I'm not really surprised anymore when the thousand year old way of doing something turns out to be way better than the modern 'conveniences'.

My friend Alison gave me a sleekstone for my birthday.  Isn't it pretty?

What is a sleekstone?  I didn't know either until Alison showed me her research on the 16th C. Italian sewing basket she's been working on. A sleekstone is basically an iron, for pressing seams.

When she showed me pictures of the extant ones, they immediately made me think of the tools I saw in Istanbul that were used for polishing paper.  I really love the wear mark on the upper cowrie shell.  You can see just how it fit into the artisan's hand.

They are easy to make but ironing the seams is a pain.  I used to use a regular iron and and ironing ham.  Then I got a mini-iron and that was better, but still awkward.

So when I made this last batch, I tried using the sleekstone and lookie here!  How pretty is that?

In addition to giving a better result and taking about a quarter of the time, the process is actually pleasant.  I was able to get a steady rhythm going and there was a lovely flow to it.  And I don't have to worry about burning myself or the hat.  The sleekstone fits my palm really well and I really enjoyed using it.

You may have noticed that it has been awhile since I posted.  It seems I thought it was possible to maintain a blog, get a masters degree and write a thesis at the same time.  Silly me.

But the degree is done (M.A. in Humanistic Psychology from the University of West Georgia) and the thesis has some bearing on the focus of this website.

I expected to learn a lot in graduate school, especially in such an amazing department with such intensely wonderful faculty and fellow students.  But what I was not expecting to discover is that my creative life (reflected on this site in my work on historical textiles, my life doing historical re-enactments and immersive research and my dance life) and my professional life might actually merge.  But merge, they have, and I am incredibly grateful for it.

I ended up spending much of my academic energy looking at how creativity can be used as  a transformational tool for living a full and rich life. More specifically, my thesis looks at how improvisational music and dance can be used to access the flow state, a very powerful and well-documented altered state of consciousness.

A masters thesis, by its very nature, is a highly focused piece of research. But there has been some interest from many kind folks in reading it. 

I've written an Introduction for the Generalist Reader to provide some context.  This introduction is also included in the .pdf of my thesis so if you would like to share it with someone else, there will still be some information about how it was written and why.

I Feel Life in This: An Introduction for the General Reader

This thesis was written as part of the requirements for a Master’s degree in Humanistic Psychology at the University of West Georgia in 2015.  A number of people were kind enough to ask to read my thesis, so I am republishing it on my website SilkRoadConjectures.com.

Humanistic psychology is referred to as the “third wave” of psychology and though its roots are much deeper, it came together as a sub-field in the 1960s and ‘70s.  In brief, humanistic psychology views human beings as complete, complex individuals.  We are complicated creatures who could only exist as we do in the particular time, place and culture we have experienced.  Human beings are not just a brain with a diagnosis attached and our bodies do more and mean more than being just sacks of meat to haul our brain around.

One of the critical insights of humanistic psychology is a turning away from the demands of the ‘natural sciences’ that have held sway intellectually for the past 400 years or so.  All modern sciences tend to try to use the standards of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics etc) to study human experience.  Unfortunately, the worldview of the natural sciences is to ignore or deny anything that cannot be externally observed, measured and judged.  For physics, astronomy, mathematics and the like, this is a reasonable position to take.  But to take that view towards human beings is to systematically ignore much of which makes us human at all, especially the variation in human consciousness.

So humanistic psychology sees itself as being a real science, but as being a fundamentally human science that requires access to more data than can be gathered from a purely external perspective.  Humanistic psychology also values the variability and uniqueness of human experience instead of looking for the ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ or ‘average’ condition and measuring all other experiences as if normality were the fundamental goal of human accomplishment and everything that does not qualify as normal is somehow lacking or wrong or unacceptable.  One of my favorite things about the amazing psychology department at UWG is the recurring refrain, “Normal? Yeah, normal is a setting on my washing machine.”

The goal of a thesis is to fill an existing hole in the research in your chosen field.  I have been passionate about dance and music for my entire life and have observed the transformational aspects of creativity in myself and others as well.  So with the guidance of Dr. Christine Simmonds-Moore, possibly the most amazing thesis adviser ever, I began exploring the variety of dance and music experience both from a psychological perspective and a cross-cultural one.

It’s very common for people to experience ‘altered states of consciousness’ during everyday activities and it appears that these states are good for us: for managing stress, for alternate ways of processing experience and solving problems, to facilitate cooperation and community feeling and just for relaxation and enjoyment.  One of the more common altered states of consciousness can occur when you are driving.  I’ve never talked to anyone who drives who has not experienced getting in their car, beginning to think of something else or nothing at all, and who is suddenly conscious of being at their destination with no clear memory of how they got there.

When I came to UWG, I was exposed to the work of writers such as Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Victor Frankl.  They all come from the position that we do not strive to be normal or ordinary; we strive to fulfill our unique potential and to live a happy life that has meaning for ourselves and for the people around us.  One of the qualities of a fulfilling life is the occurrence of ‘peak experiences’.  Descriptions of ‘peak experiences’ sounded very familiar to me; these states frequently exist for me when I dance, listen to music and do other creative activities.

The idea of ‘peak experiences’ led me to the work of Mihaly Csiksznentihalyi. (During my thesis defense, I told my committee that I shouldn’t be allowed to graduate until I could spell his name without thinking about it.  They laughed at me, and said they were willing to waive that requirement). Csiksznentihalyi was the first person to identify what he called ‘the flow state’, which is a state of being fully engaged in whatever is happening in the present moment and working to the outside limits of your skills.  You are doing something that you are intrinsically motivated to do and you have an altered experience of the passage of time; time seems to either compress or expand. This is an inherently positive, enjoyable state and frequent experience of this state carries a whole raft of positive benefits.

But a thesis is supposed to fill a ‘hole’ in the research.  The positive benefits of the flow state is very well studied; so is the type of situations or tasks that are conducive to the flow state.  We know a lot about the type of personality that allows individuals to experience the flow state and we know that their performance improves when they are in the flow state.  We know that people who frequently experience the flow state are much more likely to achieve mastery in their chosen activity.

What has not been clearly established is how you deliberately enter that state on your own, how you maintain it, or fix it if it is disrupted and how you systematically teach others how to reach it.

That is what my thesis sets out to do.  This type of research has a necessarily narrow focus and so I chose to closely examine the experiences of experienced improvisational musicians and dancers.  I examined how often they experience flow, how they control it and how they attempt or would attempt to teach others to experience flow.

I’m very pleased with the outcome of my thesis and I’m looking forward to putting what I have learned into practice.  If you read this and have any experiences you would like to share, or if you would like to possibly be interviewed for a forthcoming book on the transformational aspects of music and dance, please write to me.  If you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them, so ask away.

The thesis is reproduced here as it was published by my university through the ProQuest database, with one exception.  My department required that I include the complete transcriptions of the interviews I conducted with the research participants.  The six participants were very forthcoming during their interviews and some of the subjects they covered are quite sensitive.  Out of respect for my participants, I have chosen to not include the full transcripts in this version that is posted publicly.  However, each participant is quoted extensively within the text of the thesis.  All transcripts and the chart of meaning units referenced in the text have been removed and I have added [redacted] each time they are mentioned so you don’t go searching for something that is not included.

I want to thank my participants for their time, expertise and trust.  This research could not have been done without them.

I want to warn those of you that don’t read academic writing very often: the style of writing required is very specific.  We write in the third person and the language is quite formal. The use of terminology is very specific and sometimes words that are used casually in normal conversation have very specific meanings when used in an academic context.  All the terms are defined and explained in the text and I hope they are useful for a general reader.

However, I would welcome any questions you may have.  Chances are, you aren’t the only person to have the question.  Asking questions allows me to clarify my writing and make it more useful. I may use your questions as a jumping-off point for a blog post or as a way to edit my writing to make it clearer and more useful.

I have been overwhelmed with people’s interest in reading this work and I hope that it proves useful.  Thank you so much for much for taking the time to read it.

Lea Benson

LeaCBenson@gmail.com

Atlanta, Georgia

August 3, 2015

I learned to knit a few years ago and really enjoy recreating the colorwork socks that have been excavated in Egypt.  Fortunately, Urtatim has charted many of these patterns and I make use of her charts often and with gratitude.  I have my eye on some uncharted extant knitted items, but that is a subject for another day.

Babies seem to cause knitters to want to make things.  Since I know the babies themselves don't really care, I make something for mom instead.  For expectant moms that I'm really close to, I offer a choice between a shawl or socks.  My friend Maggie is the first to choose socks.

Most of the extant socks are done in blue and white, but Maggie decided on green and white.  I knit all my socks out of super-wash wool so they can be machine washed.  I used a fingering weight, from Knit Picks called Stroll.  I love this stuff.  It looks great, wears well and is inexpensive.  I used the forest heather and white. 

Typically, the white in the original socks was made of cotton.  But Maggie abandoned us for the cold and rainy north and I don't want her to feet to be cold even though she moved away.  (Bitter?  Whyever do you ask?)

These are based on the Ibex sock, originally make for a child.  I've also made several pair for myself and my husband from some of Urtatim's other patterns as well as patterns of my own.  I will admit that I treat knitting patterns the way treat recipes.  I look at them as a list of suggestions, really.  So any differences you see are just my own preferences.

These were knitted in the round, you can see the 'jog' where the pattern makes a little step up for the next round.  I made these for my  husband and myself  when we stepped up as Baron and Baroness of the Barony of the South Downs.  The coat of arms that represents the group has a red tower on it so I charted some simple towers to add to one of Urtatim's patterns.  My first version looked great on graph paper but knitted up resembled space invaders rather than towers. 

The sock on the left is part of the pair I made for myself from Knitpicks Stroll in a fingering weight like the Ibex socks above.  I wear a size 8 shoe.  The sock on the right is concrete proof that I love my husband and his size 14 feet very much.  These are done in a DK weight yarn, also from Knitpicks.  The first pair of socks I made for him, he requested something 'simple', trying to make things 'easy' on me.  This led to the Socks of Profanity, plain red stockinette stitches with a simple band at the top.  In fingering weight yarn.  On  size 00 needles.  Because I love my husband. A lot.

Anyway, if you had told me 5 years ago I would consider hand-knit socks to be a necessary luxury I would have laughed.  But the truth is, I am a better, more compassionate person when my feet are the correct temperature. 

And knitting isn't nearly as hard as it sometimes looks.  I promise.

I have been in love with Cloud Collars since I first discovered Persian art.  The painting at left is one of my favorites.  I've made quite a few of them over the years, most of them now owned by other people.  Here are a couple of photos.

I have felt a serious embroidery binge coming on for a while now and so I am in the planning stages of  a pretty elaborate collar for myself. 

We know that empires in Central Asia such as the Ottomans, Timurids and Safavids had royal design houses that created designs for everything from architecture, ceramics and book arts to textile arts. In the Ottoman Empire, the design house was known as the kitabkhana.

The designs were then given to craftsman to execute.  Imagine my delight when I found reproductions of design sketches from the royal design house of the Timurids.  My husband is used to these outbursts and is remarkably tolerant.

Some of these designs are specifically for cloud collars and some for other items such as quivers.  They date from the first half of the 15th century, which is the time period during which my persona lived.  In addition, the motifs include several that are of personal meaning to me, including lions and the simurgh or Persian phoenix.

I found them in the book Timur and the Princely Vision.  This entire book is wonderful, by the way.

We also have information on Persian embroidery.  One of  my main sources has been When Silk Was Gold, one of my other favorite books.  There are photographs of extant embroideries and a very good chapter on how to do the embroideries.

There are extant cloud collars including one that is reproduced in a number of books including The Princely Vision and The Tsars and the East.

This one has a little trick up its sleeve.  It has undergone extensive restoration and not all books talk about this.  The photo in the Princely Vision makes all the embroidery, including the background, appear to be gold and it is only briefly mentioned in the text.  The photograph in The Tsars and the East (above) is of higher quality and the text includes a history of the piece, including its extensive restoration. 

To summarize, the piece has been securely dated as 15th century Iranian, and was given as a royal gift to one of the Tsars which means that the design was likely produced by the same kitabkhana as the drawings in The Princely Vision.  The original ground fabric was crimson silk and there are surviving fragments of the blue silk of the garment it was originally attached to. 

The book identifies such a garment as 'a type of straight-cut Eastern robe without fastenings or collar', which is corroborated by the numerous paintings of figures wearing similar collars.  The form of the collar follows what we see in paintings, except for the extended tabs down the front.  I plan to omit those in the one I make.

The figures in gold and blue, the angels (peris), flowering vines etc were part of the original collar.  The ground, which is actually of green silk is a 17th century restoration.   This green silk was embroidered to imitate woven cloth and so in some inventories the collar is identified as having a green silk ground.

The loss of gold threads in the original motifs was replaced with gilt silver thread which has tarnished badly and some of the blue silks have been replaced as well.

So it was originally a blue silk garment with a red silk collar with gold thread embroidery with touches of blue.  These are some of my favorite colors and I have all the materials I need to do this.  I have a great piece of red silk taffeta for the ground and lots of gold threads.  I also have a good supply of silk embroidery floss in blue, turquoise and red and I suspect I will use all of them.

This embroidered canopy of gold simurghs is also going to serve as a model.  It uses couched threads of a yellow silk core wrapped with a gilded paper substrate, made thick to 'achieve the effect of relief'.  You can find this in When Silk Was Gold.

It's dated to Yuan period in China, 1279-1368.  So it's a bit earlier than the rest, but the renderings of the simurghs is pretty constant through this period, so I'm using it to fill in technique details I can't get elsewhere.  I've also made a test of the technique that is near the scale that will be used in my collar.

This was my first major attempt at gold-thread embroidery.  My teacher, Lady Rouge from Caid (Las Vegas) suggested I use a finer gauge thread for something so small.  It will be easier to get good detail.

So this is the preliminary research.  The next step is to scan and re-size the drawings so I can make a paper mock-up.  Once I think I have the design in place, I'll do a test embroidery for a couple of the major motifs to make sure it will work like I think it will. 

Then dressing the frame and embroidering.  I do not plan to cut out the coat until the collar is done.  I suspect this will take me most of the year, working on it for about an hour a day. 

While I'm working on the design process for this collar, I'll be executing the embroidery for another, simpler collar for a friend of mine.  I want to have that one done by March, for Gulf Wars.  I'll be using that project to do some testing of techniques for this project as well.

I have some issues with insomnia and so part of my routine is to shut down all computer and tv screens a minimum of a half hour before I go to bed, as my doctor recommended.  I've started working on soothing art projects during that period, so once the design and set-up phase is done, this will be my primary bedtime project.

Anybody else have any major projects planned for this year?

This awesome little guy with the crazy hat is from a series of 16th c. Persian paintings.  A friend on Facebook sent me a link.  I haven't explored this site yet, but it looks like a delightful rabbit-hole.  I have seen some images from this series redrawn in some of the Dover books, but this is the first time I've seen the whole series.  You always have to be careful using allegorical scenes as costume documentation, but I really love this hat.  I have seen portraits with this sort of hat without the angled top and I have seen the occasional use of diagonal stripes on shalwar cuffs and a couple of caftans.