My mind is a-whirl. Yesterday I drove a friend to Eugene for doctor appointments and walked to the nearby U of O bookstore instead of hanging out in the waiting room. I am working on new pieces for a November show. Books are strewn around my computer chair and piled on worktables. I am thinking and searching for long forgotten images and memories and longing for new connections. I was excited with the prospect of coming home with a new book. But I was stunned with how small the art book section was and disappointed that it appeared to be a rehash of "old" History, Picasso and other men..... until I saw two books on Maya Lin. I came home with the one she wrote - Boundaries. I had it read cover to cover by 9am this morning.
I remember vividly the day I learned that a 21 year-old Yale undergraduate had won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I was four years out of grad school, early into my spiral into reclusion, adrift, trying to find my voice, my vision in the male minefield of sculpture. I took the newspaper article to the beach, staring at the waves I found myself thinking God help her survive. I knew it had been a blind competition and I was sure that the selection committee was just as stunned to learn that they had selected a woman, let alone a college student of Asian heritage, as she was to learn she had been selected. And I followed the ensuing controversy as best I could from far, far away, wishing her strength and perseverance. 
I did not see the Memorial until three years ago. I just happened to be in Washington shortly after neighbors had learned that recently repatriated remains had been identified as their MIA son. The memorial was everything I had hoped it would be sitting on that beach twenty years earlier. I was grateful that I could turn my back on the superfluous figures added to appease the vocal objectors, and just experience the space as Lin intended. I sought out my neighbor’s son’s name, keenly aware that the tiny cross beside his name would soon become a diamond, relieved that Lin had planned ahead for the possibility that MIAs might someday come home.
But I remember that I left saddened for the family of the very last name at the tip of the right wing as it dipped into the grass. I knew the names were recorded chronologically, but mistakenly believed they read from left to right, and the last name on the right was the last man to die. Last night I read that the names begin and end in the apex, linking the first and last into one continuum, removing the significance of who was first or last, sharing the the weight of the loss amongst all the names.
I have always considered my cousin John a casualty of the war. He was practically the only veteran I know who came home with his love of life and humor in tact, but he died of skin cancer in 1980, before the design competition and long before the full impact of Agent Orange seeped out into public knowledge. John’s death was new and raw when the design controversy ensued. I was angry that his name and the names of others who came home, but just as surely lost their lives to that war as those who lost theirs on the battlefields, would never be incised into the marble. But, now I know that his name is there, strung with all those other names, written by our memories along the invisible arc that completes the continuum, connecting the end of the wall pointing towards the Washington memorial with the other pointing towards the Lincoln Memorial. I am in awe of how complete and wise Lin’s youthful vision was. 
Several years ago Maya Lin was selected for the Confluence Project (http://www.confluenceproject.org) along the Snake and Columbia Rivers. When I read that news I found my self thinking good, she survived and finally there is going to be a piece within reach of my backyard that I will not have to wait 20 years to see. But somehow she had fallen off my radar screen in those intervening years, and until I poured through Boundaries, I had no idea just how well she had survived, thrived. Her pieces after the Vietnam War Memorial are just as remarkable; her words succinct; her process so familiar to the way I work. Our work, our lives are worlds apart, but our need to think, to write and clarify our thoughts before any form begins to take shape is the same. What a joy to rediscover her work, to know that she was not swallowed whole by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial controversy, that she maintained her center, steadily thinking and creating an incredible body of work.
More information on Maya Lin can be found at http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/lin/index.html, an interview at www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/lin0int-1. The web is a miraculous source of information but most of all, I recommend reading and learning about her work through her own words in Boundaries. As Lin wrote in the book, her "work is hard to capture in a single image. Without the element of time, one cannot see these pieces, and since so much deals with tactile sensations and changes in height, depth, and sound, the experience of a piece is not easily reduced to a single image. Except perhaps in writing, where [she] can best describe the what of a piece, often by describing the why of a piece."
