A Machine for Becoming

The card I handed to ten people I trusted, late fall 2006:

There is a shack in the woods behind the golf course. I built it. Come after dark, dress warm, wear a suit under your clothes, and tell no one. There will be a fire. There will be something to drink that I made on the site. Do not ask what is in it.

The statement for the piece:

Sweat collected from my own body becomes the material foundation of a small, deliberately absurd alchemical process. Because sweat itself contains almost nothing capable of becoming alcohol, sugar must be introduced. Yeast consumes this foreign energy and converts it into ethanol. The resulting ferment is then distilled: water, salt, microbes, sugar, labor, and time passing through a sequence of transformations until something called spirit emerges.

The work treats the still less as laboratory equipment than as an alchemical apparatus. Sweat is evidence of expenditure, the body working, overheating, enduring. Alcohol is culturally almost its opposite: celebration, intoxication, communion, escape. Here one is literally made to pass into the other.

But the transformation is imperfect. The alcohol does not originate entirely from the body. The body supplies the water and salts; sugar supplies the potential energy; yeast performs the conversion. What appears to be a distillation of the self is actually a collaboration between body, organism, environment, and machine.

That failure of purity is important to the work.

The resulting “spirit” is therefore neither wholly mine nor wholly manufactured. It is a relic of a process: bodily waste fed to another organism, transformed into another form of waste, and finally purified and named as something valuable.

Sweat becomes spirit. Waste becomes sacrament. Labor becomes intoxicant.

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Before I built one, there was the rumor. Davy Damkoehler, our sculpture professor, was said to have built a sauna out in the woods where the golf course is now, back at the start of his career, and to have sat in it with his students. Campus called it a sweat lodge, the way campus names a thing it does not understand. The story came with the usual attachments, that there had been peyote out there, that the whole thing was some rite he ran on the young. It was the seventies. It was probably not true, or not all of it, and it did not matter whether it was true, because nobody ever dared ask him. That was the point of Davy. He was a man you built legends about rather than questions.

So I decided to build one too, and to hand it in for a grade.

That was a normal thing to want in that department. In sculpture especially, installation and performance were first-class citizens, given as much credence as any object you could set on a pedestal, and a lot of my projects leaned that way, the event mattering more than the thing left behind. A sauna you had to be invited to, in woods you were not supposed to be in, was mostly performance with a roof. And I had the roof. Sandy Rihn had handed me a huge cut of old copper roofing, gone green and patinated and beautiful, salvaged from somewhere the way the good sculpture students always seemed to salvage things. It had a weird oblong-cone shape already, so I let the material decide the building. The copper was the roof. The roof was the shape of the shack.

I wanted it far enough into the golf course woods that no one would see it from the hiking trails, which meant late fall, when the hikers thinned out and the golfers were gone. The trouble was the fire. A fire meant smoke, and smoke meant daylight would give me away, so it had to be built and run after dark, which in late fall is not a hardship, because it was already dark by the time the evening sculpture class began. The evening class was always the best one. I scouted until I found the thickest cover, a little ravine, and I brought an axe and a shovel and cleared a pit the shape of the roof, a bit smaller, and dug it back into the side of the ravine. There were huge rocks set into the canyon edge to anchor the whole thing against.

The still itself I built in the sculpture workshop, in the open, because I had used copper pipe on enough projects by then that nobody thought to ask what all of it was for. I angled the copper roof so the condensation would climb to the peak. The internet was no help for this kind of thing back then, and even my parents’ Foxfire books, which should have known, read as too esoteric and seemed faintly disappointed in my rusty found-object approach. So I worked it out by hand. A rain gutter ran under the peak to catch what condensed and carry it, on a slight fall, into a steel funnel and down into copper tubing. I ran a great deal of tubing, many gauges, many directions, and a good share of it carried nothing at all. I have never been able to leave a surface plain, and by now you know that about me. I put an exercise bike in there too, a St. Vincent de Paul machine from probably 1985, set near the high crest of the shack, where you could pedal if you could stand to fold yourself under the roof without cracking your head.

Joey Weber helped me carry the supplies out and set the heavy pieces. Joey knew fire the way a kiln man knows fire, how to feed it and how to make the smoke go where you told it, which out there was the whole game. He helped me drag in small logs, split them, and drive them upright into the ground to make the perimeter, and we left the bigger found logs lying for people to sit on. All told it held about seven bodies, if they liked each other.

I invited ten, and only people I trusted, for reasons that do not need spelling out. Swimsuits were recommended, as they had been for the tank, and my guests wore them under their clothes and peeled down once the fire took. Davy and Norb kept their uniforms on. Davy wore what Davy always wore, a black long-sleeve and black jeans. Norb was in his plaid and suspenders. That is the image I have kept longest from the whole thing, the two of them sitting in a smoking shack in a ravine in the clothes they wore every other day of their lives, entirely at home, while the students steamed around them in swim trunks.

And there was, in the end, a liquid. The heat and the yeast and the sugar made something off the still, whatever it truly was, and I offered it up on the site not long after everyone had settled in. Nobody took me up on it. You cannot entirely blame them. The idea had been that you sit in a box you dug into the earth, you sweat, and the machine hands the sweat back to you in a cup, and nobody asks too closely whose body it came out of. On paper it is a sacrament. In a smoky shack, offered warm, it is a hard no. So the little run of distilled sweat sat there being declined, which was, in its way, the more honest outcome, a machine holding out your own body to you and you being free to refuse it. I had also brought a jar of moonshine, so there was something people would actually drink, and that is what got drunk. The small guest list was for obvious reasons.

Davy came, as I knew he would. I had built the piece more than half certain he would approve, and a man with his stories, jumping trains across the country as a young man, a grading rubric that actually included points for risk, was not going to walk out to a golf-course ravine after dark and then turn me in to campus security. He sat in the smoke in his black clothes, took the moonshine, passed on the sweat like everyone else, and a little while after climbing out he gave me my grade in a single letter. “A.” Norb, cut from the same cloth, came too, and said about as much.

That same fall I was cutting my childhood bike into a machine for leaving and welding a horse trough into a machine for hearing nothing. This was the third of them, and the only one you went into with your own body as the raw material. The other two were about a place I was losing. This one was about a man I wanted to be more like. He is eighty now. I still think the correct response to a legend is not to ask him whether it is true. It is to go into the woods and build him one back.

And then I left it there. I did not scrap this one the way I scrapped the others. I covered it over with branches and walked out and let the woods keep it, because when I was a boy I was forever finding things like that back in the trees, a fort, a lean-to, a ring of blackened stones, and claiming them for mine without ever knowing whose hands had left them. For once I wanted to be the hands on the other end. I went back and found it a few times over the years, still standing in the ravine under its green copper roof, and then a year came when I could not find it, and I have not since. Maybe a kid has it now.