Article by Marian Dumitru

When you make a knife, you don’t just make a knife…
If you look at a playing card from the side, you don’t see much – a cardboard stripe. But if you look at it from the front, you’ll find it’s more than just a cardboard stripe… Unfortunately, we look at too many things from the side and thus miss their true beauty. Their true meaning. When looked at like this, from the side, the action of making a knife seems to be something trivial, worthless. After all, someone might say, you don’t do much: you take a piece of iron and sharpen it. Then I cut stuff with it… But whoever says that only sees the narrow cardboard stripe.Making a knife is more than just the action of making something which can cut. “Homo faber” is not a man who makes, but a creative man. And creation is not a mere “making”.

To make a knife is to cross a road, to embark on a journey. A journey inside you. This trip is different for every master, more than that, it’s different for every knife you work on.

It’s an art. And as with any kind of art, the creative process involves meditation. For some it can be like a prayer, a purifying catharsis, for others the birth of a knife can be like a retreat in itself, like a closing in an intimate parenthesis of the universe.

Others will feel it as the discovery of a sacred ritual, long forgotten, once known…

A single detail remains constant regardless of the master, regardless of the knife: to make a knife means to learn patience. It can’t be made the way you eat a loaf of bread.

It takes time. And some effort.

We live in a fast-life world. We eat fast food, we aspire to a rapid career ascent, we want to f…k on the first date, we are interested in “how fast a fool’s car can go”, everything must be fast, fast, in order to manage to die as fast and insignificant…

Fast life, short life, hmmm?

When you make a knife, it’s like you’re going to curl up in the middle of the subway, without hearing them, without feeling them rushing past you. Because, in fact, your time passes differently from their time: they and with them the whole world will seem to stand still.

When you make a knife, it’s like walking on the side of a highway passing through a flowering rape chain.

Making a knife is a kind of “Ptui!” said to the hurried world.

They say that before you die your whole life is going to pass before your eyes.

Be a smart boy and try not to wait for the moments of death to meditate a little on your life…
 
The end.

P.S. I forgot to tell you: every playing card has not just one face, but two…