A Little Madness in the Spring

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown -
Who ponders this tremendous scene -
This whole Experiment of Green -
As if it were his own!  

~~Emily Dickinson

For several years now,every April during my spring vacation I visit Emily Dickinson's garden at The Homestead. Emily is my neighbor to the southeast, less than a half hour's drive from where I live. This is one of my top favorite places in Western Massachusetts.

 Since childhood I've been fascinated by The Belle of Amherst. Her reclusiveness has been speculated upon by all manner of scholars, some of whom have made it their entire life's work to study her poems and letters, in an effort to understand who she really was.

A very private person, obviously. By her own instructions, her letters were burned after her death by her younger sister Lavinia, who while doing so, came upon a box of 1700 of Emily's poems. During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson felt uneasy about publishing her very personal and highly passionate writing. Perhaps she felt secure that her tiny bundles of poems, sewed together into little books, would one day be discovered and found to have merit.

I've always entertained a suspicion that Emily's reclusiveness was not a result of serious mental illness as was once highly speculated. The old stereotype of her as a frail, perhaps frigid spinster have more recently given way to a view of Emily much more after my own heart!  In thinking of someone like Dickinson, we assume that she was like a little mouse, never speaking to anyone, holing up in her upstairs bedroom to write, paranoid that anyone was watching her. In fact, Emily interacted fully with her own family, having close relationships with both her siblings and an adoration of her nieces and nephews. She tended the family garden and baked the family bread daily. Eccentric, yes. Yet busy and productive, with a sharpness of mind that is one of the trademarks of her poetry.

That her poems reveal, at times, a smoldering physical passion is obvious. Her relationship with God and religion  tentative and questioning, she was most comfortable worshiping nature in her garden. Her father and brother Austin, prominent citizens of Amherst, helped to found the Congregational Church, just across the street from the Dickinson home. Emily never stepped foot inside of it.

"I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die" (L13)

 I have not gone into a full biography, as others have done a much better job of it than I could possibly. For everything that is known about Emily, please visit The Homestead website, linked above. For many things speculated and invented, read Jerome Charyn's delightful novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson.

Here some more photos of Emily's garden in April, 2011. If you visit last year's post on this subject, you will notice a difference in how the garden is blooming. Spring is here, albeit somewhat delayed.

Scilla

Spring comes on the World—
I sight the Aprils—
Hueless to me until thou come
As, till the Bee
Blossoms stand negative
Touched to Conditions
By a Hum. 

~~Emily Dickinson

 

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown -
Who ponders this tremendous scene -
This whole Experiment of Green -
As if it were his own!

 The path from the Dickinson Homestead to The Evergreens, Austin and Susan Dickinson's home.

Magnolia

Hyacinth

 

 

Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the Winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight -
In Thee!

Linking to That's My World

Picture for One Moment

Saturday was brisk and windy but beautifully sunny. The-future-Mr.-Pagan-Sphinx (that's a nod to the style of hyphening one's name with one's spouse, era ;-) and I decided we had to go to the bulb show at Smith College Botanical Garden, as it was the last weekend before they closed up the bulb display for the season. We figured the last day would be less crowded but we were wrong. The place was busier than I've ever seen it on any weekend I attended this event in the past. The botanical garden is a small jewel among the laid-back, but busy pace of Northampton. And the view from of the lake from the knoll the greenhouse sits upon, is western Mass at its relaxed best. If you live in western Mass and you don't love Northampton, you have no heart!  :-D

Because it was so crowded, it was hard to take decent photos, let alone get any stand-outs. This is my humble photo offering from the bulb show, which I hope you will enjoy. For some photos of this bulb show that will really knock your socks off, go visit my dear friend The Cunning Runt at Little Bang Theory.  (for those of you who don't know him, CR is The Girls' Dad and my western Massachusetts neighbor to the west, not to mention my blog buddy.  (hi, guy).    :-)  

 

The Girls (and then there are three more girls, besides  ;)

As I look out the window my desk faces at home, a mixture of snow and freezing rain is turning to just rain. It's been coming down since around 9:30 this morning. I'm glad I had a chance to get some color and warmth on Saturday at Smith.  On this first day of the vernal equinox, I wish you....well...better weather than what we're getting around here today! But also love, peace and groovy things.

Pagan Sphinx

Linking to That's My World Tuesday

(fantastic folks from around the world gather in these places virtually to celebrate the beauty and interest that surround us through photos and other creative media)

Linking to a lot of Photo Memes

Our end-of-the-year trip to Mass MoCA

Up the Mohawk Trail from Greenfield up through the foothills over the Berkshires and into the town of North Adams, home of the Mass MoCA - the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Above is the Sign, Signs contribution

In the Building 5 Gallery:

Above images:

Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly

 Tobias Putrih

Re-Projection:  Hoosac

2010

And coming on January 4, a new photo meme called Signs Signs, hosted by Lesley, to which I will be linking. 

 Alyson Shotz

The Geometry of Light

2010

What is the red thing behind the door in the photo above, you ask?

Orly Genger (b. 1979, New York)

Big Boss, 2009–2010
Rope, paint

Created with 100 miles of knotted rope Orly Genger’s installation commands the space
with a towering wall that bursts through the architecture and falls into a riotous spill
of material. Forcing viewers to rethink their path, the distinct elements articulate
the structural potential and strength of the rope as well as its softer side. Genger’s
work often grapples with a male-dominated history of sculpture and with the legacy
of artists such as Tony Smith and Richard Serra. Hand-working her industrial material
in an adapted crochet stitch, Genger introduces a traditionally female-identified
craft process into an artistic idiom associated with a certain muscular bravado. Yet
Genger’s own process — which has her wrestling with large amounts of the heavy
material — is overtly physical. (Images of body-builders are pinned to Genger’s studio
wall). The “Big Boss” of the title might refer to the labor the rope demands of Genger,
or perhaps to her mastery over the material. Painting the rope a vivid red, the artist
matches the material’s presence with an equally forceful color.

Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen

(b. 1979, Portland, Maine, and b. 1976, Little Falls, Minnesota)
White Stag

2009–2010

Paper, wood

Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen have been working with paper since their
first collaboration in 2005. The versatility of the material — which can be flat or
volumetric, smooth or textured, buoyant or heavy — allow the artists a wide range of
possibilities for their large-scale installations which they describe as “investigations
of the uncertain territory between imagined and physical space.” At MASS MoCA the
duo has responded to the museum’s industrial, brick architecture with its imagined
opposite: a fantastical, old growth forest fashioned from twisted, crumpled, and
draped rolls of paper. The ghostly image of the decaying natural landscape, however,
mirrors in some way the fading industrial landscape embodied by the museum’s
repurposed factory spaces. Spanning two floors, the installation appears to grow from
one gallery to the next, joining the separate spaces and providing viewers a different
perspective on the labyrinthine building.

My World

Weekend Reflections

Ruby Tuesday

Signs Signs

Window Views and Doors

Wordless Wednesday

 click to enlarge

Katharina  Grosse: One Floor up More Highly

My daughter interacting with the art at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, yesterday.

 Pagan Sphinx Photo © All Rights Reserved

Yard Art on Thursday

I saw this tranquil little scene in the front yard of a yoga studio in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.  The village of Shelburne Falls is off  Rt. 2 on the Deerfield River and about 20 miles from where I live.

Namaste

Yard Art Thursday
Thanks, Mary!

Shadow Shot Sunday - Eye Shadows

Front of William College Museum of Art, featuring Eyes (nine elements), 2001, by Louise Bourgeois.
Commissioned on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the museum.

Louise Bourgeois is a French-born American Abstract Expressionist Sculptor, born in 1911

 To see a couple of truly professional photos of this sculpture series go here

Shadow Shot Sunday is brought to you every week by Tracy at Hey Harriet from Brisbane, featuring photography from around the world.

Annual Winter Visit to Mass MoCA

WP and I headed west to the Berkshires, with my mother and Lovely Stepdaughter #1 along for the cold, sunny ride over the mountain (which was hazy) and into the hamlet of North Adams, Massachusetts. We walked into the factory buildings turned large museum spaces...and into several other planets and universes and galaxies of the creative and neurotic contemporary mind...

 Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams

Mass MoCA

This is Killing Me 

exhibit of eight artists; a few of whose works I photographed and noted 

 

(pagan sphinx photo 2009)

detail from a text work by

Sean Landers

(pagan sphinx photo 2009)


Whitney Bedford

My mother standing in front of Whitney Bedford's "broken hands", her favorite art pieces at MoCA.  I was impressed by her ability to grasp the cutting-edge art, ask lots of questions about it and be okay with not having exact answers. It blew me away.

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)

House
Shana Lutker 

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)


House 
(interior detail)

Shana Lutker’s works in various media mine her
unconscious and psychoanalytic theory. In House
(1986–1996) with Art That I Dreamt That I Made
Lutker fabricated a scale-model of her childhood
home. The house is then filled with miniature
versions of the art that Lutker dreams she has
made. Lutker often reworks these miniatures
into drawings and large sculptures—making real
works from those she has literally “dreamed up.”

House
(interior detail, #2) 

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)


Untitled #3

from the "Disruption" Series

Marco Rios

 Untitled, #3

Detail

Lovely Stepdaughter #1 contemplating the slaughter of a manatee??
This exhibit included eyeballs on the ceiling that rained cold tears on museum-mers. I was getting rather wet and ducked out of there fairly quickly after taking this picture.

Lastly, some new additions to the Sol Lewitt wall drawings, which will be on exhibition at the museum for the next two decades