A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things VI: The Workshop

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

VII.      The Smallholding

This Proposal has thus far argued for an alternative vision of many areas of our life together – the homes we live in, the voluntary society we create, how we educate people at different stages of life – but the chief activity of many people has scarcely been covered. I mean, of course, “remunerative work”. Childrearing is a true remuneration, of course – training carers for our senescence is a form of pension plan! Education can have a vocational purpose. But ultimately, every household must find money and resource one way or the other.
 
There is virtue in graft. Setting oneself to a task – even a menial one – is a form of self-cultivation, ordering the soul to detail and diligence and creation. This is as true for menial tasks, indeed, as for more elevated ones. Street cleaners actively beautify the world by picking up litter – can actuaries confidently state that they do better?
 
Yet employment is so often a degrading, insecure, dislocating task. Commute for 90 minutes to a job in London where your boss constantly criticises you; drive an hour to a school for a supply job for months on end, without any promise of a permanent contract; have key staff removed from the work you manage with no warning or apology; work in a shop for minimum wage and ever-increasing demands upon your emotions and ability. The main constituent of many of our lives is toil, a Sisyphean four or five decades of boulder-pushing.
 
We normalize this. We say everyone is in the same situation; perhaps we see few who manage to escape Boulder Pushing PLC, and look on with either envy or admiration, hoping perhaps to do the same one day. We may go so far as to read books or listen to podcasts on escaping the ratrace. But most of us are systemically trapped. If you are in your thirties with kids, and you provide for them, you can’t just let the boulder roll down the hill whilst you take a few years out to work out your business plan. Hades pays only he who pushes.
 
There has always been toil, ever since the Garden. This is a fallen and constrained world, and we can only work within the parameters set by external forces. Yet this does not mean there are not better and worse situations. This does not mean it is much the same if you are a Sicilian mine slave in the 1^st century AD, or an accountant or builder’s mate in 21^st century Britain. Now, the Sicilian slave may, by the cultivation of virtue and gratitude, be a happier person – but that does not render his circumstances themselves happier or more noble.
 
In the slow building of our Citadel, what may we do to render work more dignifying and purposive? The greatest question – how we as a culture redeem workers from dry, mechanical role-functionalism where they act as fungible units, how we invest economic production on the grand scale with beauty and dignity – can partly only be answered in retrospect, in the far future, after a long and slow period of organic social coordination. The answers begin to be found, however, in the little we can attempt ourselves.
 
We must each build a sort of Workshop, a realm of dignified labour, which offers a space where transcendent purpose – the creation of beauty, focus on structure and detail, communication of meaning – can be followed and nurtured.
 
There are two contexts in which we may build a little Workshop of our own, and two species of “product” that Workshop may produce. The contexts are the “public” and the “private”, for-profit or not; the two species are solo and collaborative. It must be admitted here that – though income diversification is wise, because it improves resilience – most of us will be unable to go into business for ourselves, especially on any labour of love. Gone are the Roman Cardinals of the Baroque, gone are the eccentric Marchionesses funding their cicles, gone are the self-educating workers’ circles. We will see their rise again, in some new form – the gyres of history are inevitable, if sometimes delayed – but in this era, we must accept that we are largely limited to the realm of leisure, or the small-scale “pocket money” sidework.
 
Well, a thriving business would be valuable, and a business of virtue beautifies the public square, but our little projects now lay foundations for those greater edifices in the future. There is great value to hard work and beauty filling our leisure, or constituting our moonlit employment. So what might we do?
 
Alone, we are free to pursue our inclinations. We may have little enough space – perhaps a room desk, or a cold garage bench, or even just our beat-up old laptop – but a world cam be constructed therein. Set the light just so – start the ambient mix, drown out the noise from the house – imagine yourself stepping across the threshold of some medieval guild workshop where fine tapestries were woven, before being sent to kings; or imagine yourself corresponding with the eccentric pioneer-protectors of the Permanent Things, writing to Aelred or Federigo de Montefeltro or Eliot or that redoubtable old bush stump Les Murray. In this insignificant private Workshop, you surrender yourself to the stream of history and do insignificant works – all to a great significant purpose.
 
Who would have imagined that some great purpose lurked behind gluing plastic plane models together, or crocheting little hats for your friends’ babies, or illustrating cards to sell on some tiny scale? Indeed – can we imagine, briefly, that enchantment and deeper realities lie behind household chores? This is not really the essay for that point – and yet what an ordering and enlivening thing is washing dishes and clearing worktops! To defy the ever-gnawing chaos in the soul and the polis by stacking the dishes neatly in the oikos is the silently heroic act of the questor for the Permanent Things.
 
Orwell observed that eccentric little hobbies were the essence of the English delight in privacy – and it is possible to build a monastery in the heart through trivial and silly hobbies, committed to earnestly. As the polystyrene cement drips on to the wing, as the eccentric recipe goes in to the oven to bake, a sort of Matins is sung: “Yes, I cannot solve the world’s problems, or even my own – but life is gratitude, and I give it to God; and today I will build, not destroy.” The atheist does it against his own will, but the song is all the louder for that!
 
There is, I suggest, a need to actively set aside space and time for matters of no economic import, of no easy entertainment value, of no obvious, immediate social utility – to mend and sand and glue and sew and bake, to gain skills, to craft and transform rude matter into something better.
 
This can be shared, too! The private Workshop cultivates the individual soul in its creative and industrive facets; the shared Workshop, even (especially?) in hobby situations, models the human community. Is there anything more hope-inducing, when honestly considered, than a group of peculiar middle-aged men coming together to build a model railway display? (Especially if they can somehow get their wives involved!) You despair about the Middle East; I reply, without a hint of flippancy, that if lonely children can be accepted into wargames clubs (as I was), or if AmDram types can conquer their own neuroses and egotisms to create something of real value together, then we have a sliver of temporal hope. There’ll be no peace this side of the grave, but if we cooperate on building things together when no outside force compels us – and if we choose to learn the attendant lessons! – then we may be the kind of people who can be better neighbours, sharing resources more equitably, living more sustainably.
 
How many difficult people – like me, like you – learn social rules first or best when co-operating on some shared envisioned project? Schoolrooms of our usual type often perform this task poorly – the lack of native willingness on the part of many of the children means they may learn obedience to Teacher or to the loudest child, but rarely joyful mutual submission. Only when something worthwhile is in view can the truest expressions of co-operation appear – whether men seeking to survive together and conquer in battle, or three little children attempting, with faltering beauty, to sing a hymn together whilst they dance on the grass.
 
Of course these corporate efforts are flawed, and full of ego and misunderstanding and small-scale but utter heartbreak. The whole Creation groans, for now. Yet we want to build a Citadel around which the roiling mass of post-society might gather, and which might provide shelter to the rising generations. Perfection is not the objective – civilising means, virtuous modes, are what we seek. On that basis, voluntary co-operation in frivolous beauties must be one of the best uses of our time imaginable.
 
One can imagine how this all might happen, in the fragmentary Shadow Society we seek to build, flowing out of the Schoolrooms and ramshackle New Colleges, returning always to the Home. You can see the man in his shed with his lathe, turning tiny legs for doll-chairs. Next door, sitting in the garden, the violinist hosts her quartet, and they struggle with some new, transporting piece. Their friends from church build battlefields from foam and PVA glue – worlds for little Hanoverians and French to march over, history entering the present and casting its companionable shadow over proceedings through a silly shared love. One lady takes up tatting, lacework, with peculiar tools straight out of a textiles museum display! There are special books; there are clubs; there are codes. Perhaps someone, somewhere, even makes some sustenance out of their eccentric waste of time!
 
The models end up in the bin, and the doll’s chair is burned. The violin is stolen and broken. The lacework moulders. Everything goes down to dust – but the products of the Workshops we must build are not built to last forever; they are built to last, to last long; but they do not steal fire from the gods. They are built well to proclaim the awful givenness of life, the deep design we discern behind the clouds of chaos – even if we fear we are deluded, that chaos is truly all there is! Do children bang pots and pans in a mock brass band to set posterity to terror? No, they do it for joy, and to proclaim that friendship and fun and perhaps even nascent harmony exist, and are worth the effort. The Workshop is where our means of living come from – but in the Citadel of the Permanent Things, those means of living ought to come accompanied with gratitude, pleasure, and community. Such Workshops are what we ought to begin to build now.