ON SATYRS AND BITTERNS
Of all the screwball architectural passions—gingerbread-house fetishes, say, or the mania, in the suburbs, for crenellated and turreted tilt-wall chateaux—surely none are more feral than the hankering for heaps of broken stone. For ruined structures have spurred lusty encomiums since at least the age of Babylon, roiling the staid literature of buildings with “this orgiastic conjuring of the past, this upsurging of furious fancies,” as old Rose Macaulay put it so nicely. “Out come the screech-owls, the dragons, the satyrs, the bitterns, the serpents, the jackals, the bats, even the moles, all the familiar creatures of ruin that haunt demolished cities and glooming fancy,” she added, winking at the hothouse realm of rubble.
Today our wrecked, junked, and brambled buildings are more often barricaded by the curators of antiquity (Rome), recycled as shopping malls (Ephesus: Step right up, get yer vanitas vanitatum, folks!), or bulldozed as liabilites to urban self-esteem (Detroit). But as Gothamites circa 2001 were forcibly reminded, ruins rear up where we least expect them, as shockingly sumptuous rebuttals to Progress. Especially so (as we shall see) are the tumbled stones that stub the sojourner’s toe in our inner, psychic landscapes—the moss-strewn pillars of consciousness past.
Ruins are dangerous, in short; that’s why we need them. A good, rotting ruin gets the juices flowing.
DUST OF MOULDERING GREATNESS
“I must thank all the owners who did not set their dogs on me when I trespassed,” writes a grateful Christopher Woodward in the acknowledgements to In Ruins, his deliciously macabre volume of transience and vulnerability, seemingly scrawled on the run from snarling mutts, overweening historic-site wardens, and the odder, more generalized improvidence that is Time with a capital T.
For this Baedeker of ruinenlust —what you might call the pleasurably perverse appetite for destruction—is a paean to passages of all kinds, but mostly the vanishing ones. As Chateaubriand put it, surveying the majestic ruins of Rome’s Colosseum: “It is thus that we are warned at each step of our nothingness; man goes to meditate on the ruins of empires; he forgets that he is himself a ruin still more unsteady, and that he will fall before these remains do.” Pope Pius II, for his part, called ruins an “exemplary frailty.” Woodward calls them going, if not gone. Ruins are no longer lustily devas- tating artifacts. They’ve all been domesticated.
With trusty Poe in his pocket (“Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!”), this young British art historian makes a wily rampage over manicured hill and down pinscher-patrolled dale, veering off the scripted info-trail at Europe’s broken-pillared destinations, and rummaging on the sly in the onto-logico-historical rubbish bins....
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