How My Mornings Go Wrong
Here is how it usually happens. I wake up, and before the coffee has done anything useful, there is a small thing sitting on my chest. Never a big thing. Big things come with experts and op-eds and opinions you can borrow. It's always something stupid and specific, a noise the truck made, a sentence somebody said at the post office, a piece of junk I took apart the day before. I lie there turning it over like a stone from the river, and somewhere around the second cup I notice it has a string attached, and if I pull on the string there's a bigger thing on the end of it, and by lunchtime I am holding a rope that runs straight down into the foundations of Western civilization and I have not yet put my pants on. This is either a gift or a disorder. I've stopped asking which.
This particular morning the small thing was a knife. I'm a metal sculptor, which means I spend a respectable part of my life making things and a much less respectable part taking them apart, and a fair number of ordinary kitchen knives have crossed my bench over the years on their way to becoming something else. I wanted the steel. The handles were in the way. So I knocked out the pins, split the wood off the tang, and separated two materials that some factory had decided should spend their lives together. And there in the seam, glistening faintly in the way things glisten only when they're thinking about you, was a brown, slimy, sticky residue, packed into the gap between the metal and the handle like something that had been waiting for me. Not rust. Rust and I go way back. This had texture and ambition. Lovely, I thought. Just absolutely fucking lovely.
Let me be honest about what I don't know, because that turns out to matter. I don't know what that stuff was. I didn't send it to a lab or convene a congressional subcommittee on the dark secrets of the steak knife. Some of it was surely old food and soap and water, cooked and dried and re-wetted a few thousand times, some of it was probably glue giving up on life, and some of it may have been alive in the loose way that a lot of things in a damp dark crack are alive. What I know is what I saw: the blades were clean, the handles looked fine, the knives had done their jobs for years, and nothing on the outside announced what was on the inside. You could follow every rule your grandmother ever taught you about kitchen hygiene and never know there was a little brown civilization flourishing at the joint. The only way to find out was to destroy the knife. I threw the handle in the trash and thought that was the end of it, and then I woke up the next morning with the string in my hand.
Back of the House
The first tug on the string went to restaurants, which I'm not proud of, but mine is a working mind and it goes where the knives are. Somewhere a line cook is holding a knife ten hours a day, dragging it through a hundred pounds of onions, rinsing it under the tap, wiping it on a towel that has been doing heroic and unspeakable work since six in the morning. That blade gets washed more in a week than mine does in a year. And the joint is exactly as unreachable in a restaurant as it is in my drawer, except it's getting a lot more practice. I want to be fair here, because gonzo is not a license to libel line cooks. I have no evidence anybody ever got sick from a knife handle. Kitchens get inspected, and the people who work in them are generally more careful than the people who eat there. That's precisely what makes it interesting. Everybody follows the protocol, the protocol is aimed at the surfaces, and the one place that might actually be harboring something is a place the protocol was never built to reach, because nobody who wrote it ever took the handle off.
Pull a little harder and the restaurant stops being the point. Look at the cutting board, which is the knife's own private joint: the blade cuts, the board takes the scar, and every scar is a groove you can wipe across all day without ever reaching the bottom of it. Or the gasket on the walk-in door, or the seal behind your own kitchen faucet that you have never once in your life looked behind. Almost everything we rely on is designed so that we never have to look at the interface. That's what good design means, half the time. You don't see the wiring in the wall or the code behind the app or the handoff between the night nurse and the day nurse. You see the surface, the surface works, and because it works you assume the inside does too. The customer sees the plate. That's the whole social contract of eating out: we've collectively agreed that the front of the house is the house, which is a very pleasant agreement and also completely insane, because the front of the house is where nothing actually gets made. And look, I get it. You can't take apart every knife before you cut your sandwich. Trust is what lets civilization run faster than a full forensic inspection. The trouble starts when we forget the trust was ever a decision, when nobody remembers that somebody was supposed to check because everybody assumes somebody already did.
Where Two Good Things Meet
Here's what the knife actually taught me, once I stopped gagging long enough to listen. The steel was fine. The wood was fine, or as fine as wood ever is after a few thousand trips through the dishwater. Neither one was the problem. The problem was the seam, the place where two perfectly decent materials had been asked to behave as one thing and couldn't quite. Steel doesn't move. Wood moves its whole life, drinking water and swelling and drying and shrinking long after it stops being a tree, which anybody who studied plants for a living, as I once did, could have told the knife company in about four seconds. Every time that handle got wet and dried, the gap opened a hair and closed a hair, and every time it opened something got in, and every time it closed that something stayed. Nobody did anything wrong. They were just different, and fastened together, and nobody was ever going to look at the place where they met. Anybody who welds or glues or rivets for a living knows this in the hands rather than the head. The weld is where the crack starts. The bolt hole is where the rust blooms. Materials are what we brag about. Joints are what we live with.
And once you think that way, the whole world turns into joints. Two good people make a bad marriage. Two competent departments produce a disaster in the space between them, because each thought the other was handling it, and both have the paperwork to prove it. Two towns on the same river spend a century not talking about the river. The policy and the clerk who has to carry it out at four-thirty on a Friday. When something fails we want a villain, and we want the villain to be one of the parts: the lazy employee, the difficult wife, the crooked official, the cheap steel. Sometimes it is. But a remarkable amount of the time, if you take the thing apart honestly, every part was more or less doing its job and the failure lived in the connection, which is the one place nobody owns. The blade belongs to the steel guys, the handle belongs to the wood guys, and the seam belongs to nobody, which means it belongs to the residue. We inspect the parts of things obsessively, and we almost never inspect the relationships that make the parts into a thing.
Table Six and the Committee
Then the string drags me into relationships, a subject on which a man who spends most of his time alone in a building full of scrap metal is about as qualified as he is in forensic chemistry. But you don't need a license to notice that a couple is the most obvious joint there is. Think about the pair at table six. Well dressed, polite to the server, splitting the dessert, posting the anniversary photo and the beach photo and the dog in a ridiculous sweater, and every one of those pictures is the blade, freshly washed. Nobody posts the conversation that got skipped in 2014 because it was late, or the thing he said at his brother's wedding that she has never once mentioned and never once forgotten. Each one is a crumb, which is the insidious part. They go into the gap, the gap closes, the relationship goes back in the drawer looking fine, and years later there's a brown sticky something in there that neither of them can name and both have learned to work around. People call the divorce sudden. It wasn't sudden. It was just finally visible. And the couples whose handles last aren't the ones who never got anything in the seam, because everything gets something in the seam. They're the ones who open it up on purpose now and then, a miserable unglamorous process involving sentences like I need to tell you something that's been bothering me since March, which nobody has ever photographed either.
Now multiply that by four hundred people and give them a mission statement and a communications department. Institutions are nothing but joints, between the board and the staff, the policy and the practice, the brochure and what the guy at the front desk is actually allowed to do, and unlike couples they employ professionals whose whole job is the blade. That's what a press release is: somebody very skilled at the sink with a sponge and a bottle of Windex. When the residue finally leaks out where the public can see it, there's a statement, a review, an apology engineered to admit nothing, somebody far down the org chart gets let go, and the knife goes back in the drawer gleaming while everyone congratulates everyone on taking it seriously. Nobody takes the handle off. Nobody asks how long it was building up or who saw it and said nothing. The sneakier problem is the long quiet stretch before any scandal, when committees meet and minutes are approved and annual reports come out on heavy paper, and the very fact that nothing has visibly failed becomes the argument for never looking. We've always done it this way. Familiarity gets mistaken for inspection, longevity for soundness. And when somebody finally does crack the handle and point, the institution almost always treats the opening as the offense. You're being divisive. Look at all the good we do. Which may be perfectly true, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the brown sticky mess now lying on the table in front of everybody.
The Man with the Pry Bar
At this point, if I were reading this instead of writing it, I'd be getting suspicious of the narrator. Here's a guy who takes things apart for a living, and wouldn't you know it, he's discovered that the whole world needs taking apart. The carpenter thinks the world needs more nails. The dentist thinks civilization is collapsing from plaque. Pardon me while I roll my eyes at myself hard enough to sprain something. So let's do to the narrator what he's been recommending to everybody else. What's in my seams? I'd love to report clean bright steel and a faint smell of cedar. What I found was a tidy collection of grudges, some going back decades, each one polished and labeled and kept in good working order the way other men keep fishing lures. I found a talent for being right that isn't always matched by a talent for being kind. I found I'm a lot better at spotting residue in other people's handles than in my own, and that I tend to call my own residue character. Other people are stubborn; I'm principled. Other people hold grudges; I have a long memory for injustice. Same sponge, same Windex, just pointed at the mirror. That's the deepest joint of all, the seam between the person you think you are and the things you actually do, and it's the best hidden, because the mind that would have to inspect it is the same mind that built the handle.
And here's the other uncomfortable fact every sculptor learns: once you've taken the knife apart, you don't have a knife anymore. You have a blade, a pile of splinters, two brass pins you'll step on in your socks at eleven at night, and a smear of something brown. What you don't have is an answer. I could turn those few nasty handles into a crusade, make a video in my car, red in the face, telling America it's being poisoned by steak-knife sludge, and get a lot of views, and be, as far as I actually know, wrong. Once you find residue in one seam you start seeing it in every seam whether it's there or not. Every institution is corrupt, every marriage a lie. That's not insight, it's just the opposite flavor of laziness. The man who thinks every surface is clean and the man who thinks every interior is filthy share one thing: neither has to look. And prying has costs. Marriages have been wrecked by one partner's endless suspicious digging, and decent people have been taken apart in public over residue that turned out, when the results came back, to be mostly dishwater. Some interiors are none of your business. Some privacy isn't concealment. So the lesson isn't to open everything. It's narrower and harder than that: the surface is one kind of information and the interior is another, and you ought to know which one you're trusting. Trusting something because you checked and trusting it because it's shiny are not the same thing, and most days, me included, we can't be bothered to notice which one we're doing.
Back to the Bench
My studio these days is an old service station on State Street in Shelburne Falls, which turns out to be fitting in a way I didn't appreciate until the string led me here. A service station was a building whose whole purpose was the inside of things. You pulled in with a car that looked fine and drove fine and sounded only slightly funny, and a man in coveralls put it up on the lift and told you the truth about what was going on under there, which was usually more expensive than you wanted to hear. Nobody thanked him for the news, but they came back, because the alternative was finding out on the highway. We don't have many service stations for the rest of life. We have car washes, a whole economy of them, for our faces and homes and marriages and governments, and the cars come out shining and nobody looks underneath. What's missing isn't more suspicion, God knows. It's the guy in the coveralls, who opens it up because that's the job, not because he's out to get you, and who tells you plainly what he found and then, the part everybody forgets, helps you fix it. Inspection without repair is just gossip with a flashlight.
I still don't know what was in those handles, and I've stopped thinking the answer is the point. The point was the moment the clean, familiar, perfectly respectable object turned out to have an interior I'd never once imagined, and I realized I'd been holding it for years on nothing but the shine. You can't take everything apart. But you can remember the inside is there. You can decide, now and then, to open one thing on purpose, one conversation, one committee, one old grudge you've been keeping in good working order, and be ready to find it ugly, or fine, or most likely something in between that you'll then have to deal with using your hands, which is the hard part and the only part that matters. And when you do find something, remember what you've got: a reason to look harder, not a verdict. Finding the slime proved there was slime. It didn't prove anybody got poisoned, and the man who can't tell those two apart is just one more shiny surface somebody ought to take a screwdriver to. I've spent my working life taking things apart to see how they were made, and what it has taught me is that the place that holds a thing together is the same place it starts to go wrong, and the only way to know which is happening is to look. That's the whole philosophy. It fits on a knife handle, assuming you can get the slime off first. Anyway, it's past noon, the coffee's cold, and I still haven't put my pants on. Tomorrow I'll wake up with some other small stupid thing on my chest, and I already know there'll be a string on it.