I’ve been thinking about hands.

More specifically, I’ve been thinking about humans and their hands, and the work they choose to do with them. As my own life has progressed, it’s become more apparent to me that I truly do value handmade things of all kinds. From pottery and sculpture to drawing and painting; from handwoven textiles and jewelcraft to fine carpentry and woodworking; from handmade baked items to letterpress broadsheets; it’s all wonderful. It’s all an intrinsic part of being (and becoming) human, and it’s all good.

In the earlier part of the century and among certain crowds, the word ‘artisanal’ took on a decidedly derogatory meaning. It’s true that the Enterprising Spirit of Mercantilism saw the word slapped onto anything and everything, along with a corresponding thirty percent markup in price; ‘artisanal’ came to mean something like ‘overpriced and trendy, and probably made in a sweatshop somewhere.’ But more insidiously, the word also came to mean something like ‘unnecessarily and inefficiently made by some error-prone human, when a product optimized by an algorithm and mass-produced would be cheaper and more consistent.’ This, I feel, is not good.

I’ve been listening to a podcast on YouTube called Close Reading Poetry by Adam Walker. Much of his content is related to, yes, poetry, but he’s also a great and optimistic promoter of the idea that we are ripe to enter a new renaissance. In this episode, “Seven Signs of a New Renaissance,” Adam points out the historical connections between our own time and the periods just before other great cultural renewals. He describes the culture in these periods as ‘closed circles,’ or stagnant backwaters of culture that allow for no real growth or human flowering. He asks, what it our closed circle?

“…plagued by intellectual exhaustion and cultural disassociation, people today are beginning to realize that they too are living in a closed circle. Millions of Americans have their attention enslaved by Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, TikTok…they’re doped up on entertainment and enslaved to online shopping and the broader market.”

From my perspective as someone who has moved freely all my life between various domains of human creativity- from writing to fine art to craft and even the occasional foray into theatre- I’d like to add: the closed circle is only getting tighter and more deadening given the speeding ubiquity and bewildering adoption of AI everything. I firmly believe that humans only became humans because of art and craft and the creative use of language. Without the thirty thousand-plus years of constant self-examination, self-criticism, and the cultural/intellectual creation/destruction cycle that is the humanities, we’d still just be (and I paraphrase Sir Pratchett here) just hairless apes who fall out of trees a lot. Humans practically are a metaphor. We are our own creativity.

The move away from all works of our hands, be it writing our own sonnets, building our own kitchen cabinets, or playing the Irish tin whistle at our cousin’s wedding, is a move away from the very thing that makes us what we are. Hand to eye, pen to paper…these acts shape our brains, they shape our selves, they shape our experience of living in the world, and then they shape the world itself. But the closed and ever-tightening anti-human circle we find ourselves within is…monstrous. Alien. And to those of us with deep instinctual sensitivity to human creativity: repulsive.

So what does Adam have to say about it? What breaks the circle? I urge you to listen to the whole vlog, but I’ll quote from one of his seven points here (timestamp 8:08ish):

“What breaks the circle? Rest from the machine, and a recovery of the spiritual life exercised. Not exploited by the market, but exercised by nature, literature, community, listening to oneself, developing a deep interiority, and an appreciation of the arts. This is the only thing that will break us out of the close circle that we have been enslaved by right now. Such rest and recovery will nourish our creative output and put us in touch with our own spiritual life and that of our cultural traditions which offers so much more than any streaming platform ever could.”

I’ll leave this here for now, but it sure feels to me like the best sort of manifesto.

Here’s another link to the main page of Adam Walker’s vlog.