gates

I saw the orange - excuse me, saffron - crepe today, those hundreds of billowing half-raised curtains that wind through Central Park like a fluorescent zipper. The Gates. It's supposed to be art, and I guess in some pretentious, European way it is, but I'm missing the point, and if that makes me incapable of appreciating art, well, pronounce me guilty and gauche and guileless. At least the other significant French bestowal to NYC is that gorgeous lady in the harbor, with her book and her reading light, who is only strangely colored because she's a tough old broad who won't shelter herself from the elements. I wish the French gave us more gifts like that. Big towering tributes to freedom, impressive and awe-inspiring, humbling, unflinching, massive, that can lift their sandaled feet and crush you, that have no ambiguities, that have their meaning and purpose scribbled in enduring metal, printed on the books they carry in their hands. That's a New York tribute. This is a candyland trail that is "art" but merely pretty.

Oh, but it is pretty. I don't dislike The Gates, I just don't understand the big fuss, or why, when given Central Park as a playground, all two apparently renown artists can come up with is a marathon run of orange cloth. There's something nice about seeing our park draped in a festive color, and that it's brought so many people out, and that you can walk under something bright and cheery or sit beside it with your book and music and watch the curtains flutter - but I don't find any deep meaning, or resonance, or struck chord, the way I feel art should always inspire. I took my pictures, said my leave; I'll probably visit once more on a day nicer than today, which threatened rain throughout and delivered about the time I left the park.

I've been reading Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty, the biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and there, there, are struck chords, resonance, achingly beautiful words in a treasure of a book. Such a life as that was, and such words in which its expressed; in letters and details and diaries and poems, it seems there's a written word for every minute of her life, as if she realized how valuable these recountings would be. She must have. And yet there are many indices that she didn't. The most wonderful, beautiful little lines dashed off her tiny cuff strike these chords, particularly this one: "I am not big enough to love things the way I do!" I found particular relation to that remark. It's a marvel of a recount of her life, endlessly fascinating and and shocking and scandalous even many years later. And when my favorite poems are attached to context - how she wrote First Fig very nearly after to losing her virginity and Renascence when she was but a wonder-child - they become all the more precious. I'm not into poetry, I don't love it, I don't treasure it, I'm not precious about it, but her poems - well, her collected works is by my bedside and I read it as though I'm reading a novel. I would guess that I am. And it's art, real art, not fancy orange paper pretending. It is direct and unambigous and even as it can touch gently it can crush. Meaning scribbled in enduring ink, printed on books I carry in my hands.