The luminescence (I insist: the luminous or radiant essence) of the ruin surely derives from its multi-faceted surface, while that which is beyond expression, articulation, substantiation in the surface of the ruin must somehow reside in the unpredictability–the succinct, “inutterable before”–of form, number, and array of its many, ever-shifting facets. Indeed, though one may be able to say with certainty that some object–a building, a machine, a town, or a human body–will come to ruin, it is an altogether different, and arguably impossible proposition to foresee precisely how that ruin will progress, through what stages of deterioration it will pass, and what physical outward form it will assume at any given stage. What is ineffable about the ruin is, precisely, the literal illegibility of the vectors of ruination (and, by extension, the unforseeability of the ruined object’s resurrection as something else, something “new”…). We may read the ruin in the present, but this tells us little or nothing of any certainty about how the ruin will proceed, will look, smell, and sound beyond the present. (It may be deduced, in fact, that at some stage of ruin one also loses the ability to perceive the original object from which the ruin devolved). (III, 6a)

As for its luminosity, the ruin, perhaps, exudes its indeterminacy somewhat in the way an uncut gem refracts the light of the sun in multiple simultaneous directions, depending on the arrangement of its many irregular surface aspects… At any given moment, the ruin–an object in flux, a matrix of constantly shifting surfaces–will reveal itself in and as an ever-changing form; certainly, the ruin allows formerly untold aspects of the original object to reveal themselves in each instant, even when the interval from one such instant to the next–and hence, form one minute stage of ruin to the next–are imperceptible to the human eye, so geologically slow as to be instantaneously imperceptible. The luminous ruin, then, is a pure potentiality, in the sense of a crucible of those potential yet fleeting ‘natures’ which the process of ruination itself unleashes, arbitrarily secretes, and just as arbitrarily and inevitably erases as it progresses qua ruin, leading always to ever-changing and equally ineffable moments or conditions of ruin. The ruin ‘glows’, as it were, with its own incommensurable deterioration, signals with each ephemeral juxtaposition of multiple, possible vectors of disintegration (which may or may not ultimately be realized, concretized, substantiated) the array of possible forms of ruin, conditions or situations of ruin, to which the object may be destined… (III, 6b)