Faith: Watching an artisan find beauty in the craft of making himself 'useless'

When I first the house we’ve lived in now for 20 years, I fixated on its kitchen table. I wasn’t yet sure the place felt like home, but I knew we had to have that table. The owners had no interest in selling it, but suggested, that we might get one like it at a store in town. "It's a David Marsh.”

I’d already seen that name carved on the table’s underbelly, along with a half dozen others. This cadre of signatures only added to this whimsically designed piece’s appeal. My wife and I had seen such evidence of collective investment before — in the Salvadoran refugee camps that brought us together. It defied current obsession with “building one’s brand.” In other words (those of poet John Donne in fact): “No man is an island.”

After a near identical table in that breakfast nook endured two decades of function, its lovely rustic patina required refinishing. I contacted the store where we’d purchased several of this Houston-based furnituremaker’s pieces to seek advice about appropriate stains. “I’ll get back to you,” the owner replied. The next day I received a call from the man himself. “Tell you what,” Marsh proposed, “going to be in Austin to see friends; what say I pick up your table to take back to my shop?”

Dumbfounded by the offer, I gleaned another reason to treasure all examples in our home of Marsh’s functional art, uniquely ornamented (which in several languages means “to uplift the spirit”). My uplifted hunch: a heart of faith beat a rhythm for such generous crafting.

On the cusp of Midsummer, the ancient pagan feast of inner power and brightness, Marsh and I conversed for five hours over quiche at the table in question. I’d then get a glimpse into that heart — one intent on rendering this carpenter what he calls “useless.”

His journey to our kitchen led him into other conversations with a nearly unbelievable cast of cultural icons. For instance, after leaving a comfortable home in his early 20s with $100 in his pocket and a guitar on his back, Marsh became a protégé of Buckminster Fuller. The architect/inventor summarized young Marsh’s quest: “You have the same dymaxion mind as me — you sense the connections between things and won’t rest till you prove them all.”

Marsh’s keen intellect registers with one immediately. It would not, however, surprise me to hear him say what Fuller said of himself: “I’m not a genius; I’m just a tremendous bundle of experiences.”

Rather than unpack those experiences, I chose to explore what led Marsh into them. With his polymath mind, compelling him to delve into ancient Greek, Tamil, and the intricacies of modern medicine, Marsh might have done many things. Yet, he chose to build a cottage industry to pass on to one-time strangers he’s trained, rendering him then useless.

Where this carpenter uses the word "useless," I’m tempted to insert the made-up word "use-lost." That is, the Marsh philosophy is a two-step process. First, one must get lost in “how to be of use without owning anything” — an intent he gleaned from reading John Steinbeck — and passing that skill on to others.

The second step, enacted now in Marsh’s waning years, involves removing himself from the process to become, as he says, “beautifully anonymous.” “I only make tables and mirror frames now; my former students own the franchises for bookcases and dressers and such,” he jests, “They’ve become, you might say, my greatest competitors.”

When I asked Marsh how his furniture reflects this approach, he used the Polynesian word “mana.” Experts in cultural anthropology (a discipline Marsh has a degree in) challenge the contemporary use of the term, but all agree it refers to elemental power ascribed to inanimate as well as animate objects.

“Mana cannot be removed from its object,” the carpenter explained about this belief, “but one’s own mana, when altering that object, also cannot be removed; a board tells you what it wants to be — this craft is a dialogue.” A feature rendering the texture of Marsh’s pieces distinct is hand-planning. The result: furniture redolent with the artist’s mana.

This tactile dialogue began with carving of logs into boats on the banks of a Guatemalan lake. Marsh admits, “applying the geometry of influencing culture without being at its center is complex.” In dialogue with the 1970s classic text “The Population Bomb,” Marsh applied such “geometry.” He calculated that humans would exhaust Earth’s supply of the most sought-after woods. Thus, he decided early on to work exclusively with wood either reclaimed or, as he says, “grows like corn, i.e., currently produced at a rate equal to or greater than global consumption.”

When manufacturers offered Marsh the opportunity to “go big” and he declined. “Never had much interest in marketing,” he declared. “The crafting of this folk art is the reward — the fun of making the common interesting.” In fact, he insists the stores interested in carrying his furniture share his philosophy to some extent.

At 75 Marsh still gets up with the sun to labor in his shop alongside his Mexican partner, Paco. The pair speak only Spanish as they construct products, which Marsh likes to say, “remain of service, while its creator useless.” He can still lift one of his tables up by one leg. Witnessing this confirmed not only the strength of the man but of what he crafts.

Marsh concluded our long conversation, as we guided that table into his van, this way:

"Faith comes out of awe — as when one notices that the shadow of a butterfly is identical to that of a falling leaf; how then can you not have faith that something cool is happening all around us all the time … like my mother use to say, ‘Thank God, whoever she is!’ "

Looking upon our kitchen table returned to its nook with its forest green trim line below a row of embedded indigo marbles and freshly finished top bathed in Midsummer luster, I have to concur. It reminds me that I, too, remain in dialogue. Like March's mother, I thus give thanks for a beautifully anonymous God and all her use-lost artisans.

Terry Dawson is a retired Presbyterian minister who serves as editorial writer for the online journal Faith on View.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Faith: Furniture maker David Marsh trains new generation