Beauty and wonder in the ritual of making

What drives us as artists and makers to do what we do? The repetitive actions and technical processes that I as a weaver understand as necessary to my creation of art may seem to some as mind-numbing, tedious, and even unnecessary. After a particularly labor-intensive day, I sometimes question my methods: why do I spend hours guiding hundreds of threads individually through my loom when I could just buy a piece of cloth? This care, this attention to the single units that are eventually swallowed into the entirety of the work, what purpose does it serve? Like many artists, part of it is related to compulsion: the performance and ritual of making a sculptural raw material like cloth feels as natural and necessary as breathing, it's something I must do to feel like myself. After reading Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, I found that there was one particular story that I kept returning to, and I realized that it spoke to me on this very level of artistic obsession. It's about a man named Hagop Sandaldijan, a sculptor who carved his work not out of blocks of marble but individual strands of human hair. In the book, Sandaldijan's son describes his process:

'He would wait until late at night,' Levon said, 'when we kids were in bed and the rumble from the nearby highways had subsided. Then he would hunch over his microscope and time his applications between heartbeats-- he was working at such an infinitesimal scale that he could recognize the stirings of his own pulse in the shudder of the instruments he was using.'

The act itself is a work of art, a ritualistic performance only for the maker: but what does it satisfy? I imagine this sculptor hunched intensely at his microscope, barely breathing, knowing the only evidence of his toil will be tiny marks in a strand of hair. Underlying this process is the search for an innermost essence or truth: that which might be seen through a microscope, between the pulse of one's own heart. In the irrationality of his work we catch a glimpse of living poetry, a testiment to purity and the human capacity for goodness, beauty beyond what words can articulate. This is the gift we are given as artists, makers, human beings. As I sit at my loom and pass lines of thread back and forth, trapping the evidence of my labor one strand at a time, I understand why Sandaldijan must perform his quiet ritual. In the rythm of my own hands, my breathing, and the soft rising and falling in this machine I conduct: I realize that I too am aware of my heartbeat.