BirchLane.org
May
Friday 31
Promise. I promise to someday update all these May entries. I need to start anew in June, tomorrow.
Friday 24
On My Mind.
Thursday 23
Letter to Friend in Israel.
Dear Kathy: (add copy here)
Wednesday 22
Within a Work of Genius.
Tuesday 21
The Door to Therapy.
Monday 20
Compliment.
Sunday 19
Looking.
Saturday 18
Time Passages.
Friday 17
Prom.
Thursday 16
Rainbow.
Wednesday 15
Jamie.
Tuesday 14
How Green Is Our Valley.
Monday 13
Ambition and Rapture Add Up To Joy.
I'VE been kicking myself for not getting around sooner to the Eva Hesse retrospective, here at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Great shows must not go uncelebrated. So, better late than not at all, I would like to wax briefly about an artist whose hastened career, haunted by big ideas, reminds us that art, when produced at ecstatic pitch, can seem the most joyous and important thing in the universe. It's a useful reminder now that so many young artists are content with trivial effects and fleeting fame, which were neither Hesse's goal nor situation.
I begin with joy because everyone ritually focuses on the tragic angle, which misses the point badly. Hesse's family fled the Nazis when she was a child; her mother killed herself; her marriage to another artist soured; she battled chronic depression, and then she was found to have a brain tumor and died at 34, in 1970. But the art, even at its blackest, speaks above all of creative ardor, an optimistic desire to invent something new and the willingness to fail, which is another sign of optimism. Hesse packed a shocking amount into a decade, and the results look more impressive for being occasionally unresolved and even a little desperate
The desperation bespeaks a generation hellbent on reinventing the world from the bottom up — and naïve enough to believe it was still possible. Back in the 1960's, nothing was a given any longer, in art or life, at least if you were 20-something and in what was then a much more circumscribed world of art. You can sense Hesse's restless drive to do almost anything, day in, day out, to push headlong toward some prospective, irresistible end: the essence of the impatient, youthful ethos of the era.
Her progress, as it unfolds in the exhibition, looks amazingly tidy considering how untidy the work looks — untidy in that Hesse, like all serious artists, resisted easy, conventional beauty. She was after a more obdurate eloquence, which would retain the capacity to make you look twice or more.
Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, 5/12/02
Sunday 12
A Still Cup.
Saturday 11
Tea or Gin & Tonic?
This is today. This
is this afternoon
I am waiting
for a chipmunk
to pop out from the hole in the ground
near my feet; I say
to myself -- patience
slowly -- to the right
there is a lilac bush;
one year and not too many
years ago the yard
was covered with molehills and
one year in winter
the children would sled
from where I am
down the short hill
past the lilac bush
under the pine trees
I planted when we first moved here;
we did not know then
today would come upon so fast--
waking from a dream or a nap
where am I
who am I
what am I
what do I want
to be, will I
get there, maybe
and I mean you
and you and you and you
downtown Jonathan Edwards
preached sinners
in the hands of an angry god but
he was so much more and
Birch Lane is green
today, I wonder
what do I look like
sitting here looking
into the field of flowers
that have not yet bloomed but
will bloom later, days
from now, it is
quiet here
except for the sound
of a lawnmower on a Saturday
(or Sunday) afternoon, the chipmunks
chirp all day and the cardinals
sing in the swamp
maples and the leaves just
recently burst from their winter
alive rustle in the breeze
I have meditated here before
in the baskyard
there are my gardens
no -- a garden, I am
living with, conceived
with light and water and
last night my daughter's boyfriend
tells me a story -- a friend
went on a joyride and crashed
into a tree two nights ago --
I think of him now, his
parents, sitting here
and hum that Lucinda Williams song
"See what you lost when you left this world"
and I am blessed to sit here
this I know, just yesterday, a friend
wrote and said "bruce
you do not know how you keep me going;"
she is in my heart today and last year
in early morning blue
green light
three bears ran into the yard
one stopped and the momma
bear slapped her hard
across the face, it was
like a cartoon
but it was raining
and the two baby bears ran
up a tree, down
a tree, through the woods
across the street, their mom
running after them, Daisy
our dog, barking the entire time
and just now a girl
walks down Birch Lane
dribbling a basketball, is it
Erin, if so she has
certainly grown, my god
it is Erin, I must be getting
older, too
yet the green field
continues to change
amaze me, I am
blessed to sit here
come, sit here, with me
stay awhile, I believe
in beauty, let's watch
the grass grow and would you
like tea or gin and tonic?Friday 10
Kind Words. I receive a short note from a friend; she writes:
Thursday 09
Innocence.
Wednesday 08
She-Devil or Saint?
Tuesday 07
A Gift from Tara.
