The Act of Creation

By Bobby Neal Winters

My house doesn’t have a basement; it has a well that you can walk around in. Down the middle of it is a wall that used to separate part of it off as a furnace room, but at some point the water that regularly bubbles up from below rotted it off at the bottom. Now it is not so much a wall as a curtain of wooden planks.On one end of the planks was a beautifully weathered 3-by-4. 

A month or two ago, I’d gone down there to do some electrical work and saw it anew.  The new woodworking mania that lives in my head now said to me in a voice like Gollum, “We wants it. We wants our precious wood.”

I brought it up and began thinking of what to do with it. My brain--on its own behest and operating under the influence of old-school British woodworkers on YouTube--formed a plan. 

Cut the 3 by 4 into 4 equal pieces and divide the pieces into pairs. Connect each pair together with a stretcher, joining them with mortise and tenon. Then connected those two stretchers together with another stretcher using mortise and tenon.

Rabbet the corners of the top so they fit into a frame at the top, and join the frame to the legs below with dowel pegs.  Then put a top on it.

I saw this all in my head all at once.  It was quite a rush. I knew exactly the design and the materials.  What I didn’t know was what it was.

Given the description and any sketch made from that, it could be an end table, a stool, a step-stool, or a table.

I didn’t know what it was, and I was the one making it.

I was in the process of making the top from one of the planks retrieved from the basement, and my wife Jean looked at it and said, “A game table to put puzzles on.”

And that is what it immediately became.

This is an example of the Act of Creation with the Word. She pronounced it, and so it was.

God spoke the world into existence. After Adam was created, God took him on a tour of the Garden of Eden, and Adam named all of the animals.  Man takes part in creation too, but is somewhat limited. God spoke the animals into existence, but Adam took it from there.

There’s a fellow I know who likes to tell a joke: “If you say that a dog’s tail is a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” His answer is: “Four. Saying that a tail is a leg, doesn’t make it so.”

That is a good, common sense rhetorical argument. A dog’s tail clearly differs from its legs in any number of ways.  But we could call it a leg.  We would then have the linguistic burden of distinguishing it from the other four legs. This leg does not support the animal; it is attached differently; it has a different form.  It differs from the others in so many important ways that picking a separate name for it is just more efficient. 

God has given humankind the power to name things, and over the course of millennia, we have.  It has been a dynamic, iterative process, and we’ve done it in multiple cultures and innumerable languages.

But it is even more complicated than that.

There are layers of naming. (And it is at times like this when I wish I knew more philosophy because those guys can really shell the corn when it comes to stuff like this.) Let’s look at a “human”.  That is one layer of naming.  When we get into another area, I can look at a human, and say that is a “friend” or that is an “enemy.”  There is still another layer when I would look at the same human and say, “That is my brother.”

The last of these is God’s language.  God has names for things as well: “That human that you call ‘enemy’ is your brother because you are both my children.”

Names affect the way we think. We often switch codes when we are trying to make a political point.  The word “slave” is not used in the original U.S. Constitution.  Slaves are there, but the writers twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid using that word. 

When you call someone a slave, that is a step toward separating them from being human.  Think about this when you see illegal immigrants being referred to as “illegals” or pre-born babies being referred to as “fetuses.” 

We have God-given power.  We create with our use of language; or we can destroy. We can bind and we can loose.

This is all rather heavy going for me.  I need to get back out to the shop and glue some more pieces together.  I’ve got a game table to finish.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )