Marcy Luikart

Ribs around mold with linings glued and clamped

This blogging thing definitely requires consistency, which I don’t seem to have had.  So we are now fast forwarding a bit. Brian had me make a practice back but I didn’t want to write about the practice part, I was waiting for the real thing, as if practice is not real. Or maybe I didn’t want to overstay my blogging welcome.   But here I am, I’ve now been out of practice mode for over a month and I haven’t written a thing. This is where writing block meets wood working.  More of a happy alliteration than anything else.

The ribs are now bent around the mold.  We thinned them on a machine to 1.1 millimeters.  So thin, that I was afraid to breathe on them, amazing that something so thin and delicate supports the instrument. The ribs are bent around a hot iron like machine.   There are six pieces to the ribs.  It’s an awkward process because you don’t want to overbend them, the whole idea is to get the flow of the shape.   Heat allows the thin wood to soften enough so that it can be molded and shaped, but then once it cools it goes back to its more rigid form.  It’s tricky and delicate and the iron is hot and it’s easy to get burned.  Brian bent the center curves but let me play with the outside ones.  I put a drop of water on the wood and heard the sizzle and then as I’m holding the wood against the iron with a metal strap that I hold onto tight I felt the give.  As ifs the wood let out a deep sign and relaxed, it was at that point that I pulled the metal strap around the curve of the iron.  Not too much.  We then placed the rib around the mold.  I forgot the blocks. I’d spent the past few weeks cutting the blocks.  The blocks fit in the mold and the ribs are glued to the blocks.  Brian picked out some perfect pieces of wood for the blocks and I had to square that and then measure them to a precise height.  He pulled out one perfect piece that he said he’d been carrying around for over 10 years.  Maybe longer. A long time to have a block of wood sit around. It was beautiful and all I had to do was keep it square and sand it to the correct height. 

Square isn’t something that seems to work well with me.  It was supposed to be idiot proof. The rotating sand paper was already square to the base plate. All I had to do was hold it evenly and let the rotation do the work.  I blame it on being short.  That’s the only rational reason I can think of as to why I couldn’t actually just hold the block steady.  The machine was too high, it was awkward. I pushed just ever so slightly against the top, not holding it even and what happened?  A fraction of a millimeter. That’s all it takes, a hundredth of a millimeter and I had sanded the block at an angle. An angle that was enough off square to relegate that piece of wood that Brian had been saving for just such an occasion, that piece of wood that now would not fulfill it’s destiny, it would never become a cornerstone of a violin. 

So that was the blocks, but now I was on the ribs.  So much of this process is about flow, it is all  line and visual beauty.  I watch Brian as he helps me bend the ribs.  He pushes and prods the wood to get the perfect flow.  He says, “see, it’s not quite right there,” and I look at where he’s pointing. I nod. Of course I nod, I don’t want to seem like an idiot, but I do not completely see.  My eye is not truly trained, but when he takes the rib and flattens it out a bit on one of the curves, then I see. I understand. The eye just knows that this is a restful curve. This is a powerful curve. This is a curve that will withstand sour notes and hours of repetition to get the sound just right. This is a curve that will cradle the baby to sleep, that will hold the future.

And then it cracks.  The final push into place and I hear it.  The malleable wood had hardened again and it didn’t want to be coaxed or pushed or cajoled, so it cracked. Crack.  Say it over and over again, crack.  A firecracker, a crack in the armor, the crack of dawn, a crack in the rib.  Brian said not to worry, it happens all the time, we had extra ribs to thin and bend.  But it was my first time and I didn’t want it to happen to me.

I came back the next week and we had an extra piece of wood to use.  We cut it to size and bent it.  It seemed so promising, and once again just before it was in place, crack.   As loud and deafening as a crack of thunder, that small little crack in the wood reverberating through the small studio.  We only had one piece left. One piece that matched the other ribs perfectly, one piece already thinned to its’ impossible thinness.  We held our collective breath.  It held. 

Then there are the liners.  I was worried about the thinness of the ribs, how easy it would be to poke a hole through them, but I needn’t have worried.  There is a set of shadow ribs, made of willow and not quite as thin.  These, too, are bent and fitted next to the ribs. 

I have to back up a bit.  Because I don’t think I’ve mentioned the mold.  The mold is just that.  It is in the shape of the violin and the ribs are bent around it and glued to the blocks that are lightly glued to the mold.  The ribs are bent around the mold and the linings are attached to the ribs but they don’t cover the total rib, they are attached above and below the mold, so that when the mold is removed at the end the linings will not meet in the middle. There will be a gap that is still impossibly thin all around the middle.

I love the linings.  I love the stability and security they create.  There is strength and elegance in the curves and the structure.

I was recently asked to write an essay titled Why I Write.  This is the result.

This is one of those questions that drive me crazy.  Really, it’s one of those questions that make me stare at the blank screen and wish it would go away.  I have never been any good at self analysis. I’m not comfortable talking about myself. I prefer to tell my characters stories, not mine.  I feel as if whatever I type sounds pretentious. Because ultimately this is the questions of why do we do anything that we love?  Especially those things that highlight our weaknesses, that put us in the vulnerable position of being judged or failing. Why do I play golf when the stupid ball won’t go into the hole no matter how much I will it to?  Why do I play my fiddle when it would be so much nicer to just sit and listen to a brilliant musician who makes the instrument and the music come together in a perfect marriage rather than a relationship on the way to a therapist? Why do I paint pictures that stack up in the closet until it’s time to reuse the canvas? Why, why, why?  I don’t know.  I often wonder why the things I do for enjoyment are frequently not enjoyable. I don’t think I’m a glutton for punishment.  But, the fact is I prefer to try my hand at something and fail miserably rather than sit around and watch other people do it well.  So what is it that I love? It’s the challenge, it’s the process, and it’s the discovery. I am in love with the process of discovery.

When I was in second grade I wrote a story about my life as a chair.  I imagined what it would be like to have all different people sit in me, fat people, skinny people, babies whose feet barely touched the floor, and restless kids who kicked my legs with abandon.   I wish I still had that story.  I don’t really remember all the details, and I’m probably remembering it as way more profound than it was, but I do know that the seed for why I write was planted back then in those early years.  I write to discover.  I write to discover places, I write to discover individual people and I write to discover the heart of humanity. That sounds big.  It almost scares me it’s so big.  But I’ll go on, because as I said it’s about discovery. This right here, right now, is the discovery of me.  Not easy.  I’ve never found myself too fascinating a subject. But what more is there?

I write to play, I write to challenge myself, and I write to slow myself down.  (Ahhh. I think I’ve found the kernel. Now it is time to hold it over the fire and watch it pop.) Slowing down, taking the time, listening.  This is the hardest part of the writing process, of any process; to slow myself down enough so that I am completely in the truth of the moment. Sanford Meisner was an acting coach who said, (and I’m paraphrasing) that acting is behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances.  It is the same with writing and storytelling. The characters are imaginary and they are placed in imaginary circumstances, but it is my job, my task, my joy to find the truth, to write what I see, not what I think I see.  In my world writing and painting are deeply connected.  The words are my brushes. When I paint I struggle to capture the values of colors, the subtle changes as one object interplays with another, as the light combines with the shape. Writing is really no different, except the palette is emotion and sound and meaning, not color.

And of course, through all this I am attempting to tell a story.  It is easy to become so enamored with the beauty of my flowing prose, with my finely drawn rendition of a character, but that is not what writing is about for me.  Ultimately it is the story. We love stories, sitting around the campfire or in front of the big screen. It is the stories that pull us forward. It is the story that gets us thinking, that takes us out of ourselves and into the characters, so that we experience their lives.  We shine a light on a moment in time, on a sequence of events that make us bigger than we are.  And there is the most incredible satisfaction in knowing that someone has read something I’ve written and enjoyed it.  Maybe because I feel that I have connected, even if I never meet the person, never talk to them about what they read and why it moved them, but I feel as if once the story is out there, I am out there as well. I am meeting people. I am on an adventure.  When my kids were young we had a favorite book that we read called Paddle to the Sea. It was about a little wooden canoe that a child had placed in one of the Great Lakes and we followed it as it made its way to the sea.  When I put a story out into the world it is like that little canoe.  I don’t know where it goes.  I only sense that the adventure is possible, that my story itself becomes a story and I find that very satisfying.

So I’m back to the original question. Why do I write?   I don’t know if I’ll ever know the answer.  I have a definite love hate relationship with the process. I ask myself all the time, why am I doing this?  But I continue.  And in the end I can only come to the conclusion that I write because I can’t not write.  Hopefully this doesn’t sound too pretentious  but I write because on the deepest level it fulfills a need in me: a need to tell a story, a need to understand, a need to connect, and a need to make people smile.

Many people have told me that the best time to write in a journal is the moment that I awaken in the morning. They say that is the time to reach over, open the journal and write. It is the one moment during the day of semi-conscious thought before the intellect takes over and smashes the nascent pearls of inner honesty into dust. So this morning I reached over opened my journal and thought, I have to write my blob. That was the exact thought. It’s time to blob.
I knew something wasn’t right, but my discriminating brain had not yet kicked in. Besides, I was supposed to be getting in touch with my deep profound self, with the present moment, and I wasn’t supposed to question the thoughts, just let them go, write them true and sweet. But, there was still a niggling feeling that I’d gotten something fundamentally wrong. And then I realized what it was. It was the blob. Something about a blob that didn’t fit. A blob is something unformed, amorphous, without boundary, without identity. I didn’t think I had one. At least not that I remembered. But I must if I was supposed to write it. Write my blob. So I continued to pen my random unformed thoughts onto the page. And then I stopped. There was a hint of dawn outside my window. My dog had not yet responded to the waking day, but he would soon. My husband snored. My thoughts were more coherent. I looked down at the handwritten page. It had the look of words written, but not many were recognizable to me as such. And then I realized. It was true. Everything they’d said about those early waking moments being glimpses into the deepest recesses of consciousness were all true.

I had thought blob, and here was the proof. I had written a blob.