FORTY-FOUR DAYS: THE GENIUS OF AUTUMN


My dear friends,

When you start with one hundred days, there is something fateful about going under fifty. You are no longer beginning. You are ending. Last week we had our first frost of the season. We now have forty-four days until the end of the year.

The sunny days and cool nights have nipped the trees here into such colors as I have never seen in these Tidewater latitudes. Our maples are often spectacular, most especially the sugar maple, which is here at the southern extremity of its range. But also our many beeches and sycamores and tulip trees have quickened to a feelingful golden amber. Most surprising this year have been the oaks, which normally hold tight to their russet leaves deep into our mild winters. This year, the oaks are inexplicably brilliant, ranging from deep red to bright orange to gold-streaked. It is as though the genius of the oak forest chose to put off his tattered coat and exalt for once in the achievement of old age—

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence.

We are working each day now on securing the trees and millwork for our frame. It is a sensitive business, and we are running just narrowly in advance of necessity. Still, we are to a person pretty touchy about trees. We are trying this way and that to avoid the indignity of industrial intrusion into our precious forests, on however small a scale. Trees must be taken, of course, even for a 14-foot-square frame. I suppose the surrender of even a single tree is suffered as an occasion for general mourning by we who live so largely estranged from the harmonies of life and death. "Old age hath yet his honour and his toil." We have our frame to build and our work to accomplish. But oh it is hard to take an old tree.

Today I attach the President's Report from our autumn board meeting, introducing the change on our website from a mission of "A Deeper Home" to "Build Your Own World." And I pause to remember a dear friend.

Yours always,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.


IMAGES
Den Belitsky: Autumn Forest Ancient Tree, Adobe 125285680

QUOTATIONS
”Soul clap its hands and sing. . . “ William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium" 1928


THE INNERMOST HOUSE FOUNDATION
PRESIDENT’S REPORT TO THE ADVISORS

October 25th, 2021

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. . . All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

This autumn’s report will be brief. Our ongoing weekly updates now serve to keep us all abreast of progress on our building project. Our curricular and teaching work at William & Mary is commenced. Pandemic restrictions continue to relax, and we begin to receive visitors again in Williamsburg. Our finances remain sound. Our volunteers increase. Our online courses and events expand. Our website continues to grow and diversify, so that we now represent a widely various resource to the like-minded everywhere.

BUILD YOUR OWN WORLD


Today I wish to discuss a single subject, the present motto and subtitle on our website: “Build Your Own World.” Formerly that subtitle was: “A Deeper Home,” also taken from Emerson. We certainly represent that deeper home still, and always shall. As director Chris Nelson remarked years ago, when he first heard the title “Innermost House,” he assumed we meant the soul. That is tellingly true, so that our Innermost House may be best understood to correspond with the Inner Citadel of Marcus Aurelius, the Divine Abode of Buddhism, the Innermost Room of the Gospels, the Interior Castle of St. Teresa, or indeed with the mythic Walden of Henry Thoreau. It is the condition of interiority itself, the microcosm of the world we call the soul.

The change from “A Deeper Home” to “Build Your Own World” represents a shift from being and seeking to building and communicating, now acted upon directly in the form of our place-renewal and curriculum-building projects. At the present and for the immediately foreseeable future, I expect to direct most of our energy and resources into those two parallel courses of material and intellectual development. Together, they constitute the foundation of a call to engagement, at once inwardly among our members, locally in the Tidewater community, and outwardly to our readers in the larger world.

The last two years of political upheaval, global health crisis, and violent cultural change—all digested through many searching conversations among directors, advisors, and friends—reinforce to me the necessity of a radical approach to our philanthropic mission. Radical, that is, in the original sense of “going to the root.” The very idea of philanthropia itself is radical. The word was coined into the Greek by Aeschylus in his Prometheus Bound to signify the consciousness-altering gift of fire to men. There perhaps was never a change in all human time on earth so radically consequential as the domestication of fire. A fire on the hearth, a fire in the mind, these are most radical of things. If we would serve the philanthropic purpose for which we were constituted five years ago, I do not think we can afford to be easily reconciled with the conventionalities of cultural fashion.

To “build your own world” is not an invitation to success in this world, but an exhortation to create another world entirely. Ordinarily, our ideas of success assume an inescapable ubiquity of the ordinary world we happen to occupy, whatever that world may be. But the Stoics made no such assumption. Nor did the Buddhist elders or Hebrew patriarchs or early Christians. Nor did the medieval monastics, or, for that matter, the American founders or the Concord transcendentalists.

They each in their own way sought to “build their own world,” both inwardly and outwardly, and the measure of their success is the extent to which we remember the worlds they made. When I was young, I supposed that self-reliance meant only a determined relying on one’s own efforts, and of course, in some essential way, that remains true. But last month I turned sixty-five and feel I have earned the right to be young no longer. Now I perceive that our efforts determine only a small part of our individual destinies, that the world we accept as all-that-is determines the rest, imperceptibly but fatefully. The Hiawathas and Tecumsehs of this life, the Eleanors and Elizabeths, the Leonardos and Newtons and Bachs, the Douglasses and Lincolns and Muirs and Kings are doubtless born into every age. It must be so. But the extent to which they are realized in their natures depends to a most unfashionable degree on the world they believe themselves to occupy. And today it seems we no longer believe we occupy individual souls in a world of bodily and spiritual nature.

Therefore, I do not think we can accomplish anything more important than modeling what it means to build your own world, particularly where that world is the Deeper Home of interiority. It is a radical recontextualization of individual effort that is required if our transcendental work is to be realized. That will mean uniting as a society of solitudes behind identifiable projects, now just within reach. It will mean building and documenting and communicating what it means to say, “the individual is the world.”

Michael Lorence, President


IN MEMORIAM

Three years ago this week we lost our dear friend and Foundation director, Clint Wilson. Clint passed away between San Francisco and Williamsburg traveling to our autumn board meeting. He believed in beautiful possibilities.

Many of you never had the chance to meet Clint. He was a marvelous person. Clear-sighted and large-souled, visionary and practical at once, he was as solid as a mountain. He was a model of a man, really. Yet he was among the most quietly modest people I have ever known. Over the course of a distinguished professional career, he served his beloved California Wine Country in many roles as business founder, civic leader, faithful friend, and champion of lost causes, at last leading in the successful effort to preserve over 100,000 acres of undeveloped land in wild Sonoma County.

Clint was among the very few who knew the original Innermost House Conversation. He believed in the possibility of our “dream too wild.” He passed out of this life in that belief. He was always traveling toward a better world.

FIFTY-ONE DAYS: A GEOMETRY OF SUNBEAMS

California House: afternoon light in northeast corner.

With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Intellect"

Dear friends,

There are now fifty-one days until the end of the year. Actually, fifty. My Monday report comes on a Tuesday this week, with my apologies. But I cry foul on account of a failing computer.

We never had a computer or smartphone before we emerged from Innermost House those years ago. The deeper you are anchored at the heart of the woods, the more perilous to life is the buoyancy of the Cloud. It is enough to positively give you the bends. I confess I have often felt since the dizziness of life up here in the sky.

Still, one adapts. I surrendered to yet another computer yesterday. Over the course of the last decade I have had a variety of hand-me-down laptops, often as gifts from a well-wisher. I use one until it dies of old age, at about six or seven years. Then I get another. The lifespan of high technology presents a counterpoint to the forest trees amongst which we formerly lived, which were still young at a century or two or older.

The Ghost in my late Machine left its body last week. This was an inconvenience. I am like everyone else, I have become dependent on this thing for my connection with the outside world. It is a great question whether we all communicate now by way of the Harmonies of the World, or whether our minds have simply evacuated our bodies.

Once again last week Jeff Klee and I were occupied with questions of dimension, most particularly, with the lingering question of overall framing size. We have wobbled a bit back and forth between external dimensions of 14 and 12 feet on a side, and between a square or rectangular configuration.

At 14 by 12 feet, the original California house was as large to the inch as we could possibly make it and still squeeze between the 150-year-old live oak before us and the curving foot of the steep hillside that rose behind us and on both sides. The only other prescribed dimensions were dictated by the position of the two chairs in relation to each other, and their relation to the books and the fire. Those dimensions had been developed over the course of two decades and twenty moves before Innermost House.

Thus, the house was designed by the tree and the hill and the chairs and the books and the fire. There were no building plans. We were entirely surprised when we reduced the house to plans after the fact to discover that it reproduced seven nearly perfect golden sections. The "golden section" is a principal unit in what is sometimes called "sacred geometry." The idea that certain geometrical patterns of nature and art conform to an underlying idea in the mind of God is an ancient one, most often associated with Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, and medieval Christianity in the West; and in the East, with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism; and with ancient Egypt and Islam.

The golden section or ratio has fascinated artists, architects, and mathematicians for millenia. Mathematically, it is intimately related to the endlessly fecund Fibonacci sequence, to the transcendental number , and to the archetypal conundrum of squaring the circle. Artistically, it is connected to everything from the architecture of Vitruvius and Alberti and Le Corbusier, to the proportions of book pages in medieval manuscripts, to the dodecahedrons of Leonardo to the Last Supper of Salvador Dali.

For our part, however, we cannot credit the emergence of all those golden sections in the California House to any conscious design. Unless, that is, one credits consciousness to trees and hillsides and fires. That is another question, of course, and one well worth pursuing. But not when I am already a day tardy with my update. The fact is, our golden proportions simply appeared after we were finished.

In like way, we have struggled with the overall dimensions of the Virginia House. Bodily proportions and historical precedent--along with the unaltered relation of chairs, books, and fire--determine that 12 feet on a side is the bare minimum dimension, and 14 feet the maximum required. We knew from long experience that 14 feet across the front leaves not an inch to spare when one considers the futon mat in the sleeping loft above, so the only question was the depth of the gable dimension. Last week we reexamined our possible uses and compared them with African and English precedent in the region, then decided for good on a 14-foot square.

We did so with a certain sense of loss, I allow, for the new shape compelled us to surrender those beautiful golden sections we had formerly stumbled into. Within a day of doing so, however, I realized that we had only exchanged one mathematical godsend for another, and that we had stumbled this time into three perfect squared circles in plan. A day after that I realized that the resulting taller roof had spontaneously generated four perfect golden sections in exterior elevation. Eureka!

I am not certain any of that would have happened if my computer had not died and I been reduced to my good old pencil and drawing pad. Perhaps there are Harmonies at work as much in our losses as in the triumphs of our lives.

Yours with pleasure,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
D. Lorence, IH I: Afternoon Light, NE Corner
Adobe Stock, chakisatelier: “Golden Section on Black”

QUOTATIONS
“With a geometry of sunbeams. . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Intellect"

FIFTY-EIGHT DAYS: THE PASSINGNESS OF THINGS


There is no great and no small / To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are; / And it cometh everywhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History"


Dear friends,

It is the first day of November and fifty-eight days to the end of the year. Autumn is arrived to Tidewater Virginia. The smell of wood smoke on the morning air, the low light and lengthening shadows, all stir the memory with what the Japanese call "the beautiful passingness of things."

Innermost House is a project of remembering, of re-collecting the pieces of a broken world into wholeness again. We seek to repair a lost oneness of earth and heaven in the reclaimed unity of the individual soul. Our native homeplace is the solitude of the woods. Our given work is the harvest of history. Our holiday season is one of thanksgiving.

Last week was our autumn board meeting. Our board is composed of chief executives who put brevity and to-the-pointness at a premium. Therefore our business meetings and reports never require more than two hours, and seldom that much. After that, the informal exploration of substantial subjects goes on for days, all in pursuit of "a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual." It never ends.

This past week we formally introduced our two new initiatives, the Virginia House Project and the American Wisdom Project. We explored the character of the work before us and the various audiences to which it is addressed. In order to understand those projects, it is necessary to view them in relation to our central focus on the solitary individual.

The foundations of human craft lie in the materials and forms of the natural landscape. Our work in the sphere of Nature is the restoration of health to our lands and waters by reanimating their origins in the Mythic Landscape. Our work in the sphere of Craft is the renewal of the handmade world by seeking out its Archetypal Forms as the "Innermost House." Our Virginia House Project seeks to shape one living whole of Nature and Craft together as the foundation of an individual Wisdom of Experience. We want to make the material world whole again to the individual.

As lately as the European Renaissance and the American Founding, the classical liberal arts were conceived as a path to revelation. Our work in the sphere of Thought is the restoration of wholeness to our conception of the educated individual. Our work in the sphere of Spirit is the restoration of a sense of holiness to the common events of our daily lives. Our American Wisdom Project seeks to form one living whole of Thought and Spirit in the form of a Wisdom of Knowledge. We want to make the world of thought holy again to the individual.

These renewed wholenesses--of experience and knowledge, earth and heaven, body and mind--form the right and left hemispheres of a restored individuality. Certainly our projects are absurdly modest beginnings against a mass culture of fragmentation, hapless and hopeless at once. But that work of restoration is our mission, nevertheless.

Perhaps it is a mission that can only be accomplished on a scale so modest as to admit of individual possibility. I never feel our individual solitudes so intensely as when we are in meeting together. Nor could I ever wish that we should be less solitary in the least. We are a society of solitudes gathered together the better to be alone and whole.

I am grateful to the sky that I have lived long enough to remember, to love the passingness of things. "All things fall and are built again," as the poet said. And the preserving of things and the restoring of things and the thanksgiving for things are all the work of remembering.

Yours with pleasure,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.




IMAGES
Salmon2: Foggy Morning, Adobe Stock 112710031
Den Belitsky: Autumn Forest Ancient Tree, Adobe Stock 125285680
AHEflin: Blue Ridge Mountains, Sunset from Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina, Adobe Stock 130951012

QUOTATIONS
”There is no great and no small. . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History”
”All things fall and are built again. . .” William Butler Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli”

SIXTY-FIVE DAYS: EXPERIMENTAL ARCHETYPOLOGY

The return to origins is a constant of human development, and in this matter architecture conforms to all other human activities. The primitive hut — the house of the first man — is therefore no incidental concern of theorists, no casual ingredient of myth or ritual. The return to origins always implies a rethinking of what you do customarily, an attempt to renew the validity of your everyday actions. . . In the present rethinking of why we build and what we build for, the primitive hut will, I suggest, retain its validity as a reminder of the original and therefore essential meaning of all building for people.

Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise


Dear friends,

Today it is a precipitous sixty-five days to the end of the year. The season slopes steeply away toward its conclusion, and still we have a very great deal to accomplish just to raise our modest frame. "The beginning is half of all." I keep reminding myself of that.

We sometimes speak of our building project as a comprehensive work of handcraft, which, of course, it is. Sometimes we speak of it as a complex work of art, and it is also that. In fact our project aims to bridge the modern distinction between craft and art, for we would represent an older tradition which largely precedes such distinctions. Nothing we undertake to build should be more than craft or less than art. Nothing we make should be otherwise than craft and art at once. The idea of "fine art" itself largely belongs to the category of latter-day things. In all our work at Innermost House, we are intent upon putting first things first.

Last Friday we gathered together the IH building team to discuss the drawings again. Architectural historian Jeff Klee, consulting architects Ed Pease and David Stemann, and master builder Garland Wood all were present. With Jeff operating the historical CAD drawings he developed last month, we proceeded to examine the entire frame, member by member from bottom to top: sill beams and floor joists, posts and studs and braces, plates and girts, rafters and collar ties and purlins. Every single timber was examined from a practical, permittable, historical, philosophical, environmental, and aesthetical point of view. Truly, there must be more thought per square inch imbedded in this structure than in the Library at Alexandria. Which reminds me to get fire insurance.

All our beginning dimensions were determined by Jeff to reflect strictly historical precedent. That historical model will remain an essential part of our record as an abiding point of reference. It is our way of always allowing Nature a place at the table. If we were building an 18th century building in the 18th century, or recreating such a building in an historical museum setting today, the work would end there. But we are doing something else, or something more. We accept that model as our starting point, then adapt it forward to meet minimum modern building code requirements, inward to gain access to the archetype that may in some sense be said to precede even the past. That archetype is referred to by architectural theorists as the "primitive hut."

Both the forward and the backward reach are necessary aspects of our mission. The forward connects us to the present-day world of outward circumstance, without judgement as better or worse. We simply are where we are, and that presentness is perhaps much more comprehensibly represented by modern building codes than by layer upon layer of intellectual or political fashions. And what if those codes are to some extent post-historical, or even post-natural? Then to that extent we live in a post-historical and post-natural world. It is better to know where one is, wherever that may be.

Our backward reach connects us first to the whole human past, to Nature and Place and Place-culture. Then, at some point in that reaching back, the past-in-time gives way to the inwardness-in-mind of myth, archetype, ideal, and spirit. That condition of inwardness, sought by saints and sages in all places and times, gives its name to our American Wisdom Tradition and to Innermost House itself. Both the forward and the backward, the outward and the inward, are poles of the cultural unity it is our mission to model and explore.

There is a term in the museum world called "experimental archaeology," which Jeff introduced to me a few years ago. It may be defined as "an academic field of study which attempts to generate and test archaeological hypotheses, usually by replicating the feasibility of ancient cultures performing various tasks or actions, based on archaeological source material such as ancient structures or artifacts." So, for instance, you might build a Viking longship based on archaeological evidence, then experimentally attempt to sail it across the north Atlantic to test the theory of Vinland settlement. But if you do, you better make sure you recreate a Leif Erikson to stand at the helm. Archaeology can get pretty dangerous sometimes.

In its less strictly academic form, experimental archaeology merges into what is sometimes called "living history," which is an educational presentation of past history as a living present, "that the future may learn from the past." The exhaustively researched restorations and reconstructions at Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown exemplify this educational process.

Beyond experimental archaeology, I should like to propose a new term for our practice at Innermost House: experimental archetypology. There is almost no aspect of our work, whether artistic, intellectual, or spiritual, which is not reducible to the experimental search for reanimated archetypes. Our Virginia Frame house is a past in search of a beginning, an old house in time in search of its original in the mind.

If our primitive hut does not require us to brave the north winds, we do have our methods. At the heart of our archetypology lies the practice of excavation-by-conversation. Yesterday morning it occurred to me that we might handle the roof boards and rafters in a particular way. I wrote to Jeff Klee, and in about ten minutes he answered me from the Richmond airport with a spontaneous dissertation on the subject. Then an hour later he wrote me from Logan in Boston, further expanding on his ideas. It is that way with so many of us. I have never known a deeper or livelier conversation.

Yours with pleasure,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.

IMAGES
Bjørn Christian Tørrissen: The Gokstad Ship in the purpose-built Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway.

QUOTATIONS
”The return to origins. . .’ Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise

SEVENTY-TWO DAYS: A CHAIR BY THE FIRE


The fire confined to a fire-place was no doubt for man the first object of reverie, the symbol of repose, the invitation to repose. One can hardly conceive of a philosophy of repose that would not include a reverie before a flaming log fire.

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire


Dear friends,

It is now seventy-two days to the end of the year. The days have turned cool and the nights cold. It is that season of life in the woods when the charcoal cooking fires of summer give way to wood fires and open flame.

While the design work on our Virginia Frame continues at Stemann Pease, this past week we turned our attention to the fireplace. The construction of the firebox and chimney is still a long ways off, for we intend to pause at the stage of the frame in order to learn all it has to teach us about the last three hundred years of cultural change. But before there were frames there was the fire, and we are now at a stage where important framing questions require us to understand what relationship to the fire we expect to take.

A frontier house like the California House is misunderstood as a small house, much more as a "tiny house." That view only makes sense when seen from long after the fact, when people have actually come to occupy large houses. A single-room frontier house is not a very small house, it is a very large fireplace. All its dimensions and shapes and relations derive directly from the fire. That is why the sizes and shapes of such dwellings are so extraordinarily consistent, from the African roundhouse to the Stonehenge hut to the pre-contact tipi to the settler's cabin. "Style" in such a house is almost entirely a function of local materials and climate and long tradition. All the rest is a place for fire.

What to do with the fire was the single most important question we had to answer in building the original incarnation of the Innermost House. There were a thousand questions, of course, and we had none of the wise advisors we have now to guide us. We proceeded of necessity by trial and error, and there were a very great many errors. In a way, we had to rehearse the whole history of building errors in lesser volume, and all our conundrums began with the fire.

When we first framed the California house, we had in mind to sit on the floor in the manner of the Japanese. Diana and I had reduced our material belongings at that point to a carry-on bag apiece, save a few boxes of books we had stored. We owned no furniture. We had been introduced to Japanese floor-sitting the year before as guests of the Zen priest and tea master, the Rev. Ulrich Haas, when we stayed in his Japanese home at the edge of the Black Forest in Germany. When I look back now, I think it was to the generous and sensitive hospitality of Ulrich that we owe much of the inspiration for Innermost House.

 
 

So we began on the floor around our would-be fire in California. Japanese hearths are set into the floor near the center of the room, as they were in American Indian tipis and wigwams and igloos. But we knew we would have our books at last, and that they would be set in a tall bookcase at the side of a room just two people deep by one person wide, too small for a fireplace anywhere but on the wall. So our first trial resulted in the migration of the central hearth to the side of the room, just as it had so migrated in medieval Europe.

With the frame for the hearth on one side and the frame for the bookcase on the other, we sat down on the makeshift floor and found the seven feet of bookcase looming over us like a giant. We could reach nothing but books on the bottom shelf. So we surrendered to the necessity of chairs, but only broad, low, flat, "deep-seating" chairs that effectively lifted the floor up with us and brought the books within reach. Then we found our proximity to the fire was compromised, so we lifted the hearth up to correspond with the chairs, thus regaining a floor-sitting relationship to the fire. That is why the chairs, hearth, and bookcase in the California House appear as you see them in the images.

Now we are rehearsing the same questions, but in relation to an older, more English fireplace. The California House was heir to examples at the edge of the western frontier in the late 19th century, where Spanish and English precedent met in a Mediterranean climate. The Virginia House is set in a quite different climate at a much earlier date in the 17th century, when the Tidewater region was last a frontier.

So I wrote to Ulrich, a Founding Advisor at Innermost House and dear friend of twenty years. Ulrich has enjoyed a most unusual career. Raised in the winemaking world of Germany, as a young man he found himself powerfully drawn to things Japanese. In the 1970s he managed to secure a place in the new "Midorikai" program in Kyoto, through which serious non-Japanese students were allowed to study the Way of Tea at the Urasenke Professional College of Chado. This was a dream almost too wild to dream in those days, and would shape the rest of Ulrich's life.

The founder of the Midorikai program was Sen Soshitsu XV, hereditary heir to the ancient tea lineage of Urasenke and a humanitarian of international renown. Ulrich completed his tea studies, was eventually ordained a Zen priest, and so became one the very first Westerners to carry the ancient Way of Tea to practitioners outside Japan. His entire career has been devoted to refining the practice of that most spiritual of arts.

Ulrich wrote back with all the sensitivity and good sense of a sage. He gently disabused me of any fantasies of floor-sitting again this time. As he said with a smile I could almost see, after all these many years on his knees, "I begin to love chairs." At Innermost House we are always driving toward simplicity, but only "for its elegancy, not for its austerity."

So it would appear we are back to some manner of low chair, possibly an outdoor chair as at the California house, or even some very plain wing-back chair, such as was used in the 18th century to focus the heat of the fire.

There are many more decisions still to be made about the fireplace, some of them quite subtle and difficult. But that one decision made will permit us to frame the future firebox now for breadth and height. Until next week, keep the home fires burning, dear friends.

Yours with pleasure,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.


IMAGES
D. Lorence, “IH II, Hearth Fire”
Adobe Stock, Japan Image: “A Shaft of Light”
Courtesy of Ulrich Haas

QUOTATIONS
”The fire confined to a fire-place. . .” Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire

SEVENTY-NINE DAYS: THE CUTTING EDGE


The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man


Dear friends,

Seventy-nine days to the end of the year. Somehow that sounds like a lot fewer days than the hundred with which we began three weeks ago. No doubt it is the multiplying number of questions that seem to spring up, Hydra-like, from every question answered.

But there is no peace from questions like the autumn woods. Last week Garland Wood and I visited the land, examined the building site, and scouted for trees. It was a beautiful, warm day in early fall. The ground was already thick with leaves, though the canopy above showed little sign of thinning toward winter. The music of the woods at this time of year is set in a minor key, yet there is an inexpressible lightness of being in that music. "In the woods we return to reason and faith," as Mr. Emerson said.

Garland Wood is an exceptional person who has enjoyed a dream career. He is now just a few months short of concluding an adventure of forty years at Colonial Williamsburg. We here all feel immensely honored that our Virginia House will be the last frame Garland cuts, hews, planes, and raises with his team of historic carpenters.

Garland holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the College of William & Mary, but considers that his real education began with his apprenticeship under the legendary woodwright Roy Underhill. Roy was the first master housewright at the Colonial Williamsburg reconstruction, and is the host of the long-running PBS television series, The Woodwright's Shop.

Today Garland trains and leads a crew of three journeyman and two apprentice carpenters in the country's preeminent program of historical reconstruction. All craftspeople in the Historic Trades at CW serve the traditional six or seven-year apprenticeship, with the additional requirement that they produce a summary work of practical scholarship on their special subject. Each craftsperson must be at once an artist, a scholar, and a teacher. More than twenty such trades are practiced at CW, many of them representing practical knowledge preserved nowhere else. It is an inexhaustibly interesting world to inhabit.

I have known Garland for twenty years. All the structures he and his crew have built over those years have been constructed purely in the 18th century manner, employing materials locally available during the period. In the knowledge of his hands is a living link between the days.

Nothing here at Colonial Williamsburg is ever merely built, but that it is made an occasion of engaging with the visiting public. Over the last few years, Garland and his fellow craftspeople have concentrated on rescuing facts from fictions, particularly concerning the role of women and Black craftspeople in the 18th century trades.

It turns out that 18th century Williamsburg is largely the artwork of highly skilled Black hands, both free and enslaved. Women practiced the building trades as well. The master of the leading building business of the middle 18th century was a woman. Our humble Virginia frame house will be built as a demonstration of how modestly most people actually lived in 17th and 18th century Virginia, and may choose to live still.

"The hand is the cutting edge of the mind," observed the historian Jacob Bronowski. You learn things with your hands that open up new paths of knowledge, and preserve that knowledge against prejudgment. It is not so easy to maintain a fantasy life while your roof is leaking, or to support an opinion when your floor is falling in. It is a purpose to which we are committed at Innermost House to preserve the hand in our ideals.

Where woodworkers are, the woods must be. The forest here is mostly about a century old, with older trees in the ravines. The canopy is perhaps a hundred feet high in most parts, principally composed of native oaks, beeches, tulip poplars, and southern yellow pines. The beeches are perhaps the most numerous in the mature forest, giving the woods that haunted feeling of forever-autumn. The tulip trees are particularly striking with their straight-as-an-arrow trunks, reaching heights that make them the tallest hardwood in the Eastern forest. There is also hickory, sycamore, sweetgum, locust, holly, ash and, nearer the water, cedar and cypress.

The stout ground sills of our frame will be of white oak, an exceptionally strong and rot-resistant hardwood. Our posts and beams, joists and rafters will be of shortleaf or loblolly pine. All will be native timber harvested from the land. One is accustomed to thinking of pine as a poor substitute for hardwood, but southern yellow pine has exceptional qualities, especially the heartwood. There are heart pine floors in Williamsburg over 300 years old and still perfectly sound.

Because the 17th century Virginia House was at least partially "earthfast," that is, built on wooden posts driven straight into the ground, our porch posts will be stripped trunks of local black locust, the strongest and most rot resistant tree native to North America. The main structure will stand on brick corner piers, as were used on the Virginia frame as it entered the 18th century.

It is satisfying to think that the last frame Garland will build with Colonial Williamsburg is the first American frame to emerge as independent of English precedent more than 350 years ago. We'll explore much more about what the Virginia House means in the weeks to come,

With pleasure,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.

EIGHTY-SIX DAYS: SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE


Dear friends,

We now have eighty-six days left until the end of the year. A long day, another week, and more progress to report.

Last week, our master builder Garland Wood and I met at the offices of Stemann Pease, the leading architectural firm here in Williamsburg, and our project architects. I have known David Stemann and Ed Pease for most of a decade, since we left the original California House. Ed is lately retired from a distinguished teaching career at William & Mary, where he hosted many Innermost House presentations over the years, including several in the beautiful Wren Great Hall, dating from 1695. Ed and David are now engaged in such a wide variety of projects that I wonder how they can possibly find time to volunteer their valuable work to Innermost House. I can only thank heaven that they do.

Among their many projects over just the past few years have been two that particularly touch us at Innermost House, one representing our outreach toward Society, the other our inreach toward Solitude. Both are aspects of our work that strives for a harmony of spirit between the community and the individual soul.

The first concerns an initiative here at William & Mary called the Lemon Project of Memorialization, which grew out of a course taught by Ed in partnership with his longtime friend, Dr. Jodie Allen, Assistant Professor of History here. The course was called "Memorializing the Enslaved of William & Mary," and attracted undergraduates, graduate students, professors, alumni, and members of the community. A design competition for a memorial structure was conceived, and the winner proved to be one of Ed's many past students who have gone on to practice architecture as a profession. The design is called "Hearth," and ground was broken on construction a few months ago.

The second is a project recently undertaken by Stemann Pease and colleagues to research and restore all the cabins in the state parks of Virginia, many of them dating from the golden age Civilian Conservation Corps era of the 1930s. This required David and Ed to visit, document, photograph, and redesign all the nearly 300 cabins across the state, giving them a uniquely thorough architectural knowledge of what the search for solitude has looked like in Virginia for most of the last century. Every one of those cabins shares much of its genetic material with Innermost House.

David and Ed are now in possession of Jeff Klee's beautiful drawings of the historic frame for our Virginia House. Jeff began by investigating all that is known about the earliest Virginia House structures still extant. Though such structures once numbered in the thousands here, very few are left, and none dating from before the early 18th century. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has led the country in early architectural research for nearly a century, and, through Jeff and Garland, we are the beneficiaries of that vast body of knowledge.

David and Ed have taken Jeff's historic frame and are now in the midst of putting it to a host of structural, legal, philosophical, and aesthetic questions. They are assisted in their work by Garland's rugged practicality, on the one hand, and by a computer aided design program (CAD), on the other.

I had never seen a CAD program in action before last week. It permits David and Ed to perform a wild series of perfectly miraculous manipulations of the design, stretching this here or shirking that there, measuring and calculating, introducing or removing elements, pulling out pieces altogether to examine their shape and dimensions, or positively turning the whole thing upside down. While such assistance does not permit us to answer any substantive questions conclusively, it makes the asking of them a world easier without falsifying the process. I have included another still image below.

The work that is occupying us now concerns the reconciliation of the Virginia House frame, which grew out of a complex of circumstances in early Virginia that would come to characterize much of the expanding nation, and an Innermost House function, which developed from the proportions of the individual human body. This is not so simple. Everything must fit together perfectly or the thing fails to function entirely. Just a few inches of reach in this direction or that, and the gears do not mesh. It is almost more like putting together a very large clock than it is like building a very small house. Stemann Pease, Architects and Clockmakers.

Jeff and Garland, Ed and David have worked together on many new and historic projects. As October unfolds and the work progresses, I'll try to give a picture of what such a harmony of past and present looks like.

Yours with pleasure,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.

NINETY-THREE DAYS: AN OPEN DOOR


Good day dear friends,

It is now ninety-three days until the end of the year, save Thanksgiving and Christmas. In one short week we have made a good deal of progress.

Last week I gave a brief account of our building path for this fall. The first step in that path lies in the expert care of Mr. Jeffrey Klee, architect and Founding Advisor to Innermost House. Jeff is presently Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at the College of William & Mary and consulting architectural historian, after seventeen years as Shirley and Richard Roberts Architectural Historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

That all sounds like an entry from LinkedIn. Which it is. But having Jeff Klee as your guide to the architecture of early Virginia is more like having John Ruskin as your guide to the Stones of Venice. It is a constantly enlightening experience. We could not possibly be more fortunate than to be working with Jeff in developing the historic foundations of our Virginia House plans.

Those historic plans are now nearly finished. They are being developed as virtual models that allow for 3-D manipulation and subsequent alteration as required by code. I include just one sample image above to give you an idea of what we are seeing. That drawing beautifully represents nearly all the identifying features of the 17th/18th century Virginia House that will be incorporated into our final design, reduced to the confirmation of an "Innermost House."

What the Virginia House was, and what an Innermost House is, are things we will discuss in coming weeks. For now, let me only say that both have to do with first things, with a dimension of experience which lies at an archaeological remove from us today, buried beneath our feet at an inaccessible depth of mind and history.

Once that depth is exposed, the great thing is to preserve its message to the world. An Innermost House is the sliver of a wedge with which we propose to keep a door open.

Yours with pleasure and thanks,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.

ONE HUNDRED DAYS


Good morning dear friends,

It is one hundred days this morning until the end of the year. After a five-year marathon of building preparations and land offers, frustrated permit applications and pandemics, we are now within sight of home.

Over the course of those five years, our online foundation has grown to be so large and various, one might ask why it is still so important to build a house? The answer is simple: to ground in material reality the transcendental values we would represent to the world, for nothing is so in need of realization as idealism. Without that one tiny woodland house we have no roots in the ground, and our "dream too wild" is vulnerable to blow away in the wind.

From this moment to the end of the year, it is a sprint to the finish. Our historic "Virginia frame" building plans are now in the expert hands of Jeff Klee, in consultation with our architects Ed Pease and David Stemann. Once Jeff is finished, the plans will be given over to Ed and David to be elaborated and reconciled with modern building requirements. Materials will be ordered according to takeoff specifications and delivered to Garland Wood and his team at Colonial Williamsburg. Garland's team will then build and discuss the classic frame before the viewing public. Once finished, the frame will be disassembled and transported to the site, where Garland and interested volunteers will reassemble it.

Our schedule at this point is exacting:

September: Plans with Jeff Klee
October: Plans with Stemann Pease; Site Corners Marked and Area Cleared
October 25: Last Date to Order Materials
November 24: Last Date for Delivery of Materials; Brick Foundation Piers Established
December 24: Last Date to Finish Frame
February: Move and Reassemble on Site

This and subsequent messages are being copied to officers, board members, selected advisors, and interested volunteers in order that you should have all the assistance available at your disposal. We'll be conferring regularly now, and a summary email message will be circulated every Monday through the end of the year.

Five years and nine land offers ago, this all looked as though it would be simple. If our experience has taught us anything, it is how labyrinthine the approach to simplicity can be in the present world. Now we are almost home.

Yours with pleasure and thanks,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.