 600. Jake looked for the right angle to the bevel. “Tilt the sharpener until the little black line disappears,” he said. (The line marks the shadow gap between blade and sharpening tool.) Then he began with a very light circular motion, using the coarse side, the edges poised on his fingertips. “Just a little heavier than the weight of the tool,” he said. He was repeating what he had learning in studying restoration carpentry. I tried it too. After a couple of passes, we put our thumbs very lightly on the summit of the blade. It was rough and furry to the touch: the burr created by the metal that the sharpener was scraping off. We switched to the other side of the blade and repeated the circular passes. The burr moved over to the other side. My wife had given me a cellphone microscope for Christmas. We took a shot. It showed the burr perfectly. Cool! we shouted, almost in unison.
After shoving the burr back and forth a few more times, we switched to the fine side of the sharpener. Now the furry feel began to disappear. Same action: light circles up and down the blade at the no-black-line angle on each side. It was hard to make the motion smooth, even and rightly angled. As with measuring the coffee water by heft, the skill will come with practice. To finish the blade, we switched to the very fine 1200 grit of a Japanese water stone that I use for sharpening my pruners. Jake ran his forearm lightly over the axe blade. It shaved his hair. We took another cellphone shot. The edge was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.
The highest-tech thing we’d used was the camera, and we could have done without it. An even better way to measure the results of our work was with a log. I happened to have a dozen trunk rounds I’d cut from a fallen ash. We set one up on my maple chopping block. It took a moment to get used to the short beech handle of the Basque axe. When we did, we saw the real results: one swing, the log was split, another and the split was split. It was like cutting pats of butter.
People still often used the phrase “Can you handle it?,” meaning “Can you manage to do what you have set out to?” Axe work is the source of the saying. Before World War II, axe heads were not sold complete with axe handles. The buyer made the handle. There was thus a verb—“to handle”—which meant to cut, shape, fit, and attach a handle to a head. “Can you handle it?” originally meant “Have you got the skill it takes to make a well-balanced axe handle and securely attach it to the head?” It was a challenge but also a graceful measure. It didn’t take a PhD or a million-dollar grant to get the intellectual and physical chops to do this work with supple skill using the resistant materials of this world. It was a small piece of objective knowledge, using head and heart and hand.