Anam Cara

Ruins: Temples of Absence

The human heart longs to dwell. The root of the word “dwelling” includes the notion of lingering or delaying. It holds the recognition of our pilgrim nature, namely, the suggestion that it will only be possible to linger for a while. From ancient times, we have carved out dwelling places on the earth. Against the raw spread of Nature, the dwelling always takes on a particular intensity. It is a nest of warmth and intimacy. Over years and generations, a large aura of soul seeps into a dwelling and converts it in some way into a temple of presence. We leave our presence on whatever we touch and wherever we dwell. This presence can never be subsequently revoked or wiped away; the aura endures. Presence leaves an imprint on the ether of a place. I imagine that the death of every animal and person creates an invisible ruin in the world. As the world gets older, it becomes ever more full with the ruins of vanished presence. This can be sensed years and years later even more tangibly in the ruins of a place. The ruin still holds the memory of the people who once inhabited it. When the ruin is on a street, its silence is serrated because it endures the import of surrounding echoes. But when a ruin is an isolated presence in a field, it can insist on its personal signature of presence in contrast to the surrounding nature. A ruin is never simply empty. It remains a vivid temple of absence. All other inhabited dwellings hold their memory and their presence is continually added to and deepened by the succeeding generations. It is, consequently, quite poignant that a long since vacated ruin still retains echoes of the presence of the vanished ones. The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin captures this unstated yet perennial presence of the echo of touch in abandoned places:

When night is like day

And over slow footpaths,

Dense with golden dreams,

Lulling breezes drift.

The abandoned place is dense with the presence of the absent ones who have walked there. Another region of absence is the absence of what is yet to come.