Beyondness

It was at the end of the 1990’s that I started setting up my woodworking workshop. At that stage I bought second hand machines and overhauled them over time while I was busy farming and working with my dad in the engineering workshop. My idea was to start with the basics and gradually build it up from there. It was interesting, reading up on articles from a variety of woodworking magazines, what was regarded as “the basics”. Some said a table saw and a planer-thicknesser. Others thought you could not be without a band saw or a router. To a novice like me it was confusing and in some ways debilitating. Quite often during that period I said to myself that I could only start thinking of any project once I had the right machines and the ideal workshop. Which meant that it took a long time for me to actually put my hands on a piece of wood and make something, because for a long time I was under the impression that I didn’t have any of the two.

Then one day, on a journey into town, I had a very liberating experience. In South Africa they are such a common sight that we rarely notice them anymore – the different artists and craftsmen selling their products and creations at traffic lights and next to the road. They work in a variety of mediums – wire, wood, metal – and depending on the time of year and the season they will ingeniously change their product line to accommodate the taste of the period. There were pieces of art to commemorate the Soccer World Cup that was held in South Africa in 2010. Come Christmas, trees made from wire and Black Wattle wood appear all over the place at their points of sale.

But on that particular morning I was, as if for the very first time, struck by their “workshops” and tools. In the open air, there right on the sidewalk or the shoulder of the road, quite often with no more than a set of pliers and a role of wire, they were churning out the fruit of their hands. With much less than me, they were producing much more than me.

To me, they were and still are the embodiment of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” In them I have a constant source of encouragement and motivation. They and others like them, play a very important role in me developing what I think of as an attitude of beyondness. It is so easy to be disheartened by obstacles, be demoralized by situations that are far removed from the ideal and to feel myself the victim of my circumstances. I owe so much to those who help me see beyond the immediate, the bad, the negative. Those people who spur me on when I have a very strong urge to stop trying. They not only gift me with Roosevelt’s quote, but also with that of D.H. Lawrence: “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.” So often I need to hear that.

Then, last week, as if to make sure I get the message, while being lost in a book about the Second World War that Matilda bought me at a second hand bookstore, I came across the following piece of very interesting information. In all fairness, the book acted as a springboard and the internet as the pool I dived into from time to time. 

I have always found Albert Speer, the talented architect who became Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, an intriguing figure. A highly intelligent and refined man, he received a 20 year sentence at the Nuremberg trials at the end of the war mainly for his use of forced labour. Later known by many as “the Nazi who said sorry”, he published three books after his release in 1966 about the War and his experience in Spandau Prison where he served most of his sentence. Although some say that Speer anonymously donated as much as 80% of the royalties he received from his books to Jewish charities, his actual knowledge of the Holocaust and his involvement in maintaining the Nazi war effort, remain hotly debated topics.

What struck me though was his way of coping with his imprisonment in Spandau, where he was held with six fellow prisoners, all former high officials of the Nazi regime. At first he focussed on writing about his experience in The Third Reich. That had to be done in secret because inmates were not allowed to write memoirs. During a period of severe writer’s block he took to gardening and eventually transformed the prison wilderness to what the American commander at Spandau called “Speer’s Garden of Eden”.

But somehow it was the next project that he undertook that made the biggest impact on me.  As part of their daily exercise, prisoners had to walk in circles in the prison yard. Speer started to keep meticulous records of the distances he covered on these walks. And gradually the idea was born for him to “see the world”. Initially he thought he’ll walk the distance from Berlin to Heidelberg. With that done he decided to keep on going. By requesting maps, guidebooks and other material of the places he imagined himself passing through and by meticulously transferring his daily steps in the yard to distances on the maps, Speer “saw and experienced” all the sites on his journey. He started in northern Germany, went through Asia, then Siberia, across the Bering Strait, down across North America and ended his sentence 35 kilometers south of Guadalajara, Mexico.

Somehow, years after his death in 1981 he even reached me here on the southern tip of Africa, conveying the meaning of beyondness.

To all those who bend and form wire in the African sun, those who cross the vast open plains of Asia while walking in prison circles – thank you. You may never know it, but by me doing and trying, I pay homage to you.

George