Archaeology of Metaphor: The Art of Gilah Yelin Hirsch (review)

Long before pronouns started taking a central role in the gender debate, a young Gilah Yelin was questioning the identity of God. In third grade, she asked her male Orthodox Torah teacher why the names of God, as evidenced in the Torah, were both male and female. Pointing to the text, she explained in Yiddish, the language of instruction: es iz geshribn rekht do—it's written right here. Rather than answer Gilah's question, her teacher marched down the aisle, grabbed her by her long red hair, and threw her out of the classroom. She was never allowed back.

Two years later, ten-year old Gilah wrote a letter to Albert Einstein, asking him how he could believe in God, especially in view of the world's suffering. Einstein, who famously received and answered letters from children around the world, and who, as he said, believed in the God who created the laws of physics, answered Gilah with the following advice: "Try to form your opinions always according to your own judgement." Her letter already demonstrated her ability to do so, he remarked (Archaeology of Metaphor [henceforth: Archaeology], p. 9).

Gilah's precocious ability to ask such astute questions about the nature of God was surely influenced by her independent-thinking parents. Her father, journalist Ezra Yelin, a descendent of seven generations of distinguished rabbis,¹ was an atheist Talmud scholar. Her mother, poet, author and early feminist Shulamis Borodensky Yelin, was instrumental in forging a progressive (notwithstanding Gilah's third-grade teacher), tightknit Jewish community of east European immigrants and Holocaust survivors in Montreal, where Gilah was raised. Non-observant yet determinedly literate Jews, they sent Gilah to the Peretz Shule, a quadruple-language elementary school where the day was divided between secular studies in English and French, and Jewish studies in Hebrew and Yiddish, the language they spoke at home. Her summers were spent at Yiddish and Hebrew-language camps. This multilingual upbringing facilitated Gilah's ability to continue learning new languages with ease and nurtured her life-long fascination with and study of languages, words and alphabets.

Nearly seven decades later, Gilah Yelin Hirsch continues to advocate multilingualism. She has also promulgated her own theory of the origin of alphabets, according to which five fundamental shapes found in nature are the source of all writing systems, with ancient Hebrew as their wellspring. Positing that these shapes mirror neurons and neural processes, she sees a direct link between alphabetic forms and those discovered by science, as portrayed in her films Cosmography: The Writing of the Universe (1995) and Reading the Landscape (2019). Add to this Hirsch's extensive travels and explorations of world languages and cultures, Kabbalah, theosophy, Eastern and Native American spiritual philosophies and practices, yoga, ritual dance

Figure 1.

Ain Soph. 1977. Oil on canvas, 61 cm diameter. Gilah Yelin Hirsch, Archaeology of Metaphor, Plate 6 (p. 49).

and the healing arts.² Hirsch has merged art, science, mind and body, using the tools of creativity as consciousness raising.

Navigating a kabbalistic portal into thought and understanding of the infinite light—the or ayn sof (Fig. 1, p. 157)—Hirsch elucidates that there is no end to knowledge or to our determination to unlock the mysteries of the universe and of existence. To penetrate this Infinite—the ayn sof—she wields a feminist lens, peeling away layer after layer to get to the source of all knowledge. scientific and esoteric, and so arriving at an art of "metaphysical spiritualism," illuminating and luminous (Archaeology, p. 56). One might characterize her as a spiritual archaeologist; indeed, she has been likened to a shaman (p. 59). The title of her monograph, Archaeology of Metaphor, signifies all that is hidden, waiting to be revealed.

The 182-page volume, published in conjunction with Hirsch's October 2022 retrospective at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA) in Santa Ana, California, spans Hirsch's oeuvre from 1968...