Riyaz Latif
U
nexpected incongruous lines converge in the cone of vision; broken architectural elements vaunt their contours for a dialectical display of [arrested] decomposition; moss covered stones, arches, vaults, columns, capitals, and cornices utter a cryptic language……And we submit to the embrace of the ruin, the stirring spectacle of the fragment. Derelict architectural elements migrate from their predestined loci, dislocating our received visual logic. Be it time acting on their being, or be they vestiges of human apathy, these elements resolutely endeavor to subsume us in their potent incompleteness. This consummate incompleteness is the dialectical expression of the ruin: lush as a forest, roots and leaves and all, it branches in the itinerant eye of our perception.
Surely, a paradox thrives here: the incompleteness of the architectural elements itself conjures up the ruin and its unity; it is the apotheosis of the fragment. A broken arch which has already fulfilled its destiny, stones released from their regimental composition scattered around in an enigmatic order of their own, irreverent columnar shafts and ornate capitals that have surrendered their verticality, an entropic materiality at passionate repose in the arms of earth and grass, fluid yet frozen spaces that spell out the niches and the sanctums that once were…all things, which have reverted from their culmination, shape the lexicon of the ruin. In a sublime act of irreverence, a ruin circumscribes itself in its incompleteness, concurrently consummating its singular expression through the act.
The breathing spirit of the ruin nourishes itself on its own organic unraveling. In their stasis, its architectural fragments confer upon it an unparalleled aura to make it timeless. Paradoxically, it is time washing over the ruptured configurations of elements, subtly material and articulately fluid, tangible and intangible, that bestows a shattered singularity upon the ruin: the air carries the ineffable whiff of disintegrated architectural forms.
Light descends onto the unruly spaces through a posthumous dome. Light is absolute; it suffers no weathering. But the stones and the cracks and the crevices are temporal. The ornate fluted columns and the intricately carved screens and the cavernous cupolas are temporal. They receive and navigate light through the fold within fold strata of their surfaces to illuminate the unrest in their souls; the ruin finds itself in the realm of the poetic! Light confers with the liminal incompleteness of the architectural elements to coax out the occult aura of their nature. The ruin resounds with the terrifying beauty of the mysterious …. Light is harbored and contained; it acquires the body of the space it fills. It becomes the skin of the fragmented relics that it envelops. Light becomes the ruin, and gently slides away into the shimmering water caressing the worn stones of the broken steps. Water mirrors the sky, and the stones gather green moss. The snug leafy moss on the stones is the tactile lyricism of the ruin, a chant for what was, a requiem for the fragment.
Akin to all things, a ruin converses through time; serial, historical time floods it as an incantation. Time is its ally, its accomplice in disintegration. Tangible as well as incorporeal, all elements – arches, cupolas, niches, water, vegetation, light, darkness, reverberations, sighs, silence – are pregnant with time past. It is the requisite condition; without what was, the disintegrated organic coherence of the ruin is impossible. A ruin strives to bind time, and time, in a defiant gesture, emitting an illusion of being bound, germinates from the decapitated body of the ruin. In the process, it makes legible a profound primal formlessness, ironically imparting a recognizable visage to the ruin.
Concomitantly, it implants a desire for disintegration in that visage, a desire unfulfilled and arrested in the broken configurations of portals and buttresses and cornices.
But in this uninhibited yet cultivated disintegration, in this effacing fragmentation, lies the essence of the ruin, for to destroy or eradicate (as an unconscious creative act) is to unfold a horizon of possibilities. To disintegrate is to make room for other configurations. As Walter Benjamin proclaims: “… destroying rejuvenates in clearing away the traces of our own age…”1. In a ruin, however, the desire for clearing away completely the traces of its own age is unrealized; the urge is curbed in its progression, reflected in the haunting sculptural arrangements of the broken masses.
These broken sculptural masses, vessels for the occult workings of transience, act as a fulcrum to resolve two opposing forces of preservation and disintegration. In occupying this center-stage, the ruin enacts the futile drama of appearing to contain transience while conversely acting as its agent. On an analogous level, a ruin is architectural organization arrested in the act of returning back to nature’s raw material. This gesture, this suspension of reversal to nature’s raw material, is the palpable performance of the ruin, and its most evocative.
A ruin longs for chaos, or rather for that inexplicable pull for chaos. As E. M. Cioran characteristically declares: “I have always sought out landscapes that preceded God. Whence my weakness for Chaos.”2 What can be this weakness for Chaos? Its primordial beauty? Its unparalleled mystery? A rushing infusion of infinite options? Being at its purest? …… A ruin reaches out for that primeval generative nonexistence, but falls short of accomplishing in totality its sublime withdrawal into nature’s raw material. Stretched somewhere between the vast shores of order and disorder, the ruin preaches a recurrent gospel of inhabiting the hair-like equilibrium between being and nonbeing.
In its unguarded moments, a ruin delineates decay – the unwitting inevitable misfortune of being thrown into space and time. It throbs with life precisely due to its progression towards an illusory death. You stray your inner eye from it fractionally, and the ruin ignores you by receding into the hush of its fragments. It transfigures present sounds into ancient sighs, casting a leafy, mossy silence over them. A ruin sings in the death of its sounds …… In the final reckoning, a ruin dies for no one.
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1. Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 301. 2 E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (New York: Seaver Books, 1986), p. 26 --Insert Photo Credit: Diego Delso https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ta_Phrom,_Angkor,_Camboya,_2013-08-16,_DD_39.JPG
Riyaz Latif is a bilingual poet, essayist and translator. He teaches art history at FLAME University, Pune, India.
Riyaz Latif in The Beacon
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