Innocent Power

<p>There are five kinds of ruins.</p> <p>1.<br /> There are romantic ruins, old castles and fortresses, temples and churches. They were destroyed by the passage of time, by becoming useless and irrelevant. These vast edifices whence the gods have fled are witness to the vacuity of aristocratic warrior virtue, royal glory, ecclesiastical authority, chivalry and gallantry as well as chastity, (self-imposed) poverty and obedience. The ancient junk now devoid of aura, halo and charisma is collected in museums, its context smashed: altarpieces mounted on walls, watched by schoolboys admiring the rump of Mary Magdalen. Romantic ruins are the first instances of non-beautiful beauty. They are meant to exemplify the passing of an epoch supposed to have been somehow ‘meaningful’, fragmented by the mundane, this-worldly, philistine prose of the latecomers, the bourgeois.</p> <p>2.<br /> There are fields of ruins, human settlements laid waste by natural catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, showing up the fragility of human design, its vulnerability to anonymous forces without malice, indifferent to the human predicament, disproportionately larger than anything that the deliberately planned human cosmos can possibly muster. Those human dwellings wiped out by impassible nature will illustrate the futility of human will and the inborn weakness of the species…</p>