The benevolence of Saarinen, angry blond neo-gnostics and why the Arch is actually … small
By Gabriel Gudding
Large objects, objects of great size, often suggest to me small objects, objects of little size. The Gateway Arch reminds me of little objects. Some days it is a dental retainer. Other days it is a paperclip rammed into the mud of the Old Man. If it is not on windy days reminiscent of a damaged staple thwacked there to keep the Midwest from peeling off the earth, it does at least hint of the smooth beveled edge of a toenail clipper. And for those who have seen poodles, does the Arch not suggest something like the meaty, slightly sexual curve of a poodle’s shaven thigh?
But more than these, the St. Louis Arch is suggestive of an immense tuning fork. I am not the first to think of the Arch this way. I have heard rumors of a 1960s Marvel Comics book, of unknown title, in which the Gateway Arch is used as a tuning fork to defeat an “arch” enemy of humanity. More recently, Barbara Aho, an American white-supremacist member of the John Birch Society and follower of the neo-gnostic Ruckmanite cult, believes that the Arch is a latent but deadly tuning fork. Aho, who channels Old Testament prophets and looks much like a cross between a blond Demi Moore and a thin, furious Martha Stewart, believes without affectation that an Armageddonlike disaster will befall the Midwest once a plane, meteorite, or some other large, fast-moving object collides with the Arch. She feels that the impact will cause it to vibrate, sending disruptive vibrations into the bedrock beneath the Mississippi, triggering an earthquake so ponderous, so comprehensive, that it will not only level St. Louis but also alter the ancient courses of both the Missouri and the Mississippi, flooding vast areas of the lower United States and signaling the imminence of the Apocalypse.
Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect who designed the Gateway Arch but never saw its completion, said that a well-designed object should resonate with its “next largest context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, environment in a city plan.” What Saarinen did not say, but what would surely have seemed obvious to him, is that an object must also resonate with its smaller context: a big object, especially an imposing one, must in some way be attuned to smaller objects. If big things did not recall to us little things, they would scare us to the core. There are some objects clearly massive (such as the moon) that are not threatening at all. The moon is almost the epitome of a large, benign object. It reflects. It hangs. It floats. It moves languorously and changes its shadow just enough not to become boring. It is respectable, and if it is not entertaining, it is neither malign nor sublime. There is no danger in the moon, though the potential energy it holds above us in the powerful slinging of its orbit is enough to kill all life and thrust us back to beetles. In short, its sublimity and potential terror are mitigated by its resemblance to a cue ball. So if there were a large thing fixed purposefully above a city, especially one 630 feet tall, whose effect was only to suggest something truly large, it would be conceptually and emotionally intolerable; it would be, in fact, a sublime horror. Such an object would be fearsome. Saarinen knew this, and this is the secret to the Arch: It is in fact a little object made to look very large. It is a tuning fork, a pair of tweezers, a staple, a paperclip, or some variant on a small silver object likely to be found in a general’s desk.
By this I mean that the Arch, though it is physically huge, is metaphysically small. This is true despite its symbolism of expansion. It is really a contraction arch. People who are confused about the size of the universe, such as Barbara Aho, fear the Arch because they think it too large. The Arch is in fact small. I have flown over it on my computer, using Google Earth. For someone not native to St. Louis, the Arch is difficult to find with the use of Google Earth. But from 10 miles up, if one looks for the little sphincter of Busch Stadium, beside the pixelated gray water of the river, one can clearly see the Arch next to the sphincter. One spies at first not the silver of the monument itself, not the smooth beveled steel (which, in the satellite photograph, looks like a flattened staple); instead, one sees the dark stirrup of its shadow cast over the kelly green of the memorial’s lawn—and the earth becomes a little horse below us that we can ride.
Architecture, according to famous art historian and Yale professor Vincent Scully, is a “continuing dialogue between generations that creates an environment across time.” This could also describe the role St. Louis’ music (its liquid architecture) has played for the world. Scully reviled Saarinen, however. In a book published in 1969, Scully called Saarinen’s later works, including the Arch, “cruelly inhuman and trivial, as if they had been designed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” World-renowned Modernist architect Phillip Johnson (the man who brought glass houses into vogue) described Scully as “the most influential architectural teacher ever”—but influential or not, Scully was wrong about Saarinen. And if it is true that in one sense Saarinen’s sculpture is more a monument to the Cold War than it is to the Louisiana Purchase, Saarinen’s object is no more cruel or inhuman than a tape measure: He merely dared to hold a large bent silver ruler up to the sky and say, seemingly, “Though some may think you incomprehensible, and though you may hold missiles and apocalypses, we look on you, vast as you are, as essentially understandable and musical and benign and good.” Thank you, Eero.
Gabriel Gudding teaches at Illinois State University and is the author of A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series, 2002) and Rhode Island Notebook (Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming in 2008). At 8 p.m. December 5, Gudding and Piotr Gwiazda, author of Gagarin Street (WWPH, 2005) will read their poetry as part of the Observable Readings series at Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest; visit www.observable.org for more info.
