Hammer, By Fabio Morabito

I should have posted this long ago. It's eloquent and profound, and will change your thoughts on hammers as well as on life.

A hammer is at once the easiest of our tools and the most profound. No other tool fills the hand as much as a hammer does; none inspires the same degree of dedication to the job and such a total acceptance of the task. With hammer in hand, our body acquires its proper tension, a classic tension. Every statue ought to have a hammer, visible or invisible, like a second heart or a counterweight to offset the weight of the limbs. Wielding a hammer, we get rounded out, more integrated; it is exactly the one extra thing we need to feel ourselves permanent. Grabbed by the hand, obtuse, cyclopean, childlike with its weight and its feel, it gives us once again that sensation of freshness in a tool, a satisfying extension to our bodies, of an effort directed without waste or frustration. O first rate hammer! Willing brother! Few things are straightforward as you!

It acts like and epic poem; it’s bilious, goatish and eagle like. The force of a juicy anger has been attached to a wooden handle and has been left to ferment and toughen there. That’s the way we get hammers- from a slow drip-drip of rage, which finally forms a scab at the end of the handle, an amalgam of wrath. Just shape that and polish it, and your hammer is ready to go.

Passivity and power co-exist in a hammer. In fact, a hammer works by surprise, by nasty surprise, and its bruising strength is indebted not so much to its force as to its laconic delivery. It doesn’t affirm; it skewers. All of a hammer’s rage, slowly absorbed by the handle, slowly fermented, slowly assimilated, is expressed in one sharp bang! There’s no time for anything else. A man who hammers, it would seem, combines in the hammer head the best of himself and his forefathers. The man himself, as a particular individual, is symbolized by the handle, which determines the willingness and direction of the blow, but the impact itself is entirely indebted to his past, a past heavy with the weight of the dead. A horde of dead are packed into every hammer blow, your own dead, all that has been distilled in times before yours, everything tough that preceded you, and it’s that toughness you hammer with, along with all your dead kin, whose purpose is to serve the living as a final hardness, as their sharpened steel, their armor plating. Anyone who tries to live without the dead, without a family tree, is barely alive and won’t last long.

Thus a hammer never says anything that hasn’t been said before; no novel emotion ever changes its tone. The dead always produce the same response. Their productions get weaker with the passing of time, vast areas of memory crumble away, and their vocabulary gets smaller until at last it is reduced to a single syllable, hard and obdurate.

Upon reaching the kingdom of the dead, every dead person loses definition and his faltering voice is erased by the voices of others. Every hammer blow is like that, flowing lava of voices that has been reduced to one sole syllable. Every hammer blow raises to the surface our lowest depths, which are often close to a petrified inertia, their connections with here-and-now shrunk to a few dreams, a few pangs of conscience, a few blows from a hammer. That’s why the hammer blows of one man are vastly different from those of another; they glue together parts that are peculiar to the individual, matters that defy translation. Maybe at some point, in the farthest distance, they do touch each other and mingle, but even so they retain their separateness. Only the most sensitive of instruments could sort out those crude banging’s into all their strata of voices that have been lost in the passage of time. But it would be a hellish instrument. We’d hear the warm of our dead speaking one by one, in a terrifying whirlwind of sound.

We have to bring the dead together and confuse them, to stop them frightening us, so that they’ll let us live. We have to amalgamate them, squash them together, rub out their features and voices, until they linger on only as a choir, a far-distant clay pit, a half shadow. That’s the reason behind the invention of the hammer, its unified force. With a single blow it binds us to our dead and at the same time plunges them deep into the past. It buries them, gets them out from under our feet. When we talk to the dead through a hammer, we liberate ourselves from them. We can then go forward. The hammer flattens out, opens up a pathway, crushes down bumps in the road, levels off the track, heads toward tomorrow. A hammer is a prow, no more no less. But like every prow, it leaves behind a large wake, a choir of voices that are out dead kin, re-echoing in every blow. To move ahead is to move toward the dead. In every blow those who went before and those who are coming after, our yesterdays and our tomorrows, our liberty and our origins touch each other and fuse. In every blow we are nailed to the earth, redefined in a burst of bright flame, as if we were statues, not wholly alive, not wholly here, mildly classic and forever.

Flowery Language for Flowers

I wrote this piece for a horticulture class taught by Dr. Alex Niemiera in Fall 2011. I tried to be flowery in language. 

In a small town near Philadelphia I held a shrub trial of grand proportions. Or at least it started out that way. Fortune, for a shrub in my trial, was fickle, their most universal attribute being eventual death. My story is of the survivors, those hardy species which, though dealt the blows of capricious climate, were able to eke out a living under the vicissitudes of my premeditated culture. And all of this took place in that little town near Philadelphia, more known for the devourers of the dead[1] than horticulture village known as Kennett Square.

My intentions were admirable. Scientific progress would be made; the knowledge of mankind would be increased. The goal was simple – to determine the hardiness and ornamental performance of diverse shrubby plants. Hundreds were to be planted and observed, and manpower[2] was summoned. Into the deep my research subjects went, half-buried in the crumbly soil of an old cornfield, their verdant exterior at times muddied with that grime which makes agricultural livelihoods. ‘Twas no small task, my shovelbearers strained to thrust yet purer iron into the already iron-rich soil, pocking the ancient grounds with their implements. When all were planted, diverse species were arrayed in threes, huddled together, each with their own kind, each sharing the same future. As one entity the subjects of my noble experiment aspired to scientific relevance, and, unified, the toil of my project’s initiation was completed. 

The subjects were watered in for the first year, I looked kindly on them in their youth. After this first year, however, my compassion dried up. The flush of youthful vigor which had flown into each tenant seemed a dim memory of a vibrant past, and the field now slowed in phenological pace, stepping in time with the rain and sun nature saw fit. The peaks of color now segregated and the species emerged from deliberate cultivation distinct in form and seasonal pace. I now traversed the meadow regularly, no longer searching for the pangs of transplant stress, but for the seasonal vapors of botanical attraction. Initially I noticed an abundance of brightness, but with each passing season the remnant, incrementally weaned of runts, developed a habitual seasonality and consistent genetic identity. What had been a vast plain brimming with diversity was now a desolate desert lodged with the carcasses reaped of my insufficient care. The sole survivors were cultivars of Japanese Meadowsweet, Spiraea japonica, which hid in the crepuscular shadows of overgrown weeds. Spiraea japonica, with the hubris of a woody perennial, stood unrivaled in a field of invasive annuals. Some sixty individuals of indomitable spirit persisted, detailing the conclusion of my monument to horticultural trial. I remembered the dead properly, each memorialized in sporadic notations; each observed in the height of life and in the acme of vigor. My record, now and forever, details too the decline and demise of each individual, and of the unique struggles of each with the droughts and bracing winds of Kennett Square’s meteorological penury. 

I rambled through the grounds of the trial in recent months, touched by the utter absence of cultivation. All the unworthy plants, those whose independence from culture could not be maintained, expired long ago. Their skeletons litter the field in the rows they were confined to. Occasionally I chance upon a set of fresh dug holes, also in neat rows. These voids mark the absence of a survivor – a specimen which has been paroled from the yard, given to a friend. Each has a new master and a new purpose. Having paid its debt to me, each individual is now laid to rest in a more permanent and hospitable landscape. In this way the field becomes holey ground, a hazard for sandaled feet and weak ankles. Soon my plough with erase all memory of the trials, blotting out my toil of years forever. All that is left to me is the data, the ghost which haunts with tales of seasonal variation and growth. It will be sufficient.

[1] Mushrooms, of course.
[2] Just manpower. No women were tired in the production of this scientific study.

Purpose in Life

I want to be an artist.

My canvas will be life itself and my paint will be character, joy, and fascination.
I’ll create a beautiful lifestyle and a beautiful place to live.

I’ll not be confused as to what beauty is, and I’ll not lend my definition, which my beholding eyes create, to the Martha Stewarts or any others.

I’ll make Beauty; I’ll make my beauty.

The End of Entomological Aspiration

This was written for extra credit in my Insects and Human Society Class. It is mostly fiction.

My brother Joel began collecting insects as soon as he could capture them. He sought after every kind, but was especially fascinated by the beautiful and colorful ones. His packed his insectile assortment with vibrant and peculiar specimens, the sparkling filigree of the natural world.

Joel’s collection was more than doubled when a formerly insect-collecting uncle made Joel a gift of his insect collection. This one had masses of insects, all carefully pinned to a Styrofoam pad and organized in a neat cardboard box. Joel loved it. He even reorganized his collection of beauties with our uncle’s. There was only one goal in his mind: to collect insects like these forever. He set out to be an entomologist the day he first received this magnificent collection.

A little while after, a blazing summer day came, one in which our vegetable garden wilted as if in the throes of death itself. Joel, with water hose in hand, was rescuing our mother’s vegetables from certain scorching demise when he found something. It was a whopper of an addition to his insect museum; a gigantic, brilliantly green grasshopper. There was no trouble in catching it and it was soon pinned in his orderly collection. Joel’s collection reached critical mass that day, the addition of this magnificent insect was the beginning of the end of his entomological ambition.

To be frank, this insect was ugly. In all the ways an insect of Joel’s could be truly ugly and detestable, it was. It wouldn’t die. There is nothing less attractive to the collector of dead insects than a live insect, especially one which had the strength and motivation to wreak havoc inside a box of neatly organized, gorgeous miscellany.

Some say that Beauty is only skin deep, but I’m certain it is in the eye of the beholder. This wretched grasshopper had many eyes to behold the necropolis' many desiccated inhabitants, but it perceived no beauty in them. My brother’s collection of nature’s art was laid waste, every piece torn apart.

Joel kept but one specimen, the one insect that was left still whole. No box was needed, he pinned this verdant symbol of disaster to the cover of his insect guidebook. This minute pin nailed secured the cover permanently, and closed it forever. The destroyer of worlds couldn’t have done more harm to Joel's aspirations than this hideous grasshopper did. What once was vibrant and colorful was now pale and wizened, a symbol of the devastation of joy. Insects were no longer beautiful to him; they became uglier every time he looked at the cursed remnant of his collection.

Our joys are precious, and it is a terrible act to undo them. Every joy has a beginning, but sadly, some joys have ends.

I am the World's Worst Salesman

This is an old vehicle description I wrote when selling my old Saab on Ebay. By the way, it ended up in the junkyard. Some find it humorous, so I figured I'd put it up.

This car starts and runs. However, the state inspection runs out in February and I do not want to fix all that I would have to in order to get a new sticker. This car would be a good parts car or a good car if one was willing to invest in it. I have a new car, bought on ebay of course, and I don't want to keep this one. So, I will warn of all the difficulties it has and express that there is no warranty, car comes as is.

This beautiful Saab, as I have said before, starts and runs just fine. It even gets good gas mileage (I think it is around 25 over all). But, it has a few problems that will ensure that it won't pass inspection next month. These are:

• Power windows have no more power but are still windows. They don't open and are permanently closed unless a few parts and motors are put back together. I have all the parts to do so, but some of them (like the driver's side motor and switch) do not work. Parts will come with the car or go to the junkyard (which is the fate for this operational car if this auction is unsuccessful.) 
• Windshield wipers are half-dead. I say only halfway because only one is dead. I could also say that the glass is half-full and that the wipers are half-operational. The driver's side wiper is a paperweight for supermarket flyers, the other works just fine. In the deep recesses of the beast there is a wire that frayed. If this little wire is replaced it will all work. 
• Muffler is problematic. I have worked on it and had it worked on many times, and have never replaced it (although someone else in its history may have). The muffler is on its way out, but works nonetheless. It is currently welded in a few parts and works; it does not hang down (although that could change at any moment). 
• Hatchback/trunk door does not open from the outside. Some sort of internal mechanical problem exists. However, the door can be opened by pushing a screwdriver or similar object into the mechanism and forcing the hook off of the bar. I would use more descriptive language if I were an engineer, but as it is all I can do is offer to send pictures to anyone interested. 
• Push-button starter. The original ignition does not work, but after a bit of rewiring it now has a two-part starting mechanism (Both parts are inside the cabin, close to where the ignition was). My first concern with push-buttons is the theft concern, but no one has stolen it so far (after about two years). What is probably the fanciest thing about this car is the piece of walnut burl that decorates the button. Of all the parts that I will take out before it is crunched that is the first. However, if this car is sold the buyer can have it. 
• Note: I do have a key, not that it would do you any good. 
• Back Brakes need to be changed. I have new ones, but have not put them in due to caliper circumstances beyond my control. 
• Right-side door handle(inside one) broken. Door still works, opens and shuts, but handle is broken. 
• Tires. All they have going for them is their inflation, and even that isn't even right now. No leaks, but they are going to need replacing sometime soon. 
• Manual transmission. It would miraculously shift through all five gears smoothly if such miracles occurred, but as it is they do not. All gears work, but third and occasionally fifth have problems. Third and fifth can be smoothly shifted into by myself, but others have had no end of difficulty. I like to drive this car; it does have some power left in it. It can accelerate fast, and as far as I know has a top speed of 85 mph (may go faster, but I would not try to, the tires being what they are). This car drives like a glorified go-kart. 
• Condition. The seats are made of tan cloth. There is wear and tear. Mostly wear however; there are not too many tears. The outside has green paint that is dinged and dirty in some spots, I have never washed this car. There is some rust, although not half as much rust as the muffler has. On the whole, this car is not unsightly nor in excellent condition. It has struck a balance just shy of inspectable. 

Like a good salesman I cannot remember any other problems right now. I think I have explained it all though. Email me with questions or requests for pictures.

I am starting this auction at $100 because that is how much the junkyard will give me for it. If I can make $110 all this will have been worth it. If you want a good parts car for your beloved Saab, or a good car to drive until the end of February (plus however long the "Rejected" sticker lasts), or just feel charitable and want to help out a needy college student, please bid.