Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Vigil for the Victims of the Attack on the GLBT Youth Center in Tel Aviv

This evening Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in NYC hosted a vigil for the victims of the attack last week in Tel Aviv. Co-sponsored by a list of groups that was so long you would think there would have been a vast crowd. Nope. Barely a third of the Westbeth yard was filled with people. It was heartening to see all the young people from the Center's youth program though — these kids live with the threat of violence on a daily basis in ways many of us older folk forget.

Speaking at the gathering were Rep. Jerry Nadler and Jay Michaelson of Nehirim among others. Christine Quinn spoke, though what she thought of the huge sign for Yetta Kurland in the window of her campaign HQ across the yard who knows.

Carl Siciliano of the Ali Forney Center spoke movingly of the plight of gay youth in this country. And David Saranga from the Israeli Consulate in NY spoke of Israel's commitment to full LGBT equality (though what that means in a country where only Orthodox rabbis can perform religious marriage ceremonies I don't know).

Here are the videos of Rep. Nadler and Jay Michaelson speaking:

Day 32: Netzach of Hod, four weeks and four days of the Omer

For today's sefirotic combination, Endurance in Humility, it's good to look at the suit of Pentacles. The 7 card captures the endurance required of a gardener — not only over the course of one season, but over the course of many seasons for a garden to grow and flourish. This is not only endurance, but patience and love.

The 8 card, Humility is often described as an image of an apprentice — someone who works for a master of a trade and learns from that master with true humility. That true humility does not discount that talent and ability that brings the apprentice to the master in the first place. It is an acknowledgment of the need for direction and guidance coupled with respect for the master who gives that guidance as a spiritual path. For both the master and the apprentice are in a spiritual relationship that enables both to grow. In a sense, they are equals — one has simply gone further down a path and can help the other on the way.

I have seen this at work in Japan, where master potters take on apprentices. Like the apprentice in the 8 of Pentacles, these "deshi" make the same object again and again, learning the perfection of the form. Because they work for the master, if the form is not acceptable, it is destroyed. If it meets the standard, the master signs it. When the apprentice is ready, he or she starts out on his own, and at that point will begin the artistic variations that will make the work truly theirs. But first the form is learned from the inside.

Imagine how it might feel to have someone else sign something that was the work and sweat of your hands. And consider how that form is not only the result of your work, but the training you are given by a teacher. That the form would not exist without that training. This is humility that is also gratitude.

So what is endurance in humility. Well, I can only speak for myself here, as a Westerner who has a great deal of trouble with the system I just outlined above. Because while I understand it, and can respect it. And while I have even attempted it in my studies as an amateur potter and ikebana student in Japan, I am a rebellious American, a New York Jew and thus somewhat, uh, argumentative shall we say? I may take on the role of apprentice, and pledge to myself and a master the discipline of humility. But my endurance in this discipline is weak. Which is perhaps why I've never been a very good gardener either.

What is your relationship to apprenticeship and humility?

Today is 8 days, making one week and one day of the Omer: Chesed of Gevurah

Consider the potter throwing on the wheel. One hand is on the inside of the form being shaped. The other on the outside. The force on either side must be perfectly balanced. On one side is Gevurah, discipline, giving form and structure to the clay body. On the other side is Chesed, supporting and lifting up the form with a compassionate touch that understands the imperfections and limits of the clay body.

When compassion and love is expressed through structure and form, the results are beautiful. So it is with Chesed of Gevurah. This is not form for the sake of form. It is form infused with meaning. And of course, emptiness.

I remember once hearing one of my meditation teachers, S.N.Goenka, tell of how a potter in India beats the outside of a clay body with a flat piece of wood to give it form. And that there is a hand inside to help absorb the shock of the blow so that the beating does not destroy the pot. He laughed and said, when you are supporting it with love, of course you can beat it! Not that he was advocating beating anyone, but he was making the point that expressing discipline without love is destructive. Just as expressing love without discipline is destructive. As my friend Marion once wrote: Do I center the clay, or does the clay center me? For today, this clay body hopes we can all make every day of this counting of the Omer, truly count.

Projection: We see outside what we have (or seek) inside

That's the idea behind the motto of the ancient Order of the Garter: Honi soit qui mal y pense. Then again, as the father of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls, once noted: We never project upon a blank screen. Sometimes when we see a phallus instead of a cigar that's because psychologically speaking, that's what is really there.

Which brings me to today's pottery blog. I picked up this lovely little dish Imari dish in Japan years back. It's about 120 years old — late 19th Century — from what I can glean. The image of the leaping carp reminds me of salmon who swim upstream to breed and die. Sex and death. How Freudian!

Just to the right of the fish are two rocks jutting out of the waves. The one to the far right, well I don't think it looks like a cigar. The rock next to it, well, let's just say Japan does not really have a Jewish tradition.

Generativity, creativity and sexuality, are linked. And some cultures celebrate this with wit and a wink. And a reverent attitude to the power that flows from Source through all of us and all creative — an attitude that sees this power around us and available to us. An attitude that does not demonize this power, but takes pleasure in its natural expression.

Of course, you might see something completely different here. 

What a Potter: Morihiro Wada

On my very first trip to Kasama in 1981 my friend and guide to all things ceramic, Stephen Lemoncello, advised that I not buy the first thing I saw that I liked, since there would be so much and I might spend everything on the first thing I saw only to find something else later. I didn't take his advice. As soon as I saw it, I bought a vase by Morihiro Wada that  just sang out to me from the shelf on which it sat.

Later that day as we wandered from gallery to gallery in town I saw several coffee cups by him in the same style. The vase was so expensive, I could only afford to buy two of the cups and saucers. One of these did not survive an earthquake in Tokyo a few years later. The one I still have today I treasure not only for its beauty but for the memory of that day.

After that initial purchase I was on the watch for anything of Wada's that might be on exhibit in Tokyo, and for sale. The next year, just after his next kiln firing, he had an exhibit at Takashimaya in Nihonbashi. I went on the first day, on my lunch hour, and everything was already completely sold out. Red dots over every piece. I was miserable — desire is a bitch as the Buddha noted. My boss saw the misery on my face when I returned to work, and as a consolation prize he gave me a vase made by his brother, a well known ceramic instructor in Japan, a man who had written one of Japan's most used textbooks for pottery students in the country. It was a lovely vase, and I treasure it still. In fact, many people who look at the pottery that lines my shelves love this vase. But it wasn't a Wada.

Clearly many people feel the same way, because since that time, Wada's work has increased in value so much that I could never even consider buying anything of his today. Recently at an exhibit of pottery at New York's Japan Society — Contemporary Clay — where his work was included, a couple of sake cups he made were for sale in the shop. I hate to tell you what they cost.

That said, I realize looking at the pieces I bought 26 years ago that their style seems oddly dated. Unlike the classic folk style pottery of the surrounding area, Wada's work is modern to the moment, and thus, as the moment changes, does not have the timeless feel that comes with looking at the work of the living national treasure who lives down the road in Mashiko, Tatsuzo Shimaoka. Nevertheless, every time I arrange flowers in the Wada vase, or drink coffee from the remaining cup in my possession (and care for so that those who come after will enjoy, since pottery, as an expression and lesson of anicca, the Buddhist observation of impermanence, ultimately breaks) I feel the distinct pleasure of living with and using everyday objects that are also art, that are an expression of the vision and aesthetic of an artist whose aesthetic I share. And so, at least photographically, I share it with you. You can see the vase and cup I use to this day above. As well as a vase from the exhibit at the Japan Society earlier this year just to the left. Oh, and should you find  yourself in Kasama, be sure to stop at the Ibaraki Ceramic Art Museum, where you can see work by Wada and others who have worked in the area.

 

Pottery Blog: Cornwall Bridge and Bernard Leach

It's Memorial Day Weekend and there's a sale at Cornwall Bridge Pottery. I remember the first time I visited the studio near Kent, Connecticut. I was staying with friends at their 18th Century farmhouse, decorated with traditional Japanese antiques. The combination was perfect. I was visiting on my annual trip back home from Tokyo at the time, and I had already started my ceramic addiction in Japan, having first visited Mashiko in 1981, where I learned all about Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach. What I did not know is that eventually of course, Leach returned to Britain, where other potters served as his apprentice. Much as in Buddhist and Hasidic schools there are lineages.

So when I got to Cornwall Bridge I recognized Hamada and Leach instantly, and it was no surprise to learn that indeed some of the potters in this group got the Japanese influence by way of Leach and his students in England. The pitcher and matching tumbler you see here I got on that first trip in '81, and they exhibit the tradition "tombo" or dragonfly design so popular in Japanese folk ceramics.

Last weekend when I was up at the Nehirim retreat in CT, I was perilously close to Cornwall Bridge. I have enough table ceramic ware to serve a 6 course dinner for 12 easily, with plates and vessels from kilns all over those horned isles. So good thing I didn't stop in. But there is a sale on this weekend, so if you're anywhere nearby, you should go and experience tableware as it was meant to be — simple and beautiful. When you touch it you feel the hands of the potter who formed it.

Perfectly Potted: Masayuki Miyajima

When I met Masayuki Miyajima, he was an apprentice of one of Japan's official Living National Treasures, Tatsuzo Shimaoka — who was himself the apprentice of Shoji Hamada. So Masa comes from a royal lineage of folk potters.

In this octagonal dish, he uses a technique revived and popularized by Shimaoka that takes its inspiration from the Korean Yi Dynasty process of applying slip to decorative pottery indentations.

A true mingei artist — that is a folk artist, Miyajima continues to make ceramic objects of great beauty that are for everyday use.

Last night I was chatting with a young man who pointed out that collecting pottery has its issues, since pottery can chip or break. This is true. And this is another aspect of the Japanese concept: 物の哀れ - mono no aware: the beautiful sadness of things. It is the understanding that life is fragile, that all we hold dear will chip, crack and ultimately pass away. The pottery I own I hold in trust for future generations, but I know that someday, perhaps even while it is in my possession, it will be nothing but shards. Much like the very concept of the Living National Treasure — Shimaoka is 88 years old at the moment. The treasures he has created will live on after him, but the treasure that is the sum of who he is will fade as surely as the cherry blossoms that fell from the trees last week. And that's what makes our lives, and beauty, all the more precious.

Perfectly Potted: Kasama Potter Hiroshi Komazawa

"Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!	45
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Or so wrote Keats about another bit of pottery. And while I am inspired by amphorae at the Met, there is a spare elegance in shapes with simple geometric design instead of mythic tropes. This pitcher, by Hiroshi Komazawa contrasts a rough and rustic feel with flecks of gold, silver and crimson. Of course, while I love Keats, I can't leave him with the last word. Lily Tomlin once said, "If Truth is Beauty, why don't we get our hair done at the library?" And that's the truth.

Perfectly Potted: Kasama Potters Roy & Chieko Martin

A variation on an Edo period graphic theme, this bowl is only glazed inside and around the outer lip.

The rough feel of the underside contrasts with the smooth glaze. Unlike its Edo period inspiration, the glaze is all earth tones to match the unglazed clay.

Kasama is a small town in Ibaragi Prefecture, north of Tokyo about two hours by train. Populated by potters who have left the more traditional restrictions of Mashiko. The local ceramic museum is a small gem.

Perfectly Potted

This vase was thrown by Koji Susukida, one of the many traditional potters inspired by Shoji Hamada, the man responsible for reviving the Japanese folk ceramic tradition. Susukida lives just down the road from Hamada's old studio in Mashiko, and works on a kick-wheel. His apprentices wake up at 4am, and start wedging the cold clay. If you sat in his studio, apart from the electric light, and the radio there is little that would tell you that you're in the 21st. Century.

Bet you were thinking that after yesterday's post on kosher pot that a subject entitled "perfectly potted" was going somewhere else. Nope. Contemporary folk ceramics are one of my passions.

Susukida works with salt glazes — so that even the bricks in his kiln take on a beautiful glazed effect. Should you find yourself in Mashiko, look for his work at any of the cooperative pottery shops  — where  the local artists have banded together to sell to the public outside of the gallery system.