Flipping a narrow elm board from the nearest stack, I carefully brush the dirt away from the surface with my palm.
That, from Callum Robinson’s Ingrained, is about as plain a sentence as any. But in the callous-free world of click-‘n-swipe, it’s pure gold. It says something about our time, I think, when a thing so real and so simple sounds like magic.
Want more? Of course you do:
Flipping a narrow elm board from the nearest stack, I carefully brush the dirt away from the surface with my palm. Waiting — half wincing — for the hidden splinter’s bite that mercifully does not come. The board is far too small for my father’s purposes, but it is still rather beautiful. Honeyed browns and swirling reds, slashed through with greens and purples. Colours and features that are just faintly visible beneath its dust-caked surfaces. Pressing my thumbnail into the wood’s flesh, I scrape and drag but it leaves no mark. Even elm so young as this is incredibly tough.
In a sense, I think this is the reverse of Chesterton’s “Ethics of Elfland.”
“[Fairy] tales say that apples were golden,” Chesterton tells us, “only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”
I have loved those lines from Chesterton since the moment I first read them. But today, it’s more than enough for a craftsman and writer like Robinson merely to say that some fresh, rough-sawn lumber is (wait for it) … honeyed-brown. And the surface of the boards is (oh my) dust-caked and damp and grainy.
He shows us the magic simply by telling us the reality.
I don’t know if one needs to have the automatic memory of running his or her fingers down the wet and granular planks of lumber at a sawmill for this to take effect. I suspect that Robinson’s descriptions are enough to make any technophile or homebody want to reach out and risk a handful of splinters — emphasis on simply reaching out.
To paraphrase (and slightly tweak) part of Chesterton’s argument: You don’t need an entire cosmos to find “largeness;” the nearest tree has always been grand enough — if you actually bother to stand next to it. Which is to say, the natural world you live in has always been plenty big enough and sacred enough for your own hungry soul.
To awaken the soul to the magnificence around it, Chesterton turns us to fairy stories, the genre par excellence for re-enchanting a disenchanted world. “Stories of magic alone,” he says, “can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.” Though I would take out the word “alone,” this is Chesterton at his finest. And I think it’s quite true that magical stories still hold this valuable and wonderful place for us.
But I wonder if a modern mind which has spent years distracted, indeed, training itself to be distracted from the physical earth its physical body evolved in, was born in, walks in, breaths in — does that mind need anything so extraordinary to wake it up?
What, after all, is gold compared to the smell and texture, and especially (you won’t believe this) the swirling reds, of just one narrow board of elm?
I sometimes suspect that many, many people will soon enough discover a pretty magic- and even dopamine-filled thrill in the plain ol’ naked world.