DigitalCommons@KCU (Kansas City Univ.)

Ting, David, COM 25

IN LECTIO DIVINA 
 
14,021 ravaged acres, smoldering, ashen—an estimated $250 billion in property damage, tens of thousands of people 
displaced, at least 27 fatalities— 
 
And cultural heritage, annihilated. Countless artifacts in Southern Californian museums for local 
history, music, and culture were incinerated. How do we grieve that loss? Perhaps we may find the 
spirit of those objects, consigned to oblivion, in other artifacts shielded from destruction. 
 
Soberly, we reappraise the cultural value of the Library of F. Ting, one of the few major artistic 
institutions alongside the Getty Museum to have survived the Eaton Fire in early 2025.  
 
F. Ting (7/4/1956—7/21/2021) had storied career as a film producer. Despite a string of medical 
misdiagnoses and a catastrophic end-of-life treatment regimen, his library and archive are immortal. 
 
Located in Pasadena, California, the Library of F. Ting houses paintings, sculptures, rare film prints, 
and archival materials from leading intellectuals from around the world. The Library of F. Ting cost 
an estimated $12.3 million to complete, with an additional $22.5 million for the acquisitions in his 
collection. Carrara marble was sourced from the quarries of Tuscany for its iconic exterior and was 
designed by F. Ting himself. 
 
The library exterior resembles a pale skull, anatomical features alternately eroded or swelled by wind, 
resulting in a gently oblong form marked by unique ridges, concavities, and hints of cranial suture. 
Such is the effect of literature on the soul: a monstrously gradual form of sculpting that briefly tints 
the special, unmoving aspect of the soul in which a person always feels uniquely themselves.  
 
For such a peculiar structure, there must be more than one entryway. 
 
Stepping inside, one feels as if they have entered the heart of an immense, hollowed-out tree. Even 
without a single book in its space, the library would still be a place for enhanced meditation.  
 
But the surrounding swirl of shelves enchants further. Constructed of various woods, the shelves are 
carved into organic, wind-sculpted forms that resemble the magnificently eroded, richly colored 
sandstone of Antelope Canyon. Shifting gradients of warm and cool wood hues please the eye. 
 
The Library’s cumulative effect on the visitor is their transformation, over many years of concerted 
reading room sessions, into an intellectual spearpoint. Facing the oceanic immensity of the Library’s 
holdings, a sharply curated exhibition becomes a magnifying glass for a single golden filament of 
scholastic revelation. 
 
The following items were curated by the Library’s lead curator, Student Doctor David F. Ting, who 
hopes you will find these elaborate exhibition plaques both moving and educational. 
 
 
1. A chemically volatile silver nitrate print of Mass (2006), 2hrs 12min, produced by F. Ting. A 
rare cinematic glimpse of the 1600s wartime conflicts between the settlers of Plymouth rock 
and the Native Americans of the Massachusetts region, this film sees the failure of Native 
Americans to retain their sacred grounds. The film explores the contrasts between the 
Wampanoag, Pocumtuck, Narragansett, Nipmuck, Mohawk, and Mohegan tribes, in their 
attempt to unite against European settlers. The film begins with a Scottish musket pointed 
into the darkness of a forest. The cross-cultural love stories that punctuate Mass are akin to 
the warmth of torchlight in a vicious winter. The Oscar-nominated soundtrack features 
performances by reservation Native Americans, who have passed down mourning songs for 
centuries. Mass ends with a drone shot above a mass grave of slaughtered Native Americans. 
 
2. The working tools for an in-progress academic study by the mysterious scholar, Chen 
Talbot, who developed psychic powers in the year 1981. They devoted over thirty years of 
extended study in a cork-lined room in Nice, France, to how the unreality of mental illness 
can become a person’s only reality. Behold the cursed typewriter herein, and good pens. 
 
3. A Japanese Noh hannya theatre mask, whose fury and horror depicted in wood contains the 
distraught souls of multiple victims. On March 10, 1945, the American firebombing of 
Tokyo incinerated nearly 28,000 buildings and killed over 100,000 civilians. The hannya mask 
was recovered from an intact Noh carving workshop following the firebombing. Whenever 
worn, the mask fills its bearer with grief, and the keening, subtitled voices of the dead. 
However, as it is with a devoted viewer of anime, observing these emotions alone is not 
equivalent to Japanese language fluency. 
 
4. A novel by the renowned naturalist, novelist, and saxophonist Charlie Huang, of Columbus, 
Ohio. His book is an autobiography of a redwood. Even given this novel’s emphasis on 
scientific fact and its portrait of forest ecology, the technical masterstroke of this novel is 
surely the melodious voice of the tree. In a majestic, gradual transition from treble, to tenor, 
to baritone, the voice of the tree transforms over the seven centuries of its lifespan. 
Virtuosic shifts in literary tone mark advancements and disruptions in the tree ring growth 
cycle. 
 
The prelude: the budding of a redwood cone in December 1632.  
 
How the cone murmurs to itself, unhappy in its lack of germination, yearning for 
distant soil—then ecstatic in the quick plummet from the canopy and bonk of its 
hard green shell on a protruding knob of root. Reaching a viable patch of earth is a 
celebration. No, it does not sprout immediately. A few months pass, of the cone 
being kicked about and nuzzled by deer, claimed by a black squirrel, buried in a 
snowdrift—form frozen and desiccated but never ruined. Licked by the flames of a 
bush fire six months after its fall, the plaintive cone yields a hard dry crack of 
browning seeds, each so tough and angular they nearly look polygonal amidst a 
landscape of pine needles, muscular animal curves, swirls of fog. 
 
Let us follow the fifty-four seeds from this cone.  
 
Forty-three are inviable. Eleven fertile seeds are scattered further down the 
mountainside. Seven never reach soil. They fall into the cracks between boulders or 
now sink and swirl in the currents of mountain streams. Of the remaining four, we 
adopt one of these stray children, slowly being matted by rotting leaves. The prelude 
ends with our seed on a mountainside, in a sea of peaks in the Pacific Northwest—
mountains high enough to spot the glitter of the ocean, were the shrouding fog ever 
to part.  
 
In the year 1633, we witness not the trial and conviction of Galileo. We hear not the 
announcement of exclusion edicts against Western imports for the Japanese 
mainland. We know not the death of Xu Guangqi, Ming dynasty Catholic convert 
and first translator of Euclid, Copernicus, and Galileo into Chinese. 
 
We see this seed alone, embedded in the forest floor, tilted upwards toward a 
summer rain. 
 
The novel opens in enlivening antic green, advancing out of parted shell. In chapter one, the 
sprout’s voice is still tiny, a piccolo treble pushing past the clods of dirt and worms wriggling 
like so many animate pink capillaries. 
 
From this grand life we have many snapshots. 
 
A young sapling, shrouded by low mist, is a tenor surrounded by giants.  
 
This tree grows entirely unwitnessed by human observers, even after the settlement of 
California. Yet it presides over a territory beset by gold-panning fervor, increased wildfires, 
the idiocy of redwood logging prior to federal protection. In acres unmarred by human 
touch, undisturbed by the existence of tech centers and bumbling hikers, majesty grows still. 
 
Our redwood survives the California Fire of 2032, started by an anti-natalist activist group.  
 
Our redwood survives the drought between 2039 and 2048.  
 
A fungal blight weakens its stance in 2095. Matter and moisture accumulate in its trunk due 
to the infection. The interior’s electrical polarity and flammability begin to shift. 
 
In 2103, having just breached the height of 200 feet, lightning pierces the trunk.  
 
Sap is vaporized, turns to rapidly expanding steam, rippling wood like water— 
 
An instant later, the tree’s molten superheated guts are blown out through a flaming 
gash. The scar left by lightning is a deep slash from a burning sword. The redwood’s 
insides are a hollow of fire.  
 
Despite being struck by the gods it remains standing. Rain and dampness eventually tamp 
down the flames. With its weakened midsection and damaged vasculature, growth stalls. 
Existence becomes persistence rather than expansion. 
 
Every day, in the decades leading to its inevitable collapse, the redwood wonders what 
toppling will be like. 
 
Further events transpire around it. The impact of a major asteroid in the North American 
mainland, distant enough to fail to disturb the fog-laden acres of virgin California woodland, 
but close enough for the trees to sense a deadened root network, and the mass flight of 
humans from the region. Natural intelligence is such that the trees all produce more cones 
the following spring. 
 
Why wait for death? In a few sentences, we can imagine a moment that would take a tree 
many centuries to attain. 
 
In the year 2303 of Our Lord, the body of our redwood gives the mountains one last nod. 
As if in prayer, the top half begins its incline toward the ground. 
 
At the time of its fall—a prolonged, groaning lament—the redwood is a baritone. Yet the 
music of the novel does not cease. The novel continues past the moment of death, into the 
tree’s afterlife as a molding, festering, fermenting horizontal habitat for all manner of wood-
burrowing insects, fungi, and nesting animals. From time to time, we receive rumbles of a 
redwood’s distinct bass, but these are merely the voices of neighboring redwoods, even 
older, reaching into our decay for nitrogenous enrichment. 
 
The final chapters of the redwood’s autobiography are a diminuendo, indicated by an 
increasingly smaller font size, and varied typefaces to depict different species inhabiting the 
bulk of the dead tree. The elapsed time in this book spans more than seven hundred years, 
just over the average age for a living redwood. 
 
The novel accomplishes this vision in about 170 pages. 
 
As of this writing, the oldest living redwoods have stood for over three thousand years. 
 
5. Glass case containing the archival materials and the final published edition of a poetry 
volume by Anne Li, family medicine physician. Dialect Lessons, her debut work, tracks 
changing English dialects across America. Weaving tidbits of speech and personal anecdotes 
accumulated from countless interviews, Dr. Li adeptly collages and contrasts the different 
ways in which people see themselves as American. Her cross-country experiences as a 
traveling physician lend to the depth to which she constructs her poetic portraits. With her 
college minor in linguistics, her project began at first as an academic question of the 
genealogy of American accents and their immigrant European precedents. In Dialect Lessons, 
Dr. Li observes that for most of her subjects, the most American quality that can be 
possessed is ability to “speak English properly” according to the dictums of the geographical 
region. Dr. Li notes that those who speak with a “foreign” accent—i.e., Hispanic, Chinese, 
Indian, Russian, in varying degrees of foreignness—tend to be seen as less American by their 
Caucasian colleagues, no matter the status of their citizenship. Dialect Lessons resists these 
stereotypes of nationhood and enlarges our embrace of what we consider American. 
 
6. The severed head of an angel. Ivory-white skin, face animate with gruesome expressions as 
it dreams of genocide. Each of its eyes are a foot across, halfway open, and pitch black. 
Suspended in a thrice-blessed electromagnetic vitrine for preservation and study. Seized 
from a North Korean chemical and supernatural warfare lab. 
 
7. A coffee table book capturing the creative exploits of ANTI, the interprofessional Asian-
American think tank. Presenting all 52 individuals from ANTI’s thirty-year roster, this 
lavishly photographed volume marks the first occasion these cutting-edge thinkers have 
appeared together in one catalogue.  
 
The ranks of ANTI include, artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, legislators, and physicians, 
among others. Base requirements for induction include bilingual proficiency, and “evidence 
of substantial innovation and execution of the idea.” A handful of members as follows: 
 
Andi Kim. Patent attorney. Champion of stem cell research legislation. Tennis 
player. Grew up in Boston’s North End. Matriculated at MIT at age 16. Graduated 
Stanford Law at 23. She is the author of several best-selling YA books about an all-
female cult of assassins in a land of demons, dragons, and continent-destroying 
monsters. 
 
Braxton Huang. Hydronautics engineer. Nanofiber cleanup solutions for plastic litter 
spread throughout the ocean zones. Glasses prescription -4.0 in right eye, -4.5 in left. 
Missing in action, after attending Hong Kong democratic protests in 2020. 
Benedict’s older brother. 
 
Benedict Huang. Architect of oceanic living vessels and sustainable artificial islands. 
Suffered traumatic brain injury after attending Hong Kong democratic protests in 
2020. Refugee from Hong Kong. Intubated in Stockholm, Sweden. Braxton’s 
younger brother. 
 
Masako Nakadai. Dance choreographer. Innovator of stateside avant-garde dance. 
LGBT+ activist. Grew up dancing ballet in Portland, OR. Experienced a life-
changing fellowship in Kyoto, Japan, in which she served as an apprentice in a Noh 
mask-carving studio. Cousin twice removed to the filmmaker David Lynch, who died 
after pulmonary complications related to the fires in California. 
 
If there is a quality consistent among the members of ANTI, it is the forward-thinking 
attitude with which they tackle tasks of notable difficulty within their profession, while 
remaining tethered to diverse communities beyond their ken. The election of new members 
occurs organically, as there is no minimum or maximum number of nominations each year. 
If a member dies, they are never marked as “deceased” in the registry of ANTI. Their 
intelligence remains vast and active. 
 
8. Movie props from Valiant (2012—present). Among the defining sci-fi/fantasy franchises of 
the early 21st century, Valiant is an entertainment kingdom of associated films, television 
shows, video games, board games, and a theme park, with memorabilia auctioned regularly at 
record-breaking prices. Unlike the competing brands of the day, Valiant‘s overlapping works 
are narratively synergistic, so that a revisit of the same story or event yields different 
emotions when retold from another perspective. Valiant also successfully boosted its comics 
sales around the world by weaving cinematic plotlines with comic supplements released in 
the wait time between each movie. Below are a few of the props on display. 
 
Paladin Armor, Rune Variant. At an imposing eight feet in height, the costume is fitted to 
the build of a Brazilian WWE fighter who goes simply by “João G.” In the television series, 
this mechanized suit is worn by the chipper fan-favorite personal bodyguard of a dashing 
lady bandit.  
 
IV-4 Neurohelm. Worn by the lithe, mute assassins of Vorpal Dei. A helm with a reflective 
black wraparound faceplate and subtle winged auditory receivers. If the wearer of the IV-4 
suffers a fatal headshot, this helmet can regenerate the skull and brain up to three times, 
based on a neurophysiological save state mere instants before the assassin’s death. 
 
Simple wooden cross necklace. With the story of Valiant taking place many generations in 
the future, this franchise explores the fates of religion and ideology. The cross is worn by a 
hopeful-eyed pilgrim named Shao. Amidst a world where mutated horrors rip through rifts 
in deep space and supernatural calamities befall entire solar systems, the cross represents a 
special and unmoving source of protection.  
 
The cross, coated with a light matte varnish, is constructed from the now-extinct 
species Sequoia sempervirens, otherwise once called the redwoods of California. The 
cross is a container, sustained with a specially fitted stasis device that maintains the 
potency of the last three fertile redwood seeds known to humankind.  
 
Shao’s journey begins on a planet covered by turbulent oceans and icy hurricanes.  
 
Shao’s journey ends in a forested site marked by ancient, ruined holy dwellings.  
 
Breathing in the heavy scent of mountain fog and surrounded by the chirping of 
crickets in late evening, his hand combs through the enriched, listening, waiting soil.  
 
 
 
This multimedia sampling, exploring global historical trauma and American race relations, is a 
complete act of curation, but is an incomplete deed of embodiment outside the Library of F. Ting.  
 
Should there be any desire for limited licensing of these works, or requests for additional materials 
from the Library of F. Ting, you may contact his highly introverted lead curator and only living 
descendant, his nephew, David F. Ting, at his KCU email address.  
 
Student Doctor Ting will be exiting his position of curator following his graduation in May 2025, 
but he remains open to questions from the audience. He is concerned whether future libraries will 
be loved. No matter—he will continue his work as a street photographer, which began in Antigua. 
 
May the lucid dreams of the many creators of these works, living and dead, be of benefit to some 
receptive, yearning soul. 
 
May all the other works in the world that will never exist in their creator’s desired medium find yet 
another form.  
 
May they exist in lectio divina—that is, fully consumed when read, held in meditation, and sustained in 
the final, magisterial reality of sacred contemplation. 


English

In Lectio Divina

Lykins, Teagan, COM 28

Eye sea tears

Camera: Yashica FX-3
Film stock: Kodak Gold 20

Palaad, Sean William, COM 28

Home in Color 4

Gibson, Sydney, COM 26

Stories Carved into Red Stone: Serenity in Snowfall

Alete, Harshith, COM 28

The Endless Skies 5

De Castro, Pedro, COM 26

Between Earth and Sky 3

Bennett, Jessica, COM 26

Katragadda, Anila, COM 26

Kenya Series 1

Niewchas, Abbigail, COM 27

Marie King Forest on Film 1

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