It got harder and harder over the years to keep the ruin kept as a

reminder of the horrors of war in its designated state of ruin. With

time, the ruin did what ruins do: kept further ruining. It is in this

way that symbols resist what they symbolize. A jagged verdigris

steeple bitten off by a bomb ruining down to the threshold beyond

which the symbol turns into the opposite of a symbol—the thing

itself. The bomb was the thing itself, presumably—the war was

the thing itself (even though it was fought in theaters), but the

bitten-off steeple was no longer the thing itself, and the church it

somberly crowned was a symbolic church, to which flocked not the

faithful, but the ambivalent. But—is the opposite of a symbol the thing

itself? Or does the thing itself inhabit the interior of the symbol like a

ruin, a ruin kept ruined unto perpetuity, like a piece of amber in

which is embedded not the expected fly but the ruin of a fly,

unexpectedly not immortal. As the decades passed, the jagged

verdigris steeple bitten off by a bomb was regularly repaired

but not rebuilt, reinforced but not reimagined, held but not

healed. The healing is regularly postponed in the ruins of nostalgia.