Piling up stones

But it seems to me that for human beings, living is nothing but piling up the stones of ruins. —Toru Takemitsu, Confronting Silence

Silence is home sometimes. —Nilsa Rivera

Dear Wanderer,

My mother’s people are weavers. Traditional Filipino textiles are more sustainable than cotton, and indigenous weaving traditions incorporate deep, old magic into colorful, intricate patterns like the Binakul pattern from Northern Luzon that wards off evil spirits by confusing them. It’s often used to make blankets that protect during sleep.

Their weaving tradition is informed by place—in the tropical climate of the Southeast Asian islands there are an abundance of fibrous plants. Traditional building materials are also fibrous, like the bamboo that is used to hold houses up on stilts to protect against flooding. The tropical year has two seasons: wet and dry, and during the rainy season, some of the archipelago’s 7,000 odd islands are submerged completely. 

Before colonization, the many different cultures of the archipelago built no monuments of stone, no marble statues. Their material culture operated on cycles: harvest, make, use, return, grow, harvest again. The objects they made were given back to the earth to decompose and rejoin the cycle. Culture was maintained by a continual doing. Things were made and made again in an ongoing cultural gesture that continues to this day. 

I’ve read that Filipino culture is deeply informed by cycles of death and rebirth. I see this reflected in their material culture. In contrast, American culture, and the cultures from which it descends, seem to have an obsession with cheating, delaying, or stopping death altogether.

Maybe it’s geographical. Cebu, where my mother grew up, is an island that spans less than 2,000 square miles. The biggest monuments and temples were all built by continental cultures that were also all empires. The Philippines consists of many cultures and distinct ethnic groups that coexisted for centuries. It was a hub of trade and cultural exchange in Southeast Asia long before it was “discovered” by Magellan. But its orientation toward the death-and-rebirth cycle has remained thoughout its violent colonial and post-colonial history, as has its weaving tradition.

When did we start trying to arrest death? When did we deign to interrupt the cycle? Things built of stone are meant to last forever, but nothing lasts forever. What you have when you try to stop death is not a continuance of life, but an elongated pause, like a rest in a piece of music. A held breath. A silence. We have made our home in this silence, instead of the rhythms that moved our ancestors.

To stand in a ruin is to inhabit the span of this silence. A ruin is a kind of portal to another time. It exists in a place that transcends linear time. There’s an energy held by our grand, ruined things. People come to ruins to be awed, to be enveloped in another world. To touch something sacred. Think of that the next time you ruin something.

Likewise, there are places inside us that hold the vestiges of unfulfilled dreams, losses and sorrows. Maybe half of who we are is just in what we’ve ruined, what has ruined us and how. The shape we didn’t mean to make with our lives. It seems to me that there are some dreams that were never meant to come true. They were always going to become sites if loss, where you mourn what you never had. And there were always going to be experiences that were going to scar me, draw off a portion of my vitality in exchange for lessons learned. Ruins can be points of connection, sites of memory where truth and wisdom can be accessed. They are places of power.

Perhaps there’s nothing more powerful than to stand in the ruins of yourself. Once the pause is over and the music has continued, there are places within us that still hold the lost past. I learned once that when someone we love dies, there’s a certain percentage of our brain cells that believe and understand that they’re gone. Over time, more and more of our brain cells come this acceptance. That’s what grief is. But at no point in our lives will every brain cell reach this understanding. At no point will we believe with the entirety of our being that who we loved is gone. Some untouched parts of ourselves will always hold them as alive.

This full moon, I invite us to be the guardians of our own ruin. I invite us to allow the slow decay of our grandest structures. I invite us to shout into the silence of our own attempts to arrest death.

“As long as I live,” wrote composer Toru Takemitsu, “I shall choose sound as something to confront silence. That sound should be a single, strong sound.”

I invite us to honor the cycle, our attempts to arrest it, and the overcoming of our attampts by the dauntless cycle.

One of the world’s most famous ruins also came from an island culture: Stonehenge, in England. Its origin is a mystery, but we do know that its stones align with the the sun on the summer and winter solstices. It is believed to have been a burial site. Also, recent research has shown that Stonehenge, when intact, would have amplified the sounds of voices and musical instruments within its circle. But the sounds were only amplified for those who stood within the circle. Sound wouldn’t carry outside of it, even to those who might be nearby. It created a definitive sonic space that was separate from the area around it. It resonates. Also, musicologist Rupert Till noted, “Stonehenge hums when the wind blows hard.”

Perhaps there are different kinds of ruins, just as there are different kinds of monuments. Stonehange seems to have been a monument to cycles—life and death and the rhythm of the year—as well as a living place itself, where sound met silence and was made with intention. A place to be interacted with, and not only a place to rememeber by. Made to honor the cycles and the life, not arrest them.

May we learn to situate our constructions within the cycles of life. Make them resonate. Make them sing.

This full moon I’m sharing something very precious with my paid subscribers. It seems that most of what I do these days is for survival, and this song is no different. It’s my shout into the pause, my single strong sound to confront the silence.

Singing in the ruins,

Sasha