It is that feeling that appears when one nears the end of a journey not having found what was sought. I sat on a near-empty bus, leaning my head against the window, peering outside for whatever I could gain from Hong Kong. It didn't look like much. I had escaped the grey city for vast, open, grey sky.
Just then, the woman in front of me took out her camera and started taking photos, as if trying to bring back whatever bits of Hong Kong she could from her very last morning in the city. I started observing her to see what she considered photo-worthy, and realised all the photos she took were of apartments. She must not have many of those where she comes from.
Her choice of which apartments to shoot was impregnable. She shot almost every apartment. A property investor, perchance? She ignored the shopping malls, although to be fair this far out from the city centre the malls were more functional than aesthetic. There was only one apartment she did not shoot, a dilapidated building yellowed to the point of brownness. It had obviously fallen into desuetude, and hence ironically achieved a beauty all the other apartments never had. (And how ironic that someone who cannot live outside cities should celebrate an image of their decay!) I would have shot it had my camera not run out of battery. And yet the woman had ignored it for all the run-of-the-mill apartments we had past. By their choice of shots photographers are arbitri elegantiarum, but her aesthetic judgment confounded me. Of course there remains the possibility she was simply taking photos to show her townsfolk what buildings existed in cities, and hence chose the more typical ones.
But she got me wondering, why do aesthetic judgments vary so much between individuals? What is the nature of beauty in the first place? Does beauty inhere in the environment or is it only a mental construct for the brain to make sense of the photons striking the retina? Either way, how is the perception of beauty mediated by the brain? The answer could shed light on the human condition, but in the wrong hands could have devastating consequences. I came no closer to that answer on the ride.
As we pulled further away from the city, the scenery took on the feel of an epic tapestry. We were where the wild things were. Edifice and earth took on gargantuan proportions, titans locked in a perpetual wrestle. Highways soared over coasts, as hills kept watch in the distance. Apartments lumbered across the landscape, while cranes beat to the rhythm of war. It was an uneasy juxtaposition, as if all the layers of pretense had been stripped off art. Yet there was art, for what is art but the directed perception of beauty? Here, the beauty itself directed me to perceive, at this intersection of natural wabi-sabi and urban minimalism.
Bridge sea sky morning
Steel concrete air water earth
Bus keeps on driving.
The bus went onto a cable-stayed bridge, and a mighty pylon dominated my field of vision. It was Prometheus, bound to the bridge by tensile steel cables for the crime of aiding mankind in its bid to conquer nature. It was Atlas, bearing the weight of the bridge on its shoulders. It was the apotheosis of all Titans, more titanic than the Titanic.
In a moment of duende, something about its solitude struck me. More than its size, it was its oneness that I felt most resonantly. The bus kept moving, revealing an entire formation of pylons along the bridge. I tried multiplying in my head what had been one into many. But what was I multiplying? What was the multiplicand? And for that matter, what was the multiplier? The multiplier is a number, you say, but what is a number in the first place? What is the quiddity of eins, zwei, drei?
Whence come numbers? Do they arise from relationships between objects, inextricably bound to operators? Are they yet more mental impositions to make sense of the world? After all, the brain operates in binary, with numbers appearing in such intangible things as the state of a neuron. But we must delve deeper, where numbers of protons and neutrons dictate the substance of matter, and in turn numbers of quarks identify hadrons. Strings, dimensions, fundamental forces...wherever we look we cannot escape numbers. Perhaps Pythagoras and the Kabbalists were right; numbers contain the meaning of the universe.
Then again, even if there was no universe, numbers would still exist, albeit with nothing to be applied to. The number of universes would be zero. There is no escaping the pervasiveness of numbers. Mystical relationships between numbers are but quirks of our decimal system. Numerological connotations of numbers are but cultural associations. There is no magic about numbers, only mathematics. To think otherwise would be to deny the intrinsic rationality of numbers. Thus my rational thoughts concluded. There was nothing left but to wait till we reached the airport. And before me, the camera's shutter had long fallen silent.
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