Closer to heart, yet verified by eyes

Fire soups aka magma --> rocks  --> boulders  --> pebbles  --> sand  --> dust, that’s the geological story in its purest form. When life was on born earth, the organic matters hijacked a few processes in between and created a vast rainbow of formation of dust. Life excretes dust by various process – withered leaves from trees, dried skin shed by millipedes, humans’ dandruffs,  our industrial products, vehicle emissions. Dust is an outcome of human action on a large scale at present. The thermal dissipation from living bodies that interact with the atmosphere alone contributes to massive tons of dust every year. Besides, naturally, the interaction of life forms with non-life has greatly accelerated the dust on Earth, considering our atmospheric pressure compared with various other planets. The photons from sunlight scatter dust, tiny products of organic and inorganic matter, and make sunlight lively and meaningful.

Dust graces sunlight which in turns graces life on earth

My first curiosity with nature began on the lines of chasing sunlight through the glass-plated roof. It shows up diligently at eight in the morning and reigns over a square patch on the floor, beaming all sorts of active, chaotic motion of dust till noon. Each mote in the dust pack moves crazily; nobody can predict where it is going, unless a pair of eyes like mine steadily and closely watch it, only to fail to understand that it has no specific purpose of going anywhere. Each packet, or gossamer flimsy box radiating blackness in the backdrop of sharp sunlight, could be an everlasting curiosity for a mind that looks for some sincere occupation. One dot, if it exits the light patch, will appear back. I was frustrated and saddened many times, wondering what could be the stories of those dots or dust that exited the light patch area. The visible stillness of that grand motion captivates a powerful message of how reality could be ever-changing, the idea of time, space, and force acting within a small patch of area. When my Chitapa (uncle) accidentally walks across and reties his dhoti right in the light spot, there used to be violence among motes. Each one clashes at a greater speed, acts against the other, they repel or attract; nobody knows.

This glass tile is enough for a curious mind to talk to nature

I am terrified to imagine an Earth without dust, and petrified to watch clean sunlight where there is no patch of dust within it. Dust, in fact, makes a planet habitable, lively, real, earthly, and enjoyable to watch. On Mercury, there is literally no dust, the sunspots are bald, like light filtered through a giant lens. When light throws dust into its field, you can be sure that life is sustained on that planet. The more carbon it has, the more chances there are for a life form. Dust is a glorious bastardization of every event that occurs in the universe, acting to the tunes of a planet’s gravity. Earth’s dust is made up of organic beings, from dead man’s skin to industrial soot to pollen. Dust on meteors and other planets is made up of silicates, iron, and carbon dioxide. Thus, dust has always been an actor in creating the primordial soup, as coined by J. B. S. Haldane.

Dust is the last evidence of light, and thus the closest neighbour of truth

In modern times, dust is seen as inimical and is gradually losing its space in the art forms it once belonged to. Anselm Kiefer, a postwar German artist, used dust, ash, clay, and lead in his paintings. In his monumental works, dust represents memory, destruction, and rebirth, especially in the context of German history and the Holocaust. The American visual artist Man Ray photographed dust accumulating on Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture The Large Glass over several months. The resulting image wasn’t just documentation; it turned neglect and time into art itself. The dust symbolized entropy, decay, and the passage of time, a poetic comment on modernity and the fragility of creation. Thus, dust has been used as a metaphor for neglect and dereliction, which results in distancing and eschewal from the actual object.

Man Ray's Dust Breeding Photograph (Duchamp's Large Glass with Dust Motes) from 1920 is a document of 'The Large Glass" after it had collected a year's worth of dust while Duchamp was in New York.

Pledge your heart for a second to the exchange of truth, where did you first draw and realize the amateur artist within yourself? It must have been on a dusted car windshield. To whom did you whisper the name of your first love? It wasn’t a human, but a block of dust that took birth for you, waiting months or years for your story to be told. From love to suicide notes, dust has been the medium of communication for humans.

An artist turned a dusted car into an art

Kings haven’t spared dust from their hatred. Louis XIV was not just a ruler, he was an architect of order. Everything about him, from the choreography of court life to the layout of Versailles, was designed to erase imperfection and chaos and of course dust, the most democratic of substances, symbolized both. According to him, dust was unroyal: it settled on things without permission. It represented time, decay, and equality, yes of course you read it right “equality”,  ideas utterly offensive to a man who styled himself le Roi Soleil, the Sun King, who believed he was time’s center.  Versailles, built from 1661 onward, was a palace of spectacle, with mirrors, chandeliers, and gilded furniture, everything that reflected light and implied immortality. While he was bring order and demanding perfection, his palace sat on swampy land, later filled with gravel and lime that created fine dust. To combat dust from the soil beneath, he had over 10,000 courtiers, servants, and guards moved through its halls daily, kicking up particles. Yet, Horses and carriages outside raised clouds of dirt that drifted into corridors. Servants were ordered to sweep constantly, and the marble floors and tapestries were beaten and wiped daily, not for hygiene (the concept barely existed then) but for appearance. Louis demanded that the royal apartments, especially the Hall of Mirrors, always shine , “as though newly created.” Dust was an insult to sunlight and sunlight was him.

Dust also takes a metaphorical version in our lives. The ideal of a relationship is based on how much dust it has. A person is deeply immersed in dust when they are long forgotten or not forgiven. Having dust all over one’s name is a privilege of time in a human relationship, the more dust a person has gathered, the longer and deeper the memories they have carved from that bond.

Some masochistic people are afraid of having dust, imaginatively. Such insecurity sets in, and the web of dust starts to build up around the person, woven by the very one they loved deeply. When one asks, “Are we done?” or “You shall leave me anytime,” it is the spider working around the person, not their love’s dame. Thus, insecurity is the mother of dust in a relationship.

Being beclouded by dust is an inevitable phase in any relationship. A dutiful mother gets abandoned once her little daughter grows up and gives her up for her in-laws’ family. A dedicated man loses his pride and the possession of his glory when his girl turns him down for her greed and selfishness. A girl’s chastity is plundered by a boy for his lust. A weary father’s money is lied about and routed to gambling by his reckless son. A teacher mentors a student not just in knowledge but in building his whole character , yet the student forgets the name of the teacher, while the teacher still spells the student’s last name with pride. Thus, when every trust is broken, we burst a stack of dust on someone’s face, leaving an everlasting, indelible scar. A scar not wounded on the skin, but by a dark memory.

The dust of deceit is a spectacular costume for the clown.

Yet, dust remarkably feeds us information -a time lapse, an alarm about the newness of a thing. It made life on Earth, procreated many life forms, and accelerated evolution. If our trust in God erodes, we can trust in dust, surely and undoubtedly, with its magic of entropy and Brownian motion, it ought to produce life somewhere in a distant galaxy. Dust is an integral part of life. Being white alone cannot make you anti-dust, and being anti-white cannot exist when you are covered in dust you cannot hold. You eventually get saturated, clean yourself, come out white, and take dust again. Thus, being dusted and being cleaned is a perpetual process,  for everyone, including cats that clean themselves and then dirty themselves the next minute in a puddle.

¥¥ Anand