Oregon Humanities

Altars to Hephaestus

In praise of materials and materialists

Charles Goodrich

Hephaestus, the Smith-god … is ugly and ill-tempered,
but all his work is of matchless skill.

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

I’m sweating copper in my shop, making a railing of copper pipe for my son’s new loft bed. I’ve cleaned, fluxed, and fitted a copper elbow to the pipe. Now I open the valve on the propane bottle and strike the spark tool, and the blue flame pops to life. It licks the pipe fitting till the metal blushes purple, ocher, and gold. When I touch the solder to the hot copper, the silver wire melts and quivers into the fitting. More solder drips off and solidifies in small pearls on the shop floor. The hiss of the torch and the acrid smell of the flux are as pleasing to me as the sounds and fragrances of cooking.

I close the valve on the torch and the flame expires. Now a fresh quiet coexists with the crackle of the fire in the tin woodstove. I move over to the stove and hold my cold hands up to the metal chimney. I’m a bit dizzy from the gas, and as I look about me, the shop swims a little.

What a restless place my shop is. The cheap table saw that dominates the center of the floor is littered with copper fittings, pipe cutters, coils of solder. On the wall above the workbench, saws, hammers, and C-clamps hang in disregard of their red-painted silhouettes. In the far corner, pieces of cedar, fir, pine, oak, and maple lumber in varying lengths and dimensions lean together in a jumble against the wall. Two dozen cans of paint squat glumly on shelves beside the door. On the windowsill, agates, shards of obsidian, and the jawbone of a deer are stitched together with spider silk. Despite the cobwebs and layers of dust, nothing feels settled in the shop; everything seems to strain toward its potential, as if each chunk of lumber, all the screws and nails, even the scraps of metal under the workbench wanted to be assembled into something a human would use, something lovable.

The shop is part museum, part laboratory, and part sanctuary, a place for admiring things as the world made them, and for making the stuff of the world into new things. It’s also a refuge and a playground, where I can revel in the music of screaming power tools, fill my nose with the tang of sawdust and paint, even reel a little on the fumes of solvents. Sometimes it takes strong sensations to fire my synapses. The subtleties of nature don’t always suffice.

Every home workshop is an altar to Hephaestus. Though he was regarded as a junior god on Olympus, so ugly his mother, Hera, disowned him, what I love about Hephaestus is that he is the only god in the Greek pantheon who works. He’s a blue-collar god with a real job. His services on Olympus are in great demand because he can fix anything—he has the touch. Tools and raw materials dance in his hands. He toys with silver and gold and makes them do tricks as if alive.

According to Homer, Hephaestus once fashioned three exquisite mechanical maidens to assist him at the forge, an early foray into robotics. But Hephaestus is not an industrialist. When he needs assistance, he doesn’t build an assembly line, but three maidens. He has an erotic relationship with material objects.

Ugly, clubfooted, and clumsy of speech he may be, but Hephaestus is married to Aphrodite, the goddess of desire, beauty, and love. Such a strange pairing! What were the Greeks intimating about the relationship between beauty and ugliness, desire and revulsion? Is the hidden connection between lovers forged in part by the material world? Are beloved objects essential to the bonds between partners?

I’m thinking about all the shops in the neighborhood, all the odd, impromptu spaces my friends have for their projects. My friend Karen has a sophisticated little wood shop tucked into her garage, where she fashions hardwood lamps. Her neighbor, John, has sheathed his back deck with blue tarps, a space where he builds displays for the local nature center. Marvin and Margaret, across the street from Karen, make elaborate wooden puzzles, their tiny garage tightly arranged with racks and racks of puzzles and sheets of plywood, and a little clean-room for spray-painting. Around the corner, Michael has his glassblowing shop, a ramshackle shed behind his house. Paul builds recumbent bicycles in his carport. Mark, in the thick of renovating his fixer-upper, has a workshop set up in his living room, the doorways into his kitchen and hallway draped with flowered sheets.

If local chambers of commerce can play host to upscale winery tours, maybe our neighborhood should organize a beer-and-pretzels tour of workshops. We could sell tickets to benefit industrial arts classes at the middle school, or to help a high school girl or boy become an apprentice electrician or furniture builder.

Fifty years from now, history buffs will try to resurrect a neighborhood like ours for a living museum. But we don’t feel like anachronisms. We feel like the dexterous hands of the public body. We’re the touchers and lovers of things. If the United States ever had a materialistic culture, a culture that valued things more than ideas, it does not now. Now we are idealists—we pay not for the thing, but for the advertised ideas of pleasure, convenience, efficiency. We regard things themselves as expendable, as mere vectors of sensations, unreal in themselves, only useful so long as they stimulate us, as if every object were pumped full of some cheap ether, and we snuffed it like nitrous oxide to get a rise out of it. Then the object’s junk, an empty canister. We are degraded idealists, or maybe just addicts.

Handcrafters, artists, mechanics, manual tradespeople, do-it-yourself homeowners—these are the ones who deserve the honorific “materialists,” who love the heft and texture of things, who see and understand how one entity connects to another, who apprehend both the reality and the potentiality of an object. A ceramic bowl or a string of beads, a jigsaw or a quilted vest—the true materialist wants to know the biography of an object, where it came from, how it was made, what it wants to do in the world.

If there are people who can communicate deeply with animals—dolphin trainers, chimpanzee confidants, horse whisperers—there are just as surely people who communicate with things. I’m lucky to live near a clutch of auto mechanics—Glen next door, Jim across the street, and Chris next to Jim. They are all car whisperers. They divine messages from my car, truck, and lawn mower that I cannot perceive. These guys commune with internal combustion engines.

Say it’s your first day back to school, ninth grade. All day you keep hearing about the new shop teacher, how hairy he is.

At recess, playing hoops, you try to impress Frodie, your new flame, with some fancy dribbling, but she and her girlfriends are blatantly ignoring you.

You hear Frodie say, “He has hair growing out of his ears! It’s so disgusting.” But you can tell it’s that kind of disgusting that girls are fascinated by, the kind of disgusting you hope to muster up sometime.

You don’t care much about building bookcases and birdhouses, and there’s only one tool you’re interested in handling much lately, but you think maybe this shop teacher will be worth checking out, that something he has may rub off on you.

So, come seventh period, you join the group crowding into the industrial arts classroom. You take a stool at the workbench farthest away from the new teacher. He is ferociously ugly—scraggly blue-black hair and beard, a big wart over his left eye. One leg is a good four inches shorter than the other, so his shoulders tilt weirdly and his massive neck crooks up at a painful angle.

But when he writes his name on the board, the cursive flows from his hand and seems to move on the chalkboard like ripples on water: Mr. Godwin.

His voice is deep and ratchety. “Good morning,” he growls, and you chuckle a little, nervously, because it isn’t morning, it’s well into the afternoon. But that’s all he says.

He has in one hand a thick bundle of copper wires a foot and a half long. Now he holds them up, showing them to each quarter of the room as a magician would. He begins to tease and bend the individual wires into loops and twists, one hand holding the bundle stock-still before him like a bouquet of posies, the other hand flitting about like a bird stitching an elaborate nest. From time to time, his hand disappears into a vast pocket in his green shop coat, and bits of hardware appear, shiny steel hex nuts he weaves into the swirling circles of wire.

Then he turns his back to you and bends over his work. What’s he doing? Is he breathing on it? Now he rotates slowly back around and you see it: standing on the bare ground of his palm, silhouetted against the dark sky of his black t-shirt, glowing amber as if in late sun, a broad-headed tree spangled with silvery fruits.

All the girls sigh—elbows on the tall shop benches, cheeks in their hands—while the boys start to fidget and look around for a clock.

Mr. Godwin is smiling lopsidedly, his wet black eyes staring off into some absent landscape. He is somebody you’d keep your distance from at a bus stop.

“Copper nut tree,” he finally croaks. “Show you how tomorrow.”

Mid-February; back in the shop. Light rain on the metal roof, a narcoleptic tintinnabulation. I’m groggy and grumpy after an afternoon nap. I bumbled out here to try to wring some small accomplishment from the hind end of a wasted Presidents’ Day. With damp newspaper, wood shavings, and lumber ends, I kindle a fire in the stove. Sipping coffee, I survey the unspeakable jumble of junk, toys, and tools strewn about the shop. Between projects, the shop descends into a sort of purgatory for stuff, a limbo where each object awaits final judgment—Save, Recycle, or Shit-Can.

I find my chair under boxes of Christmas ornaments and pull it close to the stove. My wife has asked me to rip plywood for closet shelves, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to clean the shop. I don’t want to do anything. The February funk, a parasite endemic to the rainy Pacific Northwest, has claimed another victim. Gusting rain rattles the windows like malicious applause. The woodstove smokes.

Now the rain thrums harder. The shop roof whangs and booms. It’s as if I were inside a drum, sound everywhere, the tools, the wood scraps, the paintbrushes and steel wool all just sound, one roaring cacophony.

Louder still, and it’s my skull being drummed on, and I’m watching from someplace else. What I notice now: the broken-necked lamp on the wall, a splintered picture frame in the kindling box, a can of bent nails under the workbench. How sad and incomplete each solitary thing is. A bottomless silence beneath the hammering of the rain.

Can it be that the men and women I see in their garages, woodsheds, or utility rooms, rebuilding carburetors, painting secondhand cabinets, cobbling together climbing structures for their kids, are servants of beauty and love? In a culture where so few things are cherished, spruced up, repaired when broken, rebuilt when worn out by steady use, are these people sublimating the power of Eros into the making and mending of material objects?

The rain has let up enough that I can hear myself sigh. I pull a slip of paper out of my shirt pocket. It shows a rectangle drawn in my wife’s precise hand, labeled CLOSET SHELVES—57 5/16” x 14” x 3/4”. She wants six of them.

Okay. Roll the bike cart outside. Stash the bucket of ashes in the woodshed. Stack the broken toys in the little red wagon. Toss the wood scraps into the fire. I clear some space on the workbench, put a fine-toothed blade on the circular saw. I still feel sluggish and inept, but I can do this simple task if I remember that ugly god who treasures metal and wood.