PARACORD SHAKER RAIL
Our ancestors made cordage from an array of natural materials: animal hides, vegetable fibers from cattails, dogbane, nettles, flax, yucca, hemp, sanseviera, and many others. All those material options required persistence of attention and labor, skill of hand and eye. Today cordage is cheap and plentiful. Industrial machinery pumps out millions of miles of all kinds of cordage every year—polymer wrapped flexible conduits for electricity and information carried on light, steel winch cables, heavy rope, cutesy twines, and paracord.
Paracord is one of those obvious and dull portmanteaus and the product itself was initially used (as you might expect) for parachute suspension lines. The original MIL-SPEC called for Nylon sheathing of the kernmantle rope, but today it’s fairly common to find polyester used instead. In both cases, the fact that the cordage is composed of thermoplastic fibers means you can melt a frayed end into a slightly crusty cauterized stump rather than tying it off with skills first invented and honed by ancients. Other modern miracles like four-bucker steel blades and cheap butane lighters are good companions for paracord. It’s a topic for another time maybe, but the low-cost, widely available wonders have their roots in military production, like paracord has its in war. You can think of it like the discipline of combat drilling brought to bear on labor and material organization, maybe not dissimilar from how deep religious conviction fueled architectural and artistic achievements, each with their own technological innovation needs. Some faiths use baroque ornament to represent the realm of spirit, others scorn anything but stark minimalism, distrusting image, rejecting material opulence.
The Shakers believed in order, hard work, cleanliness, and organization among other things. They developed the Shaker rail and peg system to reflect and reinforce this: a strip of wood placed up the wall, studded with wooden pegs every six inches. These rails facilitated storage as well as easy cleaning, allowing objects to be kept there or placed temporarily while floors were swept free of dust and dirt, returning the earth to the earth, to the outside.
"Shaker objects are also unusually repetitive: Kirk calls these Shaker formats “tight grids,” and they infect everything the Shakers made, a last long lingering echo of Mother Ann’s hatred of the collapsed and squalid mess of the one-room home. Everything in the Shaker world, from brooms to villages, is laid out in rows, grids, tightly packaged and formatted. (The insistence on the villages’ grid planning was even formalized in the Shakers’ “Millennial Laws” of 1821.) The grid plan of a Shaker village is unlike the seemingly similar neoclassical grid plan of, say, Quaker Philadelphia, where the regular spacing allows a rational calm to fall over the streets and squares. The plans for Shaker villages are, instead, tight and surprisingly asymmetrical, with long straight main streets and side streets that jog off abruptly at odd intersections; like Shaker furniture, Shaker plans can accept asymmetry if it is dictated by practicality. Shaker plans look less like something drawn up in an Enlightenment encyclopedia than like something sketched by a seer with an Etch A Sketch, lines sprouting and kicking out at odd but angular angles.
-The Shining Tree of Life, The New Yorker
We tend to move around more, from city to city, from a week long work trip and back and then a week long vacation. Spending weekends and then weeknights at our partner’s place. Our nests more nomadic. Technology has changed, maybe God feels further away and the debris of the material world closer, too abundant.
Still, tidiness has its virtues.
Paracord Shaker Rail (PSR) is designed as a flexible, extensible, modular system for keeping small devices and objects up and away from surfaces. The silpod module can hold tiny screws or pills when the pain creeps in, a small mirror for reflecting the dawn and golden hours, seeing if you have something in your eye or peering into one of your own soul windows. A basic hanger module for clipping and unclipping any number of cheaply carabiner’d goods and bits of gear.
"Gear for throwing in your bag as you run to catch the bus. To go to the one good gallery left you know of, that's probably soon closing down for good. To go dancing after in the basement of an old ELKS lodge, a space that’s absorbed the spirit and matter of so much sweat and spilled drink exuberance, stained by collective hours lived and lusts pursed. The exuberance of a dog chasing a car and catching it. What now, what now, where's afters"
In the meantime: it’s always good to know your way around at least a few knots.
See you around.