Daughter of Decline: A Ruinological Analysis of my Father’s Bachelor Pad

It is my father’s apartment at 213 Ayers Court, Apt 2A. It is owned by Ayers Manor LLC. It’s situated in North-Central Teaneck (known as the West Englewood area) and is right off one of the suburb’s main streets. He lives a block away from pizza, sushi, Chinese, a bank, a smoothie/lifestyle shop, a math-tutoring emporium and various trinket stores. He moved there in November 2012, when my childhood home was sold after falling into disrepair— a year after my father was left by his wife and children. Pipes burst, animals relieved themselves on the carpets, a murmur announced itself in the walls. The new owners razed it, rebuilt something habitable, and sold it two years later for 288% of the original price. One way to measure destruction is to compare the cost of a destroyed thing with the cost of the thing made whole. In Jewish tort law, this is how one determines the value of physical damages against another person¹: the price the victim would fetch on the slave market is compared to the price they would fetch had they been unharmed. This analysis puts the cost of his ruination at about 176 dollars worth of physical damage to the house per square foot² ($176/sq ft). Had he stayed there longer, the differential would have been more severe. Perhaps a better quantitative analysis is that my father caused 176 dollars of financial hindrance to the house’s possible value per square foot per year of living alone ($176/sq ft/years lived). The only thing to do was leave. It’s the Gambler’s Ruin problem: games with a total negative value cannot be won by continuing (Shoesmith, 1). In the long run, the house wins. Or in this case, the house loses. 

While the walls of my childhood are undoubtedly struggling to decompose in a junkyard somewhere in Southern Jersey, the ruin of that home was packed up and transplanted here, fifteen blocks northeast. This is apparent in the overcrowding in the Ayers Court apartment: reading material, records, dishes, computers, and furniture, piled upon each other, curling at the edges. Meant for a family, in a bachelor’s home. The recreation is awkward, anachronistic and anatopistic by turn. The spare bedroom’s two beds are decorated for eight-year-olds, although his youngest child is 21. One is boy-themed (superheroes) and the other girl-themed (unicorns). They are placed incongruently close to one another, forming a kind of frankenbed that swallows the entire room. The youthfulness is inappropriate; the youthfulness combined with the genderedness and the proximity feels perverse. Who would sleep here? And why would they sleep here together? The room is out of touch—literally: dusty and disused, and also: disjointed and unreal. 

The transplanted ruin transcends the physical. In Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, his seminal work on the interpretability and phenomenology of the home, he writes, “An entire past comes to dwell in a new house. The old saying: ‘We bring our lares with us’ has many variations” (Bachelard, 27). In this way, there’s no real fresh start—what was permeates what is. When people attach old histories to new places, newness is superficial at best and fallacious at worst. “Lares” refers to ancestor spirits in Ancient Rome. They guarded the households of their descendants. “We bring our lares with us” seems to say that it is not the physical structure itself that is being haunted. When you move, the haunting moves with you. There is a feeling in the Ayers Court apartment that if I were to rummage and find a clean cup, if I were to find space in the sink to fill that cup, I would find my ancestors’ bathwater streaming from the tap. I would drink these generational dredges. I would sigh in satisfaction and say, “Ruin is a movable feast.”

The dust is worth discussing. If cleanliness is a sign that the battle between man and entropy is ongoing, that the question, “how long shall it endure?” must still be asked, (Woolf, 131), asked by the sea breeze about that which it ages (126), and asked by Mrs. McNab about the struggle itself, then dust unmitigated is a white flag. Michael Marder, a philosopher and cultural critic, reminds us that dust is materially evocative beyond the simple symbolism: “Dust is a ledger of past existence: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers. Dust is also…what has been and what is yet to be, and a figure of dispersion: a loose assemblage that barely holds together, always ready to catch a ride on the flows of air and relocate elsewhere…or to fall apart” (Marder). Seen this way, dust is not just the result of an absence of effort, but an earnest archiving of the unimportant—the dead and the discarded. It is a record of my father’s minor waste products, and those of any visitors, albeit few and far between. It catalogs and stores his cat’s dander and the season’s smallest gifts: pollen in the summer, the faintest powdered pieces of leaf material in the fall. It gently chronicles the remainder of the pages he reads and shreds, the unfathomable mountains of printed-out articles by his computer; it stores them in the crevices of the keyboard. Marder writes, “Dust’s gathering—and its dispersion—is the marker of time itself” (Marder). If the dust does not disperse, time seems out of joint. A fully dust covered room might even appear to be “abandoned by time,” because time, to the human, includes our incessant fight against it. Here, the apartment is adorned with time’s featherlight victory, falling like a snow with no spring in sight. It is “evidence that there is something, rather than nothing—or, at least, that once upon a time there was something” (Marder), but unstatic, constantly recycled, settling without ever arriving at final settlement. Dust is the open-ended archive of unidirectional time.  

While dust, affixed to furniture, carpeting, and walls with an intractable stickiness, is the apartment’s primary decoration, it is seconded by another annal of the insignificant—the off-putting pictures of the children, with someone always blinking, selfies mainly, taken either at the peripheries of life events (a graduation picture, but the graduate is forty feet behind the selfie taker and unaware that they are in frame) or at the centers of non-life events (a picture in a pizza place with a cousin seen once every two years). They all seem more likely to have been taken by a stranger than a father. If you saw them, you would ask if he even knew those kids. If he was being honest, and had taken his medication, he might have to say, “no.” We will get to the medication soon enough. None of the pictures were taken within the last six years. Some include a half moon of his ex-girlfriend’s face, the rest of her out of frame. None include my mother. These remote and artless pictures are printed on 5×8 CVS canvases, all confused expressions and awkward angles on glossy fabric. They are painful to look at. The slice of life is cut too large, the pathetic fallacy looms too pathetic: the unposedness doesn’t suggest easy intimacy as much as unbelievable discomfort. These monuments to estrangement are hung up through the short hallway, cluttered, too close together, speaking the deafening language of nothing at all. 

Rocky Stroup’s 2008 wall sculpture work, Borrowed Time (13 Years of Pill Poppin’), is a waterfall of pill bottles and their caps. It’s constructed with thirteen years of heart medication containers. The effect is visceral and overwhelming—the viewer is confronted with the precarity of being reliant upon medication, with the remote bureaucracy of diagnosis, insurance, and reimbursement, and with thirteen years worth of exhaustion. Stroup argues that cures are cruelly complicated. His work suggests that pills are the corollaries of sickness that we knowingly subject ourselves to, the valence of illness that the ill is forced to choose. My father’s apartment has a similar effect. The many empty medication containers line available surfaces like stalagmites protruding from a cave floor. Why not throw them out? They stand in quiet and dignified testimony to both his illness and his health. They are proof of what overtakes him as much as evidence of his resistance. They are displayed like a curation, showing the archival impulse to be an autobiographical impulse: here is my life told through little transparent orange plastic bottles. Here are the bad ways I feel. Here are the things meant to kill them. Sometimes, when I look at my father, I wonder where he went. He once stood resplendent in anger and the quick staccato of voices in his head. He is muted now, slower, muffled by some obstruction. It almost makes one wonder if he is somewhere in the outpouring of bottles, if he is speaking from the other side of a safety cap. His physical form becomes facade, which, in the article, The Development of Facade in the Sacred Sense, is defined as “a representation of the future perfect state of the owner (or owners) of a particular house” (Facade Design Studio). Presented always in the future perfect, whose grammatical example is the “I will have been.” This is ruin in the Boymian sense; this is an archive of faulted hope. 

A Boymian ruin is expansively defined. Boym’s concept of ruin is, in many ways, a monument to a future that never came to be—by offering up the image of what the past anticipated from the future, it questions “the making of such a ‘world picture,’ offering us a new kind of radical perspectivism” (Boym, 1). An “I will have been” that never happened. A Boymian ruin shows how futile hopes were at the outset. It mourns what never happened. In this way, if someone’s body has remained soft due to all the hikes they never really took, or thin due to all the meals they never really ate, or brittle due to all the other bodies they never really allowed to hold them—that almost-ness of expectation, that “labyrinth of ambivalent temporal adverbs—‘no longer’ and ‘not yet,’ ‘nevertheless’ and ‘albeit’” (Boym, 1) could make them a meaningful ruin. Boym’s ruin sits on the cusp of what we hoped would have happened already. Boym argues that all these meaningful ruins, which “undercut and stimulate the utopian imagination” (Boym, 1) also “embody anxieties about human aging” (Boym, 1). My father has many things he never quite became. A father. A man with peace of mind. For Boym, a ruin is what never truly existed as it was meant to be. In this analysis, it is not just the home, not just the family, but a man who is in ruins. 

For all criticism, the prevailing mood is far from critical. The effect induced is one of deep sympathy. The clutter begs the forgiveness my father cannot. The rotting smell wafting from the kitchen is a certain kind of offering, one you feel compelled to accept as our god always has, pungent and almost-freely-given. There is an art to nature’s reclamation, to the many perversions of what ought to be outside and what ought to be in—the flies, the mold, the various shades of inedible. There is a despairing beauty to the idea of a place releasing its grip on itself, casting off composure and watertight lines, dripping incontrovertibly towards decay. It is the balance Simmel saw in the architectural ruin, the “secret justice of destruction” (Simmel, 382) wherein entropy unfolds like prophecy does. It is perversely satisfying to watch the end of the world in miniature, to see a kitchen overrun with the outside. While Simmel sees this microcosm as representative, showing the karmic balance between man’s will and nature’s ability to thwart that will, perhaps there is another angle. Perhaps there is a way to see this ruin not as a stand-in for any other ruin, or for the ruination of the world at large, but as a holding place. Perhaps this ruin is ruin enough to allow other places to be habitable. 

When I leave the Ayers Court apartment, I am filled with grief. Every time and without fail. The jagged uproar of that house with its grimy floors and tacky seats fills me with sadness for my father, for the state of his life. And also—it is the rug of my childhood, piss-stained and acrid. What was my bed, dusty and ill-placed. The books I read weigh down the shelves. My father lives there, with his pill bottles and his uncalloused hands. With all the memories he may or may not have of all the things he did or did not do. All haunting is reified in that second story apartment off of Queen Anne Road. That is to say, Bachelard’s lares cannot follow me everywhere. 121 Ayers Court being a ruin allows every other house I enter to be a home. 

Ruins are places large enough to hold sadness. They are architectural containers. We are drawn to them the way we are drawn to tragedy—it gives us permission to acknowledge what we have pushed off acknowledging. Inside a story, one may cry and express pain (one’s own, mostly). The story ends and one moves on, happier for having been sad. Despair is best when bounded and externalized. It overwhelms less. Ruin bounds despair spatially: within or around this structure, mourning is encouraged. It is okay to realize that something was lost. That peace, that equanimity, thrills us because we’ve been accumulating losses for a long time, and here, permission is given to grieve. Here, ruin is not metaphor. It is pretext. 

I only ever go to the Ayers Court apartment with my brother. We enter like refugees returning home, tiptoeing around landmines and trying not to look too hard at what became of the place we’re from. We look at each other in this new oldness and we see the disarray, the archived pain, the deep decline. And I am reminded of the end of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Ruin in his Magnum Opus, A Poet in New York, where the speaker addresses his fellow as a house is overtaken by grass and decay:

Only you and I are left.
Prepare your skeleton for the air.
We’re the only ones who remain. (Lorca, 113)

As everything in the apartment seems to unloose itself, as it rusts over, as it molds away, as it all curdles in the mausoleum my father regards as a refrigerator, my brother and I stand steady, survivors of rot who have not rotted yet. Notably, he doesn’t talk about our father much. Notably, I need to. This is no great schism between us; I admire his stoicism and he spares a kind word for my explicitness. We both cringe to see our father slack apart, to see his life buckle artlessly under entropy’s weight. Usually, something in particular catches my eye—mountains of unread books, a swarm of flies, something unspeakable on the toilet seat. Then I take my brother’s hand. He understands, begins to make excuses for us and our hasty departure. He is beautiful, my brother, and the most lovely thing my father ever made. If the bruises of my childhood are flesh that withers, then the skeleton beneath them is this bond—is eternal, sturdy, and keeps me upright. And as the apartment decomposes around us, we find a way to remain. 

1. along with compensating for lost earnings, medical costs, pain, embarrassment
2. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/430-Kensington-Rd-Teaneck-NJ-07666/38034624_zpid/

Works Cited

Boym, Svetlana. “Atlas of Transformation.” Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins | Svetlana Boym, monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruinophilia/ruinophilia-appreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html. 

“The Development of the Façade in the Sacred Sense.” The Development of the Façade in the Sacred Sense, archi.capital/article/7. 

Lorca, García Federico, and Christopher Maurer. Poet in New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. 

Marder, Michael. “Dust, the Ledger of Past Existence.” The Atlantic, 18 Mar. 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/dust-the-ledger-of-past-existence/284387/. 

Shoesmith. “Huygens’ Solution to the Gambler’s Ruin Problem.” Historia Mathematica, 9 July 2004, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0315086086900285?via%3Dihub. 

Simmel. Two Essays, http://www.lma.lv/uploads/news/3653/files/simmel-the-ruin.pdf. 

Woolf, Virginia, and Susan Choi. To the Lighthouse. Vintage Classics, 2023.

Ruthie Yudelson is a young poet studying environmental sociology. She loves Torah and goats. Her work has appeared in 929, Beyond Words, The Light Ekphrastic, Ein Milim, and Verklempt.

A Song for Ruthie