CHUTNEY

When I turned 70, I cried for a year.  Finally I got to be 71and felt much better.

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“It is essential that we be convinced of the goodness of human nature and we must act as though people are good.”  John Cage

(Who in hell is John Cage anyway? But I like this quote…especially now.) 

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RISK DELIGHT!

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Andy Goldsworthy and Patrick Dougherty: both are artists whose art is a “celebration of human collaboration with nature.” I don’t know where that quote came from but I’ve used it a few times. It’s so grounded! 

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“Sacred Spaces” is a term hardly ever used by us secular folks but it has popped before my face in unlikely ways during the past week and so I must pay attention. 

First, like always, I look up definitions and they’re a little elastic. One source says that a sacred space must be”… DEFINED - distinguished from other spaces - dedicated to a sacred (holy) purpose; a place for reverence.”  Hmmmm…this sounds like a platform for building yet another church/temple/cathedral/mosque with tag line “so send us your $$$.” Still, I suppose that culturally, societies must have such labels.

Joseph Campbell wrote that everyone should have a personal space where time, telephone, family and friends can be ignored - a place for meditation where ideas can hatch and thoughts can rule uncensored, his version of a sacred space. He called this your “bliss station.” 

Edmund DeWaal is an artist and writer.  He works with porcelain and makes pure white, imperfect objects - plates, vases, bowls.  Somehow he marries the technical properties of porcelain object making with the imperfect nature of nature itself; he celebrates the wabi sabi of art. After throwing one vase he said “It looks like a kid could have made it - it’s that good.”

(Are we back to Goldsworthy and Doughtery and that celebration of nature thing?)

Anyway, in a really good interview with DeWaal published in the New York Times Magazine (November, 2015), DeWaal talks about looking at a vessel (bowl or vase or something) and crawling - metaphorically -  inside to find  a sacred space.  

I am left wondering where my bliss station is and begin a mental list of possibilities:  the garden, my tiny desk, once upon a time the workshop but not so much now. 

Guess what? It doesn’t matter!  Like a snail, I think we carry our bliss station on our backs. It surrounds us like flannel pajamas, our personal cathedral. At any instant, we can be brought to our knees by some ridiculous outburst of nature, or insanely beautiful piece of art, literature, music. I just mostly need to stop crying and pay attention. 

CHUTNEY:

I chop up whatever fruit I happen to have (apples, pears, peaches - 3 -5 )

Sautee a little minced garlic and chopped onion in olive oil (I start EVERYTHING this way)

Put in the fruit and throw in handfuls of raisins, dried cranberry, chopped walnuts

Balsamic vinegar….honey…..a little sugar…lots of cinnamon…curry….nutmeg….(I’m not too specific about amounts)

Cook the whole mess together (fruit should be soft) and serve with any meat. Bonus:  It makes your whole house smell good AND it convinces people that you really can cook!

Happy Holidays!

A SITE TO BEHOLD

Thanksgiving has ended for another year and I have some of Aunt Glenn’s cranberry relish left over. It’s in two small containers hidden in the refrigerator.  Aunt Glenn’s cranberry relish marks the beginning of the Holiday Season in our household and when it’s gone, I miss her all over again. Isn’t that odd? For all the years that we exchanged Christmas gifts, all the times we met half way for picnics, the truck loads of ham sandwiches shared on week end afternoons (and the Manhattans served - “two cherries please” ), it’s the cranberry relish that brings her back to me full-blown and re-opens the wound left when she died. 

I’ve shared the cranberry relish recipe with any number of people and I make sure it’s always titled “Aunt Glenn’s Cranberry Relish.” Is this “ever lasting life?” Maybe. I can’t think of anything much better.

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Dedication of “A Site To Behold,” the twig sculpture built in Hillsborough, North Carolina by artist Patrick Doughtery with help from volunteers (including Chip and me!) was November 21.  I did not attend but enjoy watching the video of same title (go to youtube to view).

The question I get asked about the project:  how did I happen to know about it and become an afternoon volunteer?  Simple…the power of the internet.

We planned a trip to Beaufort, SOUTH Carolina, to tour Auldbrass, the Frank Lloyd Wright designed estate and so I cruised around web sites looking for “other events of interest” during the week or so we planned to be down south.  Up popped the project listed on the Hillsborough Arts Council web site with a call for donations and volunteers. I sent in a small check and showed up with Chip, clippers and garden gloves for a half day’s work mid-way into the two week construction.

By the time we arrived, mountains of limbs and cut saplings were piled around a clearing in the wooded park just off a public boardwalk. The day before, using augers, 2 ft. deep holes were dug as “footers” for bundles of larger structural uprights and kept erect by tamping gravel around the bases of each 20 ft. tall bundle.

As Chip and I stripped leaves off more limbs, Doughtery and others were putting in place five platforms held up by scaffolding. These were strategically placed to give him and other “weavers” access to the structure.

Doughtery works constantly himself and directs construction in a soft southern voice. He’s a tall, white haired man who looks mostly like an outdoors’ builder.  He brought to this project one salaried assistant, a woman probably in her late-20s. All other workers - about fifteen the day we worked - were volunteers. The sculpture is in a very public spot; the park is smack in the middle of small Hillsborough and foot traffic is constant on the meandering boardwalk that passes not 20 feet from the base of the twig building. 

It’s easy to write about this art work, it’s poetry and relevance to the world in which we live. It’s appeal bridges the youngest explorers running through and around the giant “birds’ nests” to the more intellectual who see the work as commentary on the transitory nature of the environment. Some of us find ourselves more philosophical these days and rejoice in human collaboration with nature. Count me among them....all!

PLACEMAKING

Bynum, North Carolina cannot be called a city - hardly even a town! Bynum is about 10 miles south of Chapel Hill.  There’s a church in Bynum and a general store. The population?  About 300.  It’s where Clyde Jones lives.

Clyde is 73 years old and worked in a saw mill which accounts for his missing finger.  In his spare time he began constructing animals - “critters” he calls them - out of post sized logs. These logs are not whittled, chain sawed or otherwise messed with. They are quickly nailed together into big-eared dogs, long-necked giraffes and strange composite alien animals - a human once in awhile.  Some have baseball eyes and plastic flower noses and others, real horse saddles or any part thereof.  All are painted and most are dusted in glitter.  Clyde likes glitter. 

Once, you could hardly walk through the zoo in Clyde’s yard. So he began “loaning” animals to all his neighbors. Now nearly every one of the 75 or so houses in Bynum has at least one animal in its garden; the loanees must agree not to sell any of the menagerie. And since wooden animals are everywhere, the traffic signs are also hand-made wood - cut outs of turtles, painted with spots and stripes with words like “Drive Like a Turtle.”  (I don't know for sure if Clyde made the signs.)

It’s easy to find the house where Clyde lives. It’s the one that’s covered in painted flowers and animals. Even the chimney - even the roof! - sports flying fish, snaky eels, and wingless birds.  One whole side of his house is covered in a painted pod of whales, a sight seldom seen anywhere near Bynum. The porch is papered with letters and post cards from admirers and magazine and newspaper articles all about Clyde. 

Clyde is famous.

As recently as the late 1970s Clyde’s form of art was a big head scratcher. Academics hardly knew what to label these people who were formally untrained but created raw, spontaneous  paintings and objects. In 1980, the Corcoran Gallery curated and installed the seminal exhibit “Black Folk Art in American: 1930 - 1980.”  It was followed by a string of thoughtfully curated exhibitions in university galleries and museums like the American Folk Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institute.

Jones’ “Haw Creek Critters” have been exhibited in these and other venues all over the world. But he still gets a kick out of visitors driving off the main highway to find him and while he can’t walk around so well anymore, he’s often outside on his only luxury: a customized riding lawn mower festooned with plastic snakes.

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THE REST OF THE STORY    Clearly, Bynum, North Carolina is far from being a tourist mecca but it’s curious that the state has now widened and improved the roads leading to Bynum and the little crossroads that barely had a name, is clearly marked on maps leading out of N.C.’s Research Triangle.  I call this the power of Art in Placemaking.

ONE SIDE OF CLYDE'S HOUSE

A NEIGHBOR

ANOTHER NEIGHBOR - AND MOST OF THE ANIMALS  ARE 'LIGHTED'

THE FRONT OF CLYDE'S HOUSE

IN CASE YOU MISS HIM, THAT'S SANTA IN THE CANOE

HOME AGAIN!

When I was 9 years old, my mother took my younger brother and me by Greyhound Bus from our home in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, to visit her brothers and sister in Hardy, Arkansas where they were all born. She was the only one who moved farther than a few miles away from the 100 year old “homestead.” 

This was high adventure for kids who had never been on a bus, never been further than a city park away from home, and never remembered meeting these people with whom we shared DNA.  There was my bachelor uncle, shot gun over his knees, just in from hunting squirrels -  a trunk full of confederate dollars in the corner of the log cabin where he lived.  My other uncle lived with his sweet lady just down the hillside in a pristinely clean farmhouse. We drank milk straight from milking while Aunt Delaney baked biscuits and pies for lunch. Two cousins showed up - Aunt Velma’s sons - that I never saw before and only once since when he was interviewed on a 60 Minutes episode twenty years later.

Now I’m home from a week’s road trip through the Carolinas - one of innumerable jonts my husband and I have gone on over the years and so I am thinking about “vacations.”  I remember vivid details about that long ago visit to Arkansas, the closest thing that I can loosely label “family vacation.”

My mother must have been homesick all those years away from family and place that she loved. For her, the bus ride back to Arkansas meant something entirely different from the shift into alien territory I might describe. My brother, four years younger than me, probably holds a totally different memory (or maybe none at all!) of the bus ride back to Arkansas.

Families, known or unknown. Trips familiar or exotic. The value is in the deposit they make to our memory bank. I am thrilled - even as old as I am now - to add to the treasury.  

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This is artist Patrick Doughtery. He's building a site specific work in Hillsborough, N.C. commissioned by the arts council and paid ($26,000) by private donations and grants from the Merchants and Tourism Councils. He works with one salaried asistant and loads of volunteers.  Chip and I spent part of a day stripping leaves from saplings.

The Round Stone House in Wilson,NC, was designed and built by Oliver Freeman (born 1882), a graduate of Tuskegee and one of the country's first African -American architect/builders. It was built in the 1940s to house vets returning from World War II.

A completed work by Patrick Doughtery - NOT the one in Hillsborough. I love that these pieces are built of natural material and meant to fade back into the earth in 3 or 4 years.

The home - and art installation! - of Clyde Jones, one of the naive/folk artist we tracked down in N.C. 

ADVICE ON A RAINY SATURDAY NIGHT

I recently finished reading BIG MAGIC: CREATIVE LIVING BEYOND FEAR by Elizabeth Gilbert, the EAT, PRAY, LOVE lady.  And before I go any further and hear you witheringly say “oh, her!”, I remind you that EPL was on the New York Times Bestseller list for 187 weeks (that’s more than 3 years, baby!), re-issued in nearly every language and made into a movie (unfortunately.)  

Liz came to Rochester for a reading at a large venue and I was the oldest person in the sold out audience. Clearly she spoke to a profound need and connected uniquely to a huge number of younger women and you, friend, are too much of an old fart to know anything about that!  (Frankly, I didn’t get it either.)

But I love BIG MAGIC and recommend it to everybody - required reading for any liberal arts major. I will try to paraphrase some of her ideas and surely will get it wrong. But know this:  there is some meaty stuff between this book’s covers, enough controversy for some blood letting discussions and I hope you’ll invite me to one.

Basically, what Gilbert says is that we arrive on this earth with a cache of creative jewels stashed inside us waiting for the time and place to be vomited up and the vomiting part (she doesn’t use that term exactly) is the GREAT CREATIVE EXPLOSION that can give our humdrum existence meaning, excitement and satisfaction. (I may be over-stating all this just a tad.) 

Don’t be afraid. You will fail. So what? You will not “get it right” because there really is no “right.”  Don’t expect the end result to change your life because getting there is the change. And meanwhile, for heaven’s sake, do something else! Don’t spend every waking moment whining in the garrett trying to paint the next Mona Lisa. Guess what? The world won’t end! Don’t decide because you haven’t gotten a single poem published of the 3,742 you’ve written that the jig is up. Write 3,743.

The mantra is:  today I have this life. I will meet basic needs and I will find a way to stoke the creative parts too and sometimes the balance is weird. Or hard. A long time can pass before a glimmer of success shows up. But sometimes the discovery that comes along is AWESOME. 

CELEBRATE!  FIND A WAY TO REMIND YOURSELF THAT YOU HAVE THE POWER TO BRING THAT WONDERFUL THING INTO THE LIGHT. 

But WAIT!  What if you’ve only felt a twinge of slight gas? What if you haven’t felt that gagging, oh lord, here it comes! feeling? What if you don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about?! Not to worry….change the terminology.  Instead of “passion” and “creativity”, try “curiosity” and “challenge.” (But I’d stay away from “hobby” if I were you. Sounds too flighty.) I don’t know why anybody would be interested in building ships in bottles (for instance) but there they are anyhow. Your curiosity may be totally stupid to somebody else. So what? Go ahead and build the stupidest ship ever imagined in some lame bottle. It’s yours and you know what? It’s just as important as the Mona Lisa.   So let ‘er rip!

I chose these two photographs....the recent lunar eclipse posted on Facebook (I'm sorry I don't have the photographer's name for proper credit). And wonderful Ithaca painter Joy Adams  -  one of her Mad Sally paintings. I look at both images and am thankful to be living this life where such marvels happen.

SEE BELOW POST

P.S. A FOLLOW UP POSTING

Is there a moral to the below post: the Oneida Story?  I can’t seem to find it.

I thought perhaps one avenue was the feminist angle. During the same week end adventure, we stopped at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. The current exhibit in Smith Art Center was Feminism: Phase 2.  All I could think was (1) this is ugly stuff and (2) it’s time to quit your whining and (3) under any banner in the universe, this would not be considered “art.”

At the same time, I do understand that women are not treated equally in any profession - including the arts - and I strain to resist and suggest that this situation must be amended for the good of humanity.  Do females need to turn their backs on parenthood and monogamous relationships to fully be considered equals , as in the Oenidas? I hope not. I hope there’s a more enlightened way. (But interestingly, is the very fact of the Oneida business success due to talented women’s equal ownership?)

There’s a message circulating on social media presumably authored by a middle eastern woman who warns about sharif law, its horrible treatment of women particularly and it’s growing influence in the western world…that somehow, this movement will overthrow our government through the voting system and we will find ourselves with girl children being sold to old men/husbands, stoned for any variety of reasons…an entire menu of miseries. 

Why is it that women and sex are used repeatedly for political and economic leverages? the “reason” for acting - or not acting - in reprehensible ways? and the kernel of fear mongering? female reproduction, a political issue? Is it a fundamental as CONTROL? If you control women, you control the culture? Well….yes…..

A HISTORY LESSON

Churches. Cathedrals. Tabernacles. Temples. Meeting Houses. 

Religious edifices symbolize man’s effort to glorify and appease a more powerful creator. It’s a calling, a longing, a challenge, a primal need. Architects give it their all and artists enhance, embellish, create, and interpret. The pull is as old as humankind.  So it isn’t any surprise that we visit, photograph, and write about these structures probably more than any other manmade object in the world.

Which brings me to …THE WORLD’S SMALLEST CHAPEL! 

The Cross Island Chapel is non-denominational, seats two, measures 51 inches by 81 inches and rises out of Mason Pond in Oneida, New York.

The chapel was built by Chandler Mason and his son in 1989 and “Dedicated as a witness to God.” Unless you can walk on water, you can only reach the little white building by row boat or a quick swim. The pond and the chapel remain in the Mason family.

Weird, eh? But it’s in ONEIDA!  And that’s a story that so far outstrips weird that the definition needs a good stretch! 

In 1848,(remember the Second Great Awakening?)  John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community. I remind you that just down the road in Palmyra, Joseph Smith founded the Mormons  and around the corner, the Shakers… all around the same time. Middle New York State was bristling with religious visionaries. 

The Oneida Community built a community house for its 300 + participants.  The guiding theory was that Jesus had returned to earth in AD70 and so, believers (that would be, them) were perfect and without sin. 

All men and women were presumed “married to one another” and that puts a whole different spin on sex, division of labor and “family.” Birth control (male coitus interruptus) was practiced rather successfully  - as was selective breeding. Children were removed from the birth parent at around a year old and raised by the commune. Without the constraints of exclusive responsibility for home and hearth, women were encouraged to be equal partners in pretty much everything. 

The community manufactured, grew, traded and/or sold a variety of commodities successfully but clouds were on the horizon. By the late 1800s, led by a professor from Hamilton College nearby, an organized band of clergy began protesting the ideas and living arrangements of the Oneidas.  Old John, the founder, turned over the community to a son who lacked the leadership qualities to keep the band en point. The maturing second generation members were drawn to monogamy, sexual exclusivity and jealousy.

By the turn of the century, the Oneida Community reverted to a purely industrial limited stock company. For a century, Oneida became synonymous with silverware.  The flatware company sent manufacturing off shore in the early 2000s and was subsequently sold to a foreign owner. 

The community Mansion house still stands in Oneida. It has been lived in continuously since its construction in 1862 and today incorporates 35 apartments, 9 dorm rooms, 9 guest rooms, a museum, meeting and dining rooms and is listed as a National Landmark Historic building.