The dilapidated wreck of the future...

The name of my blog (or my name as a blogger which ever it may be) contains an irony that I feel requires thinking about at this current moment. In the west (including the midwest) one often sees dilapitated wrecks of houses and barns and other outlier structures of old homesteads and settlements being reclaimed by time. These "prairiebuildings" patiently await their destruction, outscaling the human time in which they were built. I always wonder why these buildings aren't torn down, why not circumvent this painful, protracted disintegration. Leaving them up seems like such an odd capitulation to the forces of nature in light of the savage energies of civilzation that have gone into to denying these very forces. These prairiebuildings were built in the process of "prairiebuilding," rendering the radical changes and alterations to the landscape, a great leap forward from one state into another. And yet through the destruction of those same buildings, another kind of "prairiebuilding" begins, a clearing and renewal that no one person's eyes can witness and of which I only catch fractions as a bystander swerving by in a strand of time.

I opened up my blog tonight to write about, as I never do, thoughts of a personal nature about the deconstituted, unconstructed state of my own (inner) life right now. I feel plagued by the question: How do I begin to build the person that I will become? Where does one find the resources within oneself to create what does not yet exist? The title of my blog seized me in that midst of these reflections. I am both inert and decaying and yet full of potential energy that is already undone in that inertia towards which it seems destined. The attraction that I feel to this ambivalent "word" surely indicates this. I feel that in a moment I have been built, torn down, and reclaimed by some other emerging process. Imploding, effacing, yet with premeditated spontaneity. Underlying all of this is that same paradoxical disavowal that leaves a building to sit and fold in on itself. I am negligent and progressive and destructive and creative all at once.

How to clear a space and build in that space without the blank behind the space taking revenge on that clearing with undoing. That is my dilemma.