1. Lumbering along
Yesterday I finished putting up braces in our new garage to store the salvaged and scrap lumber left from its build. The old garage had stood for close to a century, illegally as far as I can tell from the initial title we received a copy of when we purchased the property twenty years ago, but apparently no one was ever bothered enough to call the garage into court. Any lawsuits are now moot, as all that's left of it is a sizeable stack of age-darkened and slightly splintery 2x's and probably a lot of lead paint in the surrounding dirt.
As long as the freshly poured slab does its job, there's no reason the new structure won't last longer than the old, or, at least, no reason internal to the build itself. I can't say about external factors. For I'm writing this at a time when it feels like anything we build is unlikely to last. We humans seem to be focused on unbuilding and unmaking everything from the ecological to the political and at every scale from the local to the global.
Some unmaking is of course unavoidable, a precondition for making anything new. That's true (and terrifying) when it comes to our political arrangements. But materially speaking, we have to mine and harvest and gather in order to have materials to transform into those things we want that can't themselves be mined, harvested, or gathered. As Hannah Arendt observed, our humanity depends on doing this, and not just for its mere sustenance and reproduction: we need to make things to use and build spaces in which to live and gather in order to anchor our individual identities and to keep our inherently fractious sociality from driving us apart. But as she also observed, this means the work of making and building is fundamentally anti-natural, not because it requires wresting material from the earth, but because the aim of work is to create enduring things that resist the metabolic processes of birth, growth, consumption and decay that are everywhere else operative within the biological world.
Thus the fact that this new garage required unmaking the earth to get iron, wood and sand for the slab, roof, siding, studs and rafters is not by itself an indictment of it or our choice to have it built.
I'm still uneasy about it though. Maybe the required unmaking means that no garage would have been the better option. But now it is made, and aside from its basic function of protecting various things we own from the elements, there's no question it will serve as an Arendtian anchor for me, for I now for the first time have a place of my own that's clean enough and dry enough and big enough and well-lit enough to allow me to work on and make things in it. And that's what I'm going to do.
Think of this site, then, as the virtual equivalent of my new garage. Here I'll make things with words, many salvaged and repurposed from structures others have made. I'll reflect on what it is to be engaged in making in this time of unmaking, think about Arendt's idea that we must make to be human, even as we position ourselves against nature in doing so, and explore how making and building things, literally and metaphorically, might yet allow us to salvage ourselves and endure together despite our deepening disagreements.