Sennett—The Craftsman (iii)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

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CHAPTER 5

The Hand

Technique has a bad name; it can seem soulless. That's not how people whose hands become highly trained view technique. For them, technique will be intimately linked to expression. This chapter takes a first step in investigating the connection.

Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant casually remarked, "The hand is the window on to the mind." Modern science has sought to make good on this observation. ...

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"Most of the unique features of the modern human hand, including the thumb, can be related to . . . the stresses that would have been incurred with the use of these grips in the manipulation of stone tools." Thinking then ensues about the nature of what one holds. American slang advises us to "get a grip"; more generally we speak of "coming to grips with an issue." Both figures reflect the evolutionary dialogue between the hand and the brain.

There is, however, a problem about grips, especially important to people who develop an advanced hand technique. This is how to let go. In music, for instance, one can play rapidly and cleanly only by learning how to come off a piano key or how to release the finger on a string or on a valve. In the same way, mentally, we need to let go of a problem, usually temporarily, in order to see better what it's about, then take hold of it afresh. Neuropsychologists now believe that the physical and cognitive capacity to release underlies the ability of people to let go of a

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fear or an obsession. Release is also full of ethical implication, as when we surrender control—our grip—over others.

One of the myths that surround technique is that people who develop it to a high level must have unusual bodies to begin with. As concerns the hand, this is not quite true.

I suspect it is true of the lip and the teeth.

For instance, the ability to move one's fingers very rapidly is lodged in all human bodies, in the pyramidal tract in the brain. All hands can be stretched out through training so that the thumb forms a right angle to the first finger. A necessity for cellists, pianists with small hands can likewise develop ways to overcome this limit. Other demanding physical activities like surgery do not require special hands to begin with—Darwin long ago observed that physical endowment is a starting point, not an end, in any organism's behavior. This is certainly true of human hand technique. Grips develop in individuals just as they have developed in our species.

* * *

Touch poses different issues about the intelligent hand. In the history of medicine, as in philosophy, there has been a long-standing debate about whether touch furnishes the brain a different kind of sensate information than the eye. It has seemed that touch delivers invasive, "unbounded" data, whereas the eye supplies images that are contained in a frame. If you touch a hot stove, your whole body goes into sudden trauma, whereas a painful sight can be instantly diminished by shutting your eyes. A century ago, the biologist Charles Sherrington reformatted this discussion. He explored what he called "active touch," which names the conscious intent guiding the fingertip; touch appeared to him proactive as well as reactive.

A century on, Sherrington's research has taken a further turn. The fingers can engage in proactive, probing touch without conscious intent, as when the fingers search for some particular spot on an object that stimulates the brain to start thinking; this is called "localized"

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touch. ...

The calluses developed by people who use their hands professionally constitute a particular case of localized touch. In principle the thickened layer of skin should deaden touch; in practice, the reverse occurs. ...

About the hand's animal powers, Charles Bell believed that different sense limbs or organs had separate neural channels to the brain and thus that the senses could be isolated from one another. Today's neural science shows his belief to be false; instead, a neural network of eye-brain-hand allows touching, gripping, and seeing to work in concert. Stored information about holding a ball, for instance, helps the brain make sense of a two-dimensional photograph of a ball...

Prehension
To Grasp Something

To say that we "grasp something" implies physically that we reach for it. In the familiar physical gesture of grasping a glass, the hand will assume a rounded shape, suitable for cupping the glass, before it actually touches the surface. The body is ready to hold before it knows

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whether what it will hold is freezing cold or boiling hot. The technical name for movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data is prehension.

Mentally, we "grasp something" when we understand the concept, say, of an equation like a / d = b + c rather than simply perform the operations. Prehension gives a particular cast to mental understanding as well as physical action: you don't wait to think until all information is in hand, you anticipate the meaning. Prehension signals alertness, engagement, and risk-taking all in the act of looking ahead; it is in spirit the very opposite of the prudent accountant who does not exert a mental muscle until he or she has all the numbers.

Reaching for something, in the prehensive way, establishes facts on the ground. For instance, when a conductor gives directive hand gestures a moment ahead of the sound. If the hand gesture for a downbeat came exactly in time, the conductor would not be leading, since the sound would already have happened. Batsmen in cricket get the same advice: "get ahead of the swing." Beryl Markham's remarkable memoir West with the Night provides yet another example. In the days when pilots lacked much guidance from instruments, she flew through the African night by imagining that she had already made the lift or turn she was about to make. All these technical feats are based on what anyone does in reaching for a glass.

Really?

Raymond Tallis has given the fullest account we now have of prehension. He organizes this phenomenon into four dimensions: anticipation, of the sort that shapes the hand reaching for the glass; contact, when the brain acquires sense data through touch; language cognition, in naming what one holds; and last, reflection on what one has done. Tallis does not insist that these must add up to self-consciousness. One's orientation can remain focused on the object; what the hand knows is what the hand does. To Tallis's four I'll add a fifth element: the values developed by highly skilled hands.

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Hand Virtues
At the Fingertip
Truthfulness

In learning to play a string instrument, young children do not know at first where to place their fingers on the fingerboard to produce an accurate pitch. The Suzuki method, named after the Japanese music educator Suzuki Shin'ichi, solves this problem instantly by taping thin plastic strips onto the fingerboard. ...

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...

This user-friendly method inspires instant confidence. ... These happy certainties erode, however, the moment the strips are removed.

In principle, habit should have ingrained accuracy. ... In fact, habit of this mechanical sort fails—and for a physical reason. The Suzuki method has stretched small hands laterally at the knuckle ridge but has not sensitized the fingertip that actually presses down on the string. Because the fingertip doesn't know the fingerboard, sour notes appear as soon as the tapes come off. As in love, so in technique; innocent confidence is weak. ...

Suzuki well understood the problem of false security. He counseled removing the tapes as soon as the child feels the pleasure of

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making music. ...Suzuki knew from his experiments that truthfulness lies at the fingertips: touch is the arbiter of tone. ...

We want to know what sort of truth is this, which casts off false security.

In music, the ear works in concert with the fingertip to probe. Put rather dryly, the musician touches the string in different ways, hears a variety of effects, then searches for the means to repeat and reproduce the tone he or she wants. In reality, this can be a difficult and agonizing struggle to answer the questions "What exactly did I do? How can I do it again?" Instead of the fingertip acting as a mere servant, this kind of touching moves backward from sensation to procedure. The principle here is reasoning backward from consequence to cause.

...

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What could motivate a child to pursue such a demanding path? One school of psychology says that the motivation is lodged in an experience fundamental to all human development: the primal event of separation can teach the young human to become curious. This research is associated with, in the mid-twentieth century, D. W. Winnicott and John Bowlby,...

Both psychologists emphasized the energies children come to invest in "transitional objects"—technical jargon for the human capacity to care about those people or material things that themselves change. As psychotherapists, this school of psychologists sought to aid adult patients who seemed fixated in infantile traumas of security to dwell more easily in the realm of shifting human relationships. But the idea of the "transitional object" more largely names what can truly engage curiosity: an uncertain or unstable experience. Still, the child submitting to the uncertainties of tone production, or indeed any highly demanding hand activity, is a special case: he or she seems confronted by

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what might seem an unending, mushy process yielding only provisional solutions that give the musician no sense of increasing control and no emotional experience of security.

Matters don't quite become so dire because the musician has an objective standard to meet: playing in tune. ...it might be argued that high levels of technical skill can be reached only by people with fixed objective standards of truth.

Well, there are "personal" standards, "subjective" in the ultimate sense yet "objective" in context of the practice, which can fix the goalposts for self-directed artists. But we do have to "project" these "objectively" rather than just dreaming about them.

Musically we need simply observe that believing in correctness drives technical improvement; curiosity about transitional objects evolves into definitions of what they should be. The quality of sound is such a standard of correctness—even for Suzuki. ... Of course, spontaneous discoveries and happy accident inform what a musical piece should sound like. Still the composer and the performer must have a criterion to make sense of happy accidents, to select some as happier than others. In developing technique, we resolve transitional objects into definitions, and we make decisions based on such definitions.

Both composers and performers are said to hear with the "inner ear," but that immaterial metaphor is misleading... [Rather] The sound itself is the moment of truth.

This is therefore also the moment when error becomes clear to the musician. As a performer, at my fingertips I experience error—error that I will seek to correct. I have a standard for what should be, but my truthfulness resides in the simple recognition that I make mistakes. Sometimes in discussions of science this recognition is reduced to the cliché of "learning from one's mistakes." Musical technique shows that

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the matter is not so simple. I have to be willing to commit error, to play wrong notes, in order eventually to get them right. This is the commitment to truthfulness that the young musician makes by removing the Suzuki tapes.

In making music, the backward relationship between fingertip and palm has a curious consequence: it provides a solid foundation for developing physical security. Practicing that attends to momentary error at the fingertips actually increases confidence: once the musician can do something correctly more than once, he or she is no longer terrorized by that error. In turn, by making something happen more than once, we have an object to ponder;

LeRoi Jones eat your heart out.

variations in that conjuring act permit exploration of sameness and difference; practicing becomes a narrative

Ugh...

rather than mere digital repetition; hard-won movements become ever more deeply ingrained in the body; the player inches forward to greater skill. In the taped state, by contrast, musical practice becomes boring, the same thing repeated over and over. Here handwork, not surprisingly, tends to degrade.

Diminishing the fear of making mistakes is all-important in our art, since the musician on stage can't stop, paralyzed, if she or he makes a mistake. In performance, the confidence to recover from error is not a personality trait; it is a learned skill. Technique develops, then, by a dialectic between the correct way to do something and the willingness to experiment through error. The two sides cannot be separated. If the young musician is simply given the correct way, he or she will suffer from a false sense of security. If the budding musician luxuriates in curiosity, simply going with the flow of the transitional object, she or he will never improve.

* * *

This dialogue addresses one of the shibboleths in craftsmanship, the employment of "fit-for-purpose" procedures or tools. Fit-for-purpose seeks to eliminate all procedures that do not serve a predeter-

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mined end. The idea was embodied in Diderot's plates of L'Anglée, which showed no litter or wasted paper; programmers now speak of systems without "hiccups"; the Suzuki tape is a fit-for-purpose contrivance. We should think of fit-for-purpose as an achievement rather than a starting point. To arrive at that goal, the work process has to do something distasteful to the tidy mind, which is to dwell temporarily in mess—wrong moves, false starts, dead ends. Indeed, in technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures.

As good a rejoinder as any to the fear of "practicing your mistakes."

Fit-for-purpose action sets the context for prehension. Prehension seems to prepare the hand to be fit and ready, but this is an incomplete story. In making music we certainly prepare yet cannot recoil when our hand does not then fit its aim or purpose; to correct, we have to be willing—more, to desire—to dwell in error a bit longer in order to understand fully what was wrong about the initial preparation. The full scenario of practice sessions that improve skill is thus: prepare, dwell in mistakes, recover form. In this narrative,

For Christ's sake Dick, does it really just have to be a narrative?

fit-for-purpose is achieved rather than preconceived.


The Two Thumbs
From Coordination, Cooperation

An abiding virtue of craftsmen appears in the social imagery of the workshop. Diderot idealized cooperation in the images of papermaking at L'Anglée, its employees laboring together in harmony. Is there some bodily basis for working cooperatively? In the social sciences, that question has been most recently and most often addressed in discussions about altruism. Debate has focused on whether altruism is programmed into human genes. I want to tack in a different direction: What might experiences of physical coordination suggest about social cooperation? This is a question that can be made concrete in exploring how the two hands coordinate and cooperate with each other.

I don't follow at all. the two hands are not social agents.

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The digits of the hands are of unequal strength and flexibility, impeding equal coordination. This is true even of the two thumbs, whose capabilities depend on whether one is right- or left-handed. When hand skills develop to a high level, these inequalities can be compensated; fingers and thumbs will do work that other digits cannot perform for themselves. The colloquial English usages of "lending a hand" or the "helping hand" reflect such visceral experience. The compensatory work of the hands suggests—perhaps it is no more than a suggestion—that fraternal cooperation does not depend on sharing equally a skill. ...

* * *

...

When he first began playing jazz, the pianist and philosopher David Sudnow discovered just how difficult the resulting problems of coordination could be. In his remarkable book Ways of the Hand, Sudnow, classically trained, recounts how he began to trans-

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form himself into a jazz pianist. He began by taking a logical but wrong path.

In jazz piano playing, the left hand more often has to execute wide lateral palm stretches or scrunch up its fingers into bundles to achieve the harmonies peculiar to this art. Sudnow began logically enough by sequencing the movements from stretch to scrunch. Correspondingly, he worked separately on the rapid lateral movement of his right hand across wide spaces on the keyboard, the hopping hand that in traditional jazz "strides", in more modern jazz, getting quickly to the piano's upper registers keeps the rhythmic pulse flowing at the top.

Breaking his technical problems into parts proved counterproductive. The separation did little to help him scrunch on the left and stride on the right together. Worse, he overprepared the separate practices, which can be fatal for improvisation.

Well, a lot of "improvisors" say you can't overprepare because there's not actually much true "improvisation" to be had. Which is to say that preparation itself cannot be fatal to "improvisation," only the preparer himself can be.

...

Once Sudnow had his eureka moment, he changed his practice procedure. He used all the fingers as true partners. If physically one of these partners was too weak or too strong, he asked another to do the job. Photographs that show Sudnow at work horrify conventional piano teachers; he looks contorted. But hearing him, one senses how easily he plays. He does so because he had at a certain point made coordination his goal whenever he practiced.

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There is a biological reason why coordination between unequal members works. The corpus callosum in the brain is a gateway connecting the brain's right motor cortex to its left motor cortex. The gateway passes information about the control of bodily movement from one side to the other. Practice that divides handwork into parts weakens this neural transfer.

Compensation also has a biological foundation. Homo sapiens has been described as the "lopsided ape." Physical prehension is lopsided. We reach for things with one hand more than the other—in most humans, with the right hand. ... The French psychologist Yves Guiard has studied how to counter lopsidedness—with some surprising results. Strengthening the weaker limb is, as we might expect, part of the story, but exercises aimed at achieving this alone will not make the weaker hand more dexterous. The stronger hand has to recalibrate its strength to permit dexterity to develop in the weaker partner. The same thing is true of fingers. The index finger has to think, as it were, like a fourth finger to "help out." So, too, with the two thumbs: we hear Sudnow's two thumbs working together as one, but physiologically, his stronger thumb is holding back tensile force. This is even more necessary when the thumb helps the weak fourth finger; it needs to behave like a fourth finger. Playing an arpeggio in which the strong left thumb reaches out to assist the weaker right little finger is perhaps the most demanding physical task in cooperative coordination.

Hand coordination confronts a great delusion about how people become skilled. That is to imagine that one builds up technical control by proceeding from the part to the whole, perfecting the work of each part separately, then putting the parts together—as though technical competence resembles industrial production on an assembly line. Hand coordination works poorly if organized in this way. Rather than the combined result of discrete, separate, individualized activities, co-

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ordination works much better if the two hands work together from the start.

The arpeggio also provides a hint about the sort of fraternity idealized by Diderot, and after him Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen, the fraternity of people who share the same skill. The real test of their bond comes when they recognize that they share it in unequal degree. The "fraternal hand" represents finger restraint among stronger digits that Yves Guiard sees as the crux of physical coordination; has this a social reflection?

How could it?

...

Hand-Wrist-Forearm
The Lesson of Minimum Force

...

Ancient cleaver technique derived from the same kind of choice a home carpenter faces today in deciding how to hammer a nail into wood. One option is to put one's thumb on the side of the hammer's shank in order to guide the tool; all the strength of the blow will then

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come from the wrist. The alternative wraps the thumb around the shank; now one's whole forearm can provide the force. If the home carpenter chooses the second, he or she will increase the raw power of the blow but will also risk losing accuracy in aiming it. The ancient Chinese cleaver chef opted for the second position but worked out a different way to use the combined forearm, hand, and cleaver in order to cut food finely. Instead of hammering a blow, he or she guided from the elbow joint the fused forearm, hand, and cleaver so that the knife edge fell into the food; the moment the blade made contact, the forearm muscles contracted to relieve further pressure.

...

The idea of minimum force as the base line of self-control is expressed in the apocryphal if perfectly logical advice given in ancient Chinese cooking: the good cook must learn first to cleave a grain of boiled rice.

Before teasing out the implications of this craft rule, we need to understand better a physical corollary of minimum force. This is the release. If the cook, like a carpenter, holds the cleaver or hammer down after striking a blow, it works against the tool's rebound. Strain will occur all along the forearm. For physiological reasons that are still not

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well understood, the ability to withdraw force in the microsecond after it is applied also makes the gesture itself more precise; one's aim improves. So in playing the piano, where the ability to release a key is an integral motion with pressing it down, finger pressure must cease at the moment of contact for the fingers to move easily and swiftly to other keys. In playing stringed instruments, as we go to a new tone, our hand can make the move cleanly only by letting go, a microsecond before, of the string it has pressed before. In the musical hand, for this reason, it is harder to produce a clear, soft sound than to belt out loud notes. Batting in cricket or baseball requires that same prowess in release.

In hand-wrist-forearm movement, prehension plays a significant role in the release. The arm assemblage must do the same sort of anticipation as in reaching for a cup but in reverse. Even as the blow is about to occur, the arm assemblage is preparing for the next step, in the microsecond before contact-reaching for release, as it were. ...

"Cleave a grain of rice" thus stands for two bodily rules intimately connected: establish a base line of minimum necessary power, and learn to let go. Technically the point of this connection is control of movement, but it is indeed full of human implication —to which ancient Chinese cookery writers themselves were attuned. The Chuang-tzu advises, do not behave like a warrior in the kitchen, from which Taoism derives a broader ethics for Homo faber: an aggressive, adversarial address to natural materials is counterproductive. Zen Buddhism in Japan later drew on this heritage to explore the ethics of letting go, embodied in archery. ...

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In Western societies, knife use has also served as a cultural symbol of minimal aggression. Norbert Elias found that Europeans in the early Middle Ages viewed the dangers of the knife rather pragmatically. What Elias calls "the civilizing process" began as the knife took on a more symbolic importance, summoning to collective mind both the evils and the remedies for spontaneous violence. ...

A "well-bred" person disciplined the body in the most elementary of biological necessities... One consequence of such self-control was to relieve people of aggressive tension. The chef's chopping makes this quixotic proposition more comprehensible: self-control pairs with ease.

In examining the emergence of court society in the seventeenth century, Elias was struck by how this coupling had come to define the gracious aristocrat, easy with others and in control of himself; eating properly was one of the aristocrat's social skills. This mark of good manners at table was possible only because the dangers of physical violence were retreating in polite society, the dangerous skills associated with the knife ebbing. In the surging of bourgeois life in the eighteenth century, the code passed downward a grade in social class and changed again in character;...

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...

Elias is an admirable historian, but he errs, I think, as an analyst of the social life he so vividly describes. He treats civility as a veneer beneath which lies the solid, more personal experience: shame—the real catalyst of self-discipline. His histories of nose blowing, farting, or pissing in public, like the evolution of table manners, all originate in shame over natural bodily functions, shame over their spontaneous expression; the "civilizing process" inhibits spontaneity. Shame appears to Elias as an inward-turning emotion: "The anxiety that we call 'shame' is heavily veiled to the sight of others . . . never directly expressed in noisy gestures . . . It is a conflict within his own personality; he recognizes himself as an inferior."

This strikes a false note applied to aristocrats but rings truer about middle-class mores. Still, this is not an explanation that could in any way apply to the ease or self-control the craftsman seeks ; shame does not motivate the craftsman learning minimum force and release. Just considered physically, he or she cannot be so driven. There is indeed a physiology of shame, which can be measured by muscular tension in the stomach as well as in the arms—shame, anxiety, and muscular tension form an unholy trinity in the human organism. The physiology of shame would disable the freedom of physical movement that an artisan needs to work. Muscular tension is fatal to physical self-control. Put positively, as muscles develop in bulk and definition, the reflexes that cause them to tense become less pronounced; physical activity becomes smoother, less jerky. This is why people whose bodies are physically strong are more capable of calibrating minimum force than people whose bodies are weak; a gradient of muscle force has developed. Well-developed muscles in the body are equally more capable of release. They maintain shape even when they let go. Mentally, the craftsman of words could no more explore and use them well if he or she were full of anxiety.

To be just to Elias, we might imagine that self-control has two

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dimensions: one a social surface beneath which there lies personal distress, the other a reality at ease in itself both physically and mentally, a reality that serves the craftsman's development of skill. This second dimension carries its own social implication.

...

Hand and Eye
The Rhythm of Concentration

"Attention deficit disorder" currently worries many teachers and parents, focused on whether children can pay attention for sustained periods rather than attend to short moments. Hormonal imbalances account for some of the causes of attention deficit, cultural factors for others. About the latter, the sociologist Neil Postman spawned a large body of research on the negative effects watching television produces

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in children. Students of expertise often define attention span, however, in terms that may not seem entirely useful in responding to such adult worry.

As mentioned at the outset of this book, ten thousand hours is a common touchstone for how long it takes to become an expert. ... This seemingly huge time span represents how long researchers estimate it takes for complex skills to become so deeply ingrained that these become readily available, tacit knowledge. Putting the master criminal aside, this number is not really an enormity. The ten-thousand-hour rule translates into practicing three hours a day for ten years, which is indeed a common training span for young people in sports. The seven years of apprentice work in a medieval goldsmithy represents just under five hours of bench work each day, which accords with what is known of the workshops. The grueling condition of a doctor's internship and residency can compress the ten thousand hours into three years or less.

The adult worry about attention deficits, by contrast, is much smaller in scale: how a child will manage to concentrate even for one hour at a time. Educators frequently seek to interest children mentally and emotionally in subjects in order to develop their skills of concentration. The theory on which this is based is that substantive engagement breeds concentration . The long-term development of hand skills shows the reverse of this theory. The ability to concentrate for long periods comes first ; only when a person can do so will he or she get involved emotionally or intellectually. The skill of physical concentration follows rules of its own, based on how people learn to practice, to repeat what they do, and to learn from repetition. Concentration, that is, has an inner logic; this logic can, I believe, be applied to working steadily for an hour as well as for several years.

...

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...

We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labor, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it's nothing like this. Doing something over and over is stimulating when organized as looking ahead. The substance of the routine may change, metamorphose, improve, but the emotional payoff is one's experience of doing it again. There's nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm. Built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled craftsman has extended rhythm to the hand and the eye.

...

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...

I fear that my descriptive powers have reached their limit in describing the rhythm involved in concentration, and I have certainly made this experience seem more abstract than it is. The signs of a person who concentrates in practicing are concrete enough. A person who has learned to concentrate well will not count the number of times he or she repeats a motion at the command of the ear or the eye. When I am deep into practicing the cello, I want to do a physical gesture again and again to make it better but also do it better so that I can do it again. So too with Erin O'Connor. She is not counting how often; she wants to repeat breathing down the blowpipe, holding and turning it in her hands. Her eye, however, sets the tempo. When the the two elements of rhythm combine in practicing, a person can stay alert for long periods, and improve.

What then of the substance one practices? Does one practice a three-part invention by J. S. Bach better than an exercise by Ignaz Moscheles just because the music is better? My own experience is, no; the rhythm of practicing, balancing repetition and anticipation, is itself engaging. Anyone who has learned Latin or Greek as a child might reach the same conclusion. Much of this language learning was "rote," its substance remote. Only gradually did the routines that enabled us to learn the Greek language help us gain interest in a long-vanished, foreign culture. As for other apprentices who have not yet fathomed

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the content of a subject, learning to concentrate has to come first. Practicing has its own structure and an inherent interest.

The practical value of this advanced handwork to people dealing with attention deficit disorder consists in focusing attention on how practice sessions are organized. Rote learning is not in itself the enemy. Practice sessions can be made interesting through creating an internal rhythm for them, no matter how short; the complicated actions performed by an advanced glassblower or cellist can be simplified while preserving the same structuring of time. We do a disservice to those who suffer from attention deficit disorder by asking that they understand before they engage.

* * *

The view of good practicing may seem to slight the importance of commitment, but commitments themselves come in two forms, as decisions and as obligations. In the one, we judge whether a particular action is worth doing or a particular person is worth spending time with; in the other, we submit to a duty, a custom, or to another person's need, not of our own making. Rhythm organizes the second kind of commitment; we learn how to perform a duty again and again. As theologians have long pointed out, religious rituals need to be repeated to become persuasive, day after day, month after month, year upon year. The repeats are steadying, but in religious practice they are not stale; the celebrant anticipates each time that something important is about to happen.

I moot this large point in part because the practicing that occurs in repeating a musical phrase, chopping meat, or blowing a glass goblet has something of the character of a ritual. We have trained our hands in repetition; we are alert rather than bored because we have developed the skill of anticipation. But equally, the person able to perform a duty again and again has acquired a technical skill, the

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rhythmic skill of a craftsman, whatever the god or gods to which he or she subscribes.

...

[181] Display translates into a craft command frequently given young writers: "Show, don't tell!" In developing a novel this means avoiding such declarations as "She was depressed," writing instead something like "She moved slowly to the coffee pot, the cup heavy in her hand." Now we are shown what depression is. The physical display conveys more than the label. Show, don't tell occurs in workshops when the master demonstrates proper procedure through action; his or her display becomes the guide. Yet this kind of miming contains a wrinkle.

The apprentice is often expected to absorb the master's lesson by osmosis; the master's demonstration shows an act successfully performed, and the apprentice has to figure out what turned the key in the lock. Learning by demonstration puts the burden on the apprentice ; it further assumes that direct imitation can occur. To be sure, the process often works, but equally often it fails. In music conservatories, for instance, the master often has trouble putting him- or herself back into the rude state of the pupil, unable to show the mistake, only the right way. Sacks observes that deaf people learning signage have to work hard to figure exactly what they should be absorbing about what the instructor has actually done.

The literary example would profitably be stated this way too: show ing puts the burden on the reader...and it may be a burden, or it may just be an invitation. But telling is not an invitation.

...

[185] Child's recipe reads quite differently than Olney's precise direction because her story is structured around empathy for the cook; she focuses on the human protagonist rather than on the bird. The resulting language is indeed full of analogies, but these analogies are loose rather than exact, and for a reason. Cutting a chicken's sinew is technically like cutting a piece of string, but it doesn't feel quite the same. This is an instructional moment for her reader; "like" but not "exactly like" focuses the brain and the hand on the act of sinew cutting in itself: There's also an emotional point to loose analogies; the suggestion

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that a new gesture or act is roughly like something you have done before aims specifically to inspire confidence.

In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, sympathy was thought to bind people together, as for Adam Smith, who asked his readers to enter into the misfortunes and limits of other human beings. Sympathy in his view instructs ethically—but not because we are supposed to imitate the misfortunes and difficulties of other people; understanding them better, we will be more responsive to their needs. The writer of instructional language who makes the effort of sympathy has to retrace, step by step, backward knowledge that has bedded in to routine, and only then can take the reader step by step forward. But as an expert, he or she knows what comes next and where danger lies; the expert guides by anticipating difficulties for the novice; sympathy and prehension combine. This is Julia Child's method.

Child is occasionally criticized by chefs for being a fuzzy writer and in the same breath for being too detailed. Each of these six steps is necessary, however, because there are so many danger points in cooking this particular dish. Supporting the reader at such moments places a burden on any writer who aims to instruct expressively. He or she has to recover the sentiment of insecurity. The paralyzing tone of authority and certainty in much instructional language betrays a writer's inability to re-imagine vulnerability. In craftwork done for ourselves, we of course seek for closure. Child, as I've observed her in televised presentations, adopts a particular, not to say peculiar, way of holding the boning knife. Practice has led her to arrive at that decision; the practice has given her confidence; she bones without hesitation. When we wish to instruct, however, particularly in the fixed medium of print, we have to return emotionally just to the point before such habits were formed, in order to provide guidance. So for a moment Child will imagine holding the knife awkwardly; the cello master will return to playing wrong notes. This return to vulnerability is the sign of sympathy the instructor gives.

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[212] However the first stages are ordered, why call the cumulative process of an intuitive leap "intuitive"? Isn't what I've described a form of reasoning? It is reasoning, but not of a deductive sort, and it constitutes a special form of induction.

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[220] The frequently noted patience of good craftsmen signals a capacity to stay with frustrating work, and patience in the form of sustained concentration, we have seen in Chapter 5, is a learned skill that can expand in time. But Brunel was also patient, or at least determined, over many years. Here a rule can be formulated, opposite in character to the frustration-aggression syndrome: when something takes longer than

[221]

you expect, stop fighting it. This rule operated in the pigeon maze Festinger contrived in his laboratory. At first the disoriented pigeons banged against the plastic walls of the maze, but as the birds proceeded further, they stopped attacking the walls even though they remained confused; they trudged more composedly forward, still not knowing where they were going. But this rule is not quite as simple as it seems.

The difficulty lies in judging time. If a difficulty lasts, one alternative to giving up is to reorient one's expectations. In most work we estimate how long it will take; resistance obliges us to revise. The error might seem that of imagining we could accomplish a task quickly, but the wrinkle is that we have to fail consistently to make this revision—or so it seemed to the author of The Art of Archery. The Zen master offers his counsel to stop fighting specifically to that neophyte who fails again and again to hit the target. The patience of a craftsman can thus be defined as: the temporary suspension of the desire for closure.

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[234] The practitioner's skill in these designs can be likened to the "uncle logic" that lay in Elizabeth David's recipe, a conclusion left intentionally unstated, or, more concretely, to the use in writing of the ellipsis (...). As in writing, the designer uses such a device best by following the modernist principle that less is more.

Ah modernism, all things to all people.

That is, effectively using an ambiguity forces its maker to think about economy. Ambiguity and economy seem unlikely bedfellows, but they take their place in the larger family of craft practices if we think of creating ambiguity as a special instance of applying minimum force .

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