One of the most endearing remarks I came across recently was by a man characterizing his own face as looking like "a box of spanners".
It reminded me of this 'drawing' I made in 1993.
The first thing that struck me was its messiness. I remembered it as being rather neatly drawn, with every single detail copied from the actual spanners, including the actual shape and outlines of the spanners themselves. The latter is completely missing. I never drew the shapes.
The inexorable urge of memory to embellish had struck again. It's just a bunch of names and numbers and a few hints at how they were made and what material they were made of. There's absolutely nothing on the page that remotely looks like a spanner. It is difficult to explain why I felt I had to copy the spanner inscriptions. I remember that at the time I was suddenly struck by the beauty of some of those tools, how their design was the result of practical usage and standardization through the ages, and how they had to have a minimal quality to be usable at all. Also, I was in the middle of a restoration project of an old Italian motorbike, and I had been worrying about the quality of my spanners. The bike was old school high quality, and I couldn't possibly take a low or even medium quality spanner to that beautiful machine. Another thing that struck me is that there aren’t any British-made spanners here; they’re German, Swedish, French, and one is from India. Maybe it’s because the British continued using their Imperial (inch-based) standard for so long, that their tool-making never really invaded the continent.
Finally there is this enigmatic word “aition”. It is the Greek word for “cause”, a concept which is difficult to define, strangely enough. Cause is from Latin “casus” which basically just means ‘as it falls’, or ‘as it has fallen’, ie. as the case may be. But that sounds rather trivial, doesn’t it. The Greek aition, however, means ‘that to which something else is indebted’, and that seems to have a lot more weight in terms of how we once stood in the world. So when we dug up the earth, and caused it to yield copper or tin by heating, we were owed something. When we used a clump of bronze to create a helmet we were owed something. Sure, it was a matter of cause and effect, of instrumentality, but at the same time we were building up a debt, against the gods, against mother earth, and against each other. Whenever we created something that didn’t exist before we created a debt, and a duty of responsibility. When we took something out, we realized we had to put something back. The bringing forth of anything was intimately related to being responsible. I believe this ancient way of thinking has continued right up to this day in the minds of artisans, craftsmen and artists. Unfortunately, it has not continued to inform those involved in commercial mass production.
My spanners became the symbol for the medium between me and the makers of the machine, allowing me to physically interact with the machine, get to know it, see the beauty of the details and craftsmanship, gradually gaining familiarity with her soul, and that of her makers.
