On Lunar New Year’s Day in 2024, I drove for two hours from Saratoga Springs, New York, to Dia Beacon, the contemporary art museum on the banks of the Hudson River. I wanted beauty.
Tall trees stood to the side of the entrance, stark branches without leaves this time of year. I showed the e-ticket on my phone to the front desk attendant, and she gave me a maroon lapel tag to wear. Lines from a Jane Hirshfield poem floated to mind: I wanted to be surprised. / To such a request, the world is obliging.
I strolled through the bright white galleries. Here were the giants of mid-century conceptual art: Dan Flavin’s splashy fluorescent light “situations”; a series of Donald Judd’s perfectly symmetrical plywood boxes arranged just so; Robert Smithson’s marvelously incongruous juxtaposition of dirt, glass shards, and jutting mirrors. I lingered in a room of On Kawara’s date paintings, each canvas marking a day’s month, date, and year. A Michael Heiser piece: four 20-feet geometric depressions spread across the gallery floor. The installation was fenced in by waist-high sheets of plexiglass, lest any visitors fall into the art.
I made my way upstairs to the Louise Bourgeois sculptures. Bulbous, faintly erotic objects languished on tables, hung from the ceiling, oozed off the walls. In the last gallery, a magnificent black spider teetered on steel talons. She loomed 10-feet tall on eight sinewy legs, taking up an entire L-shaped corner of the museum.
Of everything I saw that day, “Crouching Spider” inspired the most awe. One imagines her ready to pounce, agile and terrible. Then again, there’s something inevitably vulnerable about the work: an invitation to stand directly under the center of the sculpture, caged in by those massive legs, and stare up at the spider’s grand, swollen egg sac.
Every day there were new photos, videos, and narrative accounts of this massive extinction event, an enterprise of extremist cruelty and specific depopulation.
I was so very lonely. One is supposed to be with family and loved ones on Lunar New Year’s Day. I walked on, passing through the airy galleries, a former Nabisco box printing factory. I looked at the art.
And Israel’s war on Gaza, its genocide of Palestinians, carried on—totalizing violence, imminent starvation, the promise of death. It was February 10th, by the solar calendar.
For four months, the Israeli military had been decimating Palestinian infrastructure without any regard for Palestinian civilians—there had been evacuation orders and designated “safe zones,” which were then systematically bombed. Every day there were new photos, videos, and narrative accounts of this massive extinction event, an enterprise of extremist cruelty and specific depopulation.
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, “Beauty in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said. This light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man.”
And of ugliness, he writes, “After so many of her husband’s infidelities, so many troubles with the cops, Tereza says: ‘Prague has become ugly.’ Some translators want to replace the word ‘ugly’ with the words horrible’ or ‘intolerable.’ They find it illogical to react to a moral situation with an aesthetic judgment. But the word ‘ugly’ is irreplaceable: the omnipresent ugliness of the modern world is mercifully veiled by routine, but it breaks through harshly the moment we run into the slightest trouble.”
I was starting the second semester of a one-year, non-renewable appointment as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Skidmore College. I am a fiction writer. I’d moved to Saratoga Springs in the fall, alone, from Los Angeles, and now it was winter. I was afraid. I was restless. I grasped at beauty, failed to find it—I was writing a novel about a massacre, set in the late 1800s. Outside the windows of my apartment, so much snow. Inside the apartment, not much belonged to me: some clothes and shoes, a selection of books, the food in the refrigerator. Most days, my world was “mercifully veiled by routine.”
What breaks through: news of more Israeli bombs and sniper fire, lack of adequate medical supplies, vigilantes who blockaded UN aid trucks at the border. The US had frozen aid to UNRWA, the largest humanitarian agency in Gaza, while we continued to supply Israel with artillery and other weapons for this grotesque killing spree. Kundera was right to insist: the word “ugly” is the correct one. An aesthetic distinction to circumscribe this immoral, unethical moment in a durational imperialist history.
And what of beauty, the ineffable thing I was seeking at Dia Beacon that day, the first of the Lunar New Year? What appears beautiful to us, in art—by Kundera’s estimation—is a feeling of discovery; though these discoveries may be old ones, no matter: we’d forgotten them already, we’ll forget them again. Such that an appreciation of beauty lies in its ability to astonish anew, every time, while it is a reminder, a recognition, a sublime sense of déjà vu.
It strikes me that this saturating amnesiac attitude toward beauty is not dissimilar to our ability to leverage violence, to make war, as a solution for the absence of peace, over and over again.
*
A person can get used to anything. I got used to being alone all the time, outside of teaching.
In the fall, I’d made some efforts at friendship with colleagues in the department, but my invitations were rarely reciprocated. I searched for meet-up groups online. On Craigslist, I clicked on a post for volunteers to explore paranormal activity in western Massachusetts, not far from where I lived upstate. I imagined going into the woods at night with white men who carried guns, and thought—I’d better not.
I joined the YMCA, tried out some weight training and HIIT courses. I swiped on Tinder, went on one date—he talked about his dead puppy for forty-five minutes, some kind of congenital heart disease. I drove three and half hours to visit a friend in Boston. I rode Amtrak four and half hours into New York City once or twice. I brought a stack of student writing to grade at the Barrelhouse, a dive bar in my neighborhood, an excuse to get out of the house for some low-stakes, ambient socializing. In March, the bar suddenly shuttered without notice.
During that period, I was surrounded by white people in a way I’d never been surrounded by white people before.
Most evenings, I sat on the porch steps outside of my apartment and smoked cigarettes, staring into the dark alley between the two houses across the street. One night, a strange white animal stalked out of that alley and crossed into the street. There was still snow on the ground. I’d never seen anything like it before. It had the proportions of a possum, smaller than a housecat, too big to be a rat. Long wiry hairs stuck out all over its body, like an electrocuted cartoon drawing. I sat very still, my body tense, blood pounding in my ears. It stopped in the middle of the street and turned its head toward me. I was afraid it would rush at me, jump the steps and bite me in the leg. We regarded one another for a few long seconds, me and this hideous little creature. Then it turned and strutted away.
Later I googled: “hairy white possum upstate NY,” “long hair white animal Saratoga Springs,” “giant white rat Saratoga.” None of the images that came up in my search matched the animal I’d seen.
What was that thing? I still don’t know.
*
During that period, I was surrounded by white people in a way I’d never been surrounded by white people before. Often, I had the thought that this is probably how most Asians in America experienced life. To feel as if—to accept—your racial identity as an “other,” a “minority,” were an ontological normal.
There had been a mayoral race in the fall, and the incumbent candidate seeking re-election was a Korean American Democrat named Ron Kim. Around my neighborhood, I saw opposition flyers with Kim’s face positioned side-by-side next to a grimacing Japanese-style demon mask. It was laughably absurd, but I understood, too, that the crude visual composition was an obvious dog whistle: Don’t vote for this evil, exotic fiend.
In Saratoga, my being “Asian American” didn’t mean anything. Racial identity isn’t some inherent essence; it is necessarily contingent on social and political contexts. Did I feel “more” Asian here, because I was—to borrow Zora Neale Hurston’s phrase—thrown against a sharp white background? No. I didn’t. Because the feeling of Asian-ness, if it can be quantified as such, had always meant—for me—abundance, exuberance, and presence. Not: something compared against, less than, revealed in relief.
And yet: I was acutely aware of my difference. When apartment managers didn’t reply to my inquiries about their rental listings, was it because of my Chinese last name? Or was I being paranoid? If a barista was cold to me, if the waiter seemed slow to take my order or refill my water glass, I wondered if it had to do with racial bias, some subterranean disgust that my uncanny Oriental presence inspired in the denizens of this quaint northeastern college town.
All of it just another stratum in the atmosphere of my loneliness.
*
Early April: a month and half left in Saratoga. Time, of course, felt exceedingly slow. The days dragged on, snow melted on the sidewalks. I couldn’t remember what I did from week to week, the story of my days and nights without shape.
A total solar eclipse was coming. To meet the path of totality, I drove an hour north toward Vermont. I pulled over in a nondescript small town not unlike the one I lived in. I was by myself, as I was most days. It was a little after three o’clock in the afternoon.
Was I not supposed to look? How could I not? I gazed directly into the sun.
I sat on a big rock, the river to my left. There were other people there, on the edge of the riverbank, in pairs and larger groups, talking excitedly, sharing drinks and snacks. I heard laughter. I heard the crinkle of a bag of chips. The creak of lawn chairs. An air of convivial anticipation floated over me but did not settle.
I put on my eclipse glasses. The sun looked like a wheel of sharp cheddar with a bite taken out of it. The yellow circle disappeared little by little. The whole thing would end in five or six minutes.
All of a sudden it got dark, spooky. Everyone quieted, no more talk and laughter, not a single murmur. No birdsong, even the insects seemed to stop buzzing. Only the sound of the river now. The air cooled, the light in the sky turned gray, and a grim, ominous feeling came over everything. Through my eclipse glasses, the sun was a sliver. Then the sliver vanished.
I squinted into the black. I tore the glasses off my face. Was I not supposed to look? How could I not? I gazed directly into the sun.
Up there, high in the sky: a perfect black circle, wreathed by a brilliant ring of light.
Tears sprang to my eyes. The sun, obliterated. I couldn’t look away. A shiver went through me. I blinked, a dumb animal. I closed my mouth, which had been open without my realizing it.
I wanted to be surprised. / To such a request, the world is obliging.
And just as quickly, it was over.
I drove back to Saratoga alone. I made dinner, ate it alone, and then went to bed alone. Nothing had changed. I’d witnessed something beautiful, finally. A total solar eclipse. It was utterly sublime.
And the whole time, I just wanted to go home to LA.
*
In May, I did go home. I moved back to LA, my nine-month contract at Skidmore completed, the gorgeous summer ahead. I saw old friends. I met new lovers. In the fall, another job will begin, this one a permanent position.
Some nights, I am still struck by the same piercing loneliness I thought I’d left behind
That month, Israel seized control of Rafah Crossing, the nine-mile zone along Palestine’s border with Egypt. It had been the only passageway out of the Gaza Strip for Palestinian refugees. Their schools and hospitals and homes had been destroyed. What were they supposed to do? Where could they go now? I didn’t understand it. I suppose it’s not meant to be understood, which is not the same as saying it is “complicated.”
It is rather simple. It is genocide. It is so ugly.
Louis Bourgeois said:
I worship transparency. I search for transparency. You see, there is no mask in my work. . . . the language of the eye, the intensity of the gaze and the steadiness of that gaze are more important than what one says. Language is useful but not necessary. You cannot fool me in the visual world, but you can get the better of me in the verbal world.
For two years now, we have been seeing images of devastation from Gaza. In the last six months: famine has set in, and the death toll climbs: more than 65,000 human beings killed, gone. A few weeks after this essay was accepted by publication—while I was working on edits—the US brokered a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, and captives were exchanged in mid-October. Two weeks later, Israel launched another major airstrike offense. Over 100 people, including at least 35 children, have died this week, as I write this. Like Bourgeois, I, too, search for transparency. What can language do? Not much, it seems, in the immediate now.
I long for some other story, but I cannot keep fooling myself. And yet: “The writer’s job, in light of the bullet of information—and the actual bombs—is to slow down time, rewind, examine the image and the statement, and the structures of power that undergird them, rewinding again, to help the soul catch up,” Philip Metres argues. I keep looking. I keep watch. Some nights, I am still struck by the same piercing loneliness I thought I’d left behind, back in Saratoga. One day, I hope my soul catches up.