is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Love Letter to Jeanine Payer
A few weeks ago, just a few days before my birthday, I won an amazing (and expensive!) necklace from Jeanine Payer, one of my favorite jewelry designers. Happy birthday to me! April was National Poetry Month, and Payer held a contest to celebrate it: send her a postcard with some poetry you like, and if she picked it, you�d win a necklace. I sent in a postcard with Cindy Sherman on the front, reading a letter, and with the first 8 lines of Wallace Stevens� �Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction� on the back. I did not at all think I would win� I thought maybe the poem was too intellectual, too much about poetry and not love, too much what I would like but wouldn�t please a wider audience, all that. But I did win! And now I have a gorgeous necklace in sterling silver and 18K gold engraved with the lines from the poem!
So I thought I would take this occasion to celebrate how all of the Jeanine Payer pieces I own came into my life.
I had been a fan for a long time as a student� unable to afford to buy anything. And then one day my good friend Wendy Dembo gave me a necklace she had bought at a Payer sample sale. It was a tiny photo necklace, with wings, and on the back it said �in my end is my beginning.� I wore it all the time for many years� I still wear it often!
Then, when I passed my oral exams in graduate school I wanted to get myself a reward. So I asked Rachel, who runs the jewelry shop at Giving Tree Gallery in MA, if it was still possible to get one of the Payer rings with a photo on it, and with a custom engraving. I hadn�t seen any of those around for years, and had always wanted one. It was still possible, yay. I had my ring engraved with a quote from Thomas Mann: �it is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.� I wore the shit out of that ring for a long time, and never got tired of looking at it.
And then I lost it! I lost the most expensive piece of jewelry I owned! I retraced my steps, called everyone I knew, had them search their carpets and couches, and finally had to come to the conclusion that it was gone. I was heartsick about it, in the way one is when one undergoes a real loss (because let�s just admit that some kinds of possessions mean more than the sum of their parts�). And then, 2 years later, the ring returned! I was packing to move out of my San Francisco apartment, to move to PA for my first real job. As I was getting ready to throw away a box of wrapping paper and party decorations, something shiny caught my eye. It was my ring.
And now, at this point in time, I�ve worn the ring so much (daily), that most of the inscription is gone� the only words you can make out are: �It is love�. �. onger than death.� So it has become a kind of Sappho poem taken from a broken tablet �.with sections missing, and yet still imparting some sort of poetic sense.
(One of these days maybe I�ll get it re-engraved.)
Then one time at a Payer sample sale I bought matching leather wrist bands for Halliday and I. They have a zen saying on one side and a quote from Nietzsche on the other. We both wore those for a long time.
Another time Wendy called me in San Francisco from a sale at Bloomingdale�s in New York to tell me that a Payer necklace that I had coveted was on sale, and should she buy it for me�? And yes, she should. It is a beautiful span of silver engraved with: �If I changed this pace I might fall out of a routine and into myself.� It is detailed with a gold stud holding a citrine briolette and a gold clasp that fastens in front. It is still a favorite of mine. I wore it endlessly towards the end of graduate school to remind me not to get stuck in the drudgery of repetition.
During those 2 years that my original ring went missing, I bought myself a Payer Marina ring� much less money and not customized for me� but something of a consolation for my loss. I wore it daily� pretty much until my original ring came back to me, and still now every now and then. It says: �A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself; that is how I hold your voice.� I use it to remind me to say things that are worth saying, and to recognize that anything I say is made possible by all the things said to me (in speaking and in writing).
That may not be what Rumi meant. That doesn�t matter.
Then, finally, I was at a conference in Toronto once, walking around downtown, when I stopped into a jewelry store, saw a Payer necklace I had never seen before, fell in love, and then left the store because I couldn�t afford it. But I could not stop thinking about it! So, a couple of days later, after much fretting, I bought it even though I could not afford it. At the time it was a stupid thing to do. From the standpoint of now, it was worth it. The necklace consists of two heavy silver disks on silver chain. One disk has some gold coil exposed; the other is engraved with a saying from Rumi: �Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.� I suppose it is funny to spend too much money on a necklace meant to remind me that I chose the right path even if it wasn�t going to make me rich. But that is what I did. Let the beauty we love be what we do!
What is so compelling about all of this jewelry is that it is gorgeous even if you are unaware that it is engraved. And then it is also ornately engraved!
Wearing these pieces has also taught me something about what people see. Very, very few people ever look closely enough at a piece of jewelry to really discern what it is. It is a rare thing, and something I really appreciate, when someone notices one of these pieces for what it is (or notices some other kind of detail that takes some attention to detail to see�).
And now I have this gorgeous new thing. The front page has gold ladybugs on silver branches. The second page is in 18K gold, and all four pages add up to these lines from Wallace Stevens:
And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.
8:55 p.m. - July 02, 2011
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