In your most recent letter, you noted that

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.

Lately, I’ve been caught between the Scylla of “trying to get my PhD thesis into a submittable form” and the Charybdis of “chronic migraines”. Needless to say, your point feels apt.

Whatever else one might wish to say about migraine — and much has already been said by others, both about the pain itself and about what Emil du Bois-Reymond called the “general feeling of disorder” that precedes it (quoted in Sacks 13) — the phrase “antagonistic relationship with the body” is fitting. In Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer describes Brod as a “genius of sadness”; “a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum” (78). Nobody says that sort of thing about people experiencing chronic pain. Pain is not, in my experience, romantic or even particularly interesting as an object of investigation. It just is. One wishes to avoid it. One hates the body for it. Nothing is as totalising and as exhausting in the moment — and yet as boring and predictable from a distance — as a body in pain.

At best, what pain highlights, in my experience, is the weirdness and artificiality of the Cartesian division of ‘body’ and ‘mind’. Sometimes (that is: when the pain is mild), it’s possible to, with some success, distract yourself the sensation. You can pull at the reins of your attention. Set the body aside. But when it’s severe, you lose your grip. The body is the mind. (Sure, yes, ‘the body is always the mind, and the mind is always the body,’ but the way that an intense & aversive experience hijacks attention makes the identity of indiscernibles especially sharp.)

So: what relevance does any of this have to that dwarvish lifeway previously discussed?

Focus. Craft. Agency. Desire. These things are all, always, always-already embodied. Yet they are also, as you rightly point out, far less solitary than modern workplace mythologies would have us believe: “craftsmen and artists come to the height of their powers when they are part of a strong collective,” as you say, and “the structures in the world that most encourage men and women to be agentic […] are hangovers from the village commonality, from what Kropotkin would call the folkmote”. This is, I agree, the modern terrain. I also believe, as you do, that the collective craft attitude of the ‘guild’ is precisely that which “the modern workplace has sought more than anything to destroy”.

Your re-framing of the ‘dwarvish lifeway’ — and the contemporary barriers to it — is well taken. To be “weird and agentic and unapologetically ambitious” in the pursuit of loving craft takes two things:

1. A lived-in body, free from the traces of fascism;
2. A strong community of other dwarves.

My sense is that, in practice, most of the problem with kickstarting a dwarvish attitude is that

1. these two things depend on one another; and,
2. both ‘body’ and ‘community’ have painful shadows.

I’ve had one particular blog post stuck in my head for the past few days: ‘A Woman According to Oxford’. In it, commenting on “a post on Éowyn” written by Kirsten Sanders, she writes the following (forgive the length) —

Why does Éowyn fear cages? Because she has lacked freedom for a very long time. This is deeper than it sounds, and I am going to use something else that Kirsten Sanders says, in a different Lord of the Rings post, to explain what I mean:

This, also, is Augustine!- in that any freedom is directed only toward the Good, and freedom to choose other than the good is actually bondage.

There is some truth here. As a feminist, it’s easy to read a statement like this and assume that the next statement is going to be “and the Good, for women, lies in motherhood, so just go ahead and be a mother and then you won’t need any other freedoms.” This can lead to a desire to reject such an Augustinian notion of freedom out of hand. But I’ve already argued that the Good, for women, does not just lie in motherhood and it would be absurd to claim that it does.

I also know that modern feminism does express something like this notion of freedom, albeit in an altered form. The most recent example that I’ve seen was from Jessica DeFino, a writer here on Substack who is critical of the beauty industry. In response to the idea that it is empowering to wear glittery makeup that will pollute the environment with microplastics, she quips, ‘Hot tip: If “empowerment” is what you’re after, try living according to your values!’

There’s a difference, here: empowerment by living according to your [implicitly subjective] values versus freedom directed towards the [objective] Good. But feminism frequently argues that not all values make one equally free, and beauty is one of the most common places that this argument is made. A woman may voluntarily choose to spend hours on makeup, to wear shoes that feel deeply uncomfortable, to undergo surgeries that bring her into compliance with narrow beauty norms. Some feminists would call this freedom, but many others would say that she is trapped by restrictive societal norms, and that she would be more free if her worth did not feel, to her, as if it depended so much on her appearance.

It seems to me that, as a first step, we ought to be clearer about the reality of (some of) the hurdles to value-alignment and ‘virtue ethics’ in the dwarvish register, namely:

1. To create, you need to be embodied, but people tend not to want to be strongly embodied when their body feels aversive.
2. Insofar as the modern office “destroys”, it does so on two fronts — first, by dissolving the guild (atomising the individual-at-work) and, second, by ingraining fascism in our behaviours and on our bodies (insisting on a narrow and aversion-inducing set of postures & configurations of attention, action, and interaction).
3. You can’t engage in robustly positive-sum craft if you don’t know what your preferences really are, or what the preferences of others really are.
4. The inaccessibility of ‘the body’ is entangled with the inaccessibility of authentic (unfalsified) preference.
5. You can’t pursue The Good if you can’t see it (or its traces).

To orient the (hypothetical) guild towards making “in common, in conversation, and in response to the need of the community”, we need knowledge of that community-in-common. Such knowledge is only possible free from domination. Not consensus, per se, but less distortion via chronic (self-)deception. We need strong normativity, non-alienated bodies, and authentic preferences all at once. Yet each gets targeted, damaged, destroyed.

As Phoebe Bridgers says, “when broken bodies are washed ashore, who am I to ask for more, more, more?”

Perhaps I’m just echoing your own point back to you; however, it seems to me that, in order to pursue ‘dwarvish’ virtue — ambitious, weird, unapologetic, robust craft — we first have to overcome the domination which makes it feel impossible. If this precursor project is going to have any chance of success, the ‘overcoming’ can never be individual, just as the downstream ‘craft’ can never be individual. Why not? Because ‘isolation’ — or, more precisely, the insistent illusion of isolation — is itself both a mechanism and a trace of domination.

You can never let yourself be, as Virginia Woolf would have it, “the only person in Sussex”. As Éowyn has it in The Return of the King,

‘I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,’ she said; ‘and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.’

In other words: see yourself ecologically again.