Sand
When I asked her, partly to be annoying, what exactly one does at a beach, she replied that we could dig a hole and cover me with sand. Even if there’s a body of water nearby, such a game is never proposed with forest dirt, or field loam, or fine loess, only sand, and I guess it’s one aspect of being alive that, with a few notable exceptions, the only things we want to touch our bodies are things that we’re sure are bereft of life. There’s something innocent about sand. That’s why even children who don’t normally go for torturing animals will sprinkle it over solitary ants, as I often did, applauding my challenger for each successful eruption.
In Woman in the Dunes, a student collecting insects is surreptitiously trapped at the bottom of a deep sandy pit, whose unhappy and unwilling antlion is a woman the villagers have condemned to digging sand for them to sell—the student is to serve as her helpmate. The film version is even stranger than the novel for how it shows the sandy banks encircling them as a carnal entity, the embodiment of desire, sinuous, fickle and overpowering, pure evanescent texture. I love to dig my hands into hot sand, to grasp at what slips away only to sneak into every crack and niche where it’s unwelcome. The student tries to dash up the slope, but his body is too heavy, the sand too yielding. Down he slides.
Beaches make people’s fingers itch—many start stuffing stones and shells in their pockets, a rarer few are suddenly inspired to gather rubbish, while the elect, unsatisfied with the surface, develop a passion for metal detectors. I want to think of these phenomena as different manifestations of the same instinct, related to the uneasiness I feel reading those recurrent stories about metal garbage floating around in outer space, the instinct to keep a void intact. Sand is the one earthy surface that pleases us in proportion to its uniformity.
God, more poet than geologist, made a curious boast in Jeremiah 5: “Should you not tremble in my presence? I made the sand a boundary for the sea, an everlasting barrier it cannot cross. The waves may roll, but they cannot prevail; they may roar, but they cannot cross it.” A bit like saying I made the bowl a boundary for the soup, but this doesn’t capture the unusual symmetry of these two elements. For how ungrudgingly it flows (although, appropriately, only when it’s dry) sand is rather like water; hence why the earliest tools for keeping time were hourglasses and water-clocks. And the great dune deserts resemble nothing if not ossified oceans. Under moonlight, their differences grow even less distinct. When I imagine dying, when I imagine crossing the everlasting barrier, for some reason the image that comes to mind is of me walking out into the dunes at night, lying down on their surface, and waiting to be drowned by those silver vitreous waves.
Sand is futile. The wind whips it along, raking it over itself in pointless sallies. A child in a sandbox crafts a swirled serving of sand ice-cream on a plastic cone, then smashes the whole thing back down, and whacks it with a shovel for good measure (children, incidentally, aren’t just fine with futility, they prefer it, a preference we forget and spend our adult lives relearning). Someone’s fat left foot crushes a name lovingly traced and hearted on the shore, while the rising tide is busy kicking down all the day’s sandcastles—over the years it will push and pound the entire beach into a new contortion. It’s miserable, in a way, what is basically a constant grinding of innumerable little stones against one another. The Japanese retire old needles by sticking them in silken tofu, to let them for once puncture something without a struggle, but I doubt even the Japanese could invent a ceremony to dignify a grain of sand, whose fate is to be stuck in an interminable crush, to be worn down day by day, chipped at, knocked against, chiseled away, not growing once, only steadily shrinking smaller and smaller, until one day it can’t, I suppose, be called a grain of sand anymore, but becomes something else, something too insignificant to have a name.