SOME SORT OF VAGUE DEIST

This phrase has floated around in my brain for probably 30-40 years.  In some novel, possibly by Iris Murdoch, a character who fancies himself a religious philosopher says he could never love a woman who was “some sort of vague Deist.”

To which I say: “Honey, you don’t know what you’re missing.”

I was raised a Catholic.  My father’s family was Catholic, as far back as we knew, which was about four generations.  (I have a strong suspicion that there was a forced conversion from Judaism somewhere back in Prussia.)  Mom wasn’t Catholic.  She grew up more or less protestant and described herself as Heathen, but she must have been a fundamentalist Heathen.  All the strictures of a Bible-thumper, and no mercy whatsoever.

Being Catholic meant catechism twice a week, confession once a month (a terrified goody-goody, I used to have to make stuff up) and kneeling on a hard tile floor in the back of the church every Sunday because my father could never get us there on time. Typical of many Catholics, I learned nothing about the Bible. I tried reading the King James version, but found it impenetrable. A childhood friend, who burned from a young age to be a hellfire preacher, explained to me that Catholics used a Douay Bible. Aha! The bible of my people! I asked for one for a confirmation present. 

No help at all. Douay was as much word salad as King James.

At 21, I fell in love with a Jewish man, married him, and converted. Not an easy process. You have to ask three times before a Rabbi will consent to tutor you. Unlike Christians, Jews make you work for it.  I studied with the Rabbi for about six months.  He was intelligent, humorous, and generous with his time.  I also learned a lot more about Christianity while studying Judaism than I’d ever learned in catechism.

My husband’s family was largely secular, but I loved the holiday celebrations in their home.  I learned the prayers and I did my part.  I was content.  But as the marriage came apart, so did my commitment to the religion.

I was becoming a psychotherapist at the time, of the transpersonal persuasion. Transpersonal therapy has acquired a reputation for using mind-expanding drugs, but it’s actually about adding “spirit” to the humanist picture of the human being.  During grad school, I explored Buddhism, Vendanta, neo-paganism,  Episcopaganism, Wicca, you name it. 

When my kids entered Waldorf School, I found Anthroposophy, a branch of esoteric Christian philosophy that incorporates many religious traditions rather than “othering” them. My hunch is that it’s what Jesus originally had in mind. I like to describe it as Christianity from Mars.

But I have a disinclination for detail, midrash, and parsing religious texts.  My basic spiritual orientation is best described by the ancient idea described by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy—the place where all religions meet.  When you read something by Gandhi, or the Dalai Lama, or Matthew Fox, or Anne Lamott, and your heart goes, “Yes. And yes, and yes, and yes,” you have stumbled on the perennial philosophy.

Which makes me some sort of vague Deist, I’m guessing.

I know I’m not the only religious dilettante out there.  (Please?) I would love to hear about your spiritual journeying!

PIECEWORK

Tomorrow is the last day of my show at the tiny Loggia Gallery of the Berkeley City Club.  I will take down my collages, pile them into the trunk of my car, and cart them home to hang on the walls of my staircase while I ponder whether to offer them somewhere else. 

I discovered collage through the work of Nick Bantock, author of Griffin & Sabine (often described as “The Jolly Postman for adults") and a large number of other beautiful books.  Griffin & Sabine brought me skidding to a stop when I saw it in a carousel at an unfamiliar library one day. They were ready to close, but I literally refused to leave until I’d acquired a library card so I could take the book home with me.

Years later, I started collaging myself, almost unknowingly.  Certain pretty pieces of paper and other materials just seemed to demand to be glued down together on a piece of paper.  After I’d done this a few times, I started messing some paint into the mix, and a little glitter (with me, there’s always a little glitter sooner or later) and some other stuff.  And a few years ago, I was lucky enough to study a bit with Nick Bantock at his studio on Salt Spring Island.  Might have been the four happiest days of my life.

Collage has always seemed an essentially feminine art form to me. Assembled from scraps of paper and other materials, a collage creates something new from pieces of old throwaway stuff, in much the same way women have made quilts for hundreds of years, or their children’s clothes, or decorated objects with found bits of shell, mirror, beach glass.

Piecework—sewing work done in the home and paid by the piece—was traditionally women’s work. This is also how most women tend to do their personal work: in the pieces of time we tuck in around the corners of our regular work. We live in a time where women piece new lives together out of the shards and remnants of old lives and old roles as a matter of course. My collages are, in part, an exploration of that process.  They are also meant to be pure pleasure—bits of fun.

I’ve shown my work a few times, here and there, but never been very serious about it.  After all, it’s just fun, right?  Or is it a little more than that?

Maybe I’ll call the ArtBeat Salon on Solano…they have a nice gallery space.  Who knows? They might like some collages on those lovely brick walls.

SPARKLES

The little country school I attended had a carnival every December.  The highlight, for me, was the White Elephant Booth.  Filled with everybody’s leftovers, it called to me in siren tones.

They had jewelry there.

I’m sure there were other useful wares as well, but I saw only the sparkles.  Every year, as soon as I spotted the table, my eyes glittered as brightly as did those castoff pieces from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. And as far as I was concerned, the sparklier, the better.  I still have a few of the treasures I picked up there in the 1960s, and I still wear them!

I collected  jewelry all through my teens and twenties, and I was given some genuine treasures by older family members and their friends.  Then one day I came home to a burgled house.  Most of my jewelry was gone. I was heartbroken.

When I claimed the losses with my insurance company, I learned a valuable, if tardy lesson.  You have to insure your jewelry separately.  I received only $500, the limit, for jewelry easily worth ten times that.  So of course, I took the 500, and I started over. 

One of the great things about being a dilettante: you get used to starting over. 

This time, I not only collected, I started making jewelry, becoming a regular at places like Baubles and Beads in Berkeley.  Another favorite these days is Beyond Beads on Howard in San Francisco.  Lots of wonderful chains & findings there.

My collection has become more focused. I started patronizing some wonderful local designers—especially the very gifted Kathryne Cassis, whose Dominion of Light Gallery you MUST see on Pinterest.  My good friend (and longtime partner in enthusiasms) Beverly collects vintage costume jewelry.  She taught me a lot.  And she gifted me with several pieces, including a pair of Miriam Haskell earrings.  Silver-grey sparkly flowers. Oh, Lordy. Like giving crack to a junkie.

My first love is rhinestones.  As far as sparkle goes, they really pack a punch. Haskell designed hundreds of pieces in gold, pearl, and rhinestone.  Heaven.  Go look at Ruby Lane or Etsy and search for Haskell-pearl-rhinestone and see if you don’t agree.  The rub is, they’ve become extremely expensive.  Stuff I could have had for a quarter and a little luck at the White Elephant Booth goes for hundreds.

So I’ve started making faux Haskells. My pearl-and-rhinestone leaf pin, crafted on the bones of a $2 find at the Alameda Antiques Fair (which we oldtimers still call the Alameda Flea Market) was quite satisfactory, so I plunged in. The first earring is finished. Pearls and rhinestones on a gold flower form. LOVE IT!

The second will be harder.  It always is.  Around here, we call the second earring The Dilettante’s Challenge. 

“Another one?  The same as the first?  Really??”

AAAANNNDDD~ WE’RE BACK.

Among all my many interests, one of the few things I have never been interested in (along with sports) would be the mysterious inner workings of the computer.  Though I love tools of all kinds, the computer is one that I don’t really want to understand.  I want it to just work, dammit.

And so of course, three days into writing a blog, I lose my internet.  For a week.  Zip, zilch, nada.

Three strong men came to fix my system; three strong men failed.  Thank God for my-son-the-computer-genius, who came over, on his day off from fixing computers no less, and tinkered with it until he found the culprits. A wire with an incompetent head, among other stuff, and so he fixed the thing.  That kid has a big red S on his chest, as far as I’m concerned.

Speaking of tools, one of the tools that most fascinated me when I was very young was the needle and thread.  I remember watching my grandmother, dear Gramma Iney, doing the mending.  That motion—pulling the needle through the cloth, far up and to the right of her body, the little twist of the wrist that made it tight and ensured the thread didn’t tangle—the entire process captivated me.  When she finished, I’d take the needle and thread and “sew,” stitching through paper towels, over and over, just to be able to copy that motion. It was completely satisfying.

In those days, almost all women sewed.  I had many lovely clothes and costumes courtesy of my mother and grandmothers.  I learned the basics of sewing in 4-H Club.  I made a few things, then lost interest until college when my friend Bev taught me approximately nine million embroidery stitches on the bank of a lakeside park one sunny day.  Embroidery became my relief from studying, and rapidly escalated to an obsession. Briefly.

Throughout the years, I sewed curtains, slipcovers, and baby clothes.  But, since I am so  extremely distractible, I have done very little sewing in the last fifteen years.   

And then last December, the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article entitled, “A Sew-Sew Approach.”  It starts:

“First you make skirts. Twenty-three skirts. Then you move on to bodices, darts, necklines, collars, sleeves, pockets and finally, tailored pants and jeans. You'll make 130 muslin prototypes and about 10 to 15 garments in fabric - plus an eight-piece ready-to-wear collection. And that's just for starters at San Francisco's toughest fashion school.

Oh dear.  I’m already hooked.  Apparel Arts wants to “bring back San Francisco's once-proud apparel production reputation now lost to fast fashion and offshore manufacturing. And pattern making is the core.”

Is there anything more appealing than becoming absolutely expert at a practical skill? Especially if you love clothing, and have definite, specific ideas about what clothes you want to wear, even though they don’t seem to exist anywhere??  COME TO MAMA.

The course is not just rigorous, it’s expensive.  Drat.  Can I justify the $? Well, let’s see; I could start by clearing off my art table; it would convert to a sewing table pretty easily; then I could find a pattern  approximating the kind of thing I like, make up a muslin version to adjust it to my needs…and see whether I can sustain interest long enough to finish an actual garment.

COFFEE WITH A MASTER PALMIST

Yesterday I was lucky enough to share a couple of hours with Richard Unger, who is a) one of the smartest people I’ve ever met—and  I tend to hang with very, very smart people—and b) more fun than a barrel of monkeys. 

Richard is responsible for teaching me the skill that has given me the independence to further my dilettantism, though I admit it has also threatened my commitment to dabbling because it is so completely fascinating.  He is not just a hand analyst, he is THE hand analyst.  A former investment counselor, he taught himself palmistry as a young man.

 A short discourse on palmistry is necessary here!  Palmistry is distinct from fortunetelling.  Fortunetellers sometimes use palmistry as a tool for divination, just like they use crystals, tarot cards, goat entrails, and God knows what else. I offer no opinions on the validity of what they do; like every profession, there is, I assume, a mixed bag of practitioners out there.

But palmistry is actually a somatic method of character and personality assessment.  When I was a psychotherapist, assessment was my greatest love.  I learned as many systems of assessment as I could find. I played with the DSM workbook the way other people do crossword puzzles.  Richard’s system of hand analysis is the best assessment system I have ever seen. One of the greatest things about it is that it works for everybody. And it is the only system I’ve seen that doesn’t overtly or covertly (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Enneagram) pathologize people, but instead gives them a useful, positive perspective from which to accept themselves and keep on growing.

Possessed of a sharp, curious, analytic mind, Richard saw many shortcomings in the various schools of traditional palmistry, so he then went on to create his own system!  One of the unique things about Richard’s brand of hand analysis is that it rests on the secrets of identity encoded in our fingerprints. 

As usual, he was brimming with projects: a San Francisco high school wants him to do hand analysis with interested students; he’s getting ready to teach a year-long master class in Bellingham, Washington; he will fly to Switzerland for ongoing work with the clients of several psychiatrists in Zurich.  And always, always, he’s looking for ways to bring his work to the attention of larger numbers of mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists here in the United States.

One of his persistent dreams is to argue with every single faculty psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.  Richard LOVES to argue.  He argues intelligently, enthusiastically—even joyously.  Because his mind is so lively and agile, he makes his points clearly and often humorously, but the remarkable thing is that he’s so quick to grasp your counter-argument that he can instantaneously analyze it, break it down into components he can agree and disagree with, and thus move the argument into new, original research on the spot.  Arguing with Richard is like Mr. Toad’s wild ride—terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

Richard always serves up a heady brew of new possibilities.  I came away from our coffee date with my head swirling with them. Perhaps I will do some tutoring for him, maybe teach one of his students some of the marketing tools I’ve learned for our unusual profession; I might work with him on the high school project.  And then there’s that film documentary that is being made about us: UNTAPPED, Secrets of the Hand, which has been on the verge of completion for so long—I hear it’s alllllmost finished…Red Carpet, here we come! 

And as always, I drove away from our meeting feeling immense gratitude to Richard Unger for his intelligence, his humor, his skill, and his immense generosity in teaching me to do what I do.