diary of a madman, iii: deep into walden, the travel within

Into these forested deeps, the yawning pastures of Pennsylvanian green: I found that the deeper I traveled into the country, the quieter my mind became, pari passu. The fewer obstacles that obstructed my vision into the stretching landscape, the more that the aperture of my eyes narrowed, the farther I got from the caterwaul of my life in the City, a simultaneous cleansing of my mind occurred. My focus narrowed into a thin corridor of light, a concentrated beam, a sharp laser that seemed to cut through all that frivolity and callowness that once clouded my mind so as to produce some clarity, a few ounces of long-awaited perspicacity. The clouds overhead were imperial in size. The cerulean blue of that entirely inaccessible space above became brighter; it looked cleaner. Nature sprawled out her beauty body before me, her gracious proportions, and I was frozen in a bitter mixture of shock and admonishment: this beautiful planet, of which I can sit and ruminate on for hours ad infinitum, yet we occupy ourselves with the exercises of tyranny, malice, and murder. The drive wasn't particularly long, no, it was about three hours. I knew, however, what I had to achieve in this academic term. I knew that it wasn't about the marks anymore, those fucking adventitious mind games that drive my generation into suicide, depravity, and apathy. It wasn't about brown-nosing professors into writing me a pristine letter of recommendation. These pithy activities are reserved for the meek, the scholarly prurience that has led to the steady decay of this generation. No, my goal was much more unpleasant. It was much more obscure. I knew that my duty for this term was to reflect on my understanding of morality, of ethics.

Concealed deeper than any farinaceous, visible layers, I knew that I harbored the same hatred and malevolence that I reviled in others who were more open about it. I knew that if one were prod enough, to dissect enough, the same dark blood of racism, prejudice, and spite could be found running through my veins as well. How could I deny this for so long? The way that I chose friends, the people I chose to avoid, those whom I wanted to help, those to whom I'm attracted to sexually, romantically. It isn't cultural upbringing, that harbinger of post-modernity is an insufficient, spindly answer. This preferential behavior was the same poison that fueled civil strife turned ethnic cleansing, cousin to genocide. I was already preparing for the battles against a world of strife, discrimination, injustice, when, in fact, the same elements constituted my very mentality. I consulted many about my fears, and though they reassured that it was something of a youth-turn-man bildungsromanesque problem experienced by every Tom Sawyer, ever 이상(Yi-sang), I couldn't accept that answer. My fear was that my morality became nothing but ornamental, and upon the slightest bending of the will, everything that I thought I stood for crumbled like some frangible, friable, insignificant thing.

So I inspect myself, without mercy, without fear of loss or defeat. I observe my weakness and prey about them, I do not supplicate a higher force to empower me. I establish firm footing, a steadfast grounding, and I prepare to hold my own against whatever torrents of doubt and darkness that lay ahead of me. I suspect that this introspection will not leave me unscathed, but will batter me, scrabble at my established mind, and bend and twist my comforts. I'm afraid; at the same time, my fear provides a light, a hubris, into a direction that I sense is progress - a sense that provides me with the comfort of knowing that I cannot fail.

diary of a madman, ii: hermitage in a Korean boarding house in Jersey

I'm a faineant mess; I've become a real heap of recycled parts.

I've locked myself into my room of a Korean boarding house in New Jersey, planning on staying here temporarily until I move back into New York. I haven't budged. My suitcases are split open and my belongings sprawled out like carcasses from the massacre of once active life. I haven't tried to reverse my jet lag so I'm basically nocturnal. I smoke cigarettes in the bathroom then cover the scent with air freshener, as if something could actually occur from this calumny of a crime. Going back to the gourmet coffee shop in the Lower East Side that I used to frequent or the hookah place in the Upper East that I liked going to only offsets miniature yet cosmologically grand identity crises. I went to a billiard hall in this small Korean town of Jersey and I nearly fainted from the overstimulation: the Korean popular tunes humming stereophonically through tacitly placed speakerphones, the delicately imported devices and miscellaneous items to provide illusion of being somewhere else, and the misappropriated conversations between the Korean patrons that always dwell on their memories of the motherland in a way that chimes with a most wicked planar incongruence.

I want lacerate, no, decimate, wait... slash, cut, sever, saw, expunge, and fucking jjalyuh off these superficial associations that I maintain with myself and replace them with something meaningful. I'm quickly losing momentum and my wheels threaten to derail. I don't know. I don't know. I'm beginning to be able to speak faster than I can think, and I know when that happens, I'm just purely confused in my situation. I'm circumstantially tied up in a noose and situationally strapped into the electric chair. This place is insidiously turning me inside and out, but for some sick reason I like it because it forces me to stay away from everything and everyone and ruminate on questions that might actually mean something. Someone came up to me the other day and asked me what's so great about Karl Marx. I told him that one of the great things about Marx is that he gave a name to universal suffering so that we don't need to talk about it like it was some alien host that we're waiting to go away, but something that we've inherently and irrevocably become.

I feel like the German friend that Camus wrote to when he called France the nation of heroes. I'm a hypocrite on a laundry line hung out to dry in the pouring rain. I've been sitting around, writing on random scraps of paper all these pointless thoughts I'm entertaining while juggling, with some sanity, the reading of CS Lewis' non-Narnia texts that I found somewhat randomly on the shelf, collecting dust like some abandoned decoration that enjoyed maybe about two days of appreciation before it receded into the greyness of the everyday.

Reentry and More

Today, I was repulsed by human behavior. Before such sweeping subsuming on my behalf, however, I should probably prelude with some ludicrous account of reality that plays coaxingly into my broad, philosophical nihilism (note the contradiction, that ugly, glazed-over oxymoron).

Partly beholden to the amount of sleep-inducing medication I took on the flight returning from Seoul, my reentry into the United States came and ended with a bang -- completely beyond the realms of calculation, you know, vagarious and all that impromptu jazz. This swirling return was only aggrandized by the potent discontent that I was nurturing towards Korean society. This comprehensive disenchantment led me to finally estrange myself from a society that I so hungrily and voraciously wanted to become a part of during my youth. From there, I conducted a wholesome disassembly of my identity, a destructive cavalcade led inward, bursting open intricate twists of balloon shapes that once functioned as anchors towards a cookie-cut-out identification of being, "Korean," or a "Korean-American." These are literally meaningless. Once I deracinated uncomfortable constituents, I found that my personality and psyche represented a Minesweeper board ravaged by a skilled player: large amounts of gaping emptiness, flags to suggest delicate emotional ground, and considerably small bits of content.

The prospect of being this empty, scarecrow of a human being was frightfully gelid -- fucking petrified me in fear. It was a vile concoction of regret and apprehension, where I wanted to retreat into somewhere subdued and isolated so that I could contemplate my identity and existence before returning to a world full of lights and distractions.

Having arrived just two days ago, I was hit with a jet lag so efficiently vicious that it's consumed me entirely. I'm overwhelmed by waves of exhaustion, but I end up sleeping about three hours at the most. So I flew back into New York with 20 hours of medicated sleep, but upon arriving, I can't sleep at all. Without sleep, I'm sure we're all aware, one becomes more sensitive to insensitivity, more susceptible towards angered outbreak and frustrated collapse. Since my mother moved to Seoul, I'm basically without a place to stay. I've taken residence in a Korean boarding house that straddles the border of New Jersey and New York, requiring me to take a bus into the city. This bus takes me from this boarding house into Port Authority, which, I'm afraid to say, is not such a majestic place. The employees at the ticket counters and the information booths remind me of this quest for personal wealth that have consumed a majority of this population entirely. They've forgotten any sense of social amity, any sort of decorum that they forget how to respect human beings for, well, human beings. This intrinsic decay of society is growing from the bottom-up.

I was fortunate enough to be employed as a photographer at a rather famous restaurant in Central Park. I spoke with one of the other photographers, and this woman worked two jobs and was so fazed by the acquisition of wealth that she always resonated with a sort of bitter weariness. In one hour of the day, she approached me to chat, which, in actuality, became a quick lapse of complaining about the other employees. Unable to shrug off this behavior any longer, I went off on this long fusillade about Marxian morality and how the loss of self can have devastating effects. Then, with a post-modern swish of her hair, she walked away without even considering what I had said.

Entering the workforce at this level has depressed me and only vitalized my doubt toward society ergo myself. I do not want to become like these gray members, and though it is egocentric of me to dismiss them into such circumstance, their behavior, I felt, must mean something in the terms of their personality and character. I crave real character, a personality that I can truly dig into and find a wealth that is actually important. Upon returning to the United States, I feel that the distance between every individual has prevented us engaging in what should be known to be the most beautiful aspect of being human: our limitless prospects through interaction. I desire, rapturously, to interact with someone at such an intensity that I can be inundated by this person's history, character, and wishes. I want to believe in holistic individuals, and be amazed by their talent and mentality. I want to be reminded, in a way most jolting, that every single person that I see pass by on the street is someone who is most extravagantly whole and infinite. I do not want to recede into the mild sleep of apathy and though, like all people, I am lined by abysmal failures, I shall not regress into becoming the abyss itself. I cannot shed my faith for humanity, for I know that the moment I do, I no longer live but wait to die.