Blast’s WorkAway #2: Of cows, Nietzsche, and language, Week 1 in Switzerland

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Then, there is the language of tools. I have never found anything as satisfying as this. Discovering a new tool. Discovering yourself with a new tool. To truly know a tool takes countless hours of work. Of trials and missteps. But the process of discovering it is as meeting a new friend. There are certain steps. A ritual.

First you must learn the names. Here the names are different, and I learn them and call the tools as such, because they are not what I once knew them as. The old words have become lies. The pickaxe here is a pickel and when I speak it, I hear in it Urs’ high pitched German strain, and I see in it the years of use from the strong hands of Urs’ father – the sides smoothed down by time, the crack towards the top splintering under strain, how many fields has it furrowed? Indeed, this is no pickaxe. It could never be anything with so bluntly invasive and forceful a name. There is no room for pickaxes here. Likewise, the schaufel masquerades a familiarity about it, for it sounds like an old friend, but it is also a lie. “Shovel” has no meaning to me here. It speaks to me of pink stone and New England dirt. But when I hear schaufel, I smell the garden behind Franz’s house, fresh with upturned soil; I know I must begin on the trench I am digging, and I can taste fresh milk on my tongue, because it means lunch is a mere hour away. Learn the names- even old tools can be new tools.

Second, you must learn to grasp it. Is this tool fickle? Is it necessary to clutch at it with a death-grip, like the plastic plunger one must ram into the throat of every new mother cow, despite her strain, despite her bucking, so that the fist sized pill full of vitamins will protect her from infection? Or is it like the machete, with which one must have something of a reckless abandon to truly command? Must it be mastered and subdued, or is it but ready to tilt and sway at moment’s notice, like the hammer, begging leverage, always swinging faithfully back to you in its arc, as if inviting a dance. You must not be overconfident and you must not be weak.

Next there are its sounds, and like everything it has a variety of voices that will come and go as you call them. Learn them. Know them. They seem at first inconsequential and indistinguishable. But they speak of good work or poor. They speak of your own place beside them. I do not claim to know, but I can now recognize, these sounds, and in them is a litany as holy as any: the rake of the hard concrete under a bent black scraper when the job has been done well, or the hushed scratchings of a shoddy sweep; the faithful thwip, as if a puncture, as if an intake of air, of the heugabel (pitchfork) when it snares its catch, or the empty gasp between the straw the when it does not hit its mark; I can tell the traktor‘s greedy growl from its tubercular purr. To know a tool is not enough. You must know what it speaks.

Next, you must know its limits. What lengths you can push a tool to, and those past which it is no longer a tool for it is no longer working with you, but has become a dead and hardened thing with which you grapple. You must gain a confidence in it and yourself. Your harmony lies within these limits. You must learn its nuances. A hammer hung in the perfect balance between strength and focus, sacrificing neither. A pikel mid-swing against the sky, before the earth calls it greedily down from the sun. The säge, its mad teeth rasping, rushing furiously, feasting on nothing but old wood filings, if one does not lodge it to its task, yet halting and impotent for all its power when pushed without sense. Within these limits there is no work; there is only the harmony of movement and purpose.

When one has spent enough time with a tool, there is an unspoken-ness that results – a union of two bodies, a shared communion. It becomes an extension of yourself and you of it. Grasping its handle is as shaking the hand of that friend, now grown so close you need not speak to know each others thoughts. There is a loss of self-consciousness, its edges seem to disappear, you blend. In this stage, you do not use a tool, for you now know it. You are able to push it to its extremes, to know its limits, to know its individual quirks and nuances like a person. And, when the task is completed, to share in its pride

There is the time before one has used a tool. Then there is when one is learning to use a tool. Finally, there is the time when one has become so accustomed to the tool that it is as an extension of oneself. It is as nature.

The time when the language is most rich, is right before it all becomes second nature. Before that first degree of forgetting that comes with anything that is no longer new. Anything that is that dreaded word “learned”. Because in thinking we have learned it, we fall prey to forgetting what it once was like. We must remember.

Cynics will cite a degree of Orientalism in this claim- a romanticizing of the foreign, a patronizing of the strange – they will say I have made a real and necessary job trendy with my fancies. They will say I have turned an honest work into a poem. But is that not a redundancy? Why should one not be the other? One need not lose communion, magic with tools, with objects, because they have become second nature to him. When I hop on my bike, I do so with the same awe and power that I did when, stumbling and scared, I first learned its limits. I still test it against the earth or wind, and delight when it bucks under the strain. When I grasp a hammer, I still feel strange at my own hand, at the power divested in it, and I still feel the same pride as when my father handed me one in a sweaty summer’s heat all those years ago. Or I try to. It gets lost sometimes. But what is important is to try and remember. Because then it all comes alive again.

In tools there is learning and there are memories. And both are satisfying. The learning, for one must know the tool. One must enter its world and, ultimately, forget oneself. And the memories first, so one can return to the tool, but second, so one can experience the tool as another has, as others have.

And it is this last part, the memory of tools, which is what I suppose makes it all so satisfying. There is, in the end, an unspoken kinship formed between you and all those who know its secrets. There is something in saying, I have known moments when my back ached in the scorching sun with the load of a the pickle’s metal weight arcing above me. I have known the fight against the tractor, climbing uphill, pulling its tow. I have known the muted song of the spade, sinking into the packed loam. One, it must be stressed, feels these things in America, one does not need to go abroad for these types of epiphanies, but they grow even brighter, even louder when another language is lacked. When they become the bridge, when they communicate the shared experiences. Lacking one speech, we recall another. One realizes, then, just how rich our struggled silences really are.

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One brief addendum: Due to an unexpected leg injury on the farm, I’m going to be flying back to the states briefly to get my leg checked out. I don’t anticipate it being more than a few weeks of rest that’s needed, but I figured I should do it now rather than risk any lingering problems that effect my trip later on. No worries, though, as I have plenty of articles in the works, and enough to keep you all updated on everything else I’ve done in Switzerland, until I get back on the road!