an OSR aesthetics of ruinewal? - Pende art in decay

 

Eastern Pende kishikishi rooftop finial, produced by an unknown master-carver*

"The artisan-poet is not concerned to make a work for eternity. The work of art is perishable. The style and the spirit are preserved, but the old work is quickly replaced and realized anew as soon as it becomes antiquated or is destroyed" - Léopold Sédar Senghor, The General Nature of African Art

Every poster gets three annoying neologisms and I'm striking one off right now.  Also, Ramadan Mubarak, y'all! Despite my questionable orthodoxy ("wallahi bro law-bearing dreams are canonical just read the Futuhat and also enter khilwa for 40 days") + general laziness, I do love the month. Hard to beat free chai every night and group singings of vaguely sexual Sufi odes at 3am. Def don't think that they're for everyone, but ritual austerities have been surprisingly helpful in supplementing my meditation exercises and the like. Anyways, I hope everyone has a peaceful month of reflection, whether or not you're observing.

Vibe Retrieval

Marcia B posted another banger (shedontmiss.png) on separating DIY principles of play from the D&D framework: it's good and short so pls read. If you have time afterward, I recommend looking at Jenx's response post on his own blog for another - pro-dungeon! - perspective. Marcia suggests that "we would do well to consider what things are conducive for interesting play in general" and it could be cool to try doing exactly that for another hobby staple - the OSR aesthetics of ruin. Much like the principles Marcia discussed, I think there are good bones here + agree with ATWC's take on the reasons for ruination's longevity/popularity, but it's certainly not for all DIY games (or even all OD&D games.) I've occasionally seen discussion of ruin-as-aesthetic as an antidote to whiggish understandings of history implicit in conventionally structured games or even D&D's colonial-imperial roots as a whole, which seems a bit odd to me - declensionism as a concept was an essential part of the Whig historian's analytical toolkit, one largely abandoned by the profession today outside of surgically narrow reconfigurations. The first time I became aware of some core concerns of this blogpost was over the course of a few discussions with the inimitable Corie, who was kind enough to let me repost these here:

I think there's a v. sensible position being forwarded here. A good deal of this spirit can be found in post-post-apocalyptic stuff, and that's cool in its own right, but I'm more than a little bothered by its frequent reliance on disjunction. For all the emphasis on new shoots growing from old soil, chaining the vision of a fruitful ruin to a preceding dark age (the post-apocalypse) is still a remarkably Petrarchian move. More importantly, ruination itself is rarely seen as a generative process in all this: ascent-descent-ascent is still a whiggish grand narrative. It may simply be that the aesthetics of ruin are inextricably linked to their classic presentation, relegating it to Marcia's specific aspects category, but something I've been considering - in an uncooked fashion - is whether the issue lies within the ways we (even in the classic ATWC post) tend to think about ruin. 

Planned Ruination 

German explorer and collector Leo Frobenius (in)famously called the Pende elders he met "philosophers of ruin" - his intentions were not kind, but there is some amount of truth here. Eastern Pende culture spends a lot of time living with its own ruins. In fact, it generates them intentionally.

The kibulu of Chief Komba** in '47, ornamented with a rooftop finial carved by the legendary master-carver Kaseya Tambwe 

The bust of a female figure at the top of the post was previously a free-standing statue situated on the rooftop of a kibulu - the residence of a chief among the Eastern Pende. The central pole of the house would have supported the statue in its position, as seen in the image above. All of these statutes, called kishikishi, are unique but there are certain distinguishing features that remain consistent - the axe, the secret-keeping pose, the connection to living woman-chiefs, etc. The kibulu and the kishikishi are both incredibly interesting for a range of reasons, and I highly recommend reading the paper I’m relying on here (Zoe Strother’s Architecture against the State: The Virtues of Impermanence in the Kibulu of Eastern Pende Chiefs in Central Africa) in full, but I’d like to focus on the impermanence bit:

“Many Pende argued that the kibulu must be regularly abandoned and a new one built in its place to avoid its becoming cluttered with power objects. However, if the destruction of the power objects associated with the chief were the only concern, then the abandonment of the house at the death of the chief should suffice. Why the rules against maintenance, which ensure that the house self-destructs roughly every decade?”

Strother's surprise is far from unwarranted: the construction of a new kibulu represented the culmination of long effort and lots of resources. The production of the power statues alone, which were ultimately left to rot alongside the building, required the services of a master carver, a painter, and a sorcerer. That such a project would be given over to ruin without any attempt to even salvage materials indicates that Something (tm) is going on. This planned ruination - and its many meanings - is what we’ll look at next...but before that, I just want to say how much I liked the parallel made with people’s lifespans by the Eastern Pende. There’s lots of other things going into this phenomenon, ofc, but I can’t shake the feeling that our reaction to ruination is conditioned by the same cultural blockage around death and the dying that I rambled about in this post. If our dwellings are indeed human themselves, as Suzanne Preston Blier's Tamberma interlocutors argued in her paper on space and place in Togo, perhaps they should be treated like Pende kibulu - allowed to grow old and die with dignity, surrounded by friends (or even, in the case of the kibulu, children), before beginning a second life as homes to ancestors.

Pende possibilities 

There's certainly the classical engagement with ruin here. Ruins still mark the passage of time or state(like) power; they are remnants of the past that evoke decay, fading grandeur, impermanence, and memory:

“Even if the community rebuilds the house, they will require that the chief live next to the decaying wreck of his previous home (including statuary toppled from the roof) as a lesson on the limits of political power. The rotting kibulu will serve as a memento mori, as do the coffin with which he is required to live and the cemetery soil on which he must sleep.”

The Eastern Pende case alerts us to the fact that this orientation hardly exhausts the aesthetic possibilities of ruin. Even their deployment of memento mori is far from wistful or nostalgic - Strother describes how people she interviewed spoke with obvious glee about the chief being reminded that he will die (based) and parents took their children to abandoned villages where they pointed out nature’s reclamation in a manner that emphasized respect for the new spiritual occupants.

The kibulu of Chief Kindamba next to the ruins of the previous kibulu, taken in ‘67

Ruins prompt imaginative efforts, including but not limited to the effort involved in thinking about what a structure looked like when whole. They can make the connection between nature and the built environment immediate, midwifing discussion around the ways that the two coexist or encroach on each other. Pende interviewees suggested that the collapsed kibulu would serve as a house for ghosts and seed-spirits, who would in turn engage favorably with the people that opened their villages to them. Even the act of growing trees around and through the ruined building, at first glance another act of memento mori, relies upon the interplay of built and unbuilt to make its actual point:

"Ironically, the impermanence of the chief's house is contrasted with the relative permanence of the long-lived trees planted in his honor in the courtyard. The lofty Chlorophora excelsa, towering over the village, flatters him with the memory he will leave behind. However, the quality of trees that is most savored is their unstinting obedience. In the words of a favorite proverb: "A tree has ears, [but] the human child has none." A plant, whether started by seed or slip, grows exactly where it is placed. It cannot wander off or rebel. No other being can ever attain this standard of steadfastness. The chief does well who measures himself against the virtue of a tree and realizes that his glory will lie in submitting his will to that of his people."

Ruins challenge notions of “functionality” (what is this FOR screams the European) in the built environment, thereby inviting critical examination of progress narratives; the inertness of such sites, lacking any active (anthropocentric) function, enables engagement with our surroundings freed from the constraint of purpose. It’s an opening of space, often literally. Eastern Pende "philosophers of ruin" recognized this phenomenon and were attuned to its significance:

"The Eastern Pende kibulu lies midway between embrace of a building's life cycle and outright political iconoclasm. While the regular renewals of the kibulu structure a cycle of rejuvenation and rebirth, the building is rigged to self-destruct and its disintegration packs as much emotive force as the torched palaces in Cameroon…In this case, it is important to realize that the decaying wreck of the chief's house is orchestrated as an aesthetic experience that signifies fully as much as the new building."

Ruination also - as the original ATWC post points out - opens space for sociopolitical possibility: "Well-maintained social order is the enemy of free-wheeling adventure, and so the more ruined everything is, the more freedom PCs will have to run around inside it." It's a notable difference, though, that the Pende - and the Songye and the Mbuti and so on - choose this freedom: the liberation PCs are faced with in a world of Pende ruin is not a temporary gap while waiting for a new Thousand Year Empire to emerge from fallow ground or the result of inexorable decline. It's something they have to work for, perhaps even built on revolutionary action! As Strother points out, the self-destructing kibulu is (among other things) a sharp political weaponization of ruin that I find hard to read otherwise:

“In effect, the rebuilding of the kibulu every seven to twelve years acts as a referendum on the chief's performance in office. To an extraordinary degree, it reminds him that he rules at the pleasure of the people…In their desire to thwart the accumulation of coercive power in the hands of their chiefs, the Eastern Pende have turned architecture against the state. The perpetual renewal of his house requires regular renegotiation of the social contract between the chief and his people and underscores their interdependence.”

Pende intentionality is, I think, a good bridge between the power of ruin-as-aesthetic and a desire to play in worlds where your character isn't dumbly blinking at the shattered labors of your betters. It may even be a genuinely optimistic spin on the hobby's love of ruin, hopeful in the way that Corie defended earlier, if one is willing to reconsider what forms that the expansion of human knowledge can take.

* The hairstyle really does look like this: 

from Henri Nicolai's Le Kwilu: Etude geographique d'une region congolaise

** The Eastern Pende practice positional succession - not uncommon in premodern E-C/C. Africa. In the Pende version, each successive holder of a title takes the name of the title, which also serves as the name of the community.