Science and Crafts

I came to Penland to write. The craft s were dear to me; first textiles, especially bobbin lace, which my wife made and collected, and taught me to look at. Then the Japanese ceramics to which Kenichi Fukui and Fred Baekeland introduced me. Followed by the protochemistry of dyeing with indigo from snail and plant sources, to me still the ideal bridge between science and culture. The tribute is to be seen around my house—my children’s inheritance consumed as much by crafts as “high” art. So it was easy to accept an invitation to come to Penland and write. Who knew what would come—I wanted to write poems, perhaps an essay. For the poems I’ve needed nature—not so much to write about as to shake me loose from the everyday worries of the (exciting) daily life I had in Ithaca. Nature was a path to concentration; I expected to find a different nature in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I would watch the crafts process. Maybe someone would even let me try something. Or ask me to tell them of the chemistry of their craft. I, in turn, would craft my poems out of the green hills. But this is not what happened; here’s what happened: I walk into Billie Ruth Sudduth’s basketry class, and there’s the whole group dyeing their canes, steaming pots of synthetic dye. I ask someone what they are doing, and she says, “Well, I’m getting ready for the upsetting,” and then seeing the puzzled look on my face, patiently explains this old, wonderfully direct basketry term for bending the canes forming the base of a basket over themselves, so that they stand up. I walk uphill to the iron shop, clearly more of a macho place, watch an intense young man, lawyer become sculptor as it turns out, hammer out a hand on a swage block. Ben tells me that it’s possible to burn away the carbon in the steel, and the iron would “burn” too, oxidize, in too hot a flame.