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| WHAT'S AN ABSTRACT GARAGE?The following is adapted from a mini-essay I originally wrote for my blog One Toe In. In many ways, it inspired this site. IN THE ABSTRACT GARAGE
My
dad is a tinkerer. As far as I know, he's had workshops in the five
houses he's owned, outfitted with workbenches he usually built, shelves
of screws and
nuts and bolts and nails of all size, fuses and
wires and wire connectors and leftover lumber and tools of all sorts.
Oh, he's not above hiring someone to do big jobs, but the smaller ones,
he usually does himself. In the house my brother and I spent most of
our childhood in, he built a deck in the garage to make
coming in
and out of the door to the house easier. He also built shelves along
the back wall to hold boxes and newspapers for recycling and the
Christmas
ornaments. Someone screened in the back porch, but I'm
not sure who. He divided the basement into four distinct areas: office,
playroom, laundry area
(eventually), and workshop. He once helped
me add a regulation basketball key to our driveway, bringing out the
plumb and bob to make it perfect. In the first years of his retirement,
he built a canoe from scratch, the plans the only thing not his own. He
later used the same techniques to build models of airplanes and went
through a model railroad phase, seeming to take far more pleasure in
mokeying with it than completing it. For a while he had a Model A Ford
he'd gotten from his tinkerer/collector brother.
I have none of these traits.
And
yet, I do. I can't drive a nail straight, I probably couldn't saw a
board straight, though I did manage to put a latch on a door without
too much problem
and I've assembled my fair share of IKEA
furniure. Still, I tinker, but I tinker in the abstract. I'm doing the
work, but the work itself is abstract. One Toe In, for instance, is
really not a concrete thing unless you print it out, and even then the
ink and the paper represent the only concrete parts. I write fiction.
Same thing, and even more so, because as real as I might make the
characters and situations and settings, at the end of the day, they're
not real in the sense that a 2x4 is. I guess you could get
philosophical and say a 2x4 is an abstraction of a tree, but you can
still hold a 2x4, cut it, nail it, break it. Fiction exists on a
different plane, and no matter how well I convey my version of that
fiction, another reader will imagine it slightly differently. The
creation
and the response takes place in the imagination. You can't sit in a
novel or take it out for a paddle around a lake. You would not get
far. I
also play and record music, which seems a step closer to working with
concrete objects. After all, I have to physically play the guitar,
which is a concrete object, a device for, at its best, making abstract
ideas concrete in the physical world. Words of course can have the same
function by rendering abstract notions such as love, hate, hope, fear,
loneliness concrete and specific for readers. Recording music,
specifically, feels like tinkering to me. It involves recording the
tracks, but also mixing them, moving them around, seeing where they
fit, maybe dropping some and adding others or correcting only a small
part, listening to mixes through different stereos until I'm happy, a
sort of sanding, I guess.
In both writing and music, I share
another trait with my dad, whether genetic or learned. When he builds
his projects, he does draw plans, but often something doesn't quite
work out, and though he might fume and mutter and occasionally curse,
he eventually figures it out, improvises a solution. He also will, on
occasion, revise. For instance, when he and my mom lived in Florida, he
screened in the porch but was never quite satisfied with the job.
Eventually, he redid it (or had someone redo it -- I wasn't there the
second time around). More recently, my brother and I helped him
screen in my brother's back porch, managing to hammer a little
straighter. We got to watch our dad in action over a couple days,
discovering ways to fill in gaps and make a scaffold out of a couple
aluminum supports and a couple sawhorses.
Although process in
any art is a mysterious and individual aspect, my process seems to
follow similar patterns, whether here, in fiction, in comics, in music,
or other things I try. I'd say in general I plan less and improvise and
revise more, especially in writing because I find too much planning can
stifle the emotion and energy of a piece. Yet some writing that
requires an immense amount of planning. When I wrote a script for a
graphic novel, I planned and sort of outlined most of it, giving myself
page limits, act breaks, sometimes what would happen on what page
before I wrote. I left enough room to react and
improvise if need
be, and more than once, my favorite parts and the most lively writing
came in those spaces, but talk about abstract. In that case,
besides
writing a story, dialogue, and narration, I was trying to
imagine what panels and pages would look like and then render that in
clear enough but not too specific terms so that an artist could
eventually interpret it. Not much like drawing plans for a table.
Anyway,
in these activities, I see myself as a bit of a tinkerer. I wouldn't
really call writing fiction tinkering or a hobby, though. The word
hobby in particular demans the work for me, but I think the analogy of
having projects still works. I've almost always got something going,
usually a few things (as I do now), though I don't have a garage or a
workshop or a basement, but I do have that impulse to build stuff. It
just happens to be a different kind of building and a different kind of
stuff, and I have to wonder if my impulse (and to a certain degree, I
think, my brother's impulse) toward this abstract tinkering is simply a
personality difference or something generational. Our dad grew up in a
time when radio, Saturday morning movies, Sunday comics, and books were
pretty much the only forms of entertainment. We grew up in the TV era,
the blockbuster movie era, the VCR era, the early video game era, the
early home computer (remember when they used to be called that) era. We
grew up with comic books and action figures and movies out all the
time. We also have a couple generations separating us from our dad
instead of just one. He grew up with World War II. We grew up with Star Wars.
I
wonder if the difference is generational because it seems like so many
more people our age and younger are interested in tinkering in this
abstract garage. Has the shift in culture bred a shift toward different
interests but similar behavior, and has that bred many of the changes
in technology that allow far more people to record music, create and
edit film, post their music and videos, spend large parts of their days
in the virtual plane of the Internet? Or have shifts in technology bred
the shifts in interests? Or is it a cycle, the cycle toward the
information age, toward urbanization, toward mass consumption? And if
our interests are that different from our father's, what kind of
tinkering will our children do?
Questions for another time, another round of tinkering. In the meantime, you know where you can find me.
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