Heige Kim

I will soon be entering my forties.  In my twenties, I didn’t or couldn’t imagine life beyond 25.  It seems sudden and unfair to face life at 39 and realize that the door to my thirties will be closing soon.  But wait, it’s just a number right?  Or, is it?  In the last couple of years, I started having urges to really clean up my life, financially, emotionally and literally go through each and every drawer so to speak.  It’s all truly overwhelming to face hundreds and hundreds of objects such as books, purses, little dolls, remote controls, soaps, hair pins, pillows, phones etc.. in boxes, drawers… on and on… Over the years, I kept many of these items because I believed that they had some kind of meaning for me. What meaning???  So meaningful that I had to rent a storage space to keep them.  Thus far, my husband and I have donated boxes and boxes of things to our local Salvation Army.  This exercise is closely tied to looking at my financial life too.  Every single object was obtained by paying for it…  All these things that will eventually end up in a drawer or in a box was paid for by money we earned by either providing a service or goods.  In a way, the objects make our world go round and round considering about 70% of our economy is based on consumer spending, buying things.  

I read somewhere that on average a person generates 3 to 4 lbs of trash everyday.  My goodness…  I think part of the reason why I kept a storage space was so that I had a place to dump things.  This way, I’m not really throwing anything away.   It’s maddening. It feels good to face them, these voiceless things that have been sitting in a dark damp space for so long.  My old artwork for instance…  years and years of drawings, paintings, collection of paper for future collages, ideas collected and then buried…  I found one box titled “hk-old drawings-DO NOT OPEN!”  Geez.  I didn’t open it.  In the next couple of weeks, I have some decisions to make.  I keep thinking about Agnes Martin who apparently destroyed much of her older work (I think mostly works that were completed before her grid paintings.)  This is a deliberate task, to destroy your work. There is no easy delete button here.  I wonder what she did…  just simply throw it in the trash? burn it? slash it?  Paint over it?  Electric saw? 

I’ll stop here with a quote by Agnes Martin:

“Violence destructiveness and possessiveness are an integral part of response to the concrete.  This distresses some people very much and they would like to escape from response to the concrete in order to avoid them.  But there is no escape.” 

(-_-) hk

NEVERTHELESS

you’ve seen a strawberry
    that’s had a struggle; yet
    was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-
    fish for the multitude
    of seeds.  What better food

than apple-seeds–the fruit
    within the fruit–locked in
    like counter-curved twin

hazel-nuts?  Frost that kills
    the little rubber-plant-
    leaves of kok-saghyz-stalks, can’t

harm the roots; they still grow
    in frozen ground.  Once where
    there was a prickly-pear-

leaf clinging to barbed wire,
    a root shot down to grow
    in earth two feet below;

as carrots form mandrakes
    or a ram’s-horn root some-
    times.  Victory won’t come

to me unless I go
    to it; a grape-tendril
    ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times,–so
    the bound twig that’s under-
    gone and over-gone, can’t stir.

The weak overcomes its
    menace, the strong over-
    comes itself.  What is there

like fortitude! What sap
    went through that little thread
    to make the cherry red! 

I’ve always had a book of Marianne Moore’s poems in my studio.  It’s been buried in a box since I moved and I found it again recently.  I’ve used this book as a brush before and the evidence of the horizon blue color I used is still there…  Unlike any other color, the sky blue, that delicate light, warm blue (I think Constable nailed it!) ages so beautifully.  The yellowing of paint over time doesn’t diminish the intensity of the color but rather adds warmth.  Well, I needed “nevertheless” today.

(-_-)hk