diary of a madman, ix: i am made of bronze.

Sometimes I catch myself staring at some ambiguous point in space, lost in a train of thought so enthralling that my mind is lost in a trance.

When I lived in Seoul, I commuted everyday to my high school. Depending on my mood, I would catch the local or district bus and walk up the large hill that my school was planted on, or I would hail a taxi from outside of my apartment and nap for the fifteen minute ride. Other times I would wake up earlier than I had to, take a long shower, and then deliberately take a much longer route than was ever necessary to get to school. I remember those particular days the clearest. I would leave my apartment around 7 AM, walk to the closest subway station, which was either Saejul or Eungnam-dong, then take the metro for three or four stops to get off at Sinchon, where my school was. I would expand what could be as short of a commute as ten minutes to one that can take almost forty.

I remember those days the clearest because those are the days that I felt like my joints, muscles, and bones were as tight and rigid as bronze. Old ladies would beat me up a flight of stairs, young toddlers would race past me up a hill, and people with heavy loads would lap me in no time. I would walk, not entirely conscious, lost in my thoughts about the most frivolous matters. These silly thoughts were like delicate, silky veneers of dust that formed on my mind.

As I passed by brightly lit stores and sleepy-eyed clerks, my body lost sense of itself and I became an entity that was entirely ephemeral. The world would flow through me, and I through it, and I wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference anymore. I was just heavier matter. I was actually just air stuck in place, in a form, and encapsulated underneath uncomfortable flesh.

I wish now that I could have thought of more important matters than the things that I actually did ruminate on. I wish that I could’ve pondered my place in the universe, or the meaning of my existence. I was exposed to philosophy, whatever that means, in the 6^th grade of middle school. I remember that day, but I’ll save that story for some other time. Since that day, however, I remember that I stopped believing in God because it felt like I was copying someone else’s homework.

No, what I actually thought about was girls and films. In one particular instance, this must be sometime in 10^th or 11^th grade, I was taking the long route to school. There was a girl whom I adored more than I can now remember. She was younger than I, and surely enough, I wasn’t the only one who liked her. She had the kind of face that made any hairstyle look trendy, and whatever outfit she wore, it became an extension of her, moving with her and providing her with a graceful definition. Her body was still childish, but we all noticed her development into womanhood.

I was a much more prolific writer in those days than I am now. I wrote scripts for stage and screen, novellas, poems and satire. I took the world around me and blended it with my words, until I couldn’t differentiate between my writing and my reality. If I didn’t write for some period of time, I grew anxious and defensive. It was like the tapping of the keyboard reaffirmed my very existence. It rooted me to the ground.

In any case, that one day, as I was commuting to school, I was staring off into space again. I was lost in thought about this girl. I already had a girlfriend at that time, so there was always some guilt involved – perhaps that's why I decided to take that long route more frequently those days. Her face was brightly lit in my mind. I examined every portion that I could recall from memory: her eyes, nose, and lips. I admired the genius of nature to produce such a gorgeous assembly of parts. Her beauty wasn’t typical. It was, if anything, so versatile that it was difficult to read her emotions. She didn’t look like your typical Korean either. I had committed to this mental exercise several times during those days, admiring her beauty from memory. I never quite got past her chin though, whenever I went from bottom-up.

It wasn’t that her chin was particularly well-formed; rather, upon contemplating any one part of her face, I couldn’t resist taking the whole into consideration. It was like reading a novel and noticing in one’s peripheral vision some dialogue that’s about to take place. There is this strange urge to skip down to read what the characters say.

I, more or less, never interacted with her in any way. There was only this once:

One day, I was seated on some benches in an obscure part of campus. It had a view of a large field, where the other students ran around or played sports. She sat down on the next row of benches, so she was maybe several feet away from where I was. I’m rather sensitive to heat, so I was in the shade of a large elm tree.

I hadn’t thought of her for a long while at that point, which might have been because I was going through a rocky patch in my relationship. She didn’t bring with her a book or anything to occupy her attention. She just sat there, staring off in the same direction that I was.

My body felt light and I was confused. I didn’t know how to handle the situation. My most brilliant moments were in my writing, but outside of that, I didn’t have much confidence. I didn't have the DELETE key to erase the undesirable.

So, instead, I sat there in silence. I felt her presence jolt through the distance between us. I felt the silence weigh down on my shoulders. I closed my eyes and tried to dissemble the moment. I wanted to savor it, even though it didn't go the way that I would’ve liked it to have.

Each moment we sat there together, I felt her presence fill into me. We didn’t know each other, I didn’t even know her name at the time, but nonetheless, I felt as if the separation between where I ended and she began blurred and became indistinct. I imagined my thoughts materializing into color, and how that distance between her and me became a spectrum of vivid, lush reds and full-bodied oranges.

I want to say that it was more than just lust that I felt at that time. I even want to say that it was more than simple attraction. I don’t know what to call it. If I saw her today, I may no longer have any feelings towards her. I may not even consider her appearance notable. That moment I spent with her, and all those moments that I didn’t, however, became, like my writing, an anchor to my existence. Through her beauty, I felt more alive. That’s the type of relationship that we had. I don’t think I would want it any other way.

diary of a madman, viii: rara avis ch. 1

Memories of childhood haunted him like sugar-sweet phantoms.

It was his first time sleeping alone. His mother sat beside him, her fingers passing through his hair. From her steady hand, gentle vibrations descended from the crown of his head, adding weight to his reluctant eyelids. He couldn't remember if she said anything to him that night. The two never spoke much. The family gathered in the dining room each night, but no one said a word. Their hands would work silently, passively assuaging their respective hungers as their minds raced galaxies away.

The dining room was a new addition to the house. Made mostly of glass, copious amounts of sunset poured into the room and left everything with a subtle sense of departure. The same silence filled his bedroom that night.

She tucked the blanket underneath his body and rose to leave the room. As she turned off the light, she bade him goodnight in Korean and left.

His bed was far too big for him. He was so small compared to this bed that each morning, when he rose out of it, there was no impression that anybody had slept on its surface at all.

He and his family lived somewhere particularly far away, called Deslinkitu. It was there that he would grow into a man, then eventually wither with age into the appreciative years of senility. He would raise his family there, and he would also watch with admiration as his wife grew old with him.

It was too early for all that though. He was still sinking in that bed, and, consequently, or inconsequentially, leaving no evidence that he'd ever been there.

When he slept, however, he designed brilliant resistances against the persuasions of time. He laid out schemes and stratagem to slow the invasions of time. When time would come in great, sweeping waves, he burrowed underneath the ground and dug intricately into a cavernous depth that Dante might understand. When time came from underfoot, enormous wings would protrude from under his arms and he would allow the wind to sweep him away. He would soar uncontrollably over glistening seas and autumn forests until he could no longer identify where he was or how he could possibly return.

In spite of his resilience, adolescence overtook him.

He spent his days lying around, thinking about his own invincibility and girls who steadily lost their baby fat. He blew smoke from his lips and it bred monsters in his system.

He lived alone in an apartment in the heart of the capitol of Deslinkitu. He had lived alone after his sister moved to America to go to art school. His parents divorced for spiritual reasons. Suddenly, life was easier for everyone if they all lived separately.

Such was the case that the days of copious sunsets came to a close.

He walked down the hill that his school rested on top of. It was an international school, which gave a likely explanation for its existence on top of such a large hill. The children of ambassadors attended the school, so in the case of riots or demonstrations against foreign influence, the school's armed security guards could fend off natives until helicopters came and lifted them away.

The walk down the hill didn't bother him after a while though. He would watch his feet scuttle across the concrete. The concrete had to be repaved every year because of the annual monsoons. Each year, after the construction workers put in new concrete, students would write their names or that of their lover's. They would become legends for a year and he would archaeologically examine their hieroglyphics like cave paintings. There were confessions of hidden passions, or sometimes of dark secrets that would only be safe in the crystallized silence of drying cement.

He had spent a particularly long time that day walking down the hill, which allowed him to notice something he never had before. Someone had wrote his name near the edge of the walkway. He knelt down for a closer look.

The color of the cement on which his name was written was slightly darker and duller.

It must've been from before the most recent paving, he thought to himself.

Beside his name, there was an "I" that was barely legible, then another word after that. He couldn't make out the other word. The life expectancies of these roads were only a year, and such was the case with this message written out to him. He stood there for a while, puzzling out the situation. He let his mind take free reign, and a drunken logic galumphed around for a while in his mind before it collapsed, exhausted.

He continued his walk home, but he couldn't get his mind off that message in the road.

What could've it been?, he wondered. It had been in decent shape, with relatively little amounts of erosion from the monsoons. He imagined the person who wrote it; he or she wrote the message with such intent that it withstood torrential rain and storm. During those days of tempestuous weather, this message of sentiment stood steadfastly to the ground.

He was quick to imagine that it was a message of passion and concealed love, which led him to walk home feeling like a warrior-king, returning home in the fashion of Odysseus. He imagined some beauty who stole a person's breath just by being present. He imagined her walking down sparkling coasts. He imagined going to war for her attention.

When he got back to his apartment, it was about seven in the evening. He learned kendo as a hobby, so when he got back it was dark and he was tired and hungry. As usual, he cleared away his school bag and chose out a light jacket to wear to dinner. As he was looking through his phone book to consider inviting someone to dine with him, he had something of a rather bleak epiphany.

The message he had seen earlier, it could have easily been one of irresistible malice and hate. Why is it that he came so quickly to the conclusion that someone had adored him? He imagined this person, shadowy in texture, writing legions of bitter messages that were never sent his way. He imagined passing this person everyday in the halls of his school, never noticing that person but always being watched and despised. He imagined this person writing volumes of fiction, where he appeared as the antagonist in every story and always ended up dead to make way for a happy ending.

He couldn't think of who it could be. Who could possibly have hated him so?

He looked back down at his mobile, which still had his phone book open. Suddenly, the names that he browsed through, those names that he passed by as not wanting to have dinner with, took new forms. The straight lines and sharp angles of the letters in their names became dangerous and lethal. One by one, systematically, he imagined their faces on the shadowy body that wrote the message on the walkway.

All along, he thought, others would pass that message and take note of it. They would see him sometime in the day and keep it lodged in their system, wondering what he could've done to have caused someone to hate him so.

He decided to order in that night.

After he hung up the phone and sat around to wait for the delivery person, he contemplated his secret admonisher while he drank a beer and watched through the window the lights of the city stretched out before him. That mysteriously alluring sight of the city at night, so full of sin, love, grief, sympathy and hate. He was drawn magnetically to the city, not only through affection, but through everything else as well: senseless remorse, blind spite, urban loneliness, irrational fear, and tragic introspection.

One of these lights, he thought, belongs to that person who hates me so.

That gaping cityscape -- he knew not whether to apologize or continue searching.

diary of a madman, vii: sleep won't come to my door

i laid there in the dark, watching photons of light rush across my wall, hurrying to get from one side to the other. the life expectancy of these passing lights is approximately twenty seconds. in the universe of my wall, they start out as a speck of light, seminal, tiny. they grow larger, through childhood, adolescence, then they stretch out, become elongated, and that's when they're adults, i guess. then, so suddenly, they disappear.

i couldn't get to sleep. i wanted to get up early the following morning to catch up on some reading. i was in bed about three hours earlier than i usually am. the tired energy that usually swells inside of my body at that late hour collides into itself, implodes like rewound fireworks, then settles into a recalcitrant stillness that doesn't have me convinced.

i watch the life and death cycles of passing lights to the sound of waves.

the sound of waves; the cars that drive by on the rain-soaked pavement wheel past spurning out the sound of wave crests breaking against a shore. i think it over cinematically and approve of its general aesthetic.

appealing background music, i think. it was good music to this fatal theatre.

i run over my thoughts slowly, letting them pass between my fingertips like fine, white sand. the grains massage the wrinkles that mark the joints on my hand. sometimes i run into small pebbles, and the sudden change in the texture of the sand startles me. other times, my hand is forced to stop because of large rocks that block the way. i move in a new direction at such times.

i feel like reading, i think. i look over to my desk to the novel that's resting teasingly beside a few scattered pencils and pens. i reach beside my pillow to a bedside lamp and roll its switch on. the click resounds into the silence of my room, but no light follows. i try at it a few more times, but nothing happens.

i forgot to buy a bulb again, i say aloud. i impugn myself gently for being so forgetful.

i do a quick once-over of my situation. i'm in bed and the only source of light is the architect's lamp that hangs wistfully over my desk. i'd have to get out of bed anyway, i think to comfort myself, so i might as well turn the light on.

my legs brace themselves for movement, but something comes to mind, like an irritating pop-up advertisement, but one that turns out to be useful and informative.

after finishing reading, i'm going to have to get up and turn off the light. that requires two trips, an extra ordeal of having to get out of bed, i think to myself.

suddenly, my body weighs as much as a cruise ship and i'm anchored in place. i turned my head to look at the book. it just sat there, dead weight, useless without a reader. i reach for a few times, but i know that it's impossible to reach it. i narrow my eyes into slits and focus a great deal of concentration into the direction of the book. i will it to come to me, summoning any possible, latent telekinetic energy i may have.

no dice. it turned out that i don't have the capacity to move objects with sheerly the power of my mind.

i relinquish the idea of reading to fate. it tumbles down a narrow hole that goes on forever, ticking quietly as it bounces off the walls.

the light show has become annoying. it's the same plot over and over again, the same reason i couldn't handle watching any more Korean dramas. love stories have become a cabaret of the recurring. i didn't think that they met the requirements for good drama and story-telling.

there weren't enough feasible plot-twists. the characters were flat, like dead Cola.

i turn to my other side, away from the book the glares at me so tantalizingly.

the architecture of this building is horrible, i whisper to the wall. it was large brick sloppily painted over with white paint. i could point out where the paint accumulated into little wells of excess. i wonder why the building was constructed this way -- so deliberately unattractive. i couldn't think of why anyone would find this at all appealing. if they're going to construct a building for however much they spent on it, they should at least take the step to make it look nice.

the wall frustrated me, so i turned on my back again. i lifted my hand in front of my face and watched it engulfed in the darkness of the room. i followed the outline of my hand illuminated by the light coming from outside. i thought about going out for a beer, but i knew it wasn't a serious thought because i wouldn't get out of bed.

then something itched at the side of my brain.

the central office of my brain sent some representatives to investigate the cause of this itchiness. the agents from the central office of my brain usually were in dark suits, dressed to attend funerals. they sat at desks all day and watched the other branches of my brain do their work. they make sure that the workers are in check, obedient, and responsible.

the representatives traveled at a light jog to the scene of the disturbance. their polished shoes echoed in the hallways of my brain. they ran along synapses, squeezing past the employees that moved lazily from one room to the next, rearranging files in manila folders.

finally, they reached the scene. someone had vandalized the hallway. the empty bottles of spray paint rolled around on the floor. the smell of aerosol still hung damp in the air. most of the agents inquired nearby employees, asking where the culprit ran off to. they chased their pointed fingers.

one agent, however, stayed behind and examined the graffiti. the paint was bleeding to the floor.

what a sizable mural, the agent thought. surely, it took more than just one individual to complete this task.

the agent pondered the graffiti some more. he appreciated the rushed but deliberate curves of the letters. he thought the color went well with the pastel hues of the wallpaper. he mouthed out the words over and over again to himself.

...carpe diem, the agent whispered to himself.

his words echoed through the empty halls. it rang in concordance with the tapping shoes of the other agents running in the distance, the rolling carts full of manila folders, and the muffled lethargy of the employees who carted them around.

diary of a madman, vi: melting heaps of snow

heavy downpours of torrential rain, snow, and sleet weighed down the campus. the nights seemed darker as storm clouds hovered ominously above. they abdicated the moon from her throne in shadowy sedition.

meanwhile, i get along just fine.

the other day, a performer by the name of S. Bear Bergman came to do her show in the small performance space in my building. she impersonated a Jewish performer whose fame became widespread through his shows in Auschwitz. the show consisted of Bergman going in and out of character. out of character, she was herself. at first glance, it's difficult to identify her gender. she had a goatee, close-cropped hair, and dressed in slacks with a tucked in oxford.

she said that she represented confusion.

her impersonations of the Jewish actor consisted mainly in her ability to speak in a German-Jewish accent. they were mostly comedic reliefs for the heavier material that she spoke of out of character.

there were thirteen or fifteen of us in the audience. i sat in the front. i was prompted to sit in the front.

maybe it's like the Blue Man show, i thought.

truthfully, didn't like the show. whenever i watch performances, i change my mindset into a critical mode, assessing the overall aesthetic and performative appeal. her actions, dialogue, and overall production churned through the gears in my head to be assessed by my subjectivity.

it turns out that i didn't think too highly of it all.

her words were eloquent, like a thick, decadent chocolate. she had a way of twisting words until they submitted to her will. her words violated my mind and i cerebrally curled around each syllable, so i could understand what she was saying.

i took the words for face value, and enjoyed their metaphoric substance. that was all though -- her words didn't incite feeling in me. they didn't stick to me palpably. i felt her sorrow, but i didn't respond with any.

beauty

beauty... beauty.

?

when i was a child, i liked to play with my dog, 눈송이, or "snowflake." once, while we were playing together in the backyard, my maid came out and to leave some bones out for Snowflake. immediately, my dog left me and went to gnaw on the bones. i watched as my dog left me for some measly portions of meat. my childlike hands reached out and groped the empty space that Snowflake once inhabited. slowly, slowly, i watched her white body slip away from me, farther, farther away.

like Snowflake, my understanding of beauty is slipping away from me. big deal! who cares? there's so much more to worry about.

but perhaps beauty is the bone and everything else i appreciated is Snowflake.

the actress Bergman's performance didn't appeal to me as beautiful. i'm a pretty sentimental guy, so when somebody does something really remarkable, i often tear up at the sight of human brilliance and capacity.

but in the void of where i might have felt the excited warmth of beauty, i felt obligation. i felt obligated to think highly of Bergman's performance because of its subject matter - the Holocaust.
i wonder... is this right?

diary of a madman, v: graceful swans next door

i always found conceptions of beauty fascinating. a simple dialogue held between people from different cultures can yield this result. ancient Greek art, up until perhaps Mycenaean art, presented the ideal female form as one that is conducive to childbearing: voluptuous, large hips, and so on. this soon transformed into the slender, body types that have become popular today. this change happened gradually, but once it materialized, it took form on the grand scale. how did this occur, i wonder? perhaps this conception is reserved for primarily those from industrial societies, from metropolitan cities that are too overpopulated to afford that kind of perspective of beauty.

i remember that i read a book, some time ago, that outlined the history of the interpretation of beauty. it detailed the madonnas of each age, from Cleopatra to Jessica Alba. i go to the store and the magazine racks colorfully remind me of what to interpret as the beautiful. there's a new standard, and, i believe, it's one that values fragility as the ideal.

women who can fit into negative sizes monopolize the industry of the attractive. their enterprise has an advertisement efficiency that goes beyond the expectations of change.

of course, this is all from my male-limited perspective. attempts to surpass that limitation would prove devastatingly supererogatory, at the very least -- if not, perhaps, something offensive. what about the women? i'm beginning to think that when they're alone, or perhaps exclusively with their girlfriends, they unwind in such a way that it deconstructs generations of this typified interpretation of beauty.

for instance, my neighbor is a sorority girl, if there ever was one. just a few minutes ago, she and her friends were chatting outside, in the hall. they were heading to the tanning salon, so it became self-evident that they needed to drive a car. i wasn't eavesdropping, mind you. in fact, i didn't even need to try. they were virtually yelling to each other, fearing, perhaps, that their voices wouldn't travel the few feet that they were distanced from one another. they were yelling vulgarities about sex, belching voluminously, and generally behaving in a way that one would perceive as entirely contradictory to the aesthetic of fragility and grace.

maybe i have it all wrong. maybe their behavior was actually so aplomb with grace that whatever they did, belch, bellow vulgarities, talk inordinately loud, they could pull all of that off with an exquisite refinement that's beyond my understanding. or maybe i'm wrong on a different paradigm, in misinterpreting these fashionable trends of the time.

it's a mystery to me.