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In the meditation one first must consider the tools, their form and divine essence. One must visualize them and name them: this is a tenon saw, this a dovetail saw, this a gimlet, this a brad-awl. One then must dwell on their purpose, which requires one to imagine each tool in action, and this in turn calls for contemplation of certain basic techniques of carpentry and joinery: the making of mortises and tenons, the construction of joists and frames, the fitting of veneers, the setting of braces and struts and wedging. This phase of the meditation is the most prolonged and the most intense. Shadrach has heard that some adherents to the cult devote the entire energy of their worship to it, and never actually take tools and wood into their hands, but carry out a completely satisfying communion in their minds alone. Until today he has never really understood how this could be accomplished, but now, scribing and mitring and butting as he sits with closed eyes, menially fitting tenon into mortise and tongue into groove, he sees that actual manual labor can be extraneous to this experience if one is able fully to enter into the meditative phase.
He perceives this, but he moves on anyway into the terminal stage of the meditation, which is the entry into the wood, the mother-stuff. This too is a highly structured exercise, which one must begin by imagining trees, not merely any trees but specific timber trees of one’s own choice, ordinarily pine or spruce or fir for Shadrach, occasionally more exotic woods, according to his whim, ebony, palisander, mahogany, teak. One must see the tree; one must imagine it felled; one must carry it onward to be milled and seasoned; one must at last behold the finished board, and contemplate its grain, its texture, its moisture content, its vulnerability to shrinkage and warpage, all its characteristics and special beauties. And then, only then, when one can taste the wood on one’s tongue, when one feels the tool hot and eager in one’s hand, then does one rise and go to the bin and select one’s lumber and begin at last to work.
Shadrach knows, by the time he has reached this stage, exactly what the form of his worship will be today. He will do no fancy joinery this day, but simple heavy carpentry, simple but pure, a job that strikes to the essence of form: he will construct the centering for a brick arch. It has sprung entire into his mind, the ribs and ties, the braces and struts, the laggings, the wedges; he has calculated the curvature, the span, the height of the crown, the springing line, all in one rush of i
He works quickly. A kind of wild feverish energy has come over him. He hastens from bin to bench, from bin to bench; his mouth bristles with nails of half a dozen lengths; he does not pause for an instant. Yet there is nothing rushed about his labor. To rush would be folly; the point here is to attain calmness of spirit. The work should be accomplished swiftly but without haste. Serenely Shadrach builds. The work contains its own purpose and has none beyond the immediate spiritual fulfillment, for one never uses anything one constructs in the carpentry chapel, one never takes anything away that one has put together, any more than one would bring in one’s own tools. This is not a substitute for the home workshop, after all. The idea here is solely to exercise skill in joining, and thus to experience the fundamental co
The arch is done. Shadrach briefly admires its perfection of form; then, calmly, he knocks it apart and carries the pieces to the salvage bin.
Does the arch no longer exist, simply because its components have been dismembered? No. The arch exists, shining as brightly in his mind as when he first conceived it. The arch will always exist. The arch is indestructible. Shadrach restores his tools to their original immaculate order, and gathers his sawdust, and makes the ceremonial pyre of it in the urn in the aisle. When his bench is as clean as he first found it, he kneels, bows his head, and remains that way a minute or two, altogether untroubled, mind blank, a tabula rasa, healed and made whole. Then he goes out.
Images of Mangu are everywhere in the streets, the handsome Mongol face looking down from the facade of every building and staring out from great ba
Shadrach, cool and bouncy, wanders toward the river, whistling some lush romantic melody — a tune out of Rachmaninoff, he suspects. He is being followed, he realizes, by a man who emerged from the carpentry chapel a moment after he did. This does not worry him. For the moment, nothing worries him. He is charmed by everything: the steppe, the hills, the faintly chilly spring air, the idea of being followed. He is charmed even by the silly ubiquity of Mangu, whose bland symmetrical features have been plastered to everything, and sprout from mailboxes, from trashbins, from the low smooth white wall of the promenade that runs along the river; there are Mangu pe