self-talk, narrative and hypothesis...

Bubble Bookshelf, designed and fabricated by Doug Meyer

This morning, I am awake after a night of reflection on some basic notions. Bear with me as I attempt to put a few pieces together. This morning I was reading about the furniture making of Doug Meyer, and he takes sheet steel scraps and fabricates whole forms from small parts. I am attempting to do the same.

As stated by Charles H. Ham, "the mind is constantly seeking the truth, the hand is constantly finding it." In other words, one cannot successfully whittle a stick without the rudimentary capacity to formulate scientific hypotheses. We can be led far from reality by well rehearsed discursive misrepresentations that may appear truth-like. 

Self-talk or internal dialog is the means through which narrative is is used to fabricate the sense of reality upon which our decision making processes are based. There is a relationship between craft, science, the discovery of reality and the ways we describe to ourselves how the world functions and how we determine our place of comfort within it.  In contrast, many of the decisions we make each day have been pushed upon us through a thousand well rehearsed discursive misrepresentations, our children are not encouraged to be makers, fixers and self-discoverers and we can see the results.

Today in the CSS woodshop, our students in 4th, 5th and 6th grades worked on toy stamp dispenser trucks as part of an economics project.

Make, fix and create...

On another subject, subscribers of Fine Woodworking will find my boxes on p. 32 of the soon to arrive Dec. 2011 issue No. 222.