I don’t see ruin as a negative thing. First of all, it is not a thing. A ruin is that which remains, that which continues to speak – a silhouette of a thing. But this silhouette rests not around the thing but at the heart of it. It is not like memory whose lining is forgetting, but like love whose line through life is marked through by loss.
What else is there to love apart from ruins? One cannot love the statue except as it is in an experience precarious in its fragility haunted by the erosion of its own memory.
It hasn’t always been there. It will not always be there. It is finite. Can we love something before it is there? Before it has a name? After it is made, it is doomed to repeat the same gestures as its birth; making and conserving bound up in its iterability.
This finitude, in which the decision is not a horizon but a line running through it, this finitude is the very reason I love it, through its birth and death, through the ghost or silhouette of its own ruin, of my own – which it already is or already prefigures.
1 response so far ↓
clare calder marshall // November 16, 2006 at 9:23 pm |
Provocative – interesting.
questioning the notion of a ruin – a building or a life ? A silhouette of a thing: the first paragraph is so moving – could be a poem. towards the end,I get a bit lost as I do not know what iterability and finitude means
I end up wondering whether the ruin is the final detachment/acceptance/forgiveness one can feel at an experience that might have been totally overwhelming & painful.. “like love whose line through life has been marked by loss”
It makes me wonder ….