Jericho, Trumpet
Amy England
A major earthquake in the 6th century C.E. changed the outline for ever. That was the real author of the Ruinenwerk, of
and in Chiang Mai, I made a circuit; the top line of the ancient city wall rose and fell, fell down to the foundation. Patches of grass grew on it, even flowers. I thought with approval, ruins flourish here
to let infatuation fuel the thing. Picture the archeologist picturing the Nike descending to the air above his head. He tells himself he will look up and see her, the beaten air, he will be in the picture. But he has been studying the ground for a long time now. He doesn't look up easily.
he was going to do with such paltry fragments? [The painter] answered, "They are the finest things in the world to introduce into our pieces. When I have such a fine parcel as that piece of a column, and this water before me, and a small dark off-scape behind it, they, together, immediately compose . . . a curious artist; all is painter-like; every thing lies so loose, pretty and wild, that few good masters would refuse coming hither to design these wonders; and nothing but the present high wind hinders their being here.
The ruin has been scavenged to build a fort against pirates, and that fort is falling down. Below its walls, attached to them, scavenged from its stones, is a wall to enclose some sheep. On a block in it there is a procession of maidens walking on their toes, playing the lyre drum and pipes, in deliberate imitation of a style from two hundred years before the sculptor was born.
Crack, fragment, break, crumble, erode, sliver, piece, potsherd, Persephone, torrent, break, infatuations.
]private, rather than a public, piece of writing, left perhaps in some collapse of a house, not the obvious library or bookstore. Whoever the apothecary was to get a hold of it, the acquisition had been a recent one. It is reasonable to estimate that he had not used up more than half of the strips he had cut, and some pages he had not got around to marring at all. In addition, the manuscript is handwritten, in a variety of inks, with the entries dated. It is therefore possible to reconstruct as complete and comprehensive a record of life before the Ruin as any that we have.
Not a block of stone, not a shard of pottery remains of the extensive excavations that are here described. For this reason, some scholars have argued that the factual nature of the record is in doubt, that it is actually a fiction, albeit at an unfinished stage. Personally I find this unlikely-the very dryness of the language argues against literary pretensions for its author. Possibly [
] practice of dismantling books to burn the strips of text as protective spells is too well known, indeed too much still with us [ ] cannot know [ ] time of fragments [ ] dazzles us.
Tables of Content
Seventeen (Fall 2003)
Sixteen (Spring 2003)
Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)
Thirteen
(Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)
Eleven (Fall 2000)
Ten (Spring 2000)
Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)
Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)
Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997)