Last Stop Before Home

I'm a mid-century baby boomer who grew up with the protest songs of Vietnam and a brother with a draft number. But I'd never been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial until tonight, on a warm spring evening with all of Washington glowing under the cherry trees. The memorial is an extraordinary place. You want souls and shadows? Reverence and regret? It gave me chills all along the quiet path, just yards away from raucous families on a Friday night.

The design of the memorial was controversial but it seems brilliant to me. It's always interesting to see something you've seen pictures of for so many years. It feels Asian, and rightly so; it's like the single stroke of a master calligrapher on the page, slender then wide, utterly simple, utterly graceful, with all the sadness and joy of life within it. 

I think there are lessons for artists here. Maya Lin said, "It was while I was at the site that I designed it. I just sort of visualized it. It just popped into my head. Some people were playing Frisbee. It was a beautiful park. I didn't want to destroy a living park. You use the landscape. You don't fight with it. You absorb the landscape . . . When I looked at the site I just knew I wanted something horizontal that took you in, that made you feel safe within the park, yet at the same time reminding you of the dead. So I just imagined opening up the earth. . . ."

 

Lin wasn't afraid to evoke deep emotion in the work. She did it with effortless simplicity, telling the story it had to tell with subtlety and dignity. It doesn't shout or whisper; it just says: These people died. In this order. Name them. There's no excess, but the details are exquisitely thought out, as the names rise up from the earth and back in. There are no birth dates alongside the names to make it obvious, but you remember how young these men were, these boys, and how long they've been gone.

I expected it to be profound and was told that it would be, and yet from a distance it looks unassuming. In not assuming, it tells the truth. It has beauty, substance, and integrity in its materials. I really can't imagine asking more of a work of art, or a work of memory.

Then I walked back past melancholy old Lincoln, who still seems to be trying to hold this country together, along the river and back into the city as the wind blew pink and white petals to the ground.

photo by outtacontext 

Comments

[Diane Roeder]

And if you visit when it's raining, you see your own image among the names.

Diane

[Chris Mundy]

I visited several years ago. We were on vacation, laughing, talking. By the time I was done walking through it I was in tears. It is incredibly effective. It's just names and names and names, and then little mementos left, or flowers, or notes It's like the sadness is in the stone. You really have to be there to understand.

[deb]

It was my contemporaries, friends and boyfriends, who held the draft numbers. I have not yet been to this memorial, afraid to try, truth be told. Thanks for the first hand perspective.

[marja-leena]

Lainie, this is very moving, poignant, beautiful,sort of haunting...

Have a good trip home.