Collection: Dreams of Ru(i)n(e)s
Dreams of Ru(i)n(e)s – It took me a while to comprehend what I was reaching for in this series. The collection title is a conflation; that is, the merging of two lines of thought or sets of information into one thread: Ruins and Runes.
With respect to that concept merging, a couple of things have been percolating in the back of my mind for a long time.
First, since I was a kid in Latin class, I’ve wondered what it would have been like to have lived in Rome as the Empire was dying. Recently, it dawned on me (notice the narrowing sunrise-yellow horizon in the series?): I’m living through an exactly congruent collapse in America, if not in the world.
I grew up on the plains – think South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska - and I’ve always been peculiarly unsettled by abandoned buildings: Farmhouses, gas stations, country stories – places that once sustained life. Those are modern-day ruins.
What happens when entire swaths of our so-called civilization are left abandoned … as ruins, where once life was sustained? Poignant? Tragic? Who will witness it? Who will remember what once happened there? What happens to the stories?
We’re watching that happen – in the concrete world. And then there’s the political-social-interaction realm where civility and thoughtful exploration of ideas has gone the way of a compete-to-win ethic that erodes empathy and interpersonal concern. Ruins of a different sort.
Which brings me to a second, equally long-considered area of rumination: Language. Spoken, certainly, but also, especially in this case, written. The pertinence, here, even if the stories of our abandoned places of living are written down, what if they cannot be read any longer far out there in the future.
I recall wandering around England a few decades ago and being fascinated by the walls, one part of which could be a thousand years old with an added-on, jagged attachment that was a few hundred years old, and on and on. To current day.
And just like we can stop refurbishing the wall, we can stop building onto our language. And what if there is nobody to build onto the old wall? Or, again, nobody to read the written stories? What if the writing is a ruined remnant just like the deteriorating buildings and the crumbling interpersonal structure? Ruins and Runes. The modern day fall of empires.
Poignant.
I think, therefore I paint. Whereof I paint, I think. And, all the while, I strive to articulate both.
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