Chinese for dao. Some Chinese art aficionados adorn their homes with a hanging scroll containing this character.

Anyone who’s tried to translate from one language into another will inevitably run into the difficulties. Connotations, syntax, and certain cultural ideologies often get lost in translation. Still, despite the difficulties that language barriers pose, Leonardo Wilson and I embarked on a quest to render the first ten lines of the Daodejing into English. Though ten lines might not seem like much, it took us hours to deliberate over subtleties in meaning and phrasing.

The Daodejing is a remarkably complex text. For those who have never heard of it, here’s some background information. The Daodejing was written by Laozi, a famous ancient Chinese philosopher. Even if you may not have heard of him specifically, at some point or another you have most likely encountered the religious and philosophical movement known as Daoism. Daoism emphasizes leading a life that harmonizes with the Dao, which roughly translates into English as the “Way.”

The Daodejing is crucial to Daoists, much as the Bible is to Christians or the Quran to Muslims. Of the chapters in the Daodejing, the first chapter is the most well-known. Though mystifying, it has a poetic force that compels the mind and moves the spirit. The debate over what it really means will probably never end, but in the meantime, open yourself through this translation to the Way.

The Way which can be weighed is not the everlasting Way;
The Name which can be named is not the everlasting Name.
From the Nameless arise Heaven and Earth;
From the Named promulgate ten thousand things.
So, always abandon desires to observe Creation.
Always embrace desires to observe Limitation.
Twins coexist, though emerge different after names.
Coexisting they conjure the mystery,
Mystery which cannot be undone:
The gate of many wonders.

At Stanford, many feel like they rarely have the time to get out into the city. Between school, work, and friends, who has time? What is there to do, anyway? Eat somewhere, see that bridge for the fourth time since fall quarter. San Francisco’s identity as a big city is somewhat less defined in our minds than a place like New York or Chicago. After coming across something a little literary in the Mission District, I tried to capture a handful of the details that make up a day in the city.

This flowerbox from the Mission District exhibits four lines from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem.” Cohen is a famous Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist, known for blurring the lines between the literary and musical.

Metrics in the Mission District

There is some delightful anonymity
In the back car of the BART, ordering
Coffee under a false name, entering
Thrift shops with purpose.

If you ever need to remember how wide
The world is, think of the two girls
In the next train booth, talking about the dog
That swallowed their tongue piercings.

San Francisco has no identity for you.
There is no Broadway, no subway,
No way for you to anchor here,
Sink to your knees in absent snow.

A shopkeeper in the indoor farmers’ market
Offers you “almond brittle, almond brittle,”
But you are watching a couple
Take engagement photos in the breezeway.

An assistant forces a mirror
Under the woman’s chin, trying not to catch,
In the back, a naked man in a cape
Crawling up the fire escape,

Two boys playing ukulele,
A homeless man pitching pebbles at
A little girl who wears down a crayon
Along the brick fish market wall.

You could disappear here, easily,
Lost shopping in a record store
Where the sun has bleached
The names on album covers white.

When I was much younger (imagine—before I’d even tried to read John Ashbery!), I used to say, ‘poets are philosophers who don’t have to justify themselves.’ Don’t think that Ashbery was just me dropping a name; I wanted to make the point that, for this younger me, the formulation was not confined only to that poetry which most obviously resists reading. Don’t think, either, that by ‘poet’ I meant anything less than any author of whatever might, more or less controversially, be called literature (but if you press me on this distinction, my apologies, I’ll just hide behind my unsubtle earlier self). So my real impression was closer to something like: voices lyrical and narrative are freer to speak than voices philosophical when saying something that, in the end, means the same to us.

Now, more often than not, people tell me that the things I write make almost no sense. Really they’re being kind, I think, when they say I hide behind abstraction; the gist of it is, my abstractions are derived from things that aren’t there in the first place, so there’s nothing for it all to fall back on, nothing actual. It’s a spectacle without a palpable heart, and if I can’t find that heart soon, I’ll probably give it up. Because I believe that young Brian was wrong, or at least he was only almost right.

Which is to say: yes, a good poem is certainly capable of making me feel something much fuller than could be borne out in a piece-by-piece examination of its written contents on the page—that is, it can be more than what would be justified if a narrower voice were to say the same thing. But this, I have come to believe, is mostly a trick that skillful writers use upon us, knowing that we come to their work so readily with ourselves. Take this instance: as I was trying, unsuccessfully, to explain to someone how a certain poem ‘worked,’ I began to describe it as a kind of unanchored obstacle course, in which everything written down marks out a pattern of motion, a navigable route threading the margin of what the words can and cannot conceivably mean—but in this way, most of the poem is potential; where the words land depends entirely on where the pattern itself is set down. In two different places, the same motions mean differently, and so this poem I was describing was only a shell; the rest of it was me, because that’s where I put it. Smart writers know where we will put their words, or at least they hope they do, and so they can afford to depend a little on our own willingness to believe that we make sense. But this can end up feeling like cheating, because if we’re the only substance to the words’ spectacle, then we’re allowing what’s on the page—though it may not mean less—to be somewhat lazier than art.

So I will try to start writing things that actually make sense; maybe this is my first attempt. But maybe I will also regret that little bit of joy lost each time I read something that seems to contain a strange breed of wonder—only to realize I have been fooled, again, into thinking I was not reading about myself.

here i see more me from Derek Ouyang on Vimeo.

music: intro by m83 ft. zola jesus
footage from burning man 2012
shot with a canon rebel t1i

I wanted to capture the experience of fountain hopping, with a focus on the texture of the water.

We were friends before we got drunk.
Earlier that night and when we were little
We played pretend while we learned how to be people,
Aging into our parents as we ring in each new year.
This one will be the best, or at least almost
Better, we scream. We will begin it and end it together.

When we are together
It is now, then, and tomorrow. We drink
Our pasts from plastic goblets, blend them into almost
One piece. In each other we see little
Versions of ourselves but this year
We each feel like brand new people.

We may be grown-up people
But we’re a machine, laughter and stress together.
At least there’s laughter. Stress. Repeat. Year
After year, we say the same words reordered when we’re drunk.
Everything that happens varies on the same pattern of little
Phrases and moments we can sew into one, almost.

I pretend we are almost
Fine until she cries, Some people
Will not be more than alone. Not when I was little.
Not to anyone. Even now, together—
She doesn’t know me, and maybe she’s drunk
But she isn’t lying this year.

Her truth comes out for our new year
When we’re classy in sparkles and silver, almost
Falling through a room that pulses in a drunk
Façade of celebration. All the people
We never talk to see us together,
Think we are exactly the same as when we were little.

Measure the little
Sad platitudes that tie each year
To the next. We were cast together
From the glamor you can almost
Buy. Once we did. Shadow us into real people
And we’ll say we understand more when we’re drunk.

We thought we felt together but it’s almost a little true,
To become people you forget you’re a person and when we scream
HAPPY NEW YEAR we hope we’re too drunk to remember tonight.

“It’s just like when I was a kid,” my father exclaimed from the driver’s seat as he geared up the windshield wipers, now whipping so violently it seemed they might fly off into the storm. We might have been driving through the roar of Niagara Falls, which our family would visit a day later, donning bright yellow rain ponchos as we ventured to the “Journey Behind the Falls,” our mouths opening and mascara streaming (in my mother and sister’s case) and our screams of laughter whisking into that wet vacuum as the Maid of the Mist bobbled in the distance. Now the rain broke over the car, hard, and drowned the windows in torrents. “This is New York in the summer for you,” my dad said.

“This is nuts,” I said. After a winding drive from New York City through Pennsylvania under gray skies, only five minutes before the sun had beat down on the hills and picket-fence cottages with emerald intensity. “This almost beats a monsoon in New Mexico.”

The key word being almost.

*

“I want to show you girls where I grew up,” my father constantly told my sister and me while we were kids. He hadn’t been back to Buffalo in years, since his older brother’s funeral in the late ’90s. Many of his relatives still lived in the area or in not-so-distant Rochester, a clan of Kolbs with whom I shared a name but nothing else. My father had dropped off the family map when, young and wanting to escape the inevitability of factory jobs and staid cousinly reunions, he’d headed west for New Mexico in 1982.

For two or three consecutive summers, we considered making the trip back. It didn’t work out: too inconvenient, too untimely, too expensive. When I was home between my freshman and sophomore years of college, my father asked if I wanted to roadtrip from New Mexico to upstate New York, like he and my mother had done for their first Christmas together, driving it in a single stretch. I laughed before I realized he was half serious. My father, in many ways, is an incorrigible romantic: driving across the country, hiking across mountain peaks, pursuing the highest summits and grandest views are all things he loves, especially when he can sweep the rest of his half-adventurous, half-complaining family along with him. He, I reckon, could have been a pioneer in the Old West. While he insisted he’d never want to return to New York or to the East – too humid, too cold, too many bugs and not enough of the scenic, captivating landscape of the West – there must still have been something drawing him back home.

A few months before we scheduled our trip and went, just before I entered my final year of college, we looked up his address on Google Earth. Elma, New York. The map spun, zoomed in. A few thin gray roads sliced through a landscape as flat and green as someone’s lawn under a microscope. It wasn’t dusty brown with sagebrush, like the New Mexico desert I knew, nor were there any textured bits to imply mountains. My father swiped the map away from a darker gray cluster, which I took to be a small town, to an empty stretch of land occasionally intersected by the same thread-like roads. After whisking back and forth, clearly searching for something that matched the fabric of his memory, he pointed at an isolated square on the screen.

“There it is,” he said to us, sitting in our living room at home, two thousand miles away. “That’s my house.”

*

Our rental car stopped halfway down the gentle slope before my father put it in reverse. He glanced to his right and his left, his eyes scanning the loosely spaced houses in the grass and trees. He parked the car and pointed across the passenger seat.

My father’s house was a small brick building, set down in the bloom of the surrounding grass as matter-of-factly as a child’s structure made of square wooden blocks. Square: that was the word for it. The corners popped out of the earth, ruddy and built for hard-nosed functionality without much thought for style. No fences, landscaping, or shrubs surrounded the property, much less indicated where the property line even lay. Unlike the manicured lawns near my school in California, this one did not compete with its neighbors or announce, “Here I am.” The driveway plunked out to the road, an abandoned tricycle perching lopsidedly near the garage. Not my father’s tricycle, I had to remind myself, my imagination already sprinting away into the past. Someone else’s, forty-five years later.

“Seven of us lived in there,” my father said, placing his hands on his hips. He shook his head. The house couldn’t have had more than three bedrooms. “In that tiny little place. My mother spent all day cooking.”

Our house back in New Mexico wraps around the yard and sprawls out from its wood-beam front porch like a ranch house, stretching under the sun. Inside, the high wooden ceilings slope down to large windows, hardwood floors, and one very long hallway. During my high school days, in the mornings, I’d gallop from one end of the house to the other in search of that math textbook I’d forgotten. I’d count my bounding strides down the hall from the garage – fourteen, fifteen, sixteen... Now, since both my sister and I left home for college, it feels too echoey and large for my parents.

“Looks like there are more trees now,” my father said, walking along the road. “And these houses weren’t here then. This was all my dad’s land, out there in back. And that hill” – he turned to look at it, the gentle slope where we had parked – “that seemed steeper too.”

Yes. So had the hills near the house in which I’d grown up. Rollerblading down that easeful driveway, which seemed like a heart-thudding precipice at the time, I would reach the bottom with my cheeks suffused with my own bravery and accomplishment.

*

Until visiting Washington, D.C. for a family vacation when I was nineteen, I had never been to the East. I’d heard jokes from college friends who marveled at the weather in California but still insisted on some quality of East Coast-ness that was ineffably better, more grounded in history, more fascinating, more – something.

That first time in the East, we drove up from Baltimore over Chesapeake Bay to Ocean City and the Delaware coast. My impression: flat, closed-in, humid, and green. Where were the mountains and the mesas?

I graduated from high school in May 2008. One of my uncles, who flew out from the Twin Cities area for the festivities, had never been west of the Mississippi river in his 50-plus years on this earth. “What kind of place is this?” he asked as he drove into Albuquerque’s dusty urban sprawl. “Where is the city under this big blue sky?”

*

“I had my first job down there,” my father said a few minutes later, after we’d driven the half-mile or so from his house to a bridge across the river. He pointed along the riverbanks to a distant clearing. “Picking cabbage for a dollar twenty-five an hour. I wanted to make money. And, there, this older kid – he was probably about fifteen, I was twelve – dragged me down to the water and initiated me. That’s what they did when you started a job back then.

“And that’s the spot I shot my first deer,” he said, pointing the other way up the river. “A bit into those trees behind the house.

“I was always coming down to this river and playing. Skipping stones, fishing, fooling around by the water.”

We got back in the car, drove out of Elma – wherever the main-street part of Elma was – and headed along the railroad tracks toward the highway. “I had a motorcycle when I was eighteen,” my dad said. “And I’d just get on and ride, ride out forever along those tracks. Then I’d turn and come back, ride all the way home.”

“But why?” my sister and I asked him. “What for?”

“Just for fun,” he said. “Wasn’t much else to do around here in those days.”

We drove to a roadside fruit stand, fan-ventilated and hot. It was cramped and dark compared to a California farmer’s market, bustling and busy, the people dressed in trendy clothes and walking sleek dogs fresh from the groomer’s. Here, cars passed by on the vacant road only about every minute. None of them stopped. The sky wrapped around us, then settled its lethargy on a cluster of trees across a small field. The few buildings along the road stood out like monuments in the haze. One had nothing to do here but breathe in the empty air, air in which there (I thought) lingered a touch of the Coca-Cola-bottle 1950s. We bought a few pears, a bag of dark seasonal cherries. They weren’t very good.

“Maybe things have changed,” my father said. “But I remember the food from here tasted better when I was young.”

*

I visited my mother’s childhood home in rural Illinois when I was seven, maybe eight. I haven’t been back since, and the memories I have of the event are fragmentary: a flat landscape consumed by corn, corn that my great-uncle let us pick off the stalk and eat while still out in the field, sweet and raw like candy. An old lean-to that had once housed feedlot cows, at which I felt dismayed that there were no horses. A screen door that I ran into (along with a plate full of food) at the family reunion. An above-ground pool. Silos and towering green John Deere tractors. My mother’s sparse upstairs room, where she’d shared a bed with her older sisters until they left for college.

My mother, like my dad, left home when she was twenty-one and did not look back. I hardly thought about this when I visited, nor did I really imagine her, freckled and blonde like me at ten or twelve, running through those cornfields. Reimagining my parents’ younger lives had not yet struck me as an interesting activity. She must have been struck by the mirror imagery, though, as she watched me and my sister – so like her at that age – tromping up and down the stairs in that house, wanting to ride in the back of the pickup, squatting outside with jars to catch fireflies in the dark.

*

My dad’s aunt Carol still lives in Buffalo, in a small townhouse decked with needlepoint pillows with homey sayings, artificial plants in pots, and hand-painted knickknacks and gifts from her grandchildren. After checking into our hotel – where I stood at the window and stared at the flat landscape, old industrial roads, and telephone lines of Buffalo – we headed out for dinner with the person my father described as his favorite aunt.

I had never met Aunt Carol. She merged in my mind with all the Kolbs I had heard about but never seen, from my father’s feisty grandmother to his hordes of cousins who still lived somewhere in Buffalo. Aunt Carol – or, rather, Great-Aunt Carol – was my grandmother’s sister, the one who’d stayed put in New York when my grandmother left for Florida, the one who still called my grandmother daily and sent her handwritten letters. Like my grandmother, my father, and the few other Kolbs I’d met, Carol’s hair remained robustly dark, untouched by coloring treatments for all her life. She was seventy-six years old.

Buffalo wings weren’t Aunt Carol’s favorite, but – as my father said – what is a visit to Buffalo without some real hot wings? She humored us, squeezing in the back seat of our rental car and pointing out streets and landmarks that had changed since my father left. Duffy’s restaurant, once we got there, seemed to serve nothing but Buffalo wings. We sat down, my father and I settled on extra hot wings (we wanted to try the suicide or death sauce, but everyone else objected), and then I sat quietly as my father and his aunt recounted people I did not know.

I do not remember most of their names. There were innumerable cousins, big clannish families who still lived close by. Some of them still attended a set Sunday get-together at a local diner. Most of their children still lived in New York. My father, to me, started to seem increasingly like a black sheep.

At some point, the conversation turned to Greg, my father’s brother. He was always tinkering with cars in the driveway, my father said, drawing an appreciative laugh from Aunt Carol. “He had a ’66 Chevy Impala that our grandmother gave him,” my father told the rest of us. “He spent all his time working on it. He knew everything about how to fix it, polish it, make it run right. Man, he loved that car.”

I had never met my uncle Greg. We had recently met his daughter Jessica for dinner in New York City. I imagined he would have looked like my father, dark-haired and lanky, bent over a gleaming hood. And, meanwhile, my father would have been rounding in on his motorcycle, heading out to go fishing, sneaking into the house at six in the morning as his own father left for work.

We finished dinner – my father and I ate twice as many Buffalo wings as everyone else – and headed back to Aunt Carol’s house. She gave us cookies and milk, and we sat on her white couch for a while longer, sharing more stories. She especially seemed to hit it off with my sister Leigh. My mind wandered. Finally, the sky had been dark for a while – even that far north in the summer – and the time had come for us to go.

“You’re so beautiful,” Aunt Carol said, rising from the sofa and clasping me tightly. “So beautiful. I just know you’re going to go far.” Her arms would not let me go; her eyes pierced into my face, as if memorizing it. I thought I saw tears beginning to rise. At first I felt awkward, embraced by this person who resembled but yet wasn’t my grandmother. Her emotion startled me – and then I understood. I was twenty-one that summer. I likely would never return to Buffalo unless the whim struck my father to come here again. The evening had been pleasant, but this was goodbye.

“Thank you,” I said. I wish I’d said, “You’re beautiful too,” or something to that effect, but I squeezed her tighter. We hugged for a while. Then Aunt Carol hugged Leigh. Then we said a last set of words and stepped outside to the car and drove away into the night.

*

The day before we left Buffalo, after venturing to see the Niagara Falls my father had visited so often as a kid, we spent the afternoon on the shores of Lake Erie. In other words, the prime outdoors destination in the greater Buffalo area, sister to Ontario, Huron, and… others I only remembered from geography tests in elementary school. Canada was a mere stone’s throw away, and I marveled that the lake was large enough to have waves beating against the sand (I’d hardly ever seen a lake whose opposite shores were not visible, however faintly, in the distance).

“This beach was my family’s idea of a vacation,” my father had said. “Sailing, swimming, fishing, picnics, barbeques. That and camping. We had fun where we could.”

At one point he wandered off into the waves in his orange swimming trunks, holding hands with my mother. My sister and I, protesting at the cold water when we’d forgotten to bring towels, made rock castles on the shore. I looked after my father and tried to imagine him, at sixteen, launching his boat out into these waters. I had been repeating the same exercise, with varying degrees of success, during the entire trip. I’d tried to ask him questions about the places we’d been and the things we’d seen, tried to draw him out, but the truth was I’d felt unusually shy. I sometimes felt like I was speaking to a stranger. The Bill Kolb who had lived here in the ’60s and ’70s wasn’t the Bill Kolb I knew.

Likely the last time he’d been here, he had been twenty-one, exactly my age. Exactly my mother’s age when she’d bought that plane ticket out of Illinois, ready to accept a job in a desert land where the mountains dominated the skyline and red rocks dotted the horizon instead of green fields and compact picket fence homes with American flags. They’d both left behind what they knew, destined to meet and marry within a year. While the scenery of Buffalo would have defined my father’s outlook at that time, and in many ways defined his later self – for instance, his love for the outdoors over “culture,” his preference for roughing it over reading – it also sank into his distant past, a past that I for all my curiosity could not access.

I, at twenty-one, stood on the shores of Lake Erie, realizing that the body of water I most thought of was the Rio Grande, or perhaps San Francisco Bay, or whatever shores lay ahead of me. The waves beat on the sand, beckoning. Soon my parents returned from their walk and my sister and I joined them in the cold water. The humid air enwreathed my body; I plunged out into those strange waves, suddenly aware of how my frame matched my father’s, both then and now, thin and long-legged and lanky. I may not have been able to shoot or sail, to ride a motorcycle or fix a car or walk the roads of Elma with my fishing pole over my shoulder, but Erie welcomed me nonetheless, welcomed my tentativeness and my youth and my dreaming.

“Lake View,” Rachel Kolb

Derek Ouyang is project manager of Stanford’s Solar Decathlon team. In his copious amounts of free time, he engages in many forms of art such as music, photography, film, writing, and dance. He almost flaked out on going to Burning Man 2012 but ultimately survived a hot, dusty week in Black Rock City and considers it one of the best experiences of his life. These photos are just a glimpse at the ephemeral art and alternative lifestyle that await you on the playa.

Death Guild

Desert Stars

Electric Dragon

Burn Egg

Burn Ego

Canopy

On the Playa (Sunburned Ass)