But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
Remarkably untouched except by dust, ash, paper and grime, the chapel served as a staging ground and haven for rescue workers.
In a disused office block north of Oxford Street, I remember pausing to wonder why the door was jammed at an uncomfortable angle, and then toured a room that was empty of everything except the dust that infects old workspaces.
One is the number concentration of simplified hygroscopic aerosol particles based on combining all aerosol species except for dust and black carbon.
Except as dust and ashes and minerals, returned to the sender, to be light, burning, in someone else's stars.
Summertime, and the livin' is easy in the coalfields -- except from dust to dawn, when untold millions of pounds of explosives are detonated across 24 states in the nation, raining down silica and coal dust, contaminating wells and watersheds, sending boulders the size of bowling balls into the homes of American citizens.
George Segal's sculptural installations came to mind the other day in front of Mr. Cohen's shrine: Segal's mute figures, preserved like the dead at Pompeii, all cast in white, are vaguely akin to the forlorn clothes covered with dust, except that the shrine is without artifice or aesthetic refinement.
Instead, it replicates Sonny's worldview, in which languages blend, reality splinters and the senses blur: "I was hearing the old couple next door who talked whatever language to each other and their English to their perrito or gatito and then I started hearing blue-gray air in the room, swirling around, floating up or down like dust except it was sound...
A bit like Burning Man's famous Temporary Autonomous Zone, which Page also cited, except with less dust, fewer rules, greater permanency, and a slightly lower incidence of incoherent naked people.
