On Thursday morning I finished working out the chords for “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through singing and playing it in French. Tomorrow I’ll go through my translation and then upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog.
I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of four sessions.
I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast.
I re-read The Ruins of Modernity, by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle and added some quotes from it to my critical summary. I started re-reading Ruined Landscapes: Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes, Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination because there’s at least one quote I wanted to find.
I weighed 86.7 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and skipped stopping at Freshco on the way back because I needed the extra time for my critical summary. I’ll go there after class tomorrow.
I weighed 86.2 kilos at 17:30.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:00.
I worked on my Critical Summary and finished it around 23:30. I uploaded it and got ready for bed. Here it is:
Beauty in Ruination
In Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle’s “Introduction” to Ruins of Modernity they offer several interpretations of the meaning of ruins. They allude to the seductive beauty of ancient ruins and ask if we are addicted to them because they return our imaginations to an earlier reality. When objects, structures and buildings of the past no longer have function or meaning in a modern context they are seen as ruins. I will add to this that when we look at these ruins we resurrect them in our minds. We love ruins because we can make them our own creations in the imagination. What we see is not the ruin but rather some semblance of what was ruined or some new form constructed by fantasy from the unbroken fragments of the original. In addition to evoking the satisfaction of experiencing the lingering splendour found in the remains of fallen structures, ruins also arouse a sense of sadness over that which was lost. We also delight in the mystery of ruins. For instance, would we love Stonehenge as much if we knew its exact purpose, who created it and when?
In the essay Ruined Landscapes: Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes, Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination, Heide Estes points out that many Medieval texts are ruins in themselves because they are badly damaged. Additionally they often describe architectural ruins and lost cultural practices in alliterative epic verse that is in itself a ruined literary form. A significant number of Medieval texts are ruined even when the manuscripts are complete because we don’t have full knowledge of their authorship. On top of this, when we study Medieval literature we are sifting through the ruins of dead languages such as Old English, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. Every translation of texts such as Beowulf from Old English or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from Middle English results in new poems, often different and sometimes strikingly so from other translations.
Hell and Schonle also examine our feelings on the regression towards ruin that modern structures continuously undergo. They ask if there is “some intrinsic logic of ruin at work in modernity”. Perhaps the flaws of a society can only be seen in retrospect through the shape of its rubble. We want to reconstruct the old and deconstruct the new. Recent ruins wake us while ancient ruins evoke dreams. To illustrate this they quote Adorno and Horkheimer who say that “modernity undermines itself and lapses into mythology and self destruction”.
The ruination of the modern is in itself an artform. There is a creative desire to ruin conventional repetitions of modern art and architecture that are still intact and replace them with new or altered forms. For example the altering of faces on billboards to make them look like skulls, vomiting colour coordinated Jello on what is perceived to be lifeless museum paintings, and the ceremonial burning of books. These are examples of post post modernist demonstrations of ruination in which some artists like Jubal Brown are engaged in contemporary times (Jubal Brown). When art becomes common and tired it inspires the compulsion to bring about its ruin.
There is something aesthetically pleasing about deterioration. Beauty can be seen in the aging process that naturally happens to architecture and sculpture. The Leslie Spit in Toronto is literally built on ruins that have been hauled there over the last fifty years from demolition sites. I have observed there that scattered pieces of broken piping and other rusted metal have become beautiful with texture and new living form. Previously hard edged and angular fragments of demolished architecture have been smoothed out and rounded into exquisitely flowing shapes by the wear of wind and rain. Bricks washed by the lake for decades have been worn down until they resemble modern abstract sculptures (Leslie Street Spit). Ruins both ancient and modern engage us in a vicarious dance with the past that allows us to reconstruct history on our own terms and thereby experience the illusion of control over our future.
Work Cited
"Jubal Brown." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 July, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubal_Brown.
"Leslie Street Spit." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 December, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Street_Spit.
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