if you're fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there
on sunsets, the ocean, and love
“I love you” becomes: in this world there is the fount you are for my life. In the water from this fount, I see our bliss, yours first.
— Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love
Suggested audio pairing: At the River by Groove Armada
We’ll do anything to watch a sunset on a clear summer day at the beach. We’ll stand and stare and remain silent, as suffused shades of orange stretch over the horizon. Meanwhile, the sun, like a painter who keeps changing his mind about which colors to use, finally resolves everything with shades of pink and light yellow, before sinking, finally, into stunning whiteness.
Suddenly, we are marveled and uplifted, pulled out of our small, ordinary lives and taken to a realm far richer and more eloquent than anything we know.
At the River is the first painting I finished in 2023. I started working on it last Thanksgiving with a heart full of gratitude - 2022 was a year of few trials and many triumphs, and the milestone of a bildungsroman: I broke my leg shortly after New Years and spent months learning to walk again (I can run now); I got to see my parents for the first time in two and a half years; I graduated from college, traveled the world with Alex, and we moved across the country to New York to start our new lives and careers together. It was a year of so much beauty and humbling, many sunsets and beach days - I wanted to capture all of that, a feeling of “plenitude”, as André Aciman, the author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me describes:
Call it enchantment, the difference between the time-bound and the timeless, between us and the otherworldly. All beauty and art evoke harmonies that transport us to a place where, for only seconds, time stops and we are one with the world. It is the best life has to offer.
Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing. It isn’t just a feeling. Or if it is, then it’s a feeling like love — yes, exactly like love. Love, after all, is the most intimate thing we know. And feeling one with someone or something isn’t just an unrivaled condition, but one we do not want to live without.
We fall in love with sunsets and beaches, with tennis, with works of art, with places like Tuscany and the Rockies and the south of France, and, of course, with other people — not just because of who or what they are, but because they promise to realign us with our better selves, with the people we’ve always known we were but neglected to become, the people we crave to be before our time runs out.
While painting, I came across the song At the River by Groove Armada. It only had one line of lyric:
If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there.
The line cycles again and again with the verse, much like the process of painting itself: working repeatedly stroke after stroke to build a subtle gradation, until the canvas begins to encompass a world’s boundlessness. There is comfort and certainty in this repetition, just like how one can wholeheartedly trust the next ocean wave to crash onto shore. It is a laborious ritual, a prayer, an effort to capture one very special moment and make it last forever, despite every rendition never being quite the same. It is under this spell that I keep painting and lose track of time - I’ve found plenitude in attempting to capture it.
“If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there.”
I am. I truly am.
I wrapped up finishing touches and signed the canvas on New Year’s day.
A week after New Years, Alex and I went on vacation to Costa Rica. It was the perfect escape after a 6-month stint in the city. We wandered through rainforests at night, enveloped by vibrant life as everything came alive in pitch darkness. We glided over lush canopies on zip-lines. We plunged into hot springs and waterfalls. And the sunsets - in a Monteverde treehouse, by the Arenal volcano, on a little beach in Manuel Antonio, once again brought back peace, marvel, and timelessness: plenitude.
Alain Badiou wrote in In Praise of Love that “love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world.” It’s the same feeling we’ve felt standing over the McWay Cove’s turquoise waters in Big Sur, on the rocky cliffs of Muscat, perched above the Tyrrhenian Sea in Sorrento - the comforting silence we share in knowing we are unequivocally here together, us before the entire world. We are the most alive now.
Alex wraps his arms around me the way he always does. The waves glimmer like ribbons of liquid gold, then crash over to a retreat. The world is reborn again and again before our eyes, basking in golden glory.
Badiou continues,
To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with everything in the world that can animate existence. This world where I see for myself in the fount of happiness my being with someone else brings. “I love you” becomes: in this world there is the fount you are for my life. In the water from this fount, I see our bliss, yours first.
This bliss is the sand dunes, the salty air, the surety of being held in the embrace you can always come home too…
Do take this bliss home.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful start to 2023.
