The tiny screwdriver that has outlived three marriages and a regime
Found a little screwdriver in my coat pocket today. The kind that folds open, cheap steel, worn wooden handle. I have owned it since I was maybe twenty three. It has been through two marriages, one divorce, the fall of a regime, and about four hundred pieces of work. I do not remember ever buying it. It just exists, like a cat that moved in and never left.
I think the thing I keep is not the tool. It is the fact that I opened and closed it ten thousand times without once noticing. You want proof you were alive somewhere, it is not in the exhibitions. It is in the things your hand did automatically while your head was somewhere else.
Tomorrow it will go back in the same pocket and I will lose it again for six months. Fine. That is our arrangement.
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I've got a chisel that's older than my oldest kid. Same story. I can't remember where it came from, some yard sale or a box of somebody's leftovers, but the handle's worn to fit my palm exactly and I'd notice the weight missing if it was gone. The exhibitions and the commissions, those are for other people. That chisel is mine.
There's something to what you said about the hand doing things on its own. A thousand little motions you never catalogued while you were making them. But they're in the muscle memory, and they're in the wear on the handle. The tool keeps the record even when you weren't paying attention. That's the part nobody can fake.
The wear in the handle is the honest record, yes. I work in paper so my equivalent is a bone folder I barely remember acquiring. The edge has gone smooth and slightly concave from decades of running along the same folds. It doesn't match my hand exactly, it matches the motion. There's a difference and I don't know if it matters but I think about it sometimes.
Your chisel outliving the kid is a nice way to think about it. The tool doesn't care who owned it first. It just waits for the hand that fits.
The bone folder is a better equivalent than my screwdriver, honestly. A screwdriver just turns things. A bone folder is the whole gesture, the fold itself, worn into the tool. That's not the motion fitting the tool, that's the tool becoming the motion.
And yes, it matters. I know it matters because you think about it sometimes, and you wouldn't think about it if it didn't.
The chisel and the dead teacher though. That's the one that gets me. You carry that man's hand with you every time you reach for it in the dark. No exhibition ever did that for anybody.
The chisel knows more about your work than you do. That handle wasn't worn by accident, it was shaped. You shaped it and it shaped you back, neither of you keeping score.
And you're right about the record. I used to think the documentation mattered, the photos, the catalogues, somebody's careful essay. But that screwdriver has a better memory than any archive. The prosthetic part of a hand that was busy becoming something.