I was looking over the things that I had made for Dwarven Morning, and it struck me that I am, as a craftsdwarf, a bit of a one trick pony. I spend quite a lot of my time at the bench, and by bench I mean table, and by table I mean prefabricated Chinese-made wood surface with wobby legs, trying really hard to make stuff look older and rottener than it actually is. All of it, perversely, in the name of trying to approximate autheticity.
I will allow you a moment to let that silliness sink in. I’m still letting it sink in myself and this, in truth, is the reason for this posting. To make some sense of it for myself.
At the moment, I’m living in Korea. It’s a fine place if you’re someone interested in phones and fashion. Otherwise, it has the second highest suicide rate on the planet, the highest rate of alcohol consumption in Asia, and is, for lack of a better term, a soul-shatteringly empty place that makes my prior city of Las Vegas look like the library at Alexandria. Does the stuggle against this emptiness, and the Xerox-copier quality of the institutions of the place where I live make me want to make things that are purposefully and obviously not-mass-produced? Alas: I cannot blame, or even attribute, the DM aesthetic to Korea as the aesthetic predates this trip.
As some of you know, DM started in Las Vegas. Specifically, it started in North Las Vegas. Not the sweeping, cookie cutter suburbs of the far north, mind you, but the 97% Latino area where I lived, housed two blocks away from what was once the home of the Donna Street Crips and, I’ve been told, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. Being originally from St. Louis, such stories didn’t scare me, but I will take the relaters of these direnesses at their word. It was a crummy neighborhood. Perhaps that DM was born in such a whirlwind of run-downness is the reason that the stuff took on an apocalyptic quality. But I don’t think that’s quite it.
I’ve often asked myself whether it is my simple lack of skills that makes me want to blacken and beat finished pieces into a state of coarseness. This point could be well argued. But I have made things in the past that are, for lack of a better word, “pretty”, but I always found the finished product to be somehow lacking. I have no explanation for why this should be.
Perhaps it’s the music I listen to? I do listen to a lot of angry, awful stuff. But as an aesthetic, I am left to wonder: If a band chooses to record itself in a lower fidelity than they can afford, or if they somehow manipulate it after the fact in order to create an atmosphere, does this invalidate the result? I think of producers like Butch Vig and the kinds of creative things he did with mic placements in order to get a sound that he found to be more “real”, and I feel like I’m getting closer. If “over-produced” is a viable concept in music, then surely “over-polished” is a viable concept in the creation of talismans.
(Are you actually still reading this? This is really, at this point, just being used like a diary. You can quit any time.)
Part of the issue, I believe, is the fact that I’m using tools and materials that are, in a way, simply too good for what I’m trying to do. I’ll get to that in a bit, because this statement begs the question: What am I trying to do?
At the end of the day, I’m trying to make stuff that I like. Unlike my day job, which is filled almost entirely with making stuff that I absolutely do not like, and struggling very hard to accept the fact that I spend nine hours a day at an institution that seems to make every possible effort at creating products of such bewildering mediocrity that it would make even the most banal long for something more, DM is something that I believe in. When I say “believe in,” I believe I mean it in the old meaning of the word. This is not some Hallmark, Christian approximation of belief, but the kind of direct physical manifestation that, for me, is the absolute cornerstone of the Heathen worldview. The total and unapologetic drive to bring thought-process into reality has value. That the thought-process behind it and the construction therein hold value is, at its root, why I choose Asatru over the competing religiosities. Mr. Flowers and his pals over at the Temple of Set are onto something with their Xeper idea, I think. (But I don’t need to do Egyptian magickye in order to make it make sense.)
This brings it back to the limitations of the tools and materials which are ill-suited to the creations in my mind’s eye. The materials that I have access to are… nice. Copper and brass sheeting does not come out in any way other than with a certain perfection. Working out of an apartment, it’s not possible (or at least not polite) to create sheet metal from ingots on an anvil. And forged items are what I desire. For years, pretty much my whole life since the age of about 10, I wanted to be a blacksmith. Worse, I felt some sort of inner drive to be a blacksmith. It probably had everything to do with reading Dragonlance and playing D&D, I guess, but the drive was there. I came home from the library one day with all of the blacksmithing books I could find. I read them as quickly as I could. At the dinner table, I told my parents of my intention: I am going to be a blacksmith. I was made to be a blacksmith. They laughed it off. “Yes, because you come from such a long-line of blacksmiths.” I shelved the idea.
It wasn’t until years later that I talked to my grandmother about it. She, who had always been making stuff, always using her hands, always crocheting or cross stitching or quilting or embroidering – who had put a cross-stitch needle in my hands at the age of 5, always understood. I was teaching at the time, I think, and I told her that I felt like I had always had a strange drive to be a blacksmith.
“Oh? Your great uncle was a blacksmith, you know. I used to go to his shop. I’d sit on the porch with him and his dog. And he’d whittle all the time – they didn’t have sandpaper, so he’d make slingshots out of branches and then use glass to smooth them out. You never saw something so smooth. And I think his father was a blacksmith, too. I’m pretty sure that whole side of the family was blacksmiths, come to think of it.” I was vindicated. But blacksmithing, as a profession, is not what it once was. When they were the cornerstone of a village, it made sense. I’m not sure it makes the same kind of sense. As much as I may cherish the idea of hammering out swords, the world does not need swords. It does not even need ploughshares.
So when I stumbled upon the making of jewelry, I found something quite close to what I had originally envisioned. Hammers. Heat. Metal and stone. (As a quick aside, I should point out the genesis of DM: I had been playing the World of Warcraft, and I had an enormous, fictitious gem empire. I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that I was, at a time, THE gem person on my server. One night, I had a revelation: What if I spent as much time cutting real gems as I did cutting fake ones? I bought a faceting machine and began to cut. When I realized that I needed a way to stick the gems into things, the DM workshop began in earnest. When the pewter hammers that I had made for my own use began to sell on eBay, I realized that heathen stuff was where the future lay. And here we are.)
Anywho, none of this explains the aesthetic. Part of it, perhaps all of it, boils down to the fact that I believe it is a honest representation of reality. I do not, frankly, see the world in the same light as many of the other pagans I’ve known. I do not love nature. I do not count my blessings. I do not see existence as particularly beautiful or bountiful in and of itself. I see reality primarily as a kind of existential war. I believe this worldview is wholly compatible with the lore. A lot of heathens externalize this into other arenas in which I have no interest when they begin to formulate a worldview which centers around some variation on This Is Us and That Is Them. I understand how this happens, and I am sometimes sympathetic. But that is not the allure for me.
Life, frankly, is brutal. It is beset with trials and tribulations and frost giants and fire giants and any manner of unpleasantries which must be resisted and fought against. When it works, being able to rely on one’s friends and family is a very powerful way to deflect these aggressions. Unfortunately, to quote Ice-T’s Body Count, often “shit ain’t like that. It’s real fucked up.” In a perfect world, interpersonal relationships would be bound by honor and oath. But we have plenty of examples in the lore of oaths being broken and to get bogged down in that sort of idealized thinking is, in my mind, a very dangerous road that leads directly to, at best, a kind of other-worldly dualism. Platonism is all fine and well for some, but I find it to be odious. I’ve tried it.
To this end, if there’s one thing that I truly and honestly cannot abide, it’s Pollyannaism. I appreciate the power of positive thinking as a kind of quasi-magical tool, but it has limits. Frank appraisals of situations are every bit of important as hope for something better. And, for me, I like to be reminded of the fact that things are often cruel and dirty. That, at the end of the day, the battle might well be lost. Let’s not forget Ragnarok. Our gods die in battle. Hope springs from their deaths, but happy endings, if they can be called that, come through war, strife, death and loss. Over the past two years, I have come to see that if there is any value in the world, that it is value in the struggle. To make meaning, to press on in the face of what appears to be certain loss is, I believe, The Heroic Trajectory. To fight for friends, to fight for love, to fight for meaning – especially when things seem hopeless or lost or totally beyond repair – is, at the end of the day, what makes life worth living. It is a dirty war, but anything less is cowardice. And if there’s one thing to be learned from the gods, it’s that cowardice is not an option. Quitting is not an option. These are what their symbols and, as an extension, Dwarven Morning, means to me.
I don’t know whether the things I make accurately reflect this. It wasn’t until I sat down to write this that it became clear to me that this was what is being done. But I’m pretty sure this is the core of it.
So to any of you who are reading this, please take these words as an honest, if belabored, attempt at providing rationale for things that on their face might seem to just be irregularly shaped bits of metal. They are a legitimate attempt at honesty. I think that matters. I hope you do, too.
Stay resolute, friends.
Hail the gods of the North.
