Dear Journal,
I have worked from dawn until well after dusk for the past two weeks, and I believe I have now re-hardened all of the dishes and cookware in Bois-de-Bas. Also, I have collected nearly all of the warming blocks; stack upon stack of them clutter the back corner of our store room, each stack tied together with twine and carefully labeled. I have room for them all only because supplies are so low after the winter.
The interval was not without its points of interest, though I have been unable to record them until now. Mme. Coterie, about whom the less said the better, tried to trick me into hardening an old set of plates that had never before appeared in my shop. I did so, and then charged her the normal rate for them. She declined to pay, and when I insisted, she repined, she moaned, she bewailed, she threw herself on my mercy, and my mercy not availing she grew fierce, and cast doubt on my parentage. I threw her over to the mercy of my wife, who has none in such cases, and having paid she departed, grumbling.
M. Gascon, on the other hand, simply refused to hand over his warming blocks. He has pains in his joints, he told me, and needs the warmth all the year round. In fact, he thanked me over and over again for the invention, for he says he was snugger this winter than in any of the past ten years! He is a widower, and takes his meals with the family next door, and so perhaps it will do no harm to let him keep them.
As for me, my life has been too effortful for me to forward my study of effort, as I call it; but though it is tedious and tiring, it takes not much thought to harden a shipload of plates, and so I have had much time for reflection as I worked.
I do not know what effort is, but I plainly see that it is part of the world, and is all around us. If I were to travel to a new land where no man has ever been, and there form a warming block, I have no doubt that the warming block would warm me up nicely. I now see that it would do so by drawing effort from my immediate vicinity.
I also see that hardened objects somehow concentrate effort, making it available for use by formed objects such as warming blocks. Putting the two in proximity establishes a flow of effort from one to the other. The plate or the pot concentrates the effort, and the block somehow receives it, uses it, and then—what? Disperses it? It is gone, in any event; it does not return to the concentrator.
Why doesn't the warming block simply draw effort from the area around it once the effort concentrated by the hardened pot is gone? Why does it proceed to consume the pot itself? And where does the dispersed effort go?
The good news is that it does seem that proximity is required: I spoke with Marc today, and he had indeed been keeping his sky-sled in the shed for his oxen, which he had been warming with my warming blocks.
A warming block can function indefinitely if there are no hardened goods nearby; this I believe. Hardened goods remain hardened indefinitely if there are nothing draining the effort from them; this I know for a fact for at home in Yorke we have dishware that was hardened by my great-great-grandfather. Bring them together, and the one devours the other.
And yet, the great sky-ships, and even the sloops we took from the Provençese in the war, combine hardened elements with motivating elements, and yet these do not devour each other. Are motivating elements somehow different than warming ones? It seems not, or Marc's sky-sled would not have crashed. Both must disperse concentrated effort.
This gives me hope: there is a way to make the two things work together. Perhaps now that I have dealt with all of the dishware in Bois-de-Bas I will have time to try a few things.
____
photo credit: michaelmueller410 Waves via photopin (license)
Zymurgia House 