A lesson about new beginnings

Washington Irving served as ambassador to Spain, and during some of his diplomatic work he stayed in the Alhambra. In later books, such as "Tales of the Alhambra" and "Spanish Tales," he wrote about creakings and clankings he heard in supposedly locked and sealed-off rooms there. Horace Walpole, son of the first prime minister of England, considered access to ruins so important that he had some artificial ruins constructed and placed on his estate.\nJohn Bower's "Lingering Spirit; a photographic tribute to Indiana's fading, forlorn and forgotten places" is currently part of an exhibit of approximately a dozen books about Indiana near the ground floor entrance of the IU Bookstore. It is made possible in part by the Indiana Arts Commission and is a beautiful art book. \nThis book is composed mainly of black-and-white photographs of abandoned houses and rooms, old barns and vehicles, even a torn piano, a dilapidated chicken coop and graveyards.\nIn the foreword, Judy O'Bannon states, "A haunting and yet an encouraging journey awaits you. ... We feel the message of ... our own inner wailings of today and hopefully our resolve for tomorrow. ... Why do I like 'old stuff?' It is because people have rubbed against them as they did their dance with life and left their marks. ... For the moments of wonder and for the acts of neglect, we are all there together. ... There is always a new use, a real value, an unrealized potential in old weathered objects. ... There is a future of promise for us all."\nOn the publisher's Web site, www.StudioIndiana.com, Bower says over the years he has found himself "increasingly drawn to machinery, buildings, vehicles and man-made structures that were once the pride of their owners and their age, but are now well past their prime."\nIn the preface, he says the book evolved as a result of him and his wife spending much of their leisure time driving on the back roads of the Midwest. Discovering something interesting and unforeseen around the next bend provided a great deal of enjoyment. He started taking a camera along and stopping to photograph when they would see a picturesque scene or building. Then he found he was photographing structures that were decaying, worn-out or abandoned. He came to understand he was being drawn to the energy of the individuals whose lives had once been intertwined with the buildings. His photographs are tributes and monuments to the homeowners, equipment operators, builders, employers, employees and families who moved on and left some of themselves in the remains of their cast-aside possessions. "What happened to the women ... who canned vegetables and sewed quilts in the now-empty farm house?" he asks. \nIn the final essay, Lynn refers to such features of the environment as the limestone in Monroe County, the artists colony in Brown County, the architecture in Bartholomew County and the sadder feature of the depopulation of the Algonquin-speaking tribes which had inhabited the area.\nPerhaps some readers and viewers of this book will see the shattered barns and ravaged living rooms as being part of the same category as the ruined castles and ruined palaces that are in parts of Europe. Or perhaps some will see them as destroyed, just as the Native American forerunners' settlements here were destroyed. Some could see them as partial relics of the hope that here would be a land where there would be enough food to eat and people could practice domesticity. Some will see them as reminders that new beginnings still need to be made. This is a book full of many mixed messages. \n"Lingering Spirit" sells for $22 in local stores and is also available on www.studioindiana.com.