Thinking about stuff while waiting

Revolutionary or reformer - the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world. Every revolutionary and reformer is a fugitive. To fight for change is to be incapable of changing oneself. To reform is to be beyond repair.

A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he's concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.


from 'The Book of Disquiet' by Fernando Pessoa

Views from a bench

The Ruinist took the opportunity of a two hour break from everything on an outing to Greenwich (once more) to take some snaps. Sitting on a riverside bench for an extended period (instead of a furtive and often feral sideways mode of behaviour The Ruinist usually adopts for a Sunday here), an innovation was entered into and The Ruinist began the lark of using the photographic device to record pictures of people from the still and solid material basis upon which The R was perched.

Mapping the 1871 Paris Commune in 2009

What could be a better route to follow through central Paris than the flight of Maurice and Jean through the combat of the Paris Commune on 23rd March 1871 as depicted by Emile Zola in his novel 'The Debacle'?
















It all starts here for the friends that had been separated finally by supporting opposing sides of Paris Commune. After the 400 pages of the trials and tribulations of the Franco-Prussian War, Jean (a Federale) and Maurice (a Communard) are reunited when unbeknown to Jean he comes across a weary rebel still firing his rifle at the barricade at the junction of rue de Lille and rue de Bac and stabs him 'through the arm near the right shoulder...it had penetrated between two ribs and probably involved the lung'. Realising that he had wounded his old friend, they begin a mad scramble across Paris to the supposed safety of Jean's room.
















Dragging Maurice to the nearby Seine, 'out on to the embankment they were momentarily blided by the dreadful light from fires burning in huge sheaves of flame on both sides of the Seine'. They clamber down to the quayside and take a boat out into the river and drift 'with the current, hugging the bank in the shadow of the bathing establishment and barges'.



























They take the boat under the Pont Soferino...'the boat seemed to be floating on a river of fire. In the dancing reflections of these huge conflagrations the Seine appeared to be bearing along blazing coals'...




















...'He had only one urgent job, to land and get away from this awful sight. All the same he was prudent enough to go past the Concorde Bridge so as not to leave the boat until the towpath below the Quai de la Conference...'


































Reaching the Place de la Concorde they move quickly across the square...'although the day was not yet dawning the light from the fires near-by threw a livid dawn over the huge square. They crossed it's empty spaces, their hearts aching at this dreary destruction'


































'On the square itself, bullets made holes in the fountains, the collosal trunk of the statue of Lille lay on the ground broken in two by a shell, while the statue of Strasbourg hard by, veiled, seemed to be in mourning for so much ruin'.





























Reaching rue de Rivoli, where the sturdiest of Commune barricades had been erected, they darted up the rue de St Florentin...






























'Hurrying along the rue Saint Florentin at last...
















...going down rue Saint-Honore...
















...only a bit of the rue d'Argenteuil and...
















...they would be in the rue des Orties, right at the top of Buttes des Moulins'...'what a deliverance when they had turned into it! It was dark, empty and silent and might have been a hundred leagues away from the battle. The house, an old and narrow one with no concierge, was sleeping the deep sleep of death'.

It was here That Ruinist was unable to go further as this whole area described above was demolished in 1876 and so I had to make do with a picture of the road from the time that I had brought along. I was also unable to find any sign of the Commune in any public text, graffiti, accidental symbolism or what have you. Here despite this momentous journey, the Commune had been erased from the streets of Paris. If you want to find out what happened to Maurice and Jean, then you'll have to read the book!

Today, the Commune's political visibility must be restored by a process of dis-incorporation: born of rupture with the Left, it must be extracted from the leftist hermeneutics that have overwhelmed it for so long.

Alain Badiou, The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics in the book 'Polemics', Verso, 2006

You can read the full essay here: Badiou The Paris Commune

Class Against Class Graffiti Revisited

This is the one we wrote about here:
"‘CLASS AGAINST CLASS - MAKE THE BOSSES PAY FOR THEIR CRISIS’
Graffito on riverwall at North Woolwich, circa 1974, still there.

That’s why I like the slogan from North Woolwich painted up in white paint in the 1970’s during the recession and the harsh attack on workers lives. I like it as it remains. It has not been scrubbed away. As nothing has changed for the poor as we face a new bosses crisis in the next few years, nothing has changed with the slogan. Class against class. Old-fashioned but immutable".


We didn't have a camera on us when we visited that one and our minds were on other things that day. But the power of the www enables a snapshot to now be included!


http://homelesshome.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-not-street-that-bothers-me.html

The Eclipse and Re-emergence of something...

Recently, and with our delight for what we have been calling 'public text', we stumbled upon signs of life that had been buried for 30 years or more because we happened to see, for example, a wall in a new light. The Ruinist is often struck how something that was previously unseen can be suddenly illuminated because the sun is shining upon it in a way that you have never seen before.
















Here, a painted grafftio that reads 'WORKERS' discovered at the junction of Walworth Rd and Liverpool Grove (the one with St Peter's church on it, designed by John Soane - see previous post!). But The Ruinist asks 'WORKERS' what? There doesn't seem to be anymore painted letters. Do you know? Was it you?
















Here's one we do know about. You can just read the word 'SCARF' written in spraypaint. Surely spraypaint begins to date graffiti. Whilst 'WORKERS' is the result of a brush and a pot of paint and thus quite cumbersome and time consuming, the invention of spraypaint made things a whole lot more speedy and calligraphic.

Memories here are stirred by the 2nd March 1980 National Front march through South London. Intending to march up Walworth Rd to The Elephant, they were routed at the last minite and escorted by cops south to the backstreets of Peckham. The Southwark Campaign Against Racialism and Fascism had done a sterling job of getting hundreds of determined anti-fascists out at The Elephant and down Walworth Rd along the proposed fascist route. Hence 'SCARF' on the wall of the Met Police's scientific forensic dept on Amelia St in Walworth.
















Here's another revelation that we enjoyed. We had already known that 76 Peckham Rd had been in the 1970's as some kind of hang-out for anarchists. We had noted in our ledger of south london radical activity the following: 'Class War Comix - Epic Productions, 76 Peckham Rd, London SE15 (1974)' and the 'autonomous collective Black Bear' who had published 'Feminism As Anarchism' around Summer 1977 from the same address. It would not be difficult to assume the hand behind the delightful and theatrical font still up on Peckham Rd - long-term local Anarchist illustrator Clifford Harper! We asked around and so it was!

Coming soon: A new series of local discoveries in the same vein! Until then.

Adventures in Metalwork: The K2

A trip by The Ruinist Team up North to Kings Cross, St Pancras and environs pretending to be a reason to pass by assorted places to see on Farringdon was really only a ruse to indulge our collective passion for the K2 telephone phone box.

Here you can see the mausoleum erected in the old St Pancras Churchyard for Sir John Soane, working class geezer made good, eminent architect and noted Freemason. As is becoming more and more commonly known, the second design for a London telephone box, the K2 (Kiosk 2) was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and introduced into London in 1926.















The inspiration for the cutely domed cast iron red box was, of course, the Soane Mausoleum and now a plaque on the site informs all of what once seemed like some kind of occult or masonic secret.
Step into one of those phone boxes and who knows what you are stepping into. The Ruinist's well-thumbed copy of The Art and Architecture of Freemasonry (by James Stevens Curl, 1991) illuminates the story better than we could with it's description of the tombs Masonic allusions:
'The mausoleum...is a 'monopteral temple' consisting of a block of stone under a canopy carried on four Ionic columns; a simple pediment surmounts each face. This little canopy is sheltered by a larger domed canopy with segmented pediments...carried on square piers. The whole is capped by a pineapple finial on a drum around which a serpent is coiled.'
















Another delight of the old churchyard was this misbehaviour and creepy addition to one of those classic 'Victorian way of death' gravestones. Two coins for the ferryman, if a bit late in the day?






























Anarcha-feminism (in some sense) is also rooted here for the joint grave of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin is here. She of 'A Vindication of the Rights Of Women',(1792) and he of 'Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Manners' (1793).
















We didn't take any pictures of the K2 and K6 model of London phoneboxes that we passed as we tramped up North but here is picture of a reputed Banana Cake from a caff in Kings Cross.

New Hideaway

Public Text - Ruinist Delights 1

The Ruinist enjoys a bit of public text to accompany the ravages of War.

9 hours of Kent

Blackfriars Bridge 1864-1985 for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway

Always good at both high tide and low tide. A Ruinist favourite.