One day I asked one of the shop owners to show me how the workmen did this chiseling. He walked me over to an area where four men stood at individual workstations, their vases perched on spindles the workmen could rotate as they chiseled patterns into the vases. Over the years I have been to dozens of Chinese factories where every step is automated with a jig or a template to ensure every piece comes out the same, and I expected this process to be similar.
To my surprise though, each workman was chiseling his pattern from memory, one hammer strike at a time. How on earth anyone could memorize an entire pattern and control its application like this was then and is still beyond me.
Handcrafted beauty like this reminds me of my brother Mark and the actress Shannon Doherty.
Mark is a psychology professor at a university in Oregon. Shannon Doherty was a star of Beverly Hills 90210, a teen drama popular on TV in the early 1990s.
In one of his lectures Mark points out that we humans tend to think the most beautiful or handsome people are the ones with the most symmetrical faces.
However, while nature can aspire to symmetry, it can never produce it with mathematical precision. We humans understand this instinctively, so we know that anything perfectly symmetrical cannot be natural. That’s where Shannon Doherty comes in.
You see, one of Shannon Doherty’s eyes is set lower than the other, so her face is clearly not symmetrical. In Mark’s lecture, Ms. Doherty serves as the exception that illustrates the symmetry rule. We see her eye’s asymmetrical placement as a lovable flaw. We feel she is less intimidating and more accessible because of it. That is, that’s how we saw her until her reputation as a confrontational bitch in public became more famous than her work on TV.
In the same way, the minute flaws in the hand-chiseled copper vases make the vases seem more beautiful than if the designs were reproduced perfectly by machine. In the hand-chiseled vases we subconsciously see Nature showcasing its perfect imperfection.
In addition to producing amazing works of chiseled copper, Turkey also makes some spectacular decorative glass. In fact, the country is one of the world’s largest exporters of glass. Most of that export is the relatively pedestrian produce of everyday water glasses and fish bowls and drawer handles we can see at Target, Walmart, and Home Depot. Some of that glass, however, ends up in Istanbul workshops that run it through additional processing where they put their own exquisitely artistic touch onto it.
One day I went to visit one of these glass workshops. This particular workshop specialized in frosted and faceted glass knobs for drawers and cupboards, taking products from one of the larger glass factories and transforming them into little works of art before sending them out into the world.
The workshop was run by a woman named Arzu (Arzu is a popular woman’s name meaning “wish” or “desire”). While Arzu was showing me what kind of work her shop did, one of her suppliers dropped by unannounced, the father and son owners of a small business that made brass and copper bases for Arzu’s workshop’s glass lanterns. I had mentioned to Arzu that I was looking for decorative metal goods too, so she decided to introduce me to these suppliers.
The father and son duo didn’t speak a word of English, but I had learned enough Turkish to break the ice and introduce myself. From my first day in Turkey I had learned that a smile and a clumsy but well-meaning attempt at the local language will turn even the steeliest Turk into an instant best friend. Sure enough, the three of us hit it off as soon as I began speaking Turkish.
Arzu left the room to make a phone call, so instead of asking her to translate, I somehow managed to pantomime to my two new friends that I was looking for metalwork suppliers. The three of us decided that when we finished our meetings with Arzu we would drive together to their workshop in another part of the city.
Having finished her phone call, Arzu came back into the room. When the three of us told her that we planned to leave together, she shot me a troubled glance. Taking me aside, she whispered in English that maybe it had been a bad idea to introduce us. I asked her why, and she said these two were radical fundamentalists, and it might be a bad idea for me to be alone with them.
…
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Fundamentalist lamp store” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]