A FATHER'S TOOLS AND THE TEARS OF THINGS

Tim's note: My young sons consider it the highest privilege to be allowed to come and gaze at their father's tools — not the ones I actually make my living by: camera, computer, microphone, but the ones that came down to me, that reek of soul — chainsaw, hatchet, big vice grip. What do they represent for these boys? For me?

This morning, just as I sat to write this, a friend, carpenter and devout Buddhist, told me, “I think a lot about not having attachments, and for most of my things, that's become fairly easy. But letting go of my tools, that's a whole other matter.”

The following essay was written for a national newspaper shortly after my father's death. I would like to revisit this theme, about the sorrow in things, or what the author Maggie Ross, in her book The Fountain and the Furnace, calls "the theology of tears”: physical labour as a form of weeping.

You'd hear it every summer, ringing out across our lake. “Oh you bitch,” the call would go, “you sonova bitchova thing!” And you'd know my father was wrestling with the water pump, or had sawn a board short, or maybe stripped a thread. As a child when I heard that, I'd wince a little. Though his anger wasn't aimed at me, I'd feel it as a kind of sulphur in the air. And I'd wonder why, when the man was such a master at building and fixing things, he always seemed to be fighting them. Even as he lay dying, he cursed the i.v. tubes, the old iron weigh scale (it was a Mother to move), the hospital bed crank.
     This year as we cleared up after him we found a half-dozen hammers, the cheaper ones splintered with their heads broken off. Also the claw end of a crowbar he'd taken a torch to. Maybe he'd wanted to use the shaft, or maybe he'd been trying to lift some hopeless weight. But why did he have to clobber things so?
     I found part of the answer in a recent collection by the Saskatchewan poet Tim Lilburn. “Summer and you dig in the ground,” Lilburn writes with mystical insight, “because a shovel conducts sadness into the earth/ beckoning tears nitroglycerine down through itself into the black/ seriousness of the world...” So it was grief then, hot and explosive, that my father was dealing with. And directing not at his tools but through them.
     That fits with an old notion known as lacrimae rerum , the Tears of Things, which has it that Nature holds a kind of reservoir of sadness. You'll feel it in certain groves of trees, for example, pulling your own mood strangely downwards. They're not human tears, exactly. They don't seem to come out of the family or of a particular injustice, but simply out of the way things are .
     Now whether or not that's just a metaphor, it catches some of the huge, mute grief in many men. Cut off from a sense of belonging to the natural world, they rage in return, as if against their own mothers (“sonova bitchova thing”). My Dad was probably doing that without knowing it. Crying for the nurturing he never got, or never allowed himself. The sorrow had to go somewhere . And what this suggests is that if we won't weep, won't get it out of the body, some thing in the world has to do it for us. That may explain the palpable sadness still left in his pitchfork, the long tapered handle of his tiling spade.
     As I see it, there's a lot of virtue in this idea. For one thing, it says there might just be a safe place, even a “home” for the male anger it seems we're trying to banish to another planet these days. Actually, men need some of that stuff, but what we don't can go just as well into the ground, where “nitroglycerine” breaks down and turns to tears. Food for flowers.
     At another level, it puts soul and consciousness back into a natural world we've too long viewed as inert, there simply for our use. That's akin to what women have done with the image of the Goddess. But where Goddess worship tends to emphasize the soft and nurturing, lacrimae rerum adds a healthy respect for the grittier side of things, their toughness and their tears. Men, God knows, desperately need a direct connection with the earth. This image offers it. It also suggests that the vegetable world is willing to accept our turmoil, especially if it means protecting other living creatures.
     The man who consciously or otherwise puts his anger into a shovel is conducting it safely away from women and children. Many of our fathers (though not, sadly, enough of them) were wise to this. Maybe it's what they meant when they would say “a good tool should take abuse,” implying that nothing else should have to. You get the hint of a forgiveness which things extend towards our brutishness and stupidity. For that they are given to carry, especially after years of use, the dark sweaty (and faintly erotic) stain that shows up in oak and hickory handles. I can't imagine the teflon you find in shovels nowadays holding that kind of juice. There's not enough soul in them.
     Good tools will last, and they will probably -- here's the painful part -- outlive us. My father, whom I loved, is gone; his hammer's still here. I can feel him when I hold it. But I have to confess the feeling's alloyed. The other day when I missed nailing a stud, I heard the familiar acid call rising in my own throat. It had passed straight into me, like a fresh-hatched robin fed a worm.
     Earlier this summer I paddled out to a point mid-way in the lake my father's curses used to ring out over, and spread his ashes there. I didn't weep then, but later, when on an impulse I've just begun to fathom I picked up the cutoff crowbar I'd found, and flung it in after him.