“Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost while I am about it”

September 10, 1918 A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf (ed. Leonard Woolf)

Somehow I have come to ask myself, how can one be a dwarf in an office environment? How can one be weird and agentic and unapologetically ambitious in a way that is not about position but about making things? While it’s almost as absurd as reading Milton in Sussex, I must not be the only person asking it.

All kinds of making have a physical element, even writing (those fingers hitting the keys). So the necessity of relinquishing the ‘it’ mode of relating to your body, the goblin-life, in order to do it - that makes sense to me. It’s necessary to have a less antagonistic relationship with the body because hating it makes you wish to avoid spending time noticing it, which then calls for distraction. Entertainment rather than focus.

That craving for distraction, for a bottomless trough of satiation, is not a state that a) any work can get done in and b) will of itself lead to a desire to do any work in the future. In order to come to want to craft, or play or feel actual pleasure, one has first to relinquish it, the sensation coined by Natasha Dow Schüll as the ‘machine zone’. Here quoting Richard Seymour, via Max Read:

“the ‘machine zone’ where ordinary reality is ‘suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process’. For many addicts, the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing.”

But even then, what? When you’ve extracted whatever worm of a social media platform that’d burrowed under your skin this week, you have to do the next thing. Because maybe as hard as closing the tab and opening up a blank white screen is somehow combatting the thought “I am not the only person..”. Or, I dunno, for you, maybe it’s, “there’s a lot of shoes out there already…”

There is a solitary aspect to the modern conception we have of writing in particular, but most craft too, that I want to argue has led us astray. Not that individual flair and talent isn’t the source of beauty and development in the artistic world, but that we’ve embraced a wider narrative that doesn’t necessarily follow, that one creates from a position outside of the world and the company of men. One must lock oneself away from it. When I think the opposite is true: I’m still not arguing that the height of writing is another complacent review of whatever book is getting hacked to death in the public square this week (here’s looking at you, Oyler), but that history will support me in asserting craftsmen and artists come to the height of their powers when they are part of a strong collective. That position is what allows them to come to fruition. I mean, of course, the guild, and I’ll follow with up with a loose cannon of an argument: that this is what the modern workplace has sought more than anything to destroy. This is exactly why one can’t be a dwarf in an office.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the structures in the world that most encourage men and women to be agentic, structures that we’ve talked about again and again, are hangovers from the village commonality, from what Kropotkin would call the folkmote. We find them where people have organised themselves around the needs of the community (the fire brigades, the food banks), our favoured activities (clubs, societies), and our labour (the unions). But what we don’t so much find, these days, or at least, what we only find in a corrupted, gatekeeping kind of way, are guilds.

Kropotkin argues in Mutual Aid that the rise of the medieval city was due in part to these structures, and the promise of brotherhood (with real attending commitments from each brother) that they enshrined. Those same cities, after having risen from the wooden shacks and built cathedrals and city halls and guild houses, then fell, having failed to extend the hand of brotherhood far enough, having allowed riches to concentrate, guilds to become dominated by entrenched families, and the ‘burgers’ to become separate from the ‘commonality’. Having forgotten, in your words, perhaps:

“The thing being crafted isn’t just the self, whatever that means, but rather (a piece of) the project that transcends the self.”

You say that to the craftsman, craft is spiritual. Once begun, something must be completed. I say, in the modern world, staying on task is the hardest thing. It’s not about temptation but about how we think about the success or failure of the task at hand. The decreased salience of alternatives is achieved by adding to the expected returns of a given course of action. So we need to find a way to make even an ugly pair of boots worth having made.

To get past that nagging voice that says, ‘but there’s already so much noise, so many things, why make more?’, we need to make things in common, in conversation, and in response to the need of the community, such as we find it.