Above you see the ruins of the 'upper studio' at the old Freedonia headquarters...more precisely and less pretentiously, my mother's backyard (the lower studio you have seen elsewhere in this blog). This one however had the added (dys)advantage of being a treehouse which, however cleverly designed style wise, was not up to the rigors of Mother Nature's various assaults coupled with my own in-ability.
I now quite fancy this view however, thinking that it looks somewhat like a steampunk version of a crashed Klingon starship. Of course it will continue to disintegrate, at some point in the future becoming a formless mass covered by leaves, encroaching vines, and sprouting seeds leaving only some vague archaeological evidence of its former luminous presence (it had a translucent roof making it seem like a hovering bit of ectoplasm in the darkening forest edge). I'm also reminded(at least in my imagination if not in the form of the collapsed studio) of the numerous science fiction novels where the massive enigmatic alien ruins lay in wait to be explored and never-quite deciphered by the intrepid explorers. The shiver of infinite curiosity and possibility always greeted me as I read those novels. Modernism, perhaps a ruin in the making, prefers more the Kafkaesque ruins of a Piranesi sketch - a sense of time compressed rather than time expanded.
There seems to be something inherently fascinating about ruins, especially in a garden setting. The nineteenth century gentried English gardener went to quite a bit of trouble to have ruins, often imitating Greek or Roman styles. It gave the garden the imprimateur of a vast deposit of fathomless and murky ruined time, almost as a palpable substance, a sublime presence all within the gardener's immediate horizon, as if an infinite fold in the finiteness of the garden.
(My friend Sean Q. Beeching has written a bit on the Southern ruin, from an article to be issued as a part of the perforations series:
We are proud of many of our ruins, as we are of our defeats. Scull Shoals was ruined by flood and accidental fire but many other mills we Southerners have maintained just as the Yankees left them. This is only partly because we white Southerners are a backwards looking people whose golden age lies in the past. The more mechanical reason that these ruins survive is that they are down by the rivers, and with coal and the railroad we moved upland away from the old water-powered mill sites. Nothing, for instance, is left of upland Civil War Atlanta. In suburbanized Georgia the past is awakened only when an excavation inadvertently brings to daylight a horseshoe, a pipe stem, or a bullet. Cotton mills were not part of the moonlight-and-magnolia South of legend, the one we revisualize out of our ruined Taras and Gone with the Wind. But because we revel in the agony of the destruction of the South, we are happy to include Yankee atrocities in that vanished and invisible empire of the imagination. The same sort of self-pity is at work, for the South, at Gettysburg, for Texans at the ruins of the Alamo, and for all Americans at Pearl Harbor and in lower Manhattan. In each that invisible but still present moment just before the destruction is what we have come to see.)
Of course, the garden holds both possibilities it seems to me. A garden is nothing if not the firm placement of feet on soil, preparing for the mundane act of digging, or tugging or hauling, or some such prosaic gesture. The work of Empire, the digs of the Ozimandias's of the world, shrink to a mote in the realm of the garden. But still...the need for some sort of vastness (though not necessarily of the despair revolving around the decayed Cyclopean works) is perhaps retained in an encapsulated, encrypted form in the very nature of the seed itself, no flotsam and jetsam of demented emperors (well, that is until the advent of Monsanto) but a bit of matter with a mission invisibly stretched and folded within itself...perhaps one of the closest glimpses a jaded modern human can get to anything resembling a teleology these days.
When the desire is for everything shiny and new and electronic (actually, the very essence of time ruined and compressed), the ruin seems particularly Lovecraftian to a modern age, biological horrors with a stench of a grave which is the only opening to infinity...too much like a garden in some respects maybe. and maybe too Biblical: 'from dust we come to dust we go'.
