Ilana sobre las ruinas

I found a picture of myself today, floating about, in the ether. It was taken by the brother of my dead friend, or of my ex-lover... not the same connectors, but the same individual.

Not the person who named it, though, Ilana sobre las ruinas. Rising from the ruined pile of rubble, milenary ruins, Ilana, always walking, traipsing, climbing over the ruins. Ilana always creating the ruins, stumbling up, and over, and back down again, to conquer the already conquered, to unravel the already destroyed.

The black skirt was one that I often remember. It still hangs hopeful in my closet, hopeful of some miraculous cure for age, and wear, and tears in the fabric of its inception. It will be in tatters, like the Stones, tatters, and tatters, and tatters, like circles and circles and circles, but not ruins.

The city is a ruin, and the ruin ciudad eats at us, eats us away, into nothing. I wonder why my French is not better. I think about the extra hours of sleep that I had no right to take, and the language, the tongue that was traded in their place. And I am angry.

Mostly at myself it would seem. Angry that there is no real justice, no point, no beauty. That work becomes a stand-in, a fixative, a paso en falso... it works to fill the void, of the voided human detritus, devoid of anything real, or meaningful, or meaningless. They are all words, and I begin to understand, perhaps, the madness that had to come, and Derridá, and the choice of the signifier over the signified, and the Bustrófedon, and Trotsky....

I always had a soft spot for Trotsky, though I can't really explain it.

Back then, perhaps in that very same skirt, under that very same sky, I walked over the ruins. I wandered the streets in search of something. I let myself sink into the city, the pulse, the push, the paved impunity. I went to his house, Lev Bronstein Davidovich.

We construct museums to mean what they never meant in life.

I watched a film, about his assasin, Mornard, or Jacson, or Mercader.

The names that pile up on top of themselves, the years that pile up on top, and the images, superimposed over time to mean absolutely nothing. No marcha de la humanidad. No progression in any sense but the ephemeral note, bare, brazen of a piano, in stillness, in night.

The screen flickers, and I search, over layers and oceans and bodies of ruin, over death in its meaningless or meaningful roundness, completeness, saturated, and plucked bleeding from the vine, intertwined with ivy and cornhusks.

Bent bodies, a pick-axe, a chisel, a game of metonymic distress, destreza, dexterity. And I search out the names of those that came before me, and I think about that time I was told, you can count on me, not one two three, but really, count on me.

And how those words seemed so childish, but wanted to sound so grown, and how I was the cause of ruin, and heartbreak, and how it can all mean so incessantly little, when the night's curtain comes down.