Museum Memories

On the last day of January of this year, George and I went to the Dia in Beacon, New York. I love contemporary art for its challenging, thought-provoking ways of deconstructing and reconstructing the world. Little did I know that would be the last time I visited a museum in...a year? years? 

Thinking of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses and Michael Heizer's North East South West (you can google these artists/titles, and in fact almost the entire collection of the Dia is viewable on this museum's website), I see the common themes and effects of these works on my way of thinking. Serra's metal cylinders are inviting, yet create a sense of vertigo. Heizer's geometric holes descend like wells, or like the subconscious. Both works are metaphors for what we are going through in these days of the Covid-19 pandemic: Spaces we thought we knew now seem out-of-balance (or its lack of balance has been revealed); the the paradox of absent/all-too-present is on us like a physical weight. 

Thank you, Dia, and all art museums, for asking us to stand and stare and wonder. Thank you for offering to shore up our inner resources, for when we need to make sense of the senseless. Thank you artists, for the new ways of thinking about the world. 

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artwork: altered page, "In the Museum," 4-29-20, by Jean LeBlanc

Notes on a Small Planet

Lichens or lichen? Where does one lichen stop and another begin? Well, I'll leave it "lichens" in this haiga.

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The pileated woodpeckers seem unusually active this spring, or perhaps that's just because I've been taking more and longer walks. Have you seen one, a woodpecker larger than a crow with a flame-red crest of feathers and white stripes on the wings? Go out and watch. It's okay, even, if you live in town, because once in my backyard I looked toward the busy street and there, on a telephone pole, was a pileated woodpecker. One may see anything anywhere.

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More closely than ever, marking the cycles of rain sun, rain.

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One may see anything anywhere. But there are ways to increase the odds.

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Recent trees: beech, black cherry, white pine, chestnut oak, hemlock. Maples, but I need to see leaves before I say species. Same with the hickories (mockernut? pignut?), though I should be able to tell from the shells halved and piled up by squirrels.

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Pay attention to the trees.

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A fine country, if one looks to the lichens, mosses, ferns for guidance.

Adaptation Notes

Notes to Self:

Adaptation is not the same thing as capitulation.

Poetry doesn't simply still matter; it matters more than ever.

This is what it feels like to live in the Age of Extinction. Every species is vulnerable, including our own. Tell the story.

Things do not "happen for a reason." Those who are adaptable learn from what happens and find—maybe even MAKE—a reason to go on.

Five thousand books to read; five thousand poems to write. Go!

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lichen and fern
is it really so easy
to adapt to stone

The Radical Sacred

The act of creating a piece of art—visual, verbal, physical, aural—is RADICAL, from the moment of being drawn to the drawing board or opening the journal or taking brush in hand. Creating art is a SACRED act in this profane world. To visit a museum or flip through an art book or listen to a song is a VITAL part of the radical sacredness of art; to visit, view, listen are PRECISELY the things this profane world seeks to curtail.

Go create something, and/or go admire some creative work from the hands and mind and vision of someone else. Be a part of the radical sacred. Make "radical sacred" your mantra.

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the poem
where the pen runs dry
the page still listens
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