an essay on ruins:
O U R R U I N
We are our ruins, and our ruins are us. In the age of the moderns, preservation! has become the rallying call of the ruin, handily replacing reclamation at exactly the right time; buildings and their materials have changed. It is no longer necessary to make a quarry of a colosseum as great stones are no longer the medium of choice for builders. A gossamer steel beam, a shimmering aluminum and glass shell; these things have taken their place in the great buildings of our age. Our ruins are left as they have fallen--dried corpses of what once was, carefully embalmed so as to carry some shadow of their appearance in life into their death.
Perhaps there was a moment, a post-reclamation period, in which preservation had not yet taken hold. Reclamation was no longer a way of life, yet there was no desire to preserve. A disused building was what it was; a pile of stone and no more. Left to its own devices, such a building would in time become less a pile and more a field. Many have. In a city these buildings could be cleared and replaced with new structures, the rubble being carted away and dumped unceremoniously in some hole or other like the victim of a murder.
Strangely, many of the oft-plundered heaps of rubble were the funerary monuments of kings of old, their fine stone hacked out and re-stacked in the current kings tomb. In Egypt, noone saw the dishonor in this, the systematic disassembly of a predecessors gateway to eternal life. Noone, apparently, grasped the terrible implications this had for their own bid to live forever. Noone drew a parallel that connected the destruction of the tomb and the destruction of the body it contained. Not then.
It is doubtful that there was a moment, a particular spot in time when we stopped seeing ruins as so much junk and began to see them as symbols. Rather, this realization probably crept up slowly, its momentum started by the sight of the kings desecrated tomb and sped up by the end of reclamation. We drew the line from so long ago: we, all of us, are moving through time unswervingly toward our own ruin. We too decay, our usefulness ends. We too are torn apart and dumped. Our faces fall away until even those brave enough to look on us could not say who--or what--we were. We disintegrate until only our hardest bits are left, and then they too become dust. We are our ruins, and our ruins are us.
So reclamation gives way to indifference and then preservation, and the quarry to the heap and then the ruin. We see in the ruins process of decay that which we most fear: death, loss, and our own forgetfulness. In the broken edifice of a church, we see our own broken bodies in the earth; both shattered by time and the hands of men. We are the kings whose tombs have been destroyed, and we want them back so that we might live forever.
And now by bracket and brace, stone and strap we force our ruins back to life. We prop up crumbling walls, perhaps add a handrail and a long-dead market becomes a revenant of a tourist attraction, a cadaver in grotesque motion, its gestures all wrong and its odor overpowering. And we love it, because it makes us feel alive.
O U R R U I N
We are our ruins, and our ruins are us. In the age of the moderns, preservation! has become the rallying call of the ruin, handily replacing reclamation at exactly the right time; buildings and their materials have changed. It is no longer necessary to make a quarry of a colosseum as great stones are no longer the medium of choice for builders. A gossamer steel beam, a shimmering aluminum and glass shell; these things have taken their place in the great buildings of our age. Our ruins are left as they have fallen--dried corpses of what once was, carefully embalmed so as to carry some shadow of their appearance in life into their death.
Perhaps there was a moment, a post-reclamation period, in which preservation had not yet taken hold. Reclamation was no longer a way of life, yet there was no desire to preserve. A disused building was what it was; a pile of stone and no more. Left to its own devices, such a building would in time become less a pile and more a field. Many have. In a city these buildings could be cleared and replaced with new structures, the rubble being carted away and dumped unceremoniously in some hole or other like the victim of a murder.
Strangely, many of the oft-plundered heaps of rubble were the funerary monuments of kings of old, their fine stone hacked out and re-stacked in the current kings tomb. In Egypt, noone saw the dishonor in this, the systematic disassembly of a predecessors gateway to eternal life. Noone, apparently, grasped the terrible implications this had for their own bid to live forever. Noone drew a parallel that connected the destruction of the tomb and the destruction of the body it contained. Not then.
It is doubtful that there was a moment, a particular spot in time when we stopped seeing ruins as so much junk and began to see them as symbols. Rather, this realization probably crept up slowly, its momentum started by the sight of the kings desecrated tomb and sped up by the end of reclamation. We drew the line from so long ago: we, all of us, are moving through time unswervingly toward our own ruin. We too decay, our usefulness ends. We too are torn apart and dumped. Our faces fall away until even those brave enough to look on us could not say who--or what--we were. We disintegrate until only our hardest bits are left, and then they too become dust. We are our ruins, and our ruins are us.
So reclamation gives way to indifference and then preservation, and the quarry to the heap and then the ruin. We see in the ruins process of decay that which we most fear: death, loss, and our own forgetfulness. In the broken edifice of a church, we see our own broken bodies in the earth; both shattered by time and the hands of men. We are the kings whose tombs have been destroyed, and we want them back so that we might live forever.
And now by bracket and brace, stone and strap we force our ruins back to life. We prop up crumbling walls, perhaps add a handrail and a long-dead market becomes a revenant of a tourist attraction, a cadaver in grotesque motion, its gestures all wrong and its odor overpowering. And we love it, because it makes us feel alive.
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ahem.. that was interesting!