My wife made most of these costumes for our youngest daughter when Phoebe was a very young dancer. Like most costumes: lovingly made, sparingly used.  They most especially have my wife’s love intertwingled in them. We are in the process of beginning to make a lighter footprint on the world. These magnificent acts of love are among the first to go.  I wanted at least a partial record of their having existed and their having been brought into the world by my wife. I surely do love her.

She had washed them last night after I had gone to bed and this morning as I was walking in the pitch dark to do the necessaries I walked through them, their unique textures brushing across my face and hands.  Even in the dark I was startled by the memories they fetched up sight unseen. I knew what they were by touch alone. Remembering. Glorying in that prism of touch.

I think this is a morning in memoria because I was putting a bird feeder back together soon after taking the costume pics above and the last step was to insert and screw together two bolts along with their corresponding nuts.  I started doing that hinkty job as if I was on automatic pilot.  I was. I felt like I was outside of myself watching myself from above doing this simple task.

Truth is it’s not a simple task at all.  I refined this skill over forty years of using these tools, ten of those years as a chimney sweep using that little tool dozens of times a day, often in the pitch black of a fireplace or some other “sight unseen” space.  Truth is that twiddling a screwdriver is a profound act of embodied cognition, deep and full of nuance and discipline and precision. Mostly, I realized it was an act of the imagination in action through the body.

Last, both of these memories reminded me of the more than twenty years of tax returns my wife and I did as a way to patch the hole of our home economy in the winter and into the spring when cash was scarce.  I remember how (pre-internet) I used to order box after box of forms from the IRS. How they would arrive in early January as a harbinger of tax season. How I did taxes by hand for many years until I finally bought a computer and tax program to run on it.  (Those early versions of TurboTax were so MSDOS.) In fact the reason I got my first computer, an Epson 8088, and printer was to do taxes.

How OMG.   Such a difference, but I never forgot the analog, embodied work of pencil and form that was the art of doing taxes early in my career. In fact, if my customers already had the forms, I prided myself that I could walk into a home and do their taxes without bringing anything other than my own brain and pencil.  I did so many sets of taxes that I could conjure them up in my mind’s eye if needed.

Of course, this led to some very interesting discoveries, the most illuminating being that every one of these forms was politics made flesh. After 1985 the Schedule A, for example, was where all the middle class tax breaks went to die.  Medical expenses, charitable giving, and almost every other potential offset for income were now subject to limits of various sorts.  What the political parties and their bean counting lackeys had figured out was that you didn’t need to increase taxes if you could simply reduce or effectively deny enough deductions to make the form largely useless for most folks to use. Hence: moe income to tax. Almost all of my customers post-1986 no longer used the Schedule A.  They just took the standard deduction unless they had big mortgage interest or medical deductions.

What ties these three stories together besides their reliance upon memory?  I think they all are representative of the idea that ‘every force evolves a form’.

This phrase is often attributed to the founder of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee.  I have some connections with Shaker communities. I spent a year working as stock and garden manager at the  Centre Family House at Pleasant Hill, KY. I, also, spent a summer on an archeological dig of a Shaker mill and water race nearby.  Digging through the ruins of their work I found how carefully they made their stone flumes.  Like the limestone fences all around their farms, I discovered that the forces of water evolved the work of transporting it to the mill run in particular ways.  The water’s force evolved a particular form for transporting it.

The Shaker invention of the modern broom follows a similar pattern.  The force there was Mother Ann’s booming voice exhorting her followers as they swept a room, “There is no dirt in heaven!” Or as Guy Davenport sums up in an utterly original book of essays on this topic

A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible (ix).

(Davenport, Guy. Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays. Open Road Media, 2015.)

The screwdriver skills, the 1040 Schedule A, and hand-made ballet costumes are all examples of a force evolving into a form.  Or perhaps many forces evolving into a particular form. The force of discipline, the force of need, the force of love.  Evolving works of art.

How do we work backwards with this?  What force is driving our social connection online?  My social connection? What exhortation from what Mother Ann is pushing us/me toward what brave new form? I think the drive to answer these questions is all about living the examined life.  I don’t disagree with the modern idea that form follows function, but I am beginning to think that is only a subset of Mother Ann Lee’s dictum: that force precedes form and function.  At the very least I believe that we need to give greater credence to the larger forces that govern function and form.  Perhaps we all need someone to call upon some form, “There is no dirt in heaven!” We need to find that force in ourselves and learn to exhort ourselves with it.