peter nesteruk (home page:
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The Ruins of
Ankor Wat
Another
look at the Aesthetics of Ruins, at an-other ruin, an Other ruin, using philosophical
concepts of Western origin, applied mutatis
mutandis to Eastern ruins (one of the most famous and evocative) the ruins
of Ankor Wat. And including Eastern history and religion (as all translations
into another culture involve its inescapable connotations, its history and
religion… in medias res).
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In the inexorable winding and thickening of these all-embracing
roots, in an embrace become a stranglehold, in the cold embrace of a immense
snake, whose coils, once enveloping, now begin to constrict; a vast snake,
whose sinuous coils will crush a culture, divide its stones and topple them… or
hold the remains in its embrace in an act of ironic preservation - precisely as
digestion preserves the indigestible (leaving behind only the stones). In this
place of tumbled edifices and twisting roots. What do we see? A mocking
reminder to others, a vaunting of the power of the destroyer in the face of a
culture: in the place of the culture that would have vaunted its power, in any
culture that would vaunt its power; its claim to everlasting fame… now reduced
to ruins.
A vaunting of
the power of the destroyer in the face of all culture.
(First look… first impression). If the traditional reading usually
given too the prospect of ruins applies, then we have the revenge of Nature
against an arrogant Culture, of time against that which would dare to be
permanent, of the Heavens against worldly success of any kind (Nature and the
Heavens may be read as interchangeable here, indicating an universal exterior,
as in traditional Chinese culture where the translation of the ‘tian’/天
character includes both Nature and Heaven and their attendant, and overlapping,
meanings – in modern Chinese usage the word ‘tian’ is restricted to Heaven).
The traditional, general, so, dominant reading; the first to arrive, the last
to go; a meditation on first and last things – and on what it is that … lasts.
So if the meaning of ruin, of the scene of ruin, begins with a melancholic,
even nostalgic, meditation upon the fate of a particular past civilization;
then the larger function of the ruin seems to lie in the putting of ‘us’, mere
mortals, in our place. So functioning as a kind of momento mori, usually represented in the history of Western art by
a human skull, another less subtle reminder of our supposed debt to the
heavens, or to the religion, be it sacred or secular, that would interpose
itself onto this awaiting space of interpretation, in effect claiming the last
word… so transforming the ruin into an act of rhetoric… Everything must pass…
(but the remains, of what remains, and how… to support these meanings, may
themselves ask: who is it who claims the meta-view… the last word?). Mutabilitie. ‘Everything passes’, but something,
someone, nevertheless remains to say this… to lay claim to this position of the
one who knows: we do, so finding in the ruin a convenient excuse for our
superiority (an identity proposition of a colossal order, matching in everyway
the supposed arrogance of the culture mocked by its ruins; as in Shelley’s
poem, ‘Ozymandias’ where the mocker is mocked, as the table are turned, as they
may be again, turned upon us… in turn). Old cultures, indeed all cultures, are
as fallen in the light of the eternal (or whatever would fill its space…
whatever we nominate to fill this space). The aesthetics of ruins would include
the joy, indeed Schadenfreude, of the
survivor (the surviving, or inheriting culture) as well as the prompt to
consider all things temporal as temporary, to take the long view, including
that of our culture’s point of view on history as well as ourselves as
occupying our historical position for a brief moment in time (this latter
triggering of a chain of meanings, which in the past would have been
overwhelmingly religious, but now include ideology and history and other
variations on ‘last things’).
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(Second look… a ‘second meaning’). The preceding constitutes the
received view the dominant reading: but the reverse or reactive reading is also
possible. What Nature destroys when it destroys (a) culture is also the heavens
(the heavens as imagined by that culture, its Heaven). The religion which
inspired the building of the ruins, the religion of the civilization that was
the builder of the ruins, of that which became ruined… itself has been
de-legitimised, deposed from the apex of a world view (‘Heaven’ is after all
only a particular cultural reading of the Eternal or ‘outside of time’ as
ultimate foundation; all cultures have some version of this… they must after
all be founded on something…). On this reading something deeper has returned to
reclaim its own, the last word, the hand of destruction, the revenge of a forgotten
(or pace Freud, ‘repressed’) substratum, where something that had previously
lain below the surface, the thin surface veneer of our civilization, had
finally re-awakened to claim its own (a Romantic reading, D. H. Lawrence would
have cleaved to this stage of interpretation). Nature, the avenger, here may be
seen as either Good or Evil (or as Nietzsche would have it, as beyond such…).
The return of the Good, as overturning the rule of the False; or the irruption
of the Evil that the religion would have held in check, but finally failed. On
this reading the religion proved to be a false one, a false friend, a source of
unreliable father figures, gurus who bluffed us all in their claims to absolute
knowledge, offering absolute truths that were but the latest round of
illusions, the last word in fashion – to be dispelled by the arrival of one of
Nature’s catastrophes (acting as kind of ‘reality principle’). Good from the
point of view of a cleansing of the culture in question (a sort of
Nature no longer the Nature Tamed, or The Garden, or our
agricultural modifications as exemplified by the fantasy (Myth) of Pastoral.
Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’; Absolute Other to our puny efforts at
civilization building.
Evil may have returned to take apart the attempts of the Good to
build a culture; as entropy returns to eat away at order… and in the end we
lack the energy (or the will) to replace the work of the destroyer, our rituals
of celebration and continuance or renewal, no longer sufficient to counter the
sandpaper that with the wind wears away the hardest granite, or the acid that
with the water eats away at our structures physical and social, institutional
and mental - the tiny roots that will crack open the stones of our foundations…
Evil as the effect of time as chaos on our putative order… Time as not on our
side. Time as evil. The oldest enemy.
Nature as Absolute Other… An absolute Otherness also found
residing within us. And now it is Matter that is radically evil, refiguring,
and denied by our language and culture, home of our consciousness, but
supported, fatally by matter, by our nature - by a Nature over which we have no
final control. Supported by a matter that finally fails them or overwhelms
them, or just moves on, obeying its own laws; as the sign itself is made from
matter which then turns against itself, turns against the self as painted onto
it, fashioned from it, but not essentially of it - dispensable. Nature as Evil,
as Human Nature is evil; ourselves as always already irrevocably lost, beyond
and without any possibility of redemption.
Matter to whom we do not matter: insofar as ‘we’ are not matter,
so we matter not. Materialism as the frightened response or partial awareness
of this fact (‘Idealism’ as the denial of this fact). A worship of what
frightens us. Devil worship. Requiring sacrifice, palliative, recognizing its
inimicality, and offering a part in place of the whole, in the hope that the
whole would be left alone, for a while at least… till the next time…
And what
fools we would be to think that we could take this side, mimetic last hope,
‘identification with the aggressor’ – could ride the Tiger.
Whence the
historical prevalence of ritual, whose repetition is our bulwark against
entropy, physical and social, of identity and community, which itself resorts
too easily to destruction, to sacrifice, in its bid to appease tbe destroyer.
(And so we take a last look… found an Other reading). Last
glimpse of ourselves before we vanish, last things indeed, although it is the
Thing that remains, is the remains, the matter that remains and which we call
ruins – blaming the culture before, or human nature from the point of view of
God/gods, who are on our side. We may choose to be on their side, and so be
‘saved’. But who may not be conscious of us, be incapable of being conscious of
us. For if it were, it would be a consciousness of, a consciousness full of,
sardonic irony. In the understanding of these matters (of Matter) we are left
in the act of attempting understanding, for understanding is human, and we are
talking of what is beyond…or before, what is human. We are left, thrown back on
our meager resources, with personification (genius
loci, the spirit of the place, or prosopopoiea,
the trope of the evocation or the lost, absent, abstract or dead) or …
projecting ourselves onto that which is prior to ourselves… Desperate remedy.
Poverty of means indeed. The universe conceived as a child’s mirror. The face
which we find everywhere. Our face. The Mask in the Mirror. For risk that we
might glimpse what lies concealed behind the mask, the Face of the Other. What
lies behind. The true face of Nature, of Matter, of…Things.
…‘things-in-themselves’
indeed (Kant, looking out, immediately looks back in).
(That which we glimpse in ruins, in the rock faces of sacred
sites, mountains and their ‘face’ - and in the use of stone in the garden,
Nature tamed… putatively glimpsed in the formless un-mimetic, resistance of
stones to mimetic re-appropriation, such stones as collected and placed in
gardens like a talisman, or a ritual inoculation, tamed by their surroundings,
but still uncanny in their resistance to resemblance, always suggesting …
something else… pointing… somewhere else).
Something,
before, or prior…
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(Third, or inward, look, or gaze… a step beyond dominant and
reactive… and also beyond the projection outwards of the demons of the Self onto
the Other).
And so perhaps last things are but the shadows of first things…
marking the place where… Do not point up (or out)... but (‘down’) and in… So it
is that the effect, the evil, points back to something deeper, the cause,
something apparently… primary. Primeval. Came first. Take priority. And we note
immediately that this position, this reading (this claim to priority), is
itself a rhetorical trope, or the return to origins as source of Truth, and of
this Truth (only provided that it maintains its capital ‘T’, its claim to
eternity) as good, even if at first sight ‘evil’, now become good, in an
inversion of values as first good, of the ‘prior’ reading, of the first time as
‘authentic’, ‘un-alienated’, etc… as explaining ‘everything’. And so as the
Good, from which we have fallen, the root (sic) of the myth of the Fall (…or
conversely, the Evil from which we have been rescued by our pantheons of gods,
gurus and immortals).
As with the onion game, layer after layer of ‘false’ or
‘inessential’ matter is removed to get to the kernel or ‘essence’, where
‘Truth’ awaits… Primeval. Good or Evil. Or beyond both. Or if absence only, the
ultimate step, beyond: Nirvana (this step had already been anticipated and
founds a sect in Buddhism, Chan/Zen, as it does in Western philosophy, often
described as European Nihilism). Yet what does remain, if we eschew the
invitation to metaphysics, the return of religion under any guise that is
offered here (whether of the worship of Good, or of other’s good, the Other Good,
of Evil)? If pragmatists accept the given (order and religion) as the illusion
that is first amongst many, the empiricist refuses all only to let in the
universals of science and a quantitative (universal) measure or ground of
exchange. Yet is there another thing that we may learn, from our descent into
the historical maelstrom of destruction that the roots of Ankor Wat suggest to
us as they wrap themselves around our minds and imaginations, as they first
wrapped, then engulfed the stones of Ankor Wat? The ruins of Ankor Wat. Do we
allow them too to ruin our beliefs, and is this not, is this evil not… a good -
a liberation from illusion?
Or might we find that in the force we feel when faced with their
aspect, in this vision of an ancient conflict, the conflict of destruction and
preservation, ceaseless, all-encompassing (itself re-figured in the carvings on
the stones of Ankor Wat, in the images of Shiva, Hindu god or avatar of
destruction, of the many armed, dancing Natraj, the dance of destruction, as
the walls of medieval cathedrals in the West show the dance of the great
leveler, the Dance of Death). Does not this continuance not suggest to us that
these feelings, this omni-present rhetoric, has a source deeper even than the
forces we see… than what we can see… for they are not external, but internal;
and they have accompanied us in our ascent from out of the forest although at
times (oft-times if sometimes seems) we lurch back, when ‘desperation takes
hold’, and the rationalist goods and their casting as universals (gods) no
longer can assuage the wounds of economic or other (existential) pain and
suffering. What is there beneath
religion? ‘Religion without religion’, the desire that religions built upon,
the desire for religion? Religious desire (lets keep this term for the moment)
underpins the variety of cultural manifestations we witness. Or we may suggest
a religious organ (part nature, part nurture like our recognition organ of
identity and community evolved from our interaction with others, from mOther
on, psychological, so real… because part of our hardware). The desire for
religion, for that which functions as such, must be prior to religion,
supporting it, forming it, so providing the fertile ground for its flowering. A
flowering that includes much of the very best of human culture.
The symbolism of the roots and trunks that engulf the temple
stones (as their leaves blot out the stars) directs us no longer upwards (the
proliferation of branches and leaves have taken care of that option) but down
to our very selves. So the desire for externals, all outsides, the Outside,
Eternity, universals, all manner of permanances, mysterious, because unreal;
because unreal so mysterious, always making us a little… superstitious (even
logic, like all second order languages, all claims to universality, ‘deep
structures’, of lasting meanings ‘beyond history’, ‘above particularity’ etc.,
all that claims to be above temporal restriction, so failing at the gate of
reality, unconditionally particular). In this light science and reason can also
function as religions (needless to say ideologies, pretending scientificity,
have always done so). Once we subtract the functionalist’s (good) explanation
of religion as representing society in its cohesive aspect, the (fictive, but
effective) glue that sutures its participants and ensures the survival of the
group, its reproduction … is there not a propensity that prefigured this
adaptation (as it then prefigured later imperial, feudal adaptations)? And even
if we posit this explanation as originary, nevertheless, the effect, the
formation, the propensity, is left, washed up in the high tide as the water of
necessity subsides (and given the time scales involved, psychological
adaptation could well have become generic… Lamarkianism need not be implied by
a genetic, evolutionary aspect, as with the evolution of the brain through
social cooperation and a high level of attrition, so the cohesion provided by
religion may have tilted the odds to survival). Or perhaps it was always there,
as a foundation awaits the structure that arises upon it, in our animal
reaction to Nature’s Sublime, to the experience of terror, to the manumission
of fear (so evolved from our reaction to incomprehensible or terrifying facts
or truths…). As repeated in our vision of the ruins of Ankor Wat. Undecidable.
Ever present.
(And here I would like to note the use of the brain scanner, of
neurology, or a psychology based upon such, as the science that is the proper field
for the search for the ‘organ of religious desire’ type questions, its
‘ontology’; our concern is with our experience of this desire and its
persistence.)
After religion remains, the desire for religion, or something
like it… For the certainties we have just mentioned, as for the magic that may
redeem reality and the value of things that are so hard to find in many modern
ideologies, not least modern Rationalisms, have pushed many an unbeliever into
New Ageism or to other syncretic religious movements - popular superstition
systematized, globalised. Of course the return to a vicious sectarian
fundamentalism in all religions has its call in this crisis of disbelief and
the desire for something (as opposed to ‘Nothing’… only Buddhist and Hindu
philosophers, or the mystics of other religions -usually regarded and often
burnt as heretics- can do this, perhaps existentialist philosophers too). But
for most the positive draws – almost regardless of its content. Only requiring
an Enemy, Other, and a sacrificial politics, sacrificial of self and of other,
together with all the usual paraphernalia of first and last things (so giving
the ‘true believer’ the ease of having the last word) super-added onto a feudal
or tribal atavism regarding traditional roles, restrictions and hierarchies.
(As those fearing violence must adopt or copy the ways of those
who are violent, who they fear… yet who they become…)
So the taming, or appropriating of the desire for religion
(where rationalist beliefs have failed) is something we need: both as a
self-defense against its appropriation by would be Leaders and Followers, the
Good Sheppards of mass murder or mass suicide, and their Sheep. And as the glad
reception of a gift we all have, a disposition to make sacred, to value, to dispose
of values (and which we, since the Romantics, ground in the Cult of Art or,
more recently, and perhaps more urgently, in the culmination of a long history
of genius loci, ground in the Cult of
the Environment). If the commodity (the mass market) has gone part of the way,
together with mass entertainment to cool this desire, to assuage its
enthusiasms, neutralising it for most intents and purposes – yet today’s other
identity props, nationalism and other forms of communitarianism, still return
with economic and political (legitimation) crisis. This latter ‘crisis of
Postmodernity’ perhaps approximating to the cause of the ‘return to religion’
of our recent decades (not that the putative substitutes were not ‘religions’ -
otherwise how would they have attracted the religious…). Economic crisis, to
which our system is endemically prone, undoes the work of the commodity (always
incomplete) in defusing and deflecting the desires that feed into other more
dangerous forms of identity assertion and maintenance. We might think well on
how we would, otherwise, ground them. Or (to change metaphors) re-direct their
flow, as we channel the flow of rivers that threaten to overflow their banks…
to avoid another Flood.
So it is perhaps the ‘desire for religion’ that offers us our
gift of value giving, as well as of our compromise with the Other; our
frightened mimetic reaction to our fear of the Other, at once imitating and
placing upon a pedestal. So resolved in part by our creative decoration of it,
the bestowal of a veneer of sacrality - the sense of the Sublime. In life as in
Art, a making Beautiful of that which is also frightening, inimical and in
excess of our scale of things… (as the Sublime is never simply overawing or
exponential, breathtaking or mysterious, supernatural or frightening, but also
includes a moment of pleasure and even of positive admiration – indeed it is
important to note that the negatives alone do not constitute a sense of the
Sublime - this is not pain, it is pleasure, even if, at times it would seem, a
little masochistic). Creativity, our human uniqueness which constantly
reinvents our culture (a uniqueness even over-and-above language, which we now
know animals too share) even if a ‘buzz’ word to be sure, may of course, also
be creative of evil… Recreating Order may be Beautiful (we recognize ourselves
as worthy servants of the gods): creating the Sublime makes us feel as if gods
(so intoxicated by power to incite Chaos we forget the return to Order than
accompanies, or better, follows, all Sublime moments…).
Deliberately taking as sacred the best of manners and the
civilised values necessary for a decent urban life (the values we would once
have designated ‘universal’, but now would not dare, knowing that this act of
‘putting outside’ is done at the behest of a belief system which rests on,
rather than founds the very place of support, may however be consciously, even
rationally, pragmatically chosen - and so valued to provide a similar effect).
The deployment of creative value-giving as exemplified in re-creating livable
urban and rural landscapes and ‘saving the environment’, including the
beautifying of cities, the designing of attractive architecture.
Re-invigourating the challenge to build Heaven on Earth: as opposed to the
endlessly deferred Utopia of the social ideologies with their concomitant
programs of extermination, their tell-tale use of the purge (the ‘witch-hunt’)
and continuation of the pogrom (the nomination of the ’scapegoat’) as means of
‘purification’ and ‘re-birth’ – in actuality a desperate diversion of the
desires of ‘the masses’ for the Good Life on to destructive paths where fear
forbids resistance.
Offering
instead the compromise of tamed Nature here and now… The Garden which
configures our love of parks and gardens, allotments and patios, and including
even the potted plant on the window sill. Once again to make the World into a
Garden. A garden or park in which there lies a ruin…
The Ruins of
Ankor Wat
(The
ruins that anchor what?)
The roots of
Ankor Wat…
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Peter
Nesteruk, 2014