Ruins

Ruins Lauren K. Watel (bio) "Ruins give us this beautiful idea," writes the author, "that you could make something, something wonderful and strange, as pleasing as you could, imbuing it with something of yourself." Yet even the self, subject to time, must evanesce. Click for larger view View full resolution Photos courtesy of the author [End Page 20] I Today the wind churns up, as if on some terrible errand of vengeance; trees uprooted all over the city, parks closed for damage assessment. But I'm out in the weather, on a day trip to a site that was once an ancient port city at the mouth of the river, where women had their ecstatic visions, where pirates kidnapped senators, where residents and visitors thronged the theater and the public baths. The port city now mostly foundations and rubble, arrayed in the rough shapes of houses and apartments and shops and baths and temples, columns jutting up now and then like the first weeds growing back after a fire. Acres of ruins sit exposed to the elements, cragging and crumbling even further into ruin. I roam among the cypresses and umbrella pines and the ancient, weathered stones, placed there by the wealthy and the ambitious for purposes, noble and ignoble, that have always moved men to build things, and still do. Here a headless statue, there fragments of frescoes—one depicting a pair of human legs, painted in the faded pastels of time passing. Marvelous mosaics appear underfoot, naked men posed in warlike stances and holding spears, horses with the hindquarters of a serpent, fanciful fish, leafy patterns. In moments like this, when coming upon a fragment of a fresco with a pair of legs, legs not unlike my own, I feel a sense of astonished recognition, though of what, or whom, I'm not sure. Maybe it's just the dumb luck of those legs having survived. And the tenaciousness of art, which is moving in part because utterly useless—against time, against loss. Moving also because nonetheless hopeful, a recognition of our shared humanity, our shared mortality. Those ancient legs, which seem capable of stepping off that chunk of wall, so alive do they seem. Each discovery miraculous, these ancient hints of human making, the impulse to beautify, to decorate, to tell stories. We are gifted with it, compelled by it, this impulse, and we feel that kinship of makers, which easily stretches its arm across centuries and oceans, and in that stretching allows us an acquaintance, as if we were standing across from each other and shaking hands. We need know nothing about the artist's particulars—those details denied us by the erasures of time, even if we sought them—to feel the thrill of connection. We need know nothing at all, not even the artist's name. The ruins give us this beautiful idea: that you could make something, something wonderful and strange, as pleasing as you could, imbuing it with something of yourself. And if you managed to send it out into the world and it managed to last, even as a ruin, it could speak to anyone who encountered it, speak for you long after you were gone, perhaps for thousands of years—that is, if the human race can survive its own stupidities past the next generation. II I've discovered I prefer ruins to intact new things. Not to live in, of course, but to visit, to explore. The lure of the abandoned and the decrepit, the cracked vestiges of things formerly solid, have a pull on me; their ruination feels almost soothing, perhaps because among their slow erasure I feel in good company, my own erasure, the erasure of so many species, including the human species, such a constant concern these days. Also, I quite like the amorphous thingness of a ruin, which no longer can serve any practical function and therefore passes into the realm of being for its own sake, enduring and deteriorating both. In this spirit I join an excursion to a famous archaeological site in the center of this city famous for its archaeological sites. The outing is led by an internationally known classicist, a contrarian...