Craftsman

Reflections; Maestro, Autocord.

"Inarticulate does not mean stupid; indeed, what we can say in words may be more limited than what we can do with things. Craftwork establishes a realm of skill and knowledge perhaps beyond human verbal capacities to explain; it taxes the power of the most professional writer to describe precisely how to tie a slipknot. Here is a, perhaps the, fundamental human limit: language is not an adequate "mirror tool" for the physical movements of the human body...

One solution to the limits of language is to substitute the image for the word... The images, in other words, illuminate by clarifying and simplifying movement into a series of clear pictures of the sort the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called 'decisive moments'...

It might be possible to imagine an experience of enlightenment strictly as a visual experience following this photographic procedure, one that enables our eyes to do the thinking about material things. In silence, as in a monastery, communication among people would be reduced to a minimum for the sake of contemplating how an object is made. Zen Buddhism follows this nonverbal path, taking the craftsman to be an emblematic figure who enlightens by showing rather than telling. Zen counsels that to understand the craft of archery you need not become an archer; instead, silently compose its decisive moments in your mind."
~Richard Sennet, The Craftsman