ADSactly Photography: Poetics of the Ruins
Poetics of the Ruins
Until then, solitude had been considered something frightening, but Christians found a thousand charms in it. The anchorites wrote about the sweetness of the rock and the delights of contemplation.
The Spanish philosopher María Zambrano has a very beautiful essay entitled "The ruins" (belonging to her book Man and the Divine), and there she reflects poetically:
The ruins are the most living thing in history, because only that which has survived its destruction, that which has remained in ruins, lives historically.
Because ruin is only the trace of something human defeated and then victor of the passage of time.
Something divine emanates from every ruin, something different that springs from the very entrails of human life.
Therefore, I have wanted to give you this modest photographic work of my own, with photos taken by me in the Castle of Araya (Sucre State, Venezuela), in which I recreate this image of the ruins, and I accompany them with poetic texts.
The photos were taken with a Kodak EasyShare CD82 camera.
What destiny in the matter of things
left in them the form of my life
until I look at your well of absences?
Eugenio Montejo
The stones have been heated in the sun,
in the vapours condense
ghosts I imagine.
Elisabetta Balasso
Dream of the inhabitant Saltpetre dwelling everlasting (a Marc de Civrieux and Gisela Barrios) José Malavé Balasso, Elisabetta (2000). The ruins. Venezuela: Edit. Art.
Memory Transfer Stone
worn down by the dull rumor of time
and the perfume of dead consciences
You'll end up as a seed of yourself.
echo and shadow of your own exile
Or you'll go back to the night of your dreams
flooded with waves
and filled with rain
of the old shooting stars
Bibliographic references
Jauss, Hans Robert (1976). The history of literature as provocation. Spain: Edit. Península.
Malavé, José (1991). Shadow Breviary. Venezuela. Caljars-Conac.
Montejo, Eugenio (1982). Absolute tropic. Venezuela: Edit. Fundarte.
Zambrano, María (1973). Man and the Divine (2nd ed.). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Author: @josemalavem
What beautiful poems! Since I saw the photos I knew that it was the ruins of the Castle of Araya (in that town I did my Master's thesis and spent hundreds of hours in that Castle looking at the sea). The poems chosen are of singular feelings, even yours. The whole post is perfect. You left me with a sense of past lives that placed stone upon stone to do a great architectural work. Thank you @josemalavem for reminding us that everything is being built little by little and for evoking a past that unites us (even when everyone has their past).
Thank you for your visit and comment, @marcybetancourt. The castle (or fortress) of Araya is one of the most attractive monumental sites (even in its neglect) in this area, and its presence stands before our eyes as a testimony of time and its avatars. Greetings.
Oh this is a delicious post. I scroll slowly through the photographs, eager to see the next one but not wanting to leave the one before. Then poems! It's almost too much, I could spend all evening "reading" this post. Maybe I will.
Like Elisabetta Balasso, I can see the ghosts in the vapors of your photographs. I really LOVE the first two, your placement of them in the series.
It seems like Castle of Araya is a powerful place.
Thank you for your emotive and generous comment, @owasco. The photographs I publish here, which are just a part of a larger collection, speak as much or more than the poems, may be something like "poem-pictures".
Indeed, the castle of Araya keeps within itself many mysteries, which the stones hide, perhaps like any historical ruin.
Greetings.
Beautiful photos and senses texts, @josemalavem. Your poem is simply sublime. The ruins give me a certain shudder. I feel that, like old age, they speak of time, of history, of the past. Seeing the ruins of a castle like Araya leads us to imagine characters, to create a reality. I don't know if it happens to you, but I feel that the ruins give a certain air of permanence, of perennial existence through time. As if the world showed the wounds, vestiges of a time that is no longer, but that survives. In the end, even man is ruins, echoes of what he was and never again. Thank you for sharing.
Grateful for your visit and comment, @nancybriti. I agree with you (and some of that is picked up in Maria Zambrano's quotes): the ruins are a testimony of a time that survives us, that goes beyond the immediate time. It is a pity that many times some ruins are lost due to negligence or mistreatment. Greetings.
Great photographic work.
This is so true
There are many places about which we have only oral narratives, in some cases written accounts; but of those places that disappeared leaving nothing behind, it is hard to think as historical. I lament the loss of any structure that meant something once.
The falling or burning of a building is a devastating even for me, as much as the loss of human lives, because these places hosted human lives once and stories were told and event happened and those events influenced others.
I feel overwhelmed whenever I visit an ancient place. The Araya fortress must have witnessed so many amazing stories.
Thanks for your opinion, @hlezama. I share it. When we consider, for example, the influence of the Mayan, Nahuatl and Quechua cultures for the later, we know that it is largely because they were monumental cultures, which left their testimony in the ruins of their constructions.
It is very regrettable when we see how governments and civil society allow their monumental heritage to be lost, even if it is not from remote times.
Greetings.
Excuse me, kind readers. By my own mistake, when I copied and pasted the original text I left out the first paragraph, which I reproduce here below:
Since ancient times the ruins have attracted the attention of philosophers, poets and artists in general. Already original Romanticism (German, English and French) fixed its gaze on them, and turned them into symbolic objects. Think, for example, of François-René de Chateaubriand, considered the founder of French Romanticism, who in his essay Genius of Christianity (1802), rediscovered the value of medieval poetry, and with it a taste for solitude, and, by derivation, for remoteness and ruins. Let us cite it:
Thank you for making the correction, @josemalavem.
The pictures are beautiful. This place is awesome. Without going to that place can mean how beautiful the place is? If you do not get there, you can not understand how beautiful the place is. But because of photographers like you, the place looks very nice to us. Looking at the pictures, I feel like I'm staying in that place.
Thanks for taking the opportunity to see this beautiful scene with us.
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Thank you for your attention, @saifulshahid. Certainly, it is a place of beauty much touched by aridity, sunlight and marine vision. Photography and internet allow us this wonder of sharing the vision of places like this.
Thanks for always sharing with us
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Thanks to you, @shinersfamily.
You are warmly welcome
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@josemalavem, These pictures are telling the stories of histories and in my opinion sometimes stones showcase some pictures of time which puts lots of effect into it.
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That's right, @chireerocks. As an old expression says, the stones speak; the ruins offer us their mystery. Greetings.
Thank you and good to read this meaningful response.
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Beautiful photographs accompanied by poems that give it life, describe them and make us imagine the stories found in them. Being there must be something really significant and indescribable.
Glad to see you, @luces. Yes, it is a place of great historical significance, but more, of great telluric force. Greetings.