“There is a long tradition of seeing in craft a meditative state of “no-mind,” as if the artisan were a hollow vessel into which ancient skills flowed, only to be poured out anew. Walter Benjamin envisioned the craftsman this way and placed him at the center of oral tradition on that basis. Storytelling is “an artisan form of communication,” as he put it; a weaver silently working in the workshop, plying a shuttle back and forth, seemed to Benjamin a perfect receptacle for ancient narratives: “The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm to work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.”

Perpetual Motion by Glenn Adamson from Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft