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?