Manually Processing

This afternoon, I cut up two empty oatcake boxes and wove them together again. For fun, obviously, if you had to ask why.

Actually it's richer than that, isn't it? There's something important and attractive in doing something with your hands other than slide them over keyboards and touchscreens. And something also about thinking out a "project" like this. I'd seen someone do something similar and had held back a couple of these boxes from recycling to try it out. But I hadn't really thought through how it would work or what I needed to do. That came in the doing.

There's also something about thinking with your hands. Weaving, like knitting or woodwork depends on a sort of intelligence that lives in the whole body and is expressed through manual dexterity. It's a great rest from thinking only with one's brain about abstract nonsense.

41 years ago, I was put in an academic stream that meant I didn't do any more art or craft or drawing or engineering or anything manual at school again. I was destined for brain work and telling people what to do so there was no point in me doing anything else. Nobody in the same classroom as me was doing it either, the class was defined by which subjects we were doing and although officially we were all supposed to be equal, everyone knew what the differences were between the class who did Latin and the class who did technical drawing. I wish it hadn't been so - I think we all need access to this sort of activity and not just in school.