Pencil Gauged Lines
on Final Arching

Look at the lines.  It is all about the flow.  Thumb plane and scrapers.  At first I draw the lines and they are wavy and chaotic.  I have to scrape away until the line flows, until it doesn’t take a meandering path, but instead flows in one continuous smooth arc across the wood.

I feel awkward and Clumsy. It isn’t easy.  That is the way of flow.  It tricks us into thinking it will be easy but it never is the crafting of a  perfect combination of words in a poem, or the placement of a  line  that effortlessly says human form – simple elegant, flow.  The eye just follows and it is right and satisfying.

Go with the flow, let it flow, love flows……emotional flow, physical flow, design flow.  I never appreciated how beautiful a violin is.   The arches, the ribs, the scroll.  Ah the scroll.  My husband and I are having a discussion, heated at times.  He says how can you spend all this time making an instrument and not do something unusual with the scroll. The one piece that does not affect the sound but can be seen from across the room.  The one thing that will set your instrument apart from all the others.  And I balk.  I think about what I might want and I cannot picture anything other than the scroll. Even if I could carve something else, what could it be?

Not a head, not a face, I don’t want some wood sprite staring at me every time I lift my fiddle.  I don’t want personality or even a totem, maybe a flower or a leaf, but it always comes back to the scroll. Why the scroll? What is it about the design that has made it iconic and pervasive?  It flows.  The wood is visually wound up on itself and I have the sense that it can be unwound and inside is a treasure a seed of thought, of sound, of life itself curled and carved into that gentle flow.

Always back to flow.  The back is arched.  There is nothing left to scrape, the eyelash has been flicked from the sleeping baby’s cheek and now there is only softness and quiet and flow.  I rest in this moment. 

Cutting the channel

It is purfling time.  Brian has a tool that lays the track, two faint  lines etched into the wood. They are a bare millimeter apart, maybe two, maybe three, but they seem impossibly close together. I have my 5x magnifiers so that I can see the barely there line.  And the knife with the surgical steel blades, the blades that are made for delicately slicing the broken parts of humanity so that they can be made whole again. I take the knife and slice into the line, no not even slice at this point, I barely push against it to deepen the groove. Both sides, an imperceptible deepening like a trickle of water that becomes a deep river.  And I search for the metaphors in that process and the one of discovering the story, because they are linked, the birth of one engendering the birth of the other; an odd pair of fraternal twins, sharing the same womb. I cannot rush either, the unfolding of the story or the making of the violin.  I lay down the line and gently push the channel, deepening as it unfolds. If I rush it doesn’t happen. If I try to force it, to make it go faster I have ruined the wood, I have nothing that lasts, nothing that resonates through time and space.

It hurts my finger, the maple is hard and yet it’s not. It moves with the pressure, it parts as easily as if the fibers are held by nothing more than a thought.  My thought that pushes against the resistance of logic and makes the channel creates the groove. 

I go outside the line.  It is inevitable, my hand is not quite steady enough. My magnified eyesight still does not see clearly.  But after a few attempts I find it and the line is deepened and once the line is deepened the next pass is easier. I have a clear track to follow. I am no longer lost in the deep snow. My metaphors mingle and clash with one other but they do the job. 

I just need to breathe. I just need to slow down and let myself truly see.

The Offending Platform

So now we are in the long haul. The Look at me, Look at what a cool thing I’m doing phase is past, and now when I write, it is the little tidbits of what I’m doing that I have to write, but is it interesting? The small minutiae of the project.  At least nine hours on the platform. Probably more, but I lost track of time. That’s what happens when you deal in 10ths of millimeters.  How many millimeters to the moon, how many millimeters to the big bang back in time and space.  How many millimeters, how many words until I discover the story.  These projects intertwining, the novel the fiddle, I lose one and find the other. And I am mired in the long slog through the mistakes and the missteps and the insecurity of where it goes.  At least with a fiddle I know where it’s going.  But I went too low on the platform.  2/10 of a millimeter. How could that really make a difference?  I measure, I carve, no I don’t even carve, there isn’t enough room, I measure I file, dust, saw dust, that isn’t sawed, file dust, like stardust that falls from the wood as I file and measure and file and measure and, OH S**t, too much, how did it get to be too much? 

Brian says we can fix it.  But I know it’s there. A mistake, life.  No one else will know, but I know. I know that there will be a thin veneer glued onto the platform, but in the end does it matter?  What matters is the sound, the tone, the song and the story.

And now I carve. I am settled in to the routine and it hits me, truly, that this is not an overnight task.  I mean, I knew it would take time, of course I knew it.  Brian said he calculated that it takes a student around 300 hours to complete an instrument.  That’s a lot of hours. And much of the time is spent in the detailed work. The carving and measuring, the ceaseless carving and measuring. I have finished my rough arching, which gets the wood to the basic shape and now I have to work the platform. I am nervous about the platform. Carving things flat is difficult. I seem to list to one side or the other.  And  while I  worry about the measurements and destroying the wood, I find myself thinking about the long tradition whose coattails I am grabbing onto.

  I listened to a Radio Lab podcast the other day and the theme was Things.  http://www.radiolab.org/story/things/  (If you’ve never listened to Radio Lab, you must, it’s not an option, go, listen…..) In the opening sequence Robert Krulwich discusses the difference between how he and his wife relate to things, specifically things from the past. Things that have cultural, emotional, scientific significance.  And it got me thinking about my relationship to things and how they spur the imagination. My husband and I were on a trip to England and we had just visited the Daphne de Maurier museum on Bodmin Moor.  We meandered around the moor on our way to find a place to spend the night and on the way one of the maps said we were near an historical ruin.  We found the spot to park our car but there was no real clear signpost as to where we were supposed to go.  We were racing the daylight but I really wanted to see the ruin and didn’t want to give up.  We finally found it. I don’t know exactly what I’d expected but it turned out that the ruin was nothing more than the rock footprint of a town or village.  It was clear that the rocks were not random.  I could imagine the walls that had arisen from the rocks.  It was a medieval ghost town.  There weren’t even things at that spot just stones laid out but I imagined the people walking and sitting and knitting and cooking and arguing and crying.

  And what does all this have to do with me making a violin? As I scrape away my millimeters of wood I find myself connected in a very tactile way to the past.  It is as if I touch the past as if I carve away more than wood. I carve away years, I carve away time. I time travel. This violin I am making, the violin I now play, the violin that is played in the concert hall, the violin that is played in the mountains of West Virginia, the violin that is played in the Mariachi band, the violin that is played in Scotland, Ireland, Rumania, the violin that is played in rock band, all of them every last one are born of the same beginnings.  They all trace their source back to the workshops of 15^th century Italy.  And I carve the way they carved. I scrape and file and measure with almost exactly the same tools.    The music played may be different, the music arises from the individual cultures, but the instrument spans them all.  The instrument binds us. 

Once the ribs were done it was time for the joins. I’d like to say that I’m doing this all myself, but I’m not.  I plane the center join and Brian steps in at the end.  Getting the two halves to

Planeing

meet perfectly is not easy.  There can be no gap and my brain doesn’t quite get how to tell which side is high and which is low.  It’s all so subtle and I have to make sure that I keep the plane completely steady.    There is a tendency to push more in the center so the edges are off.  Brian is very kind and lets me think that I’m helping, but this task I happily leave to him.   We glue the halves together and take a small shaving of the join. It is perfect.  The fit is so tight that it is hard to see the line. 

When I sculpt in clay joining two pieces is easy.  I score the two sides and then add water and pull the clay across the join until there really aren’t two distinct pieces anymore, the clay has been joined and one piece has become the other.  Wood isn’t clay and the two pieces that need to be joined are really always separate.  They are separate but held together by the glue that fills the invisible empty spaces. The join is a thin line that is all but invisible but I know it’s there. 

Once the joins were done I traced the shape of the ribs on the top and bottom.  This is it.  The individuality of dimension is set.  Whatever small variation came into play when the ribs were bent, this now dictates what my fiddle will be. The ribs won’t be used again until it’s time to put the pieces together. So now they sit on a shelf in the spare room keeping company with the fingerboard that, too, must wait its turn.

And then I sawed out the pieces with the aptly named coping saw.  They call it a coping saw, I am sure, because it is very difficult to cope with.  The blade turns, which is handy, but my brain cannot figure out which way it’s supposed to go.  I muddle through and in the end I am way too far from the line which means I will have to file a ridiculous amount of wood.  Oh well. 

I am missing steps.  The filing, the planeing somehow they disappear.  Like all the photographs I never took of family vacations and times past.  The days, the hours, I didn’t write them and now they merge together and end in the blister I got today.

 I’ve never had a relationship with wood before.  Don’t get me wrong. I love wood. I knock on it for luck, hug a tree in the wilderness, admire a lovely piece of furniture, but I haven’t loved it like a wood worker loves it.  There is a specialty wood store in town and my husband took me there as if it was a field trip.  He stood in front of the wood displays as if they were pieces of art.  I stood next to him and nodded my appreciation, but I didn’t see what he saw.  I didn’t understand. But now I have an inkling.  Textiles, clay, paint, words, have been the tools of my creative expression.  Wood, not so much.  Wood existed in nature, and wood existed in ready made furniture.  When unfinished furniture stores became popular I first realized that the wood needed to be stained or painted, that it didn’t come that way out of the tree, kind of like discovering that chocolate milk doesn’t come from chocolate cows.

 Picking the wood was a whole process in itself. I found the maple I wanted to use with no problem.   But the top, the spruce was more difficult.  So many factors.  Do I want bright or do I want sweet and warm? Is the grain straight all the way through?  I had narrowed my choice down to two, but one of the pieces was still in its wedge form, it hadn’t been cut yet, so I couldn’t hear it ring.  The other one, had a nice tone when I tapped on it, but I was drawn to the grain on the thick one and I wanted to hear it sing. I spent almost an hour and we had to put it aside and wait. Brian will cut it so that I can hear the ring.  Not that that really means anything, there is so much more, but I want to hear the ring and then I’ll know.

So we cut the one piece that was still in the wedge and still I couldn’t choose.  I held the wood as I was shown and tapped on it.  It rang. The wood sang. I tapped on the other piece. It too sang. A different sound, but still resonant.  Which one would sound best with the bottom I had chosen. I couldn’t decide.  I couldn’t see into the future. Which one. Eeny meeny minty mo.   In the end it was the feel of the wood as I gouged a piece of it.  Brian said,  “which one do you want to work with.  So I went for the one that carved in a way that felt comfortable to me. Not right or wrong or better, just good for me.  It’s so interesting, this subjective choosing.  I wanted Brian to make the choice for me, “which would you choose?” I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. “They’re both good.”

And still, with all this planning and theorizing about what the wood will end up sounding like, no one knows.  It is truly like the birth of a child. I hold the wood up to the light and try to see the future. But I can’t.  So much can go wrong.  I could end up with a pretty lump of varnished wood that has no sound, no soul.  Or I could end up with something sublime. 

Ribs around mold with linings glued and clamped

This blogging thing definitely requires consistency, which I don’t seem to have had.  So we are now fast forwarding a bit. Brian had me make a practice back but I didn’t want to write about the practice part, I was waiting for the real thing, as if practice is not real. Or maybe I didn’t want to overstay my blogging welcome.   But here I am, I’ve now been out of practice mode for over a month and I haven’t written a thing. This is where writing block meets wood working.  More of a happy alliteration than anything else.

The ribs are now bent around the mold.  We thinned them on a machine to 1.1 millimeters.  So thin, that I was afraid to breathe on them, amazing that something so thin and delicate supports the instrument. The ribs are bent around a hot iron like machine.   There are six pieces to the ribs.  It’s an awkward process because you don’t want to overbend them, the whole idea is to get the flow of the shape.   Heat allows the thin wood to soften enough so that it can be molded and shaped, but then once it cools it goes back to its more rigid form.  It’s tricky and delicate and the iron is hot and it’s easy to get burned.  Brian bent the center curves but let me play with the outside ones.  I put a drop of water on the wood and heard the sizzle and then as I’m holding the wood against the iron with a metal strap that I hold onto tight I felt the give.  As ifs the wood let out a deep sign and relaxed, it was at that point that I pulled the metal strap around the curve of the iron.  Not too much.  We then placed the rib around the mold.  I forgot the blocks. I’d spent the past few weeks cutting the blocks.  The blocks fit in the mold and the ribs are glued to the blocks.  Brian picked out some perfect pieces of wood for the blocks and I had to square that and then measure them to a precise height.  He pulled out one perfect piece that he said he’d been carrying around for over 10 years.  Maybe longer. A long time to have a block of wood sit around. It was beautiful and all I had to do was keep it square and sand it to the correct height. 

Square isn’t something that seems to work well with me.  It was supposed to be idiot proof. The rotating sand paper was already square to the base plate. All I had to do was hold it evenly and let the rotation do the work.  I blame it on being short.  That’s the only rational reason I can think of as to why I couldn’t actually just hold the block steady.  The machine was too high, it was awkward. I pushed just ever so slightly against the top, not holding it even and what happened?  A fraction of a millimeter. That’s all it takes, a hundredth of a millimeter and I had sanded the block at an angle. An angle that was enough off square to relegate that piece of wood that Brian had been saving for just such an occasion, that piece of wood that now would not fulfill it’s destiny, it would never become a cornerstone of a violin. 

So that was the blocks, but now I was on the ribs.  So much of this process is about flow, it is all  line and visual beauty.  I watch Brian as he helps me bend the ribs.  He pushes and prods the wood to get the perfect flow.  He says, “see, it’s not quite right there,” and I look at where he’s pointing. I nod. Of course I nod, I don’t want to seem like an idiot, but I do not completely see.  My eye is not truly trained, but when he takes the rib and flattens it out a bit on one of the curves, then I see. I understand. The eye just knows that this is a restful curve. This is a powerful curve. This is a curve that will withstand sour notes and hours of repetition to get the sound just right. This is a curve that will cradle the baby to sleep, that will hold the future.

And then it cracks.  The final push into place and I hear it.  The malleable wood had hardened again and it didn’t want to be coaxed or pushed or cajoled, so it cracked. Crack.  Say it over and over again, crack.  A firecracker, a crack in the armor, the crack of dawn, a crack in the rib.  Brian said not to worry, it happens all the time, we had extra ribs to thin and bend.  But it was my first time and I didn’t want it to happen to me.

I came back the next week and we had an extra piece of wood to use.  We cut it to size and bent it.  It seemed so promising, and once again just before it was in place, crack.   As loud and deafening as a crack of thunder, that small little crack in the wood reverberating through the small studio.  We only had one piece left. One piece that matched the other ribs perfectly, one piece already thinned to its’ impossible thinness.  We held our collective breath.  It held. 

Then there are the liners.  I was worried about the thinness of the ribs, how easy it would be to poke a hole through them, but I needn’t have worried.  There is a set of shadow ribs, made of willow and not quite as thin.  These, too, are bent and fitted next to the ribs. 

I have to back up a bit.  Because I don’t think I’ve mentioned the mold.  The mold is just that.  It is in the shape of the violin and the ribs are bent around it and glued to the blocks that are lightly glued to the mold.  The ribs are bent around the mold and the linings are attached to the ribs but they don’t cover the total rib, they are attached above and below the mold, so that when the mold is removed at the end the linings will not meet in the middle. There will be a gap that is still impossibly thin all around the middle.

I love the linings.  I love the stability and security they create.  There is strength and elegance in the curves and the structure.

Making A Violin: How it Began

This is one of those questions that drive me crazy.  Really, it’s one of those questions that make me stare at the blank screen and wish it would go away.  I have never been any good at self analysis. I’m not comfortable talking about myself. I prefer to tell my characters stories, not mine.  I feel as if whatever I type sounds pretentious. Because ultimately this is the questions of why do we do anything that we love?  Especially those things that highlight our weaknesses, that put us in the vulnerable position of being judged or failing. Why do I play golf when the stupid ball won’t go into the hole no matter how much I will it to?  Why do I play my fiddle when it would be so much nicer to just sit and listen to a brilliant musician who makes the instrument and the music come together in a perfect marriage rather than a relationship on the way to a therapist? Why do I paint pictures that stack up in the closet until it’s time to reuse the canvas? Why, why, why?  I don’t know.  I often wonder why the things I do for enjoyment are frequently not enjoyable. I don’t think I’m a glutton for punishment.  But, the fact is I prefer to try my hand at something and fail miserably rather than sit around and watch other people do it well.  So what is it that I love? It’s the challenge, it’s the process, and it’s the discovery. I am in love with the process of discovery.

When I was in second grade I wrote a story about my life as a chair.  I imagined what it would be like to have all different people sit in me, fat people, skinny people, babies whose feet barely touched the floor, and restless kids who kicked my legs with abandon.   I wish I still had that story.  I don’t really remember all the details, and I’m probably remembering it as way more profound than it was, but I do know that the seed for why I write was planted back then in those early years.  I write to discover.  I write to discover places, I write to discover individual people and I write to discover the heart of humanity. That sounds big.  It almost scares me it’s so big.  But I’ll go on, because as I said it’s about discovery. This right here, right now, is the discovery of me.  Not easy.  I’ve never found myself too fascinating a subject. But what more is there?

I write to play, I write to challenge myself, and I write to slow myself down.  (Ahhh. I think I’ve found the kernel. Now it is time to hold it over the fire and watch it pop.) Slowing down, taking the time, listening.  This is the hardest part of the writing process, of any process; to slow myself down enough so that I am completely in the truth of the moment. Sanford Meisner was an acting coach who said, (and I’m paraphrasing) that acting is behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances.  It is the same with writing and storytelling. The characters are imaginary and they are placed in imaginary circumstances, but it is my job, my task, my joy to find the truth, to write what I see, not what I think I see.  In my world writing and painting are deeply connected.  The words are my brushes. When I paint I struggle to capture the values of colors, the subtle changes as one object interplays with another, as the light combines with the shape. Writing is really no different, except the palette is emotion and sound and meaning, not color.

And of course, through all this I am attempting to tell a story.  It is easy to become so enamored with the beauty of my flowing prose, with my finely drawn rendition of a character, but that is not what writing is about for me.  Ultimately it is the story. We love stories, sitting around the campfire or in front of the big screen. It is the stories that pull us forward. It is the story that gets us thinking, that takes us out of ourselves and into the characters, so that we experience their lives.  We shine a light on a moment in time, on a sequence of events that make us bigger than we are.  And there is the most incredible satisfaction in knowing that someone has read something I’ve written and enjoyed it.  Maybe because I feel that I have connected, even if I never meet the person, never talk to them about what they read and why it moved them, but I feel as if once the story is out there, I am out there as well. I am meeting people. I am on an adventure.  When my kids were young we had a favorite book that we read called Paddle to the Sea. It was about a little wooden canoe that a child had placed in one of the Great Lakes and we followed it as it made its way to the sea.  When I put a story out into the world it is like that little canoe.  I don’t know where it goes.  I only sense that the adventure is possible, that my story itself becomes a story and I find that very satisfying.

So I’m back to the original question. Why do I write?   I don’t know if I’ll ever know the answer.  I have a definite love hate relationship with the process. I ask myself all the time, why am I doing this?  But I continue.  And in the end I can only come to the conclusion that I write because I can’t not write.  Hopefully this doesn’t sound too pretentious  but I write because on the deepest level it fulfills a need in me: a need to tell a story, a need to understand, a need to connect, and a need to make people smile.