The Weekly LitWit Challenge 6.5: Make rust beautiful (+emergency handbook)
Last Saturday on our hopia tour of Binondo we saw this.
It’s some kind of warehouse crammed with chains, hardware and all manner of junk. We found it strangely beautiful. So your assignment this week is to explain why this rust is beautiful.
Write us an essay of 500 words describing this picture and post it in Comments on or before 11.59 pm on Sunday, 31 July 2011. Remember: Beautiful.
The prize is this copy of The Greatest Stories of Guy de Maupassant and a fully-loaded pencil case.
The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.
* * * * *
Did you feel that earthquake last night? No, it wasn’t your next-door neighbor getting lucky, it was an actual seismic event, 6.2 on the Richter scale. I thought my cats were jumping on the bed but they were all asleep. I took this to mean the quake wasn’t so powerful because minutes before the last big earthquake at the turn of this century my cat Koosi stood in a corner and let out a low, continuous howl I’d never heard from her before or since.
In the morning, after a quick evacuation drill with my cats, I looked up the major fault lines in the Philippines. There was little point in my doing this since the entire archipelago is sitting on fault lines. Then I remembered a new Anvil publication.
Your Emergency Survival Handbook written by Paloma, edited by my first editor Marita Nuque, with a foreword by Nanay Socorro Ramos. It covers Rains (typhoon, ongoing), Floods (ongoing), Earthquakes (this morning), Volcanic eruptions (it’s the 20th anniversary of the Pinatubo eruption), Tsunami, Lightning, Ipo-Ipo, Heat, Radiation, Electrical failure and Government collapse.
According to experts the best option during earthquakes is still the Drop-Cover-Hold On method. The Triangle of Life method has been disputed by the Red Cross and other rescue organizations.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 28th, 2011 at 11:44
Objects are emotions in tangible form.
It cannot be denied that whenever I see something I have already encountered, the object instantly transforms into emotions, into memories. New things don’t emit this odd “power”. Old things do.
There is something beautiful about old things. I guess the reason to this is old things are — like humans — wise. How the hell can inanimate objects be wise? They don’t think; they don’t learn; they don’t get hurt. Yet as far as we, the human observers, are concerned, these old objects carry wisdom. They make us remember our past. They make us realize things we’ve been locking in our subconscious mind that want to creep into the conscious one. And as humans who are obsessed with going back to the past, old things like rusty chains is the nearest thing we could use to “time-travel”.
Add to that the fact that many closet geeks believe wisdom is a form of beauty, a turn-on to wisdom-lovers, that no pretty face can duplicate.
Rust, a sign that a metal stuff is too old, too used. That rust is almost like an 80-year-old human — too old, too used. Yet the old ones are who we admire. They carry experiences that make them deep, that make them an essential part of this world.
No one can force someone to be neither old nor wise. In the same way that rust cannot be forced to appear. It takes time, time, time. This natural phenomenon in chains, is a reminder that there are things we cannot control. I wonder though if there’s already a machine that can make a chain rust faster. But then again, who would want a chain to rust? Not the ordinary people. Not the humans who’d like to use them now. But the odds, those who are too excited to see the future — full of beautiful rusty chains, they’d love this.
July 29th, 2011 at 12:33
Beloved Lady Rust,
You perplex me. How your beauty is defined with your chocolate-colored pelt of crusty, flaky, aged quality, and how patches peel to unfold the tarnished element beneath. How the strongest fall prey and succumb to the creeping, contemplating, patient caress of your prowess, slowly by age and tenderly by weather. How you disregard my sheath of robust sheen, and crack it open in your own time.
You are an equalizer, unyielding and persistent. Your perseverance infects and entangles even the most sturdy and proud. Weaving and wafting through the fabric of matter, bonding and reacting, changing and recreating the untarnished to the matured, the supple and smooth to the aged and textured. You impart warmth and character to the otherwise detached and frigid. You ripen the surface to show an inherent weakness, creating folds and creases where there used to be none, fashioning me into a myriad of valleys and peaks, of trenches and outcrops.
You strip me of my pride, forcing me to yield and thus inducing my dissolution. You extract a history I long to keep hidden; and by an utter lack of discrimination, prove that like all things, I too must falter, that I too have an end, an Achilles’ heel. You are my Delilah, as you cut your way through my falsely impervious skin, peeking beneath my stature to reveal the latent senescence within me. Slowly, affectionately, you make me new by rendering me old.
I become the evidence of your presence, the metastasizing fibrosis of a time I cannot will to deny. That I, too, am subject to passing, and will one day fall into oblivion and obsolescence. I am under your whims, and may you make do with my body as you have done for countless others before me. You are no hunter, nor am I hunted. You are simply my salvation. My deliverer.
Take me, piecewise and layer by layer. And destroy what industry and man have made out of my ore and core. Return me into the earth that I have longed for, and pined for, for so long. I am at your mercy, my Lady in Red. Create from this gloss and glib the ashes of my deliverance, the nature of my origins, the truth that I am part of the earth, and by your gentle hands will return to it.
I am yours.
Sincerely,
The Chained Irons
July 29th, 2011 at 18:23
First, the lighting. The natural outside light gives some aesthetic impact to the orange chain structure on the left side, while the other chains and junk appear shadowy and faint, and some even life-like (the monoblock chair on the upper right seem to move with a slight blink).
The indoor fluorescent light doesn’t illuminate much, which gave the picture an illusion of perspective, an unexpected mystery. You will start to wonder how big the warehouse is from the inside and how crammed can all the junk get.
Second, that catchy blue jug. I asked a friend of what he thought about the picture and his first reaction was – “what the hell is that jug doing in there?” On the economic point-of-view though, there are important questions like:
Is that jug part of the recycle-able junk?
If not, does it have water in it? Is it mineral or distilled?
The bluish effect also blends to the other colors in the room, like the yellow and white colors from the stack of rice sacks scattered on the side.
Third, the Golden Rectangle argument. Cutting a vertical section of the picture an inch from the blue jug to the right, we argued there is a Golden Rectangle proportion somewhere in the picture. Then we tried testing it manually using MS Paint, and gave up. Too much math.
Fourth, Symmetry VS Chaos. Flickr, the photo-sharing site reveals lot pictures where this is harmonized. The symmetry among the wound chains and the chaos on the background harmonize well that, looking closely at it can give any viewer that classical, modernistic, and familiar feel.
July 31st, 2011 at 23:54
We are the masters of the universe. We’ve conquered all but the most inhospitable patches of land on earth, and have begun our descent into the sea; and although the depths of space have yet to fall in our reach, they have long been ours, claimed by the first human eyes that gazed upwards and found the night sky pleasing.
As befits a god, we create and destroy, we create to destroy, we destroy to create. Ever do we approach perfection: the complete system, the all-encompassing work, the everlasting opus.
And so it is that humankind embarked upon the penultimate step to godhood: it consciously set itself to attain the three marks of a god. The method of this path is as follows:
* We create and destroy society to approach godliness.
* We create and destroy tools to create and destroy.
* We create and destroy ourselves, and others of our race, for the same purpose.
All of humankind participate in all three activities in varying degrees, and in varying capacities. For example:
* A parent creates humans on a basic level; molds its child as a tool; destroys and recreates society for the perpetuation of its bloodline;
* A government official creates society with each executive decision;
* On a more physical level, scientists create tools for the creation of further tools; ofttimes destroying tools for the discovery of new methods to utilize them (e.g. vivisection of creatures, collision of atoms, application of heat or pressure to various materials)
By these we observe how humankind assays omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence — by occupying an ever-expanding number of niches as they are created by discovery and necessity,
Yet a further stratification does exist. On the one hand, scientific tools become quickly outdated, often by their own efficacy; and humans are displaced from their roles, or move on of their own volition. Their niches are swiftly reoccupied, and the system marches steadily forward.
On the other hand, there are domains that progress does not touch. These are invariably the areas of brute labor, which are looked down upon by most, owing to the belief that the human physique is debased as a mechanical tool. Traditions have mostly been retained in these disciplines, as regards materials, methods, and results, with only slight improvements that do not affect their essence. Undoubtedly, this adds to its disrepute — there is not enough suspicion for a field to which science or politics cannot contribute.
Yet perhaps it is something deeper which sparks our distaste, as well as our admiration: these disciplines, with their ancient tools (materials, methods, etc.), have become their own perpetual machines from which we must draw, to breathe life into the so-called higher disciplines. And so, whereas every element of these fields display the outward marks of the ravages of time, they are in fact the progenitors of the gods which we dare, and fail, to create — and the progenitors of the gods which we will one day likewise debase and distrust.
August 1st, 2011 at 00:17
the human body does not rust.
it moves in place, works and breathes and gathers dust.
chains, these chains, inanimate things, give off and take and build up.
The wind that once blew in the docks of the bay in 1995.
These chains they witnessed and they took
and collected and kept that moment in time.
disguised and compacted in the brown roughness and lines
young children in carousel rides
seafarers and travellers, afternoons by the sea side
the very atoms that some stranger breathed in and then out
in some cold december evening last last year
the very moisture from the hand
of the man searching for plastics and tin cans
feelings, emotions, human reactions
all in one room
summarized
so easily overloooked
considered as grime
yet in actuality
moments toucing moments
so easily looked at in one glance