The Beach

It is a white piece of paper, dabbed with light blue on top along with circles of white cotton. On the bottom of the page, there are clear green waters that form white flowers as the waves goes through ebb and flows. I am at Panama City Beach.

I have live inside a box for too long that I am not quite sure what to do with the newly found freedom and space. As I try to fit myself somewhere in this vastness, I can only sense the smallness of my figure slowly compressing and reducing, finally into nothingness and completely melt into the picture. The evaporation of my physical form tastes sweet like the syrup that drips into a hungry mouth. I belong here. There is no past, no future, no routines, no stress, no jealousy, and no competition. There is only now, only the present. Time stills. My mind stops thinking and is swallowed whole by the ocean.

The tide comes, and the playful waves run after one another in the race to the shore. They push themselves over my arms, tumble through my legs and gently crush in the vicinity around my body. The rhythmic beats sound like a stream of continuous confirmation. They are saying “Yes, Yes, come to me, stay around”. Their beckoning works like the lullaby songs that the mother uses to lull a child to sleep. I fall prey and lapse into a dreamy state until I trip over in the waves. I push myself up and continue to look around for shells that are left over from the tide. There are not a lot of whole ones, but a lot of broken pieces of various colors. They are fragments and remnants of what they used to be, but they are treasures to me. There is so much that the beach and the waters have to offer that I cannot swallow it whole, but have to resort instead to examining them in pieces and fragments, like the broken shells.

I walk over to the sand dunes and involuntarily flick sand onto the back of my shin as I trudge forward. The seagulls standing on guard flutter away in a diagonal line and disappear into the clouds. I look back to the sea and suddenly remember a phrase I have recently read on beach therapy.com; it goes, “Don’t grow up too quickly, lest you forget how much you love the beach”. There is most definitely a child in all of us, and the beach brings and blows out the inner childishness of everyone on a trumpet to announce it to the world. Except no one cares enough to hide it. Several adults are lying on their children’s surf boards and trying eagerly to catch the waves. They are competing to see who gets carried off the farthest. An old lady with an orange polka-dots swim suit staggers as she chases after the shells along the shore. Two women in their late-twenties are burying a man in the white crystal sand, leaving only his wavering toes and mustache.

In the distance, the sea oats perform belly dance to the ocean breeze. I want to pick them up and sway with them, but then remember that they build and anchor the sand dunes; so I retreat. Apparently, the sea oats develop “new roots on the recently buried stems as sand piles up around the plants”, which helps to trap more sand and allow the sand dunes to grow. Like the sand, my feet are glued to the ground as I admire the scenery in awe. I am scared to move any further in the case that if I am not careful, the transparent layer that is separating this surreal dreamland and the outside world will peel often, and the picture will shatter to pieces.

Fireflies

Fireflies

"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..."

I first ran into this quote on a magnetic plate in my AP literature class in High School as I helped my professor to pack for retirement. My professor was a crazy woman. She talks to us not in words but in letters. Instead of saying “how are you”, she would occasionally surprise the class by blurting out fragmented letters in the forms of:”H-O-W-A-R-E-Y-O-U?” A couple students would catch up and converse with her in this newly invented communication method. She ties her silky brown hair in a tight bun, lets her dark framed glasses dangle and sway like a pendulum while filling our brains with ideas of Holly Golightly coaxing money from rich gentlemen, Hemingway dragging along a feast of Paris on a side table across national borders, and a lavish party host by the name of Gatsby who obsessively monitors moves of his lover like an secret agent only to end up helplessly in a pool of blood.

She also tries very hard to extend our love for literature beyond school time by relating to us a fanciful place called the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Oregon, where the menu is a table of contents and rooms are designed to match the styles of particular authors like Mark Twain, Colette, Dr. Seuss, Emily Dickinson and etc. To fully illustrate how personalized the rooms are, she carefully relates to us in a sharp tone that Agatha Christie’s room, in particular, has bullet holes, half hidden slippers, clues and mysteries that the visitors can solve and really live the surreal life of the author. When May came, she hinted to us that she has finally saved enough money to go on a world-tour, kind of explaining the sudden retirement plan. Before she left, she insisted to those who helped to organize her stuff that we could “pick something of hers to keep”. An auburn haired girl on the cheerleading team picked a poster of Audrey Hepburn. I picked the magnet with Jack Kerouac’s quote because I thought it was somehow relevant at the time partly due to the professor’s madness.

I was my freshman year at Oxford that I ran into this saying again, this time in my freshman literature class with Dr. Hawley. He enthusiastically confesses that he was a rebel in college, and that he would eat Kerouac’s books all day long in the back of the classroom and zoom out on lectures. The reason why he becomes a teacher, he says, is because he loves school and never wants to leave campus to go out to the real world. Through the fires that lit in his eyes while he talked about books, I think I got an inkling of what the quote was saying.

The third time I run into this quote was when I actually had to read On the Road in a contemporary literature at Oxford. I dropped the class early into the semester because I couldn’t figure out what to write on the topics given for the book on the first major paper. On the Road didn’t quite make sense to me at the time. It was full of random fights in bars, hangover, promiscuous sex and scenes of loud uproars. To me, it was the highest state of entropy and disorder without any connection or reasoning. I was never able to fully comprehend the mad style of carpe diem living from On the Road in which sensibilities are blunted, but something stuck to me in the end. As I thought about the book, I envisaged worker bees working together to protect the queen and fend off invaders by stinging, which directly lead to their deaths. Their “mad” moment is perhaps in the moment of the sting, in which they gave it all in their last breaths. I also envisioned the Grizzly man, Timothy Treadwell, as he battles with the very Grizzly bears that he set up to protect. I wonder what he thought about in the final moments as the bear tore off his fingers, arms and legs. Maybe his maddening expeditions are caused by the near-fatal attempts that numbed his reasons, but there is something about his work that mesmerizes me. Maybe people pursue extreme sports and activities to experience the temporary sensations of “burning”, to feel really alive amid the materialistic world of fashion, money, fame, reasons and obligations.

As I ponder about the “mad people”, I imagine a group of fireflies, dancing violently in the dark, bursting their lighted abdomens open during the climax and trailing off into the darkness again. The little glows that they pass out in their peak are not even enough to light the smallest corner in the streets, but they are "the all and everything" to the fireflies.

Of dust and man

Of Dust and Man

Dust

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.
--Barnabe Barnes

I sneeze a lot in my art class. Professor Moore says it is probably because of the dust and the fact that I may have allergies to the dust particles floating around the studio. He tries to alleviate the problem by sharpening the graphite and charcoal pencils outside the studio room, sending off wood splinters and graphite debris flying in the adjacent materials room instead.

Dust is an often-ignored subject. When I wake up in the morning and the sun lights(lifts?) up the room and makes it glow like a 100-watts light bulb, I can see ballerina dust particles, wearing their white tutu and pointes in the early sun, lightly pirouetting their way across the room, circling back and forth around the center stage, timidly but gracefully making their first appearances to the audience.

Dust is hardly detectable and likes to play hide and seek by harboring in corners. In this sense, it resembles an injured animal that likes to hide and find solitude when it is sick. Animals do this for two main reasons. First of all, animals hide to avoid getting picked off easily by predators. Secondly, animals hide to protect other members of the herd by not infecting other members or attracting predators that can kill the healthier ones. Dust, though not as magnanimous as injured elks or cattle that seek isolation for their relatives’ benefits, may nevertheless has the incentive to conceal itself to prevent getting wiped off by cleaners and wipers.

When we fail to wipe off the surfaces of a countertop, bookshelves, desktop computers, or tables, dust accumulates. It therefore can be used to tell the age of an abandoned house the way annual circles tell the age of a chopped open tree. In a sense, it is like a protective snowy winter coat that covers the earth to give it more layers, more substance.

Many contemporary artists use dirt and dust in their works. The British artist Paul Hazelton uses dirt and ephemera in his sculpture to “suggests the impermanence of all things”. He sums up his work by these words: “The dust of everyday life-the unavoidable and necessary by-product of living, engrosses me. Art, also an unavoidable and necessary by-product of living, engrosses me. Art, like dust, is a residue of life and therefore, the making of art is like an extreme act of self exfoliation. For me, making art is a per-version of life that has many possible diversions. Sometimes these diversions take you somewhere unexpected, sometimes somewhere gross but you have to keep going”. This is indeed a remarkable insight as dust still exists and flourishes no matter how much one cleanses. Living itself creates dust and dirt. Dust is a by-product that is an expression and manifestation of life and of the living.

Another Colombian born artist Maria Adelaida Lopez who cleaned houses to help support her master program in Philadelphia created a series entitled “Dust Houses” that consist of doll houses which are covered over in vacuum clean lint. She takes apart familiar urban houses and discards the “decorative elements, so these houses end up almost as a sketch of the original or as a new house in the process of been built, with no doors, no windows, and no flowers”. She uses this to represent the phenomenon that when “dust comes, the whole house and the windows and the flowers are being replaced by dirt. The houses are fully covered, so they began to have a gray scale quality, they look monochromatic almost like a block, minimal, but once you start getting closer you begin to first smell, then to see the hair, the skin, the lint, the debris..." In the end, she says," you have a physical experience, you realize that there is so much poetry in such ugliness.”

Finally, man originated in dust. Genesis 2:7 of the Bible in Hebrew translates to “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being”. Science also points its spear to dust. In addition to the idea that earth comes from fragments expelled in an explosion called the Big Bang, the phenomenon of star dust “found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean” has led many scientists to “speculate that a supernova explosion three million years ago might possibly have helped to bring about human evolution”. Eventually, man would end in dust as cremation becomes the more popular choice in the increasingly high-tech world. After the human body burns for two to three hours in a furnace that reaches from 1600 to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit and the cremated four pounds remains are ground up into fine powers and placed into urns, flesh is converted into dust.

Like dust, human life is ephemeral. It is a vapor that quickly evaporates; a breath that is emitted out in the winter air and quickly blends into the background, a runner swiftly passing by, and a cloud that contiguously reshapes itself in the sky. The brief 90 years of human life is fleeting compared to the 4.55 billion years age of Earth. Yet earth, too, is a flicker compared to the entire breadth of the Solar system. Human life is like the clay that is malleable and brittle when dry. When powdered, it blows away, carried by the breeze.

Peering down at the particles settling in the crevices on the keyboard of my desktop computer as I type away, I cannot help but wonder about the care-free dust. I wonder if it knows the roles that it partakes in the human legacy. As generations came and went, only dust is left in the end. It is, after all, a witness to the living, a testimony about what has happened before, and a reminder about what awaits us in the future.

Can you, like Maria, see the poetry and beauty in dust?

On Beauty

“I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty. Every person has beauty at some point in their lifetime. Usually in different degrees. Sometimes they have the looks when they’re a baby and they don’t have it when they’re grown up, but then they could get it back again when they’re older. Or they might be fat but have a beautiful face. Or have bow-legs but a beautiful body. Or be the number one female beauty and have no tits. Or be the number one male beauty and have a small you-know-what”

-The philosophy of Andy Warhol : from A to B and back again

Beauty. Everyone have different standards of it. It is as abstract as the color gray: there are simply too many gradations to gray for it to be defined as exactly as the color black, for example. Beauty, to me, like a photograph, is contained in the moment. The essence of beauty is very much relevant to the context in question. Like Andy Warhol says, “Beauty really has to do with the way a person carries it off. When you see “beauty”, It has to do with the place, with what they’re wearing, what they are standing next to, what closet they’re coming down the stairs from”. A girl smoking outside the Business School the other day was beautiful by this standard because of the way she was leaning to the concrete wall, the way the breeze carried her silky hair like barley plants waving rhythmically in the air, and the way she blew out the smoke puffs so nonchalantly, as though she does not belong to this world.

I am addicted to beautiful things and beautiful people, especially beautiful people. I can spend half an hour staring at someone gorgeous, girl or boy alike. Beautiful people, people are aesthetically pleasing, who carry themselves strikingly different and who has a unique air about them, seem to be the doom of my existence. They are the jaws of killer whales. I am the squids in the sea that gets easily fascinated and that falls prey. They usually swallow me whole. They are also the alcohol that feeds on my spirits, leaving me clueless about what has happened before and what I am supposed to do after, besides the fact that I just ran into someone beautiful. The definition provided by dictionary.com defines beauty as “the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations ( as shape, color, sound, etc), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest. Maybe people do receive deep satisfaction to the mind when they behold beauties. Maybe this explains my addiction. Maybe it’s the same mechanism as how runners persist in running because of the adrenaline and endorphin rush they get afterwards.

I imagine that people in love are beautiful because they wear their emotions inside out tackily like girls wear their shorts inside out on spirit days. Their partner’s impression of the beloved problems goes something like the lyrics from “Just the way you are by Bruno Mars”—

“When I see your face

There is not a thing that I would change

Cause you’re amazing

Just the way you are

And when you smile,

The whole world stops and stares for awhile

Cause girl you’re amazing

Just the way you are.”

In psychology, we learned that symmetry is beautiful, which is genetically important as symmetry seem to be a good indicator of health, and good health is significant in light of reproduction. Beauty can arise from attraction and in this sense, even body odors can be beautiful because it is fine-tuned in such a way to help people find compatible mates as suggested by the recent “sweaty T-shirt experiment” done by Swiss zoologist Claus, which showed that “women sniffing the T-shirts recently worn by males favored the scent of those whose immune response (MHC)genes were different from their own”. Since it is beneficial for partners to have diverse sets of immune genes to pass on to their offspring for their offspring to fend off different diseases, odors are beautiful this way because they are purposeful and functional. Some things are beautiful because they serve their purpose well. For instance, Birkenstocks and New Balance shoes are beautiful even when they go out of style. Their beauty lies in the comfort they provide to the consumers. Toilet papers are beautiful to the users not because of the intricate patterns on them but because that they are simply present and ready to be used in the place and the time that they are most needed.

In Spain, the plump, as represented by Penelope Cruz, is the beautiful. In United Kingdoms, the skinny ones, as represented by Keira Knightely, are the beautiful, they pursue the figure of the “emaciated” up there. In some Amazonian and African tribes such as the Sara People, the Makonde, of Africa, the Surma and Mursi of Ethiopia, and Kayapo of Amazonian, lip plates done with the excision of teeth are deemed beautiful. Some decades ago, Chinese men saw small feet in women as beautiful. In the Elizabethan time, the ideal beauty was one with “alabaster white skin, red lips and cheeks, bright eyes and fair hair”, which all pinpoints to nobility, wealth and delicacy. As a result, ceruse, “an ointment of white lead and vinegar, was applied to the face and neck to achieve this look”. To achieve fair hair, some used urine to dye their hair, or to simply the issue, wore wigs. It should be noted that back then, “the tightly curled front was the most popular”. In the modern age, there is of course, the invention of plastic surgery and many beneficiaries and victims alike under this new method of achieving the “perfect look”. This brings up the question of “Can beauty ever be perfected?”

Then there comes the question of which is more important, inward beauty or outward physical beauty? Honestly, I am not quite sure. Outward beauty brings applause, acceptance, positivity, popularity, friendship, all factors that can build one up inside. Sometimes, inward beauty can exude/ooze out like toothpaste and make one more alluring on the surface-for I always think that the smile of Mona Lisa is bewitching more so because of the thoughts she was having in the moment, because Leonardo de Vinci captured her heart, not just her outer shell.