My favorite tool is a tool I rarely ever have the opportunity to use. Because it's beautiful, it sits on my desk, rather than being jostled about in my bag or buried with the ugly tools that fill my toolbox. I feel safe leaving it there because the chance to use it would be an event, and I could hardly forget to take it with me. Calling it a tool seems strange, since you have to let it go for it to work. I suppose its the equivalent of a sailor's compass. Both are indicators of great cosmic forces, and the operator only need to watch and reckon.
Mine is a cone of polished brass with a black screw-on tip, of steel, I'm guessing, which resembles a tiny warhead. While writing e-mails I pick it up to feel it's weight and admire it's Brancusi-like finish. I imagine removing it from it's velvet-lined mahogany box, deftly attaching it's string, lifting it up for the congregation to see, mumbling an incantation and nodding while I climb the Sacred Ladder. When suspended from a roof-beam or some fixed point, it dances and spins a little in ever smaller circles until it comes to rest, pointing to the center of the earth. It does look missile or bullet-like and might serve, in a pinch, as some kind improvised weapon, but it's destiny is at the end of a piece of string, a gravity kite. I've seen ugly ones, which baffles me, because, honestly, a rock on a string will do just as well most of the time, so if you've made the effort to give it form, how can you accept anything less than a little sculpture.
They were supposedly in use in Ancient Egypt, pointing opposite the Pyramids, and I'm guessing the Egyptians held them in equally high esteem. They take their name from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. I haven't seen what one used for the Dome of St. Peter's would have looked like, but I'm sure it was well proportioned, and maybe as a nod to Peter's former occupation, shaped like one of those little lead weights for fishing line.
I don't know if the name was just pulled out of a hat or had some symbolic significance, but in 1957, the U.S. conducted a series of nuclear tests in the Nevada desert, dubbed Operation Plumbbob. I think at least one bomb was suspended plumbbob-like from a large balloon for detonation, but I think the name was chosen as a reference to measuring or determining. Like any good series of Cold-War era experiments, there were plenty of explosions, blimps, and pigs in asbestos suits. Plumb those mysteries. Knowledge of that event colors my feelings about my plumbbob, sign-post to the Center of the Earth, adding a wee bit of menace to it's shape.
