bricoleur’s junk truck
A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur.
I put a divider up to store some bins of junk while the truck is on the move. Two panels I’d hid behind the bushes alongside the house and an old door leaning against the shed for years. Makes it look like I have a basement door inside the truck that leads to a magical storeroom in the transmission.
Glenn the educated carpenter tells me my work aesthetic is not so much construction, but bricolage.
“You take bits and pieces of what ever’s on hand to build something.”
Then, work boats on my dashboard, cigarette in his hand, he tells me about Claude Levi-Strauss’s seminal work of the early sixties, “The Savage Mind”. Claude was an ethnologist and an anthropologist and used bricolage* “to describe any spontaneous action, further extending this to include the characteristic patterns of mythological thought.” – wikipedia
It happens to be a book Google has scanned, so I read the first page, my small attempt to keep up with Glenn’s educational level. I pulled out this fun sentence and moved on to Craigslist’s free section:
“The proposition, “The bad man killed the poor child,” is rendered in Chinook: “The man’s badness killed the child’s poverty.”"
I’d like to speak English like a bricoleur as well, taking thought patterns of the Chinook Indians of Northwestern U.S. and applying them to my next conversation with Glenn. This is how we learn from each other simply through friendship. Go make a new friend today.
*”The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoleur – the core meaning in French being, “fiddle, tinker” and, by extension, “make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose)”; in contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and seen on large shed retail outlets all over France.” From wikipedia as well
