site ruin

after Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’, part IV

Not one death but many,
not preservation but censor, the stasis proves, the ruin is
lost

Into the same river no man steps twice
I hollow out bedded earth
And find the remains of all Albion one

Over the attritions of time that we shield our faces from, we discover
new remains. Else how is it,
if we remain the same,
we take pleasure now
in what we did not take pleasure before? endure
intergenerational trauma? choose to restore and / or destruct? exist
in psychic space, feel the need to sanctify, have
nor figure, visceral, immaterial, body
the same?

To be in different states without a change
is not a possibility

We can excavate. The crises are
in the spirit and / or the tradition the crises are
transference and / or withholding, both involve
an iteration. And what is iterated? The iteration is
a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time

is the birth of the air, is
the birth of water, is
a state between
the origin and
the end, between
birth and the beginning of
another buried ruin

is change, presents
no more than itself

And the too strong grasping of it,
sugar and slate escaping from between your fingers
loses it

This very thing you are

 

Note: This piece was commissioned as part of a performance with Gentle/Radical by the National Trust, in which notions of preservation & the colonial histories of heritage sites were excavated.

Sadia Pineda Hameed is a writer and artist currently living in Cardiff. She is also the co-founder of experimental collective & indie press LUMIN. Her practice sometimes involves performance, film and installation work created with and around texts she has written or deconstructed. She is usually exploring decolonisation, deinstitutionalisation, and non-Western rationale such as telepathic dreaming, textual journeys and ancestral connections. @piffspice