AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

25 July 2006

2:15pm. Here we are once again. 2 and a half hours to go, and I don't know if I can make it. The din of the shop. My coworkers are in high spirits, talking about muscle cars and how they like their espresso. That gurgling troll of a machinist makes his usual mucus noises interspersed with dog-like, whimpering laughter at his own jokes. Lathes and drill presses hum and whirr, torches hiss, and beautiful things are made by ugly creatures with skilled hands.

I am reminded of the Dwarves of Norse legend and Tolkein novels. Fat, stocky, crude creatures that live underground, out of the sun, out of the world. They eat too much and they drink too much and they enjoy little in life, but they craft objects of unrivaled beauty and workmanship.

They give themselves to their craft: body and mind, heart and soul, until there is nothing left of them but hairy, sweating, sacks of meat. What they have lost comes out as Gold and Music, to be seen and heard by those up above, by those worthy to appreciate it. By those who can afford to pay for it.

Your back is the first thing to go in the under ground.
" Flutemaking breaks your back," says my boss, before demonstrating how to use tools ambidextrously to slow the rate at which repetitive stress withers the body.

As you sit at your workbench, head down, back rounded, shoulders rolled in, day after day, it happens. The body adapts to the conditions in which it finds itself.
The fumes from the torch gas, the chemicals, the powdered gold and silver in the air, they get inside you. They weaken your heart and lungs and mind. Your body slows down, you get fat, and you melt into your chair.

Everyone around me is fat and balding. The longer they've been here, the fatter and balder they are. And arrogant, selfish, and crude.

You live like a dwarf, you become one. If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, etc.

One of my coworkers has worked here since his late teens. He is only slightly older than I, and though the light has not yet gone from his eyes nor the music from his voice, he has become a dwarf. Fat, bald, ignorant, and crude. Despite the small age difference, he looks much older than I do, even as I, who have been here but a single year, look older than most my age. I too have begun to stoop, and grow fat and slow.

But what we make is beautiful, and what we do is noble.

We grow into selfish, petty, ignorant creatures down here, out of the light. The company changes directors and even owners every few years, but my fellow dwarves have endured through it all.

"Nothing ever really changes," they say, and down here, it is true. Out of the light, out of the world.

"Different bosses, different owners, same old crap."

The managers leave in frustration. They can't work with the bickering, stubborn dwarves. They are not dwarves. Dwarves cannot manage dwarves, because their minds are too small and their patience too short. It takes someone else to master a dwarf. In the end, though, only dwarves can stand the company of dwarves. If you want to stay here, you will become a dwarf, and then you will bring the shop to ruin with your greed, stubbornness, and selfishness.

Before I was here, the manager was a dwarf, and though he was much loved by his fellows, he nearly ran the company into the ground. He died before it reached that point, but the damage was done, and the company had to be sold. The new owner brought in a man of light, one of the few people I've met that I would call, without hesitation, a genius. He was going to save the company, it was thought.

But after a year of living with the dwarves, and watching his belly grow and his thoughts scatter, he said that he couldn't take it anymore, and returned to the land of light.

And now there's a new one, another man of light drawn to our world by the beauty and music it emanates. How long will he last? What will become of him? Who knows, but I have already heard him speak of hiring a new one to manage the shop, so that he may focus on marketing and finances.

No man may remain in the darkness and still remain a man.

Dwarves take the light out from themselves and put it into the world.

Men live in the light of the world, and let it shine on them, let it feed them.

The Scientist is a lens which focuses that light that we might see things more clearly.

The Artist is a prism, that shows us the true nature of the light, in all its variety and beauty.

A dwarf can put truth and beauty into life, but only an artist can show us what is already there.