Chew Me Up and Spit Me Out

Last night I stared into not the abyss but the whirling humming clanking rush and release of the motorized C & P platen press, although it often seems like it is staring back at me.

Only later did I notice my foot aches, only later did I succumb to fatigue. In the extended, pulsing moment, all I could feel was the jumbled shudders of the press. My eyes followed the swing of the bed as it tilted up toward me for each card and bowed back down to urge the card on in its kiss with the persistent type-clad platen. My hands worked on their own, retrieving and feeding each card and the next, the next, the next. With each feed of the press, I leaned in and the maw of the press gaped, trapping my eyes among the internal ink-caked iron parts that clicked and gnashed. Each of my breaths slipped into the cycle. If I happened to glance up at the clock, or down further at my hands, I was jolted from my focus and my stomach would turn abruptly, uncomfortably.

A large lever, left of the wheel that was left of the platen, allowed me to shift the platen and bed farther apart, so the type and card just missed, could not meet. When my pile of printed cards grew high enough on the shelf before me, I would throw the lever, step out of the rhythm for four or five measures. I'd set the cards aside, refresh my stack of blank ones, and step back into the rhythm and breathe again. The rhythm would break only if I pressed the switch so the press would stop mid churn, when I would dab more ink to the disc that crowned the press. Rollers slid up and down the disc with a hushing sound, picking up ink to slick over the type.

Within that rhythm, which always exists, though not often so dizzyingly or monstrously, I have room to think. If I fret or mope, I lose the rhythm. The thinking is gradual, it sneaks under my elbow or up through the churning parts of the press. Thoughts ride on the back of a feeling that ferments every time I succumb to rhythm. Not that I am one with the machine, nothing so zen. Just that I am a living part of the machine, part of a bridge between craft and industry. It's more a feeling of fitting just so in a cycle rather than straddling a gap.

Somehow when I stare, as I did last night, into the churning of the parts of the press and release my hands to move deftly in and out of them, the anxieties of my mind are released from me by my physical actions. The rest of my mind approaches a state that I can only describe as a strange disconnect from self-consciousness, the state that I generally need to write, paint, throw pottery,* or make jewelry.

I often have to stay up past exhaustion to reach that state when I am trying to write. When I make jewelry, throw, or paint, I reach it through the physical, tactile efforts that each of those crafts require. Printing seems to me to be an integral part of the craft of letterpress because it allows me to feel the way I do when I finally let go and write, even though technically, the creative part has just about finished. Sometimes I'm not even involved in the creative process, when I just print a pre-designed form, yet I still get that feeling, that state. The reason, I haven't yet figured out. I guess I'll have to print more. It's a good thing the Print Shop is hopping. President Tipson's Christmas cards require a total of 10,000 impressions in the press, my part of which will give me plenty of time for thinking.


*shape clay on a potter's wheel, not toss vases