Among the Ruins

We’d come to Tintern Abbey because it was located just across the border, just across the River Wye, in Wales, the land of my distant ancestors. We’d also come because of William Wordsworth, who mentions the abbey in a poem that isn’t about the abbey at all but about his ability to remember and contemplate and be inspired by experience. The abbey itself is referred to only in the poem’s title—“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798”—which has to be one of the least inspiring titles about being inspired that has ever been applied to a poem.

But we came because I’d read Wordsworth in college, and I wanted to at least set foot on Welsh soil, even though we had many other places on our itinerary that beckoned to the east: Bath, Stonehenge, the medieval smuggler’s town of Rye, Bodiam Castle, and then, of course, London.

What we found on the sylvan banks of the Wye, much to our pleasure, were the ruins of a Cistercian monastery that Henry VIII had dissolved and plundered (after dissolving a few marriages first and founding the Church of England). The abbey’s roof is gone, some walls and outer buildings crumbled, but the primary structure of the church—its soaring pillars and archways—can stir the soul nonetheless. Instead of stone floor, you walk on grass. Here’s a place where the human endeavor to reach the heavens is pulled back into focus by the surrounding, tree-flush hillsides as seen through paneless windows and doorless doorways and by the verdant growth beneath your feet. The original spiritual activity of Cistercian monks is gone, but a spiritual connection remains and is in some ways magnified by the wreckage.

I sensed this would be the case before visiting, had Googled pictures of the abbey’s Old Red Sandstone remains while plotting our tour, but was not entirely prepared for the effect, especially since I’d seen other ruins in my life. In fact, visiting a ruin (or partial ruin) generally puts me in mind of a different poem—one by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was a generation younger than Wordsworth. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley reminds us how the ravages of time can take down even the most powerful of rulers, including the King of Kings whose monument to testosterone has decayed into “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.” (Fun fact: Shelley, who had a beef with Wordsworth for deserting his nature-loving radicalism and becoming too conservative, wrote a sonnet cutting his predecessor down to size.)

But then I pulled a Wordsworth and started thinking about how I was feeling. In truth, Tintern Abbey inspired me to write a song, though not immediately—only when I returned home and recollected my emotions in tranquility, as was Wordsworth’s wont for poetic discourse. For me, nature’s inclination toward recapturing the spaces once filled by lofty human achievement (sky instead of roof, grass instead of floor) provided a suitable check to human hubris, which is what Shelley warbles about in “Ozymandias.” It also became, in the narrative I was conceiving, representative of the ephemeral, no-promises quality of a traveler’s romance—of a guy who meets a girl at the ruins of a church, travels with her to other places, falls in love, and discovers that such a romance, much like the abbey, has an expiration date.

Things fall apart. Castles, churches, and sometimes love.

But time also provides opportunity for new creation. If time destroys (and doesn’t give a damn about it), it also avails the distance necessary for emotions to be recollected, sifted, sorted, compressed, cooked, cooled, and reheated. Love among the ruins—once ruined—becomes fodder for a poem, a story, a song, or a made-for-TV movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier.

And so I consume my fodder as I glance backward. I think of how we wandered the grounds at Tintern Abbey that day. Took our pictures, saw cows grazing in the nearby field, walked the nave, paused in the transepts, read placards about the night stair and the lavatorium and the presbytery, separated for quiet contemplation and converged for quiet commentary, jumped off stones (at least the kids did), and saw small indications of nature’s continuing impulse to seed new life into cracks and sills.

When we left, we crossed the River Wye and headed for Bath and the Roman times and, a few days later, Stonehenge, where time and human achievement took on yet another formulation in the grass beneath an open sky.

Shadow Play

Some shadows engulf and some shadows suggest. Some are acts of diffusion, blending into the eaves of a house, say, or into the leaves of a tree, murky and amorphous, unwilling to offer up definition yet capable of playing tricks on the mind. Fairy tales and ghost stories lurk in such shadows—in forests and creaky homes, where shapes become particulate matter and material forms lose their particularity.

Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki laments the loss of shadows when he writes of modern electrical illumination and Japanese architecture: “[O]ur ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.” We are quite a distance from Hemingway’s clean, well-lighted place, here, even though these two writers were near contemporaries. But the difference is perhaps only a matter of metaphorical temperament—for at the beginning of Hemingway’s famous short story, we are introduced to “an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.”

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is but one example of Hemingway’s iceberg view of writing in which only an eighth of a story—like the Titanic’s nemesis—is seen. So, too, are shadows, which obscure space and leave much unseen. Or untold.

Interesting that one of the waiters in Hemingway’s story proclaims the goodness of the light after pondering the reportedly suicidal old man (implying that the reason why the old man hangs out there is because of the cleanliness of the café and its illumination), yet the old man choses to sit in the shadow, not entirely exposed to the brightness.

Interesting, too, that it often takes a bright light to cast a shadow with any definition. From these kinds of shadows, we get more information, we see outlines, we cast puppets onto walls and profiles of loved ones onto paper. We put hands (a rabbit, a bird) into relief, noses and chins and Regency hairstyles. We make silhouettes.

The word silhouette comes from the 18th-century French finance minister Etienne de Silhouette, who was known for being cheap. He also liked to cut portraits out of paper. Compared to the more time-consuming and pricier option of commissioning a painting, silhouette profiles could be traced and rendered quickly with little expense.

Two-dimensional figurative outlines go back at least as far as Paleolithic handprints on cave walls. And, though many succeeding schools of painting have helped change the way we look at the world, we still seem to have an affinity for these images. Go to Instagram, for instance, and type silhouette into the search option and you’ll get more than 7 million posts—half a million if the word is plural. That might not be as impressive as cat (50 million) or love (1 billion and counting), but it’s something.

I think it’s safe to suggest that people are enamored of silhouettes much in the way they are enamored of sunsets, and often the two go together on Instagram. By themselves, sunset photos typically don’t live up to the original, unmediated experience that makes you gasp in delight. How many times have I taken a picture of a sunset over the ocean and looked at it later, only to go, “Meh, let’s drag that one into the trash bin”? But sometimes, when the sky glows yellow or red, a shape appears—a boat near the horizon, a figure on the beach, a lone tree in the desert—that is especially compelling for its sharpened outline and black interiority. We see, in an odd sort of way, the categorical thingness of this figure because we can’t see it fully. We see “sailboat” or “dog” much in the way we see street signs of walking people and crossing deer and rows of ducks. We see, perhaps in a Jungian sense, an archetypal representation.

I once took a picture of a man standing by a chain-link fence. The light was strong behind him, and when I looked at the photo and made a few adjustments for contrast I had a pretty nifty silhouette. I liked the graphic boldness of the image and the angular composition. But what I liked most about it was that you couldn’t tell if the man was leaning back against the fence or standing behind it like a parent at a Little League baseball game. Three dimensions became two, and my view of the world became simultaneously less complicated and more complicated.

Rorschach inkblot tests are often silhouettes (though not always), which serve as purposeful abstractions seeking interpretation. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave posits a thought experiment about what we would believe if all we saw were shadows cast on a wall. With the exception of a prisoner who escapes, Plato’s shackled inmates are not in a position to interpret these shadows because they do not think of them as shadows. But for the rest of us, what we know of shadows is possible because of what we know about light.

Silhouettes and shadows invite interpretation. They ask us to fill in the dark spaces, and when we do that we bring with us all the darkness and light we’ve borne throughout our lives as material for consideration.

For some reason, I find that appealing.