November 4, 2022
William Blake said that the ruins of time build mansions in Eternity. Sounds good, but what does it actually mean? The aphorism seems as if it must contain the secret of our fascination with ruins, a fascination which fascinates me, as it were. What draws us to ruins, to those failed attempts to hold out against the destructive power of time? Why are ruins a source of melancholy pleasure rather than a painful reminder to be avoided?
A beginning can perhaps be made by attempting to distinguish ruins from mere junk. Junk is meaningless: it is excrescence, to be expelled, hauled away, deposited somewhere out of sight. The uselessness of junk makes it ugly, the opposite of aesthetic. It is in fact excremental, dirty, and those associated with junk and junkyards are themselves regarded as “trash” by the more respectable citizens, like Joel and Rufus in the great comic strip Gasoline Alley, still running now after a century. Trash pickup is stereotypically the job lowest on the social class ladder. When Abraham Maslow set his students a project of designing a utopia, a question that the assignment demanded they answer was “Who will pick up the garbage?” A traditional answer was, African Americans, so often regarded as “trash” by white people (although there is also “white trash”), a stereotype transvalued by African American artists, from the sitcom Sanford and Son in the 1970’s, in which Redd Foxx played George Sanford, a wily junk dealer in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, to Samuel R. Delany’s wonderful African American gay pastoral utopia, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), whose protagonist takes a job as a garbage collector in Georgia while participating in rural Black gay communalism and trying to read Spinoza—a life well lived, whatever the respectable think. The novel is a counterpart to Delany’s narratives of urban communalism lived out by marginalized people amidst the decayed slum neighborhoods of the big cities, from the nonfiction Heavenly Breakfast (1978) to the fictional Dhalgren (1975).
Capitalist civilization creates junk everywhere: the oceans are full of plastic, outer space full of defunct satellites. We have even left junk on the moon. We try to recycle, but the proliferation vastly exceeds the efforts to control it. With remarkable prescience, Dickens identified capitalism with junk in his last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, in which the character John Harmon made a fortune out of dust heaps, mountains of refuse and coal dust that could be scavenged: in the course of the novel, the dust heaps come to stand for modern society itself. T.S. Eliot was clearly fascinated with Our Mutual Friend: the title of The Waste Land was originally He Do the Police in Different Voices, a reference to one of its characters, a young boy who read the police report in the newspaper in different voices. Eliot’s poem is itself a dust heap of voices, ending with the line “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.” Images of civilization in its decline and fall reverting to a dust heap or junkyard proliferate in Modernist writing. In James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a hen drags out of a trash heap a soiled manuscript that is obviously the Wake itself.
In Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man on the Dump,” the junk is false or outmoded descriptions of reality, in comparison with the eternal freshness of reality itself beneath the cheap and phony descriptions of it: “The dump is full / Of images. Days pass like papers from a press,” and the detritus of dead descriptions ends in the dump along with “the wrapper on the can of pears, / The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box / From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.” The outmoded descriptions include old myths and archetypes that are no longer anything but artificial poetic diction. As Stevens says in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Let purple Phoebus life in umber harvest, / Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber, / Phoebus is dead, ephebe,” the precious, Swinburnian sound effects conveying the sterility of the imagery. Or, as he puts it more bluntly in “The Pure Good of Theory,” “To say the solar chariot is junk / Is not a variation but an end.”
Postmodernism added its own images to the junk collection, from the famous camera shot in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) tracking an endless traffic jam to the empty swimming pools in J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) and the descriptions of an abandoned atomic testing island in his story “The Terminal Beach” (1964, in the collection of that title). Postmodernist writers, especially Thomas Pynchon, have made a metaphor of the thermodynamic law of entropy, the tendency of closed systems to become progressively disorganized as their energy runs down. Essentially, the entire universe is slowly becoming junk. It is clear by this point that what these modern and contemporary writers are doing is modernizing the ancient mythological motif of the return of the cosmos to chaos at the end of a cycle.
I have spoken before of the strange mood of modern times, half fearful and half longing for apocalypse. There is an urge to let it all go, stop trying to prop up a world civilization that is increasingly falling apart. I can understand it, in a way. I work myself to exhaustion trying to keep up the order I have created in my life: this house, my teaching career, my writing, playing guitar. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to stop striving and just let it all fall apart, come what may. I doubt I would be temperamentally capable of that, but it is certainly the mood of the times, and I feel its pull. I am urged that way sometimes by friends and acquaintances, especially about this property. Instead of battling the leaves of perhaps a hundred trees that ring my yard every fall, why not let the yard go wild?
This is something of a fad now: there are lots of articles about it online. I won’t do it, because there are many reasons not to, starting with the fact that in suburban areas it is usually illegal. There are “nuisance laws” that can be invoked to order you to maintain your lawn—your neighbors may not want wilderness in the next yard. There is also a huge septic system that would have to remain cleared. But beyond that, I would not want it. I don’t know what people imagine—some pretty magazine cover of a field of wildflowers. But it would not be that way. The leaves would fall and create a huge 2.5 acre compost pile instead of a yard, and then the weeds would grow—a few pretty, many brambly and ugly. I know because that’s what they are outside the perimeter of the property. There would be mosquitoes, an army of mice to invade the house and chew the wires of my car, as indeed they already do, and who knows what else. I do not want to live like the Unibomber and am puzzled that people think it would be wonderful. I do not fertilize or water the lawn, so it would not improve my environmental record. I discuss it at such length only because it seems to me an example of how people who long for the return of chaos fantasize in ways that are disconnected from reality. There is a reason that we tame nature to some degree in order to live in it.
Nonetheless, our time is gripped by a decreative urge to return to origins. The arts have been its harbingers for over a century. The move towards abstraction in the visual arts is a decreation of the world from the phenomenal world of representation down to the ground of the visual world in line, shape, color, and texture. Jackson Pollack’s famous technique of painting attempts to abdicate the artist’s power of choice and allow chance to create the picture as much as possible. Similarly, in modern music, people like John Cage have experimented with the renunciation of traditional order and given the process of composition up to chance. All this is old news: the question is whether it is prophetic of some decreative compulsion in civilization itself.
But ruins are not junk. They are another phenomenon altogether. Junk is meaningless, just crap to be hauled away and buried in a landfill. Ruins, as I understand them—and I am not sure I do fully understand them, even as I am drawn to them—are borderline manifestations, and everything about them is paradoxical. On the one hand, they are emblems of time’s victory over the human will to form and order—but the victory is partial, for the forms not only still stand before us but somehow affect us more powerfully in their damaged state. “Restoring” them would be a vulgar sacrilege—we do not want arms on the Venus de Milo. A restored Parthenon would merely be something out of a Disney theme park. It is in their present state that they grip our imagination: partly, like junk, victims of entropy, and yet partly haunted by something numinous and uncanny. After all, a good many of the most famous ruins are in fact tombs. The ruins in many a Gothic novel are of a castle, which may be literally haunted by ghosts, and, even if not, are haunted in a non-literal sense by the past itself. The past is somehow still present, though in an elusive, mysterious way. Symbols of this spooky half-presence are hidden treasures, catacombs, family secrets harbored in various forms including figures lurking in the labyrinthine rooms and halls.
Ruins are what survive of a lost past, as noted in the title of Volney’s Ruins: Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1791), a book translated anonymously by Thomas Jefferson. It opens with the author sitting in contemplation of the ruins of the Roman city of Palmyra and approached by the Spirit of the place, so that the book partly unfolds as a series of dialogues. Volney contended that empires underwent revolutions because of failure to keep to natural law, which restrains human selfishness because human beings cannot thrive without recognizing the needs of others. It was hugely popular during the Romantic period, and is one of the books by which Victor Frankenstein’s “monster” learns something about human history. Of it, he says:
These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike (116).
The ruins of Palmyra are thus a memento mori, but they are in fact not fully dead but embodied in a Spirit of Place or Genius Loci who speaks from a perspective beyond the cycles of time—from the perspective that Blake called the mansions of Eternity. Ruins may speak to us as the inscriptions on tombstones sometimes speak to us—Traveler, halt!—even if at times with an irony that is at the speaker’s own expense, as with the mighty ruler Ozymandias in Percy Shelley’s famous sonnet about him, whose inscription says “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” even though the statue is a ruin lying in the sand.
All my life I have been drawn to ruins of various sorts. In preparing to write this newsletter, I have in fact been surprised to realize how consistent the attraction has been. When I wrote a memoir some years ago, called Banish Misfortune, I opened it with an account of a visit with my father and brother to the ruins of the coal mine for which my Italian grandfather was the carpenter from the time he immigrated to the United States. Trained as a cabinet maker—the oak table on which I write this newsletter was made by him—he could only find work as an immigrant during the Depression at the coal mine. He built its tipple, the huge repository for the coal, more or less singlehandedly, according to my dad’s account, balancing on a board between two beams sixty feet in the air, carrying the huge wooden toolbox which I also still own. When we visited, the mine was abandoned but still standing, a proletarian vertical axis mundi with its shaft deep in the earth and its wooden tower pointing skyward. An unimportant ruin, doubtless long gone, outside the unimportant town of Midvale, Ohio, but it remains in my imagination as a portal through which I sense a dimension of time beyond the ordinary process of mutability, the process by which the world decays and becomes junk.
Once I explored a better-known ruin, that of the Birge Mansion in Buffalo, located in Symphony Circle across from Kleinhans music hall where the Buffalo Philharmonic performs (The Birge Mansion, Buffalo). In 1978, my first wife Bonney and I moved from Ohio to Buffalo so that I could commute to graduate school at the University of Toronto, and we ended up in an apartment building on North Street, half a block from Symphony Circle. The Birge Mansion was built by millionaire George Birge in 1897, and in its day was a center of elite social life, but by the 1970’s it was an abandoned building, a shocking reminder of the economic plight of Buffalo at that point. It was not until 2004 that it was restored and made into offices. In 1978 it was not, to my surprise, even locked and boarded up but stood open to the elements and to eccentric explorers of ruins. So one day I managed to get inside and explored it for over an hour, being careful on the second floor to keep close to the walls in case the floor collapsed, which looked quite possible. I was standing where, a mere 50 or 75 years previously, parties like something out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel took place, when Buffalo was in its days of greatness.
Apparently I am not the only connoisseur of ruins. Quite by accident, while researching the Birge mansion, I ran across a website called Places That Were by someone named Jim Sullivan (The Warner and Swasey Observatory, Cleveland), who actually spent some years traveling to, exploring, and photographing ruins of various sites in the United States. Although the website may be a ruin itself at this point, as it has not seen a new posting since 2018, the posting I came upon concerned a Cleveland ruin originally constructed very close in time to the Buffalo Birge mansion: the Warner and Swasey Observatory, built in 1894 by two industrialists known among other things for manufacturing astronomical equipment, and who were enthusiastic amateur astronomers themselves, originally for their private use, though it was later given to the Case School of Applied Science, now part of Case Western University. A dome for a second telescope was constructed in 1941, and the website has a photo of a plaque by his wife and daughter dedicating to Warner the auditorium “for the extension of knowledge and the service of those who, as did he, gain delight and inspiration from the unfolding mysteries of the skies.” Sadly, increasing light pollution from the city made the observatory increasingly impractical, even though, according to Sullivan, it lasted long enough to make important contributions to astronomy, such as proving that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. It was closed in 1982 and the original telescope relocated to Case Western University, where it is still in use. Again according to the website, craters of the moon have been named after both Warner and Swasey, and the latter has an asteroid named after him as well.
Despite being ruins of secular constructions, the preceding examples hint at something numinous and mythological. Coal mine and observatory are realistically displaced forms of the axis mundi, the axis of being that extends from this middle earth upward into the heavens and downward into unknown depths. They are humble examples of something that much more eminent ruins also exemplify. The Egyptian pyramids, like the Babylonian ziggurats, were towers reaching towards the nexus where the heavens intersect with the earthly realm, while the tombs within are a gateway to the underworld. But there are ruins even more ancient and mysterious. In the Outer Hebrides, rugged islands off the west coast of Scotland, stand the Callanish stones: 13 stones, each about ten feet tall, with a central monolith (The Callanish Stones). They date from about 2900 BCE, making them older than Stonehenge, and were a site of ritual activity for at least 1500 years. What kind of ritual? Possibly lunar, as there are 13 months in a lunar year, but we really don’t know. We can call them ruins only in the sense of their abandonment, since for all we know they look exactly as they did 5000 years ago.
These are what the Anglo-Saxons, looking at the old Roman ruins in Britain, called eald enta geweorc, the ancient work of the giants. Giants: some vanished race of beings with power and wisdom far beyond ours, who have left behind only their enigmatic artefacts. This is in fact a recurrent mythological motif. Some ruins vanish under the earth, like Troy, with its many buried levels, one atop the other. Others vanish underwater, like Atlantis, according to the account we have in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias of a civilization located on a now-drowned island at the Pillars of Hercules in the Straits of Gibraltar, the nexus between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the known and the unknown. Although the only “ruin” remaining of Atlantis is its fragmentary, enigmatic legend, that legend has caught the imagination of a succession of writers after Plato, who developed Atlantis into a miraculous utopia whose wisdom and science exceeded the barbarism that succeeded it. The idea that many of the great ruins of human civilizations around the world were built by some superior, more than human race, was updated in 1968 by the best seller Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken, which claimed they were all built by an alien race from the stars. More sanely fictional ruins proliferate in science fiction. A common motif, especially in the Cold War era, was the exploration of a city bombed into ruins by nuclear war, the technological commonplaces of our era seeming half-miraculous to our descendants who have been, in the stereotypical phrase, bombed back into the Stone Age. A variation of the motif is the exploration of cities on far planets or starships left behind by alien races so superior to us that we do not even understand the artefacts that come into our possession.
Whether they are among the monuments of the human race or merely local and ever so humble, true ruins awaken something in the imagination. Their decrepitude defamiliarizes them, so that even a common building may harbor a suggestive otherness that is a potential gateway to a dimension—call it Eternity if you wish—in which the past is still somehow a presence, in which the upper and lower realms of the axis of being converge upon the present moment. A symbol of what is absent, failed, destroyed, a check to human pride is paradoxically also the presence of whatever mode of being is beyond both time and space. The most important dream I had in my life was about ruins. While an undergraduate, I became fascinated with Minoan civilization, one of the so-called goddess cultures that preceded the patriarchal warrior cultures of Bronze Age Greece. Minoan civilization was destroyed in 1550 BCE by the eruption of a volcano, but its ruins proliferate on the island of Crete. The excavation of the palace of Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans in 1908 was a major event in modern archeology. The Minoans, peaceable and artistic from what we can tell, seem a utopian-pastoral alternative to the heroic thugs who populate the Iliad. I am not the only one to suspect that they are the inspiration for the wonderfully civilized Phaiakians of the Odyssey. Is it mere coincidence that, when Odysseus leaves the Phaiakians and returns to Ithaca, he disguises himself and gives a false cover story insisting that he is from the island of Crete?
The narrative of my dream was very simple. I was exploring, for what seemed a long period of time, the ruins of a Minoan palace that were half drowned, projecting partly above the water, using stone roofs as stepping stones. What was unforgettable—and I will never forget it—was the mood of the dream. It was dawn, a pink-orange sky tinting everything, including the waters slowly lapping the stones. It was quiet, it was calm, it was sacred. I am not one of those gifted dreamers who dream something archetypal about every third night. Most of my dreams are just, well, junk. Perhaps embarrassing for a Jungian, but I do not care. The gift of this one dream was enough.
The ruins of time are also the productions of time that gave me the title for my book. Eternity is in love with those productions, ruins or no, but latent in Blake’s aphorisms is a key to something important about the creative process. In his book The Savage Mind (1962, translated 1966), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said that the myths of pre-modern, pre-scientific peoples are created by a process for which he borrowed the term bricolage. Of the bricoleur he says that “the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project” (17). The bricoleur is often something of a pack rat or hoarder “because the elements are collected or maintained on the principle that ‘they may always come in handy’” (18). He gives an example: “A particular cube of oak could be a wedge to make up for the inadequate length of a plank of pine or it could be a pedestal—which would allow the grain and polish of the old wood to show to advantage” (18-19). The bricoleur “addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours, that is, only a sub-set of the culture” (19).
To which I exclaim, yes! The cube of oak exemplifies exactly how I have kept up this house over the years. I save all sorts of odds and ends—not everything, like a hoarder, but things that seem as if they may come in handy. And they often do, even though it may take years to arrive at the situation in which I can make use of it. I am always improvising solutions to problems around here. Lévi-Strauss contrasts the bricoleur with the “engineer,” who does not invent and who creates with materials expressly designed for the job. To me, the engineer is the guy you call to come in and fix it the right way—which is the way I usually cannot afford. The shower door comes off, and fixing it would mean replacing the whole shower stall, costing about $1500 with labor. I rig up a way to make the stall work with a shower curtain. The flower beds outside are bare and ugly. I turn them into a rock garden interspersed with decorative pots—small-time ruins, I suppose.
In his critique of Lévi-Strauss in the famous essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” philosopher Jacques Derrida says that the contrast with the engineer is illusory--the engineer is only one more fabrication of the bricoleur. In other words, all human creation is bricolage, and I think Derrida is right about this. But in any case, Lévi-Strauss is certainly right that mythmaking is bricolage.
It does not proceed from first principles or Platonic Forms but from what happens to be at hand. He quotes a striking sentence from the anthropologist Franz Boas: “it would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments” (21). On the same page, he supplies a footnote of his own asserting that mythical thought “builds ideological castles out of the debris of what was once a social discourse” (21). The bricoleur, whether material or intellectual, is thus a Robinson Crusoe, building a home out of the materials of his shipwreck.
I was always concerned that The Productions of Time might look like the work of a would-be engineer, imposing a perfect shape on the messiness of human creativity by forcing it to fit the abstract perfection of a mandala blueprint. In reality, it is pure bricolage, as I tried to make clear at the outset. It is the product of a lifetime of reading by one fairly limited person, and so in no way truly encyclopedic as such a work “should” be. The list of works I haven’t read and should have is too embarrassing to talk about, not to mention that I don’t remember what I’ve read. Moreover, the mélange of literary theory, comparative mythology, politics, and popular culture is bricolage too, some of what I think are its best associative leaps being originally serendipity, happy accident. I used the materials I had at hand and invented solutions to problems. This is not engineering but rather improv comedy.
As such, it matches my teaching style, and also, of course, the method of these newsletters, which is bricolage unbound. In following where a particular newsletter subject leads me, I often discover patterns that I could not have invented or planned. It is a form that seems ideally suited to my unruly temperament, making a virtue of my limitations.
But I do not want to end by talking about myself. There is something universal about the process of the imagination here. First, the bricoleur has to decide what to save as potential material. What is potentially of use and what is just junk? It is an important question, because, in the old saying, a weed is a flower in the wrong place. It all depends on how we categorize. Old English poetry speaks of the poet’s “word hoard.” It occurs to me suddenly that latent here is an answer to a question I have asked for years: why does my memory insist on hoarding what for all the world seems just like random nonsense? Maybe the unconscious makes its own decisions about what is junk and what is raw material. At any rate, human creation is a gamble. Anyone who creates in any form or genre is aware that the chances are overwhelming that what to them is a labor of love may simply seem junk to the rest of the world, and be consigned to the dust heap. No one’s work transcends the decreative power of time. When we create in the face of transience, what we are hoping is that what we create will become not junk but a ruin, decrepit but at the same time a portal into a mode of being in which past, present, and future are one, an Eternity that is not beyond time but rather the total form of time, transfiguring its destruction into a shape that holds, like an ark, all that we have known, and loved, and lost.
References
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press. English translation 1966.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Edited by Maurice Hindle. Penguin, 1985.