The Crooked Line

NEWSLETTER 014.

I spent a season in Akola, a small craft village outside Udaipur, Rajasthan. The traditional dyers worked in mud as a resist dye technique for blockprinting. Most dyers used tar. Tar was cheaper. It was faster. It was what the West was using. So it was better.

L.M. Sacasas, in Embrace Your Crookedness, makes the case for what resists being predicted, commodified, reduced to a cost/benefit — "that which requires actual attention to the particularities and peculiarities of our being." Like the crookedness of timber, it reflects a history: the losses, communities, chance happenings, and heartbreaks that shaped a specific person, specific hand.

"If a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it."

When Glen Adamson was asked, in The Future of American Craft, to sum up what makes craft quintessentially "American," he said he sees it as an extension of the classic American dichotomy: the individual and the community. "Craft has a unique way of getting those two values together — it's a way of expressing the value of community through the individual."

Every wave of industrial and technological advancement has raised a counter-wish — to make something on one’s own terms, at the scale of a hand.

The question now isn't whether it fails. It's how we maintain our crookedness when a consensus engine does what the synthetic tar did, only faster. It doesn't fail. It converges. The mud went the same way decades earlier, displaced by the cheaper middle everyone moved toward, because everyone else was.

Which means the thing most at risk was never failure. Failure is specific; it has a hand in it. What's at risk is the crooked line. Not because it's beautiful, it often isn't, but because it holds what competence only performs. The texture of a genuine attempt. Someone was here. They worked with what they had.

"The crooked heart is simply the human heart — irregular, unpredictable, bending in on itself." — L.M. Sacasas

What are you quietly resisting to maintain your crookedness?

— Courtney

P.S. Thresholds is a monthly letter exploring the values, methods, and culture that shape what endures. I'm glad you're here.