EXPLOITS OF DESLINKITU

Diary of a Madman, XXIII

2009-07-12T03:34:00.002+09:00

A deep decline into the strumming fingertips of rain, a cloud of cigarette smoke lost into the curve of a moral universe, and a refracted beam of light that cuts through thick silence.

Diary of a Madman, XXII

2009-07-01T12:25:00.002+09:00

The world spun into a swirl of mud. It was the magnificent, repulsive, irresistible, and dour filth of humankind. Sweet jazz played from hidden speakers in corners of the room, under which, like mistletoes, young couples explored with the pedantic fascination of laboratory researchers the hidden secrets of the human anatomy. The trumpet exploded with noise discordant, whining away in the most palpable blues. My heart started sweating, but my brain was shivering with the chills. She had on that strappy dress that made men sink into the abyss of their lonely presence---I was sinking fast. I loosened my tie and lit a cigarette in as suave a way as I could, but I ended up fumbling and lighting the wrong side. She didn't see, most fortuitously, but she had a kind of smug countenance that suggested otherwise... or nothing at all. The human condition curled like a ribbon on her lips. The shadows in that place were thick, emphatic, and gave the sound from the cello an orotund resonance that made my spine jitter. Even my cup, now empty from a once delectable glass of Jameson, was soughing from either the harmonic vibrations from the stage or my pitiable state of affairs.

"They're so fucking demonic," the words seemed to slip out of her mouth without her actually saying anything. She was the paragon of nonchalance and disembodied cool that it was hermetic. He wasn't listening to a thing she was saying because his mind was galaxies away, exploring the inner realms of his unbeing.

She was easily the most beautiful woman on campus. Why she agreed to go to this place with a schmuck like him he'll never know. He led a questionable existence immured in the fondly suffocating cloisters of academic buildings. Her coordinated presence baffled him. It was one of those deliriously impossible events that it heuristically blurred the separation from dream and reality. A chance so abnegate that it was not so much a prospect as a passing thought that was influenced by that feeling of having nothing better to do. He didn't know if he liked it. Her munificence made him into one of those dusty gaping mouths of poverty. She emaciated him.

He ordered another drink for more well-mannered quaffing. She was speaking about somehing, but he couldn't pay attention. The music was too intoxicating, not to mention that he was becoming increasingly inebriated. The place was baking in the heat of human bodies and broken air conditoners. He could feel the unctuous veneer of sweat formulating like an embarrassing postulate across his forehead. She was looking at him now. Whatever she was saying was no longer in the tone of passing rumination. He was being directly addressed. He must have look beastly. He wanted to go home, away from her scrutinizing eyes, but this was too promising. Everything could have changed in an instant.

"Hey, you listening?"

"H-huh...? Yeah."

"So is that a yes?"

"Yes, I'm listening."

She gave a low chuckle and it shot straight through his brain. "No, not about that. About what I was talking about."

"Sorry, I didn't entirely hear what you said."

A radiating smile. Was his world about to change?

"About last week's lecture notes. May I borrow them?"

Diary of a Madman, XX: Disappearing Act

2009-05-04T14:55:00.009+09:00

Three years had gone by---three very curious years, indeed. He jumped into himself with all the swanlike grace of divers, slippery and slick-----very hermetic. What was the result?, he pondered as he traced his steps back to the beginning. At such a small place he was certain that he must've walked the same paths hundreds of times, in a heedless repetition, a droning cavalcade that was probably like playing a vinyl record with a snuffed out turntable needle. Was this it? Was this the famed moment that had earned so much consternation? Was this that invidious split in time between adolescence and adulthood? The production five years in pursuit led to nothing but the massive influx of doubt and questions that left his mind brimming over with the frothy foam of apprehension. He knew that if he turned back to look at the results of his wake, it would be like deciphering the memories of a rubbed out photograph that became some denigrated thing by force of the merciless sun.

Thousands of cups of coffee, potentially tens of thousands of cigarettes, and an incorrigible number of libations later, he straightens his tie for one final act: disappearance.

-------------------

CHAPTER ONE: MY NEW COMPANION

In those final moments, I wondered whether anything could be experienced together or if we were isolated to our individual perspectives. Could there be that moment in which by force of some alignment of the stars, language became complete? I traced my footsteps with a new companion. These were ill-fitted times for new companions--the number of characters in this chapter exceeded the quota. This new companion would enter my life and then leave it in an instant. In those short moments together, could we express some true thought? Could we share a stark revelation of the clearest meaning? The sun raced its shadow and the day came to a close. In the familiar quiet of the night, I traced my steps and she with me. It wasn't long, I thought to myself. I knew the number of steps we had left before it was the inevitable moment of good-bye. Language was rising and boiling at that point, bubbling over into a crescendo. I had scribed a thousand phrases in my mind and was prepared to deliver each with constant fluency and deliberate elocution.

Before any of my words materialized, however, I had noticed that we had already said good-bye. I watched her disappear into the distance, along with everything else, like it was all being vacuumed into a source to which I was not allowed--or perhaps no longer allowed. I yelled out for her. I would never know whether, perhaps, she turned back and tried to yell out to me as well.

-------------------

CHAPTER TWO: VACANCY

My very vessel had become farewell in these final days few numbered. The weather had paled into inclemency, shifting at the prerogative of imperial clouds that would occasional allow coruscating beams of light shed between their gargantuan ligaments. I would spend entire days in an existential phase shift, drifting between utter isolation and crowded pandemoniums. Saccharine memories lingered in my mind still, like stubborn residue, and made the stillness inside of me resonate with a trembling fury---a deep resonance like the grinding of tectonic plates.

Diary of a Madman, XIX

2009-03-01T18:49:00.005+09:00

As he made sense of the situation, a strange pulling ache flushed over him. It was like the insistent tugging of a small child inside of his heart. He was invited to a small dinner party at a friend's house. It wasn't anything spectacular, this dinner party. The music dwelt on classic rock that hardly fit the mood. The moment he arrived, the fellows with whom he arrived split into respective groups of comfort. The attendants split into their cliques and the room shattered into multiple people speaking at once and no one really listening. It was the first time that he'd break away from his studies to engage in some kind of a social activity, so he felt particularly well-groomed that day. He had a olive green turtle-neck under a brown herringbone blazer. His chinos were fine-pressed, as he enjoyed ironing his clothing to dwell over his thoughts. Like a steady stream of water, he would flood over his thoughts and explore them in a fluid curiosity as he pressed out each wrinkle in his clothing.

When he arrived, he took the time to greet familiar faces and ask a round of general questions regarding health, weather, and news. He was rather skilled at these conversations since there was a certain obligatory nature to them. In spite of the rushing bustle of the technological generation, it seems that these minute conversations were gradually growing in length.

His mind, however, was not with the conversations he was currently having, rather, was at the other side of the room, where an attractive young woman stood, deeply pondering an entirely generic reproduction of Magritte's Les Empire des Lumiere VII, whose placement at that wall in that particular apartment was mysterious of itself.

She was slender, which was more pronounced by the way she tied her hair back. She wore a skirt of a pastel brown that stopped just before her knees. It matched with a black wool sports coat. She finished the outfit with a dark reddish pair of stilettos. She would occasionally tilt her head from one side to the other, as if she were decoding the fundamental secrets of the universe by gazing at the cheaply reproduced colors of the print.

Though he had no idea of how this woman looked or any notion of her age, he felt a powerful gravitation that, to him, had a stalwart vacuum effect on his soul. He felt the boundaries of his amorphous essence blur and bend to the unrequited chemistry that this one-sided interaction to which her pure form, her sheer idea, was catalyst. She added a new aspect to his very existence.

He felt a stuffy desire fog his core. For some reason, that woman became the very weight that became the centre for this entire universe. Yet, he felt an insufferable distance stretched between them. For some inexplicable reason, he knew that they would never meet. He would leave without knowing her name and he would never ask what about that very plain print she find so fascinating.

Two hours later, two hours that seemed like a mere shade of a minute, he watched her leave the apartment with a friend. In her absence, she left an extended presence in his mind that sunk into him like a cruel, slow-acting insidious poison.

Diary of a Madman, XVII

2009-01-08T22:56:00.003+09:00

Kim leaned back on a leather recliner.

The moment was particularly sweet because he had meticulously prepared steps to ensure maximum comfort before sitting on the before said leather recliner. Truthfully speaking, in all matter of fact, the recliner was not, by any standard, very comfortable. The leather had yet to have worn, resulting in a rather stiff, relentless dexterity. In other words, Kim didn't sink into this recliner--he merely sat atop of it, no more to the recliner than the small particulates of dust that have accumulated upon its surface.

The preparations that Kim had so meticulously arranged before sitting on this recliner were multifarious and wholesome in approach. He had lit a stick of Nag Champa, whose burning tip twinkled like flickering sun inserted so haplessly in all of that cosmic distance. He had, on repeat, that one song that he enjoyed so palpably that he felt entirely at home when listening to it. The lighting was superb: not too bright as to alert the soul, yet not so dim as to leave it lethargic. His preparations were to mathematical precision along the algorithms of his every satisfaction.

Why did Kim go so far to prepare the comforts of that moment? How long would he sit on that recliner, conscious of those comforts, before drifting off to sleep or boredom, rendering his preparation supernumerary? Kim didn't think of these factors before or during his preparations. He didn't think of the duration of time, the spillage of seconds into minutes, awning hours, while he was relaxing on this recliner. Instead, he sat there, enjoyed the elements of his prepared comfort, and stared blankly at the air in front of him.

Kim was in a peculiar mood.

He couldn't put his finger on explaining his feelings. Its name was elusive, like a word that's simply too hard to pronounce. When his mind tried to grasp the feeling, he felt like he was grasping at nothing but the empty air before him, the very air at which he was now staring upon. At each attempt, one being more futile than the next, he could only think of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. He could only think of Kafka's K. from The Castle. In other words, Kim was feeling particularly... redundant. For whatever reason, Kim suddenly embodied the superfluous man. In other words---excuse the overt cliche--Kim no longer knew why he existed.

What was the meaning of this blink of consciousness before the resounding depths of expiration?

Kim had a girlfriend with whom he's been going steady. Kim had many friends, all of whom would reach out to him if he needed emotional assistance. Kim had a loving family who supported him most generously. Yet, in spite of all that, Kim stared longingly at Nietzsche's abyss. He embraced the futility of the transience of his existence and he felt not scathed nor anxious, but a bright, violent, dull, boring, explosive, exciting, dry, arid, vital, cardinal, raw and ever-lasting...

...neutrality...

"How curious," Kim exclaimed to himself. How curious, indeed.

Kim relieved his pocket of his mobile phone and shifted through the list of numbers he had stored inside of it. He stopped on his girlfriend's contact, Hyo-Jin, and on that small, mobile screen, he saw the memories that they have shared. He saw his brightly smiling face, and hers, and he saw that essential fluctuation in pupil dilation that clearly indicated the activities of love. He was, indeed, quite in love with Hyo-Jin. Yet, at that particular moment, those memories, those images of two smiling, laughing, beautifully amorous people were fictitious in the face of a intimidating redundancy that was much like an extra period after a sentence as a result of a mistake of the keyboard..

Kim scrolled through his list of friends, many of whom have been such friends since early on in Kim's life. He saw all those moments of glorious youth, spartan vitality, and the days of everlasting summer. He saw them running in courtyards, smoking their first cigarettes, and eagerly gathered in a circle to talk about the mysterious beauty of women. Yet these memories, like those of Hyo-Jin, passed in silence, like quiet mourners, and Kim was again unaffected.

Kim scrolled to his mother's phone number and observed the immortality of his childhood. He saw the struggle that his mother so valiantly persevered with so much dignity and sacrifice, yet, like the others, these memories clicked by with all the sentimentality of a projector scrolling through slides.

It was as if Kim was standing on the marble floor of an intensely prestigious art museum, evaluating a precious work of cultural achievement by this or that genius artist. He stood there, hands clutched together, observing the strokes and colors of the artwork before him. It was all of this, yet he could not come to appreciate any of it. He knew that he should feel something while laying witness before a spectacle, in front of a work so elusive and wonderful that it commanded the careers and lives of so many in this world. Yet, as much as Kim tried, his eyes glazed over with the look of impertinent boredom while his mind flushed with anxiety, despairing the possibility that he may be incapable of true enjoyment.

The demands of this world are so many and so deep. There stood the modern man, at the peak of his development and the zenith of his industry. He enjoyed Romantic orchestration by Russia composers, the melodious cool of Coltrane, fawned at the work of Dali, read Haruki Murakami interspersed with Camus, and yet, standing in this dense smog with only the promise of effervescence, Kim watched the spectacle of existence before him:

the sparkling of the stars that be-twinkled the gloaming above, the passing from life to death, the interaction of all of nature's units, the miraculous ingenuity of humankind, the infinity of love in an amorous embrace, the rise and fall of dignity, the legend of father to son and mother to daughter...

and, like that prestigious work of art, his eyes glazed in incomprehension and then his mind, in a staccato of silence, in a crescendo that led to nothing, fell asleep upon that stiff leather recliner. The incense eventually burned out, its deep smell withering into olfactory incompetence. The music came to a halt, the mechanics of the machine eventually malfunctioning.

Kim, asleep on that recliner, in silence.

Diary of a Madman, XVI

2008-12-10T01:46:00.002+09:00

Winter coil draws clouds near

Bristles of leaden air

Water shades cracked earth

A step back for two steps forward

Men are puddles

Who know nothing of great oceans.

Diary of a Madman, XIV: Letter to a Friend

2008-10-04T01:23:00.004+09:00

My Dearest Friend,

The summer heat is beginning to wane and the colors are the world are shifting. Hints of brown age are seeping into the once pastel-spring palette of my natural surroundings. As usual, Seoul is reluctant to change its season---it is a stubborn city. It grips onto the heat and sun that once baked its sidewalk and kept its subterranean underpinnings--those serpentine tunnels that snake beneath my feet. The cold weather is blowing in from all around.

With the changing season, I also espy a change within myself. It is a deep change, a recurring one. Deep inside my chest, ancient gears lodged beyond my senses are beginning to churn and rotate. Their seasonal hibernation now at an end, new emotions arise with a new season. I always believed that I was meant of the temperament of Fall.

The other day I went to the 한강 (Han River) to attend the annual fireworks festival. As I watched those glimmering lights in the sky, amongst that throng of people, I realized how narrow this world is. Allow me to explain:

We are limited to just one perspective, are we not? Each man, woman and child are subjected the boundaries of their optical, and otherwise cerebral, purview. Sitting with those people, all of us turned towards the flashing pops and brief explosions of the fireworks, I realized that amongst all that which exists on this earth that is sentient, there is a common property that must be entertained: one may only understand oneself.

How could this not be the case? I feel that such an assertion has all the mass and momentum of a rock slide of logical certainty.

To the extent in which one may understand anything at all, we may and can only know ourselves to the relative highest degree. I may see remorse in another man, but my ability to speculate on such a state do little but inch beyond estimation.

Without further sake of argument, I tender this, then, very humanitarian belief:
It is through our rather lachrymose inability to understand beyond our demarcation of flesh, that there is a new relationship between us! The limitations of our cognitive abilities present us the same challenges, to which, upon collusion, can respond in like-minded, collaborative solutions.

We are frail and weak alone. The might of man, however, is the relationships between us. The space that we mutually inhabit when we interact is a might that has seen centuries of imperial success. Alone, however, when we partition ourselves from the world and capitulate to the darkness of within our inherent solitude, we bear witness to the very roots of devastation.

I am, etc.-
Soohyun Alexander

MMVIII.X.V

Diary of a Madman, XIII:

2008-08-25T07:21:00.004+09:00

Hello Friends, 안녕하십니까 당신 여러분,

It's been long since we've wrote. It is my sincere hope that the effects of time has not rusted the joint of friendship that once held us together in a such a pivotal way. I trust that all is well with you, as you may trust that I am still in a healthful enough capacity to write this winsome letter addressed to you. In truth, I knew not how to articulate this letter. How can words wrap themselves around time as a suitable garment, both modest and wholesome? For the time we've spent apart in silence, as we became muted ghosts in each other's past, what words must I use to manifest that time? Do my words count a minute each, or do they substantiate the mighty hour? Can these sentences, as noble as they might be, eclipse the inevitable locomotion of minutes and hours? We've invented something of a proverb, though not very gnomic, to encapsulate this dreadful idea:

Hey, how are you?

I'm alright.

Good sir, in no aspect of the word, "alright," should I ever find myself so. All in good fortune, I'd say, for to be just alright would be the greatest incapacity I could imagine. So I shall not be alright, for I am against the very idea of being alright! What a silly thought! Watch it frolic about and collapse under its own weight! Do I mean to wrong myself in some manner, whichever byzantine way that I may or may not intend it to be the way in which it is ultimately unfurled? Do I stand in front of myself and yell, stop! When I am out with friends, passing drinks around in jubilant quantity, am I then to be that insensate troglodyte a few seats down, drinking alone, in the shadows of remorse, weighing the place down with anchors of sand?

To be alright, and just merely so, is not some commonly used indication of a salubrious condition; it expresses the lack thereof, if not entirely, to some significant amount---unknowing if one's own condition is positive or negative. The indecision implicated in the letters of that word, alright, and the weight it carries about it when used in the context of this present inquiry, represents, my good friend, a steady deterioration of human interconnectedness. It is the fear of sharing the truth of one's circumstances to the fellow person. At our disposal is a lingual system that has been ironed into near perfection over centuries of physiological engineering and semantic architecture, yet our creation is limited by our resistance of using it to its full capacity. Language has become too vast for us to use completely. We have become so disconnected from language that we do not know the roundness of its words or the precision of their utility. The girth of nouns, the depth of verbs, and the height of adjectives have become elusive, mercurial and such enigmatic totems that they have the effect of warding us with all the skill of scarecrows.

Allow me here, my friend, to express my undying fealty to language and my amity for words. If I am to be excavated decades from today, old and patina by the over brimming of age, let it be known that there lies a man who believed in words with more faith than the contention that he was extant.

Ach, I apologize. I meant to write to you a letter of simple correspondence, but it became some epistemological palaver. I am tired yet restive---quite nervous, actually...

You see, in two hours' time, I have an important interview with the United Nations. You know that I have always wanted to be an employee at that fine establishment. I have not been able to sleep an ounce of rest last night. I lay there, half dreaming and half in gentle rumination, proceeding from sleep and wakefulness effortlessly as if they had no distinction, thinking about the promise of the future and the memories of the past.

I suppose it is a misfortune that I must write to a friend when I am feeling nervous! Imagine the rambling letters that I have delivered each time I am in need to take an important turn in my life. I wish that instead of having penned this letter, we can meet and embrace like old friend should, and then talk about all the exuberance of life over the finest ales that we can afford. I suppose it is too early in the morning for that and we are too many lands apart.

Express my love to your loved ones. I shall write again soon.

LEE, Soo-hyun.

Deslinkitu, VIII.MMVIII

Deslinkitu Chronicles, Alucinor Pt. 2

2008-07-04T17:02:00.003+09:00

The Premiere returned to his office rather briskly, his mobile ringing eagerly in his jacket pocket. There are only two situations where Alucinor didn't answer his mobile:

1. His mother was calling to describe yet another eligible spouse, concerned that he was "aging off the bachelor market," though, he might remind, he was only 30 years old, possibly the youngest PM in history

2. His secretary was calling for a surprise visit by one of the many superior politicians, i.e., ministers of the interior, defense, or whatever.

This was the second scenario, and these situations have been more commonly the second scenario lately. He was either become a more ineligible bachelor, or his superiors were more determined to catch him away from his office. He was a threat to the older generation of politicians of Deslinkitu. He represented progress and reform, seeking policies that reach all of Deslinkitu, not only the well-connected regions. He knew that if his superiors caught him away from his office just once, he'd be labeled as a good-for-nothing, a thumb-twiddler.

It was partially true, however. Much of Deslinkitan politics were absorbed in mediating local conflicts between the several ethnic groups of Deslinkitu. Why, just last week, Alucinor was visiting the north regions, a rather mountainous landscape, and was negotiating land disputes with the Fertoondian minority, known for their tribal ways. They were a fascinating race; they towered above any other race in Deslinkitu and were as tough as the mountains themselves. They stood unmoving to change, just as the mountains stood steadfastly, or impartially, against the wind.

In any case, he truly believed that many of the said ministers were only siphoning away public money for their own gain. Many of them lived in the southwestern Golden Shores. Their pale skin seemed incongruous in comparison to the locals there, who were evenly tanned and just as complacent. Theses ministers lived in monstrous mansions that consumed stretches of land that could've been used for ten or twenty others to live comfortably. Alucinor had the suspicion that these ministers sometimes got lost in their own houses, which is why they were late all the time.

Alucinor rushed into his office, wiping a veneer of sweat from his brow, and nodded to his secretary, who frowned as she saw his library pass leaking from his pocket. With a meaningful expression, Alucinor yielded a slight bow and dove head first into his office.

He always enjoyed walking into his office. It was spacious. It had a small conference area with plush couches that was separate from his study. He had a gargantuan bookcase full of the books that he had read during his decades of schooling. In the center there was a crystal globe that was presented to him by the PM of Slovakia, which spun in mid-air. He never understood the mechanics of it, but it was certainly amusing to look located far-off places on it. He had several paintings he managed to collect with his relatively small income hanging about the walls. He had a few obscure pieces of classical masters, Caravaggio, Raphael, along with even more obscure works by Picasso, Manet, and still more nameless works by contemporary Asian artists.

He sat at his desk and rested his eyes, trying to catch his breath. The minutes oozed off the clock and dirtied the floor. He knew that within a few minutes, at most a dozen, a minister of some irrelevant ministry would barge into his office and bark orders at his secretary that required her to exit the governmental building and go to an import store.

Alucinor combed his hair, fixed his shirt, and sat back, looking out the large window behind him for ministerial vehicles. His hand leaped into his jacket and he pulled out his cigarette tin. He looked through the contents, as he enjoyed mixing the brands, and ejected a Virgina blend. Alucinor lit his cigarette with the heavy lighter et al paperweight on his desk and slowly took a shallow breath in. He closed his eyes and let his place in this world sink into him. He let it swirl about him with or without meaning. He felt the great mysteries of the universe pressing against this minuscule world, and it was like a pressure against his skull.

There is so much to learn, he trivially murmured to himself. There is so much we can never know.

His mind raced on the surface of the landscapes he visited throughout Deslinkitu, the beautiful pastures of the Eastern farms, the mountains to the North, the beaches to the South, and deserts to the West, and he thought it beautiful how so many races, dare he say species, exist in Deslinkitu. There are places where has yet to visit, but has read that still resembled the medieval times. There were forests whose trees were sentient. There were entire underground civilizations that had highly intelligent creatures but had the appearance of moles.

What a world to live in, he thought as he ashed his cigarette. As he became satiated by the greatness of the world, he saw two black ministerial cars pull up to his building.

Deslinkitu Chronicles; Alucinor pt. 1

2008-06-25T09:52:00.004+09:00

Alucinor, recently elected Prime Minister of Deslinkitu, was received with mixed reviews.

For the most part, he was a upright public servant who cared not only for his fellow Deslinkitans, but also for all of humanity. He believed that there was a basis of good shared amongst all people. It was the foundation to every interaction imaginable, he stated. Even the most heinous crimes were on the premise of some moral intention. The problem is that they're selfish and egocentric.

The Premiere woke up early each morning and slept very late every night. He was at his peak intellectual condition late at night and had to wake up early each morning to attend to his duties. If he had it his way, he would've liked to start sometime after lunch.

He lived in a community of ministers and governmental officials, which was consequently the area in the capitol of Deslinkitu, which was named most unoriginally Deslinikitu, that foreigners, mostly emissaries, were allowed to reside.

The day was Wednesday, when Deslinkitans came together to celebrate the independence movement against its oppressors many centuries ago. You see, Deslinkitu is located somewhere in Eastern Asia, and suffered colonization from the Chinese, then the Russians, then the Japanese, and short bout with Koreans and the Americans, until finally, Deslinkitu managed to hold its own against foreign influence.

Mostly independent from the rest of the world, with the exception of trade and intellectual collaboration, Deslinkitu managed to exist virtually as a separate dimension from the earth. It was closed off by dense mountains, nearly cut off as an island, as it was once a peninsula, and had the general impression of being impregnable.

Given such, Premiere Alucinor found that after being assigned into his office, most of his foreign involvement had to do with facilitating the frequent exchange between Deslinkitan academics and the rest of the world. He found this most appreciable, as Alucinor was best at being a student. He yearns for his long afternoons and late evenings in the aging stacks of his university library, where he voraciously consumed literary theory, philosophical inquiry, and some of the finest works of prose he's ever known.

Today, one of the three independence days that Deslinkitu observed as national holidays, was the first free day that Aluncinor had during his fledgling career as the Prime Minister. He decided to spend the day exploring the governmental library, which contained the oldest volumes in all the land.

He slid into his summer blazer, slipped his ID card into a pocket, and then made his way to the library. Deslinkitu never got very hot during the summer because it was surrounded by ocean. The sea breeze was strong enough to blow cool currents across the entire land, even if it was quite vast. He had lived in a number of other countries during his studies and youth, but he enjoyed Deslinkitu the most. He always told his friends that he believed that Deslinkitu was the soul of the, unperturbed by the activities of the rest of the body yet deeply involved.

Once he reached the library, the lethargic guard checked his ID and waved him in with a respectful bow, to which he returned humbly.

After a few circuits of the library floors, he decided to read the archive of foreign correspondence to see how other Prime Ministers have handled their positions. Flipping through the thoroughly aged pages, trying to decide where, or when, he should start, a folded parchment fell to the floor.

He picked it up, gently unraveled it, then began reading. It was clearly quite old, but the language structure signaled that it couldn't have been more than 50 or 60 years aged. It was from one of the former Prime Ministers and addressed to a woman, someone out of seas, by the look of her name. He read to himself quietly:

I've read and reread your message a number of times and thought of the various ways I could link the words that I wanted to use for the feelings and impressions that I wished to describe. It's as if thousands of my neural pathways lit up like streets lined with streetlamps, yet each street is almost identical in this town, this variegated emotion that I felt, so I found it difficult to find the proper descriptions to distinguish each street, each which contains universes of subtle differences in how I feel about all of this and you. The first avenue of my reaction to this message was of course one of incredulity.

You've nearly left me entirely. I searched my mind for reasons why this would occur when it seemed that we were getting along so well, but the deeper that I searched, the more lost I became. It was finally when I was sifting for gold in pitch black darkness that I relinquished the task. I yielded to the explanation that this circumstance was simply due to the whims of human nature, whose vagarious tendencies were beyond both the fires of my imagination and the dexterity of my logic.

After this search concluded, I found that I had begun to lose your essence. You were slipping from my mind: your minute eccentricities, the aura of your presence, and the details of your voice. All that I was able to retain was an ambiguous feeling of doubt knowing that being in such a close proximity as you, the embers of what we once had were whimpering into a quiet and graceless end. Seeing you around campus or even hearing your voice became something alien to me, something that conflicted with the concept of you that I already had, so that when I did see or hear you, my distance to you stretched further apart.

My charismatic faith in humanity hectored me into believing there were legitimate reasons to explain what happened, so I began my process of accepting this fate. I am not embarrassed to say that it was not a simple task. I am not so experienced in this world that I can easily close off the way that I feel into an archaic smile or benign normalcy. You became someone important to me, but the way that I felt was as if you bypassed years of meticulously laid defenses only to wreak Trojan havoc once inside. It was unbearable. The only buoy that I had was the fact that I've stripped myself of any sense of pride and self-dignity long ago.

I found that your overall disposition was constantly fluctuating between affectionate warmth to a sudden, unprecedented coldness. I found this to be overwhelmingly disorienting until I eventually developed the impression that you simply didn't enjoy my company. Being from a city of so many, these cues prove to be rather important to maintain some level of social sanity. I deduced that the best way to respect your privacy and space was to distance myself from you and allow whatever it is we had to be either affirmed by the passing of time or gradually unravel silently into a neutral acquaintanceship.

Diary of a Madman, XII; pt. 3: Glass Jars and Jazz Clubs

2008-06-07T00:59:00.002+09:00

He went to sleep each night never knowing whether he was going to wake up the following morning. It was childish to entertain those pubescent thoughts, he knew that already. These metaphysical quandaries were woven of the same threads that the most fantastical stories were elaborately fabricated to such extensive lengths to persuade children of ethical spinal cords constituted of fictitious beings that relay a system of perfectly rationed positive reinforcement that typically includes gumdrops and lollipops in place of any species of vindictiveness. He went to sleep each night enveloped in uncertainty--with the prospect that he may never regain consciousness. There was an inherent sense of tranquility to the idea that interwoven in everything he accepted as real, as something ascertained as factual and consistent, there was the possibility that there was nothing at all: there is nothingness in everything; nothing is everything; everything is made of nothing; everything is nothing.

He didn't need to persuade himself of this anymore. He took it to the heart like a mantra. In fact, his whole reality became not merely the rather agnostic acceptance of the idea that he didn't truly know whether he or anyone else existed, but one that depended on a sense of faith that he'd never know. His moral experiments that eventually fomented the individual he is today was premised on the assumptions that

1. Others exist
2. I am part of society

As he went about his day, at work, during the night, momentary lapses in reading, eating, fucking, he would sketch these primordial assumptions out into greater elaboration.

1.1 Others exist in a realm of physicality: anything demarcated by matter, anything that possesses materiality, are inevitably interacting with one another by sharing the same atmospheric, climatic, environmental, and physical circumstances.
1.12 The mere fact of simultaneous existence within any situational bracket enables self-reflexivity
1.121 Brackets can encompass either/or, but is not limited to, time and space
1.122 Self-reflexivity is the foremost, and singularly most important, metaphysical assumption that enables further inquiry
1.1221 Metaphysics must be separated albeit eschewed for inquiry to begin and end
1.12212 Concepts like "beginning" and "end" are meaningless words given this metaphysical sketch

2.1 I exist
2.12 Society is constructed of people who are in some way related, relatable, or relevant to myself.
2.121 Society is based on self-referentiality
2.2 I can make a difference in my society
2.21 Differences, changing others, affecting others, are possible under a scheme of social values
2.211 "Social" refers to the sentient beings interacting within a given area
2.212 "Values" are meaningless unless considered within the framework of society
2.3 Society is a linguistic tool to categorize and group together individuals, who share only the most basic similarities (cf. 1.12), for the sake of ORDER
2.31 Order is the harmonizing of conflicting wants between individual constituents in society

...and so on. These verbal-dynamics flowed through his brain until he felt like he would just ooze through the floor and never solidify again. In grocery stores, he would evaluate the morality of purchasing organic items. He would begin as most people start, with the political realm, then to a humanitarian idea, then to post-structuralism, then linguistic [failure], the social inquiry, then ethical philosophy, and finally he would go through metaphysical assumptions like a checklist stuck on a refrigerator door by a magnet for fast-food delivery.

Of course, these mental exercises of his would never lead anywhere other than dense fogs of confusion. He would walk around in a daze, lost in space, until someone jostled him out of it so that he could resume his work. He would be sitting in the subway and be completely enthralled by the beauty of a passing woman, only, soon thereafter, to be perplexed by the questions of attraction, luck, perceptibility, and solipsistic deception.

Like heavy drops of rain, his mind spiraled downward until he deduced himself into a cloud of randomly clustered particles that consequently and weight for some reason.

What did he find attractive about that woman?
Do she and I share a planar coexistence?
If not, she is an apparition, a pure figment of imagination?
If she is not real, but an apparition, then is what I desire nothing more than a wanton thought-procedure so perfected by repitition that it seems flawless?
Am I seeing what or who she really is, or is it the projections of my mind at work?

He found himself back at Purgatorio, sipping away at a drink of substantive strength at the bar, being lectured in Japanese by the bartender. As usual, he didn't know what the bartender was saying. For all he knew, he could be systematically solving everyting he ever wondered in his entire life.

Joon-suk wondered, though, even if he understood what the bartender was saying, would he understand?

Diary of a Madman, XII; pt. 2: Glass Jars and Jazz Clubs

2008-05-12T11:33:00.006+09:00

He stumbled out of the bar, fresh out of money and pride. The world was spinning--he was sure it wasn't the liquor. That's when they get you, he thought, as he stumbled around his jacket pockets for a smoke. The night was still vibrant; people all around him just blurs on an unsentimental spectroscope. He lit his cigarette and for a minute, he held a light brighter than the moon. He whistled an old tune he learned on the radio, something about how wolves were more apt to come out during rainy nights to hunt for their prey. They had real acumen--perceived as merciless but only come out when no one else was around. As he was about to walk away, the bartender came out and spoke to him in Japanese. He never knew why the bartender always insisted on speaking to him in Japanese when it was clear that he didn't know any. He just turned and smiled and listened as the bartender let out a stream of unfamiliar sounds. Then he said in Korean,

"Joon-suk, you forgot your briefcase."

"You know I don't know what you're saying to me"

"But you do."

With that he handed the briefcase to Joon-suk and went back into the bar. Joon-suk chortled as he held the familiar briefcase in his hand. It was heavier than it could ever be. It wasn't the contents of the briefcase, but the fustian meaning of what those contents had. Nothing is irrelevant; there couldn't be or meanings would cease to exist.

Joon-suk worked for an anti-corruption agency in the city, the largest and most respected, in fact. That was easily to explain though: the firm was so well funded that they could afford to handle every case of corruption with a top-notch attorney. He had gone to school for ten years, wanting to become a legislator for something that mattered, but he ended up in a position that had him revealing legal loopholes in contracts and transactions drawn out by overeager corporations, essentially revealing specific people for doing what anyone probably would've done in a similar situation: opportunities to earn more money. It was a popularity contest, and he was on the panel to decide who would make the biggest news. He could easily list five or six names of people who were much more worthy of putting in jail, but they were too expensive to reveal. They were either too small to bother bringing to the public eye, or they were far too high up, basically shedding money everywhere they went, consequently leaving everybody bowing as they passed.

Nonetheless, he had recently swept up what could be the biggest case of scandal and bribery of the decade, having caught a military general taking hefty bribes for excusing the sons of big mobs from going into compulsory military service, thereby preventing any government spotlighting on the shady shiftings of the underworld. He just had to submit his report and it would be finished. The associated mobs would go to jail not for bribery, but the countless actions they've been committing under the thick veil of currency. Hundreds of kids who couldn't do anything else but work for mobsters would end up on the street, probably pushed into committing petty crimes so that they could feed themselves--terrorizing for a living. Gone would be the structured, organized crime of this mafia ringleaders, and then would dawn more banditry. He would be the blade that would cut up a swelling wound, revealing the far uglier, much more festering problem underneath the inflammation. The truth was that it was society that was sick. The society had become gilded and obsessed with wealth, essentially replacing humanity-based morality into a fiscal one.

Dozens of contracts signed and stamped by this general were photocopied and carefully archived in manila envelopes that would provide enough evidence to successfully litigate these mobsters. It was all very sub rosa as well--he would submit his report through an intricate internet system that guaranteed his anonymity. There was virtually no way he could be caught in this act.

But it wasn't about being caught and threatened that Joon-suk was concerned that evening. It wasn't why he was as drunk as he was at that moment. It was something more philosophical: how limited was his perspective? One of the first classes that he took in law school was that anything that could be interpreted as "worth fighting for" were battles that were too complex to assign the trivial descriptions of good or bad.

It was something like a triangle placed on a flat surface, or a prism. The tip, the topmost point, could represent the "event," though that was somewhat philosophically noxious as well. In any case, if that apex was construed as the event, every part of the prism, the numerous strands that led to that apex, were the different elements that were somehow associated to how that event occurred. Innumerable intentions were all set off at once like fireworks, lit by some indeterminate force, and thus resulted an event that these associated elements would understand and interpret in their own way. Everybody thought that what they did was somehow right, each and every one of the equipped with a meticulously designed justification. Ultimately, it was he who would decide the recipients of the punishment. Ultimately, it was someone who was completely unassociated and irrelevant who put to rest all those other contentions.

He lost his breath just thinking about the precarious ground he stood on. Who was he to do any of this? He had to imitate objectivity, neutrality, and the loss of identity en route the foolproof internet submission system made sure that there was no humanity, thus subjectivity, in this whole procedure. It wasn't he, but his labor that was valued.

There was no humanity in his work, though that's why he wanted to go into law in the first place, and then dozens of misguided kids would rampage the street, since they now think that they've been wronged by society, which more or less may have wronged them, resulting in people who are just walking around, minding their own business, to be more at risk of being mugged, robbed, or even murdered.

This societal existence that we lead, he thought, was something that was unfathomable. It was sublime. It was terrifying. Any and everything that he did caused some rippled in this system that affects others for better or worse. He could study his moral standards and try to perfect them, but his inevitable consequentiality was beyond the realms of any powers of rumination. It couldn't be understood, because the nature of a single individual in society was the society itself, so to understand the whole, which produces the one, led to dead-ends that he could neither fully conceive, thus precluding rectification, nor prevented in any way. All roads led to the same destination:

I have no idea.

He smoked his cigarette as he waited in a taxi queue. There were four others in front of him, maybe a dozen behind him. Those who were too drunk to be orderly kept cutting in line in front of him, but what could he really do? Would they even listen? If they did listen, to what effect would his talking to them really have?

He removed a glass jar from his briefcase that was filled with cigarette butts. He unwound the the top and threw his lit cigarette inside. He let out a sigh and the smoke rose far, far above him.

Diary of a Madman, XII: Glass Jars and Jazz Clubs

2008-05-03T03:28:00.008+09:00

He's in Seoul now, standing on the eighth storey of a building located on a major rotary, staring partly at his reflection in a wide window, partly at the cars and people below. He's in a jazz club. It's around 9:00 PM.

The club is dimly lit, mostly by dark crimson Chinese lanterns that hung listlessly from the ceiling. The fluorescent Johnny Walker sign at the bar gave the place a feeling of clean-cut modernity. There's a lit stream flowing down the middle of the floor, decorated with exotic-looking pebbles, small Oriental paper dragons, and off-white rose petals. The Tosca Tango Orchestra's Mi Otra Mitad de Naranja was playing faintly in the background, dwindling from its discordant fortissimo. The few patrons in the club were drinking quietly, much like him, alone.

The joint was called Purgatorio. People came here to wait before going somewhere else, unwind after work or school, or simply to be alone with one's thoughts. The owner was also the bartender who ran the place with his wife, a Japanese-born Korean who came back. She prepared the dishes in a separate room, coming out only to receive compliments as a culinary artisan.

He started coming here, to Purgatorio, his second year of high school. The owner never asked questions about his age. He came in alone, sat by the window and drank without disturbing anyone--much like he was at that moment.

His reflection in the window acted like an overlay for the city behind it. The city moved; every second of its existence it breathed faster, throbbed, and pulsated with so much activity that it was impossible to comprehend. He watched, perched in that height, like a gargoyle, office workers speeding home, taxi cabs rushing to squeeze in a few more customers, and trucks traveling unhurriedly, expecting a long journey. He watched people standing in line to wait for the bus to pick them up. He watched all the people entering and exiting stores and buildings. He watched people sitting around, smoking, chatting, or idling. He watched the faces in the restaurants; a few of them were staring, like him, while others were engaged in conversation.

The song changed to a Brubeck number he couldn't put his finger on. He always came here on the wrong days, he thought. This place had a live band on Monday and Friday, but he always came on Wednesdays and Sundays.

He never had to step outside to come here: the building was connected to the subway system, so he could get here always underneath the ground. He'd get on a train and it would snake him around the city, quickly and efficiently.

He wasn't thinking about anything in particular that day, at that time, in that place. He usually went there to think something through, something that required more than his undivided attention. He would sit there, settle into his favorite spot, let his fingers absorb the cool touch of the leather couch, and suck up the atmosphere through a ravenous osmosis. His mind would slowly calm, like a thin layer of dust settling on the surface of still objects. At the slightest disturbance during this stage, his concentration would shatter incorrigibly. His breathing would normalize and the world would slip off of him, regardless of how it tried to latch on. Then he broke down every one of his thoughts and memories, organizing them carefully into glass jars, and then placing them in various locations in his mind.

After this cautious exercise, he would examine each thought, each memory, without refrain. He would remit no detail in this examination. He colored-coded them with words, details--language.

That day, however, he had nothing to think about. The day had passed like any other. He was on vacation, so he had more free time than he would've liked. His life became inflated like an enormous balloon, while he, something separate, held on from a string that was tied superfluously from the bottom. The weight of his body and then of his life balanced each other out, so he would gain no elevation but never touch the ground. He would hover through space, setting in the direction of the wind.

Suspended in that space, he wondered if it was the weightlessness of the balloon that permitted the wind to blow it about, or if it was the strength of the wind that caused the balloon to move.

No, that's not it.

He remembered a line from a film: it wasn't a question about the wind, or an object, but his mind that perceived this interaction.

Diary of a Madman, XI: Momentary Relapse

2008-04-27T07:36:00.001+09:00

There are particular moments when I engage in art, media, or literature in a highly palpable way. My mind, for whatever reason, is sensitive in those moments; its surface layer trembling, fresh, and throbbing to interpret vastly intricate concepts, like layers of smoothly shaped wood on elaborate frontispiece bas relief. In these moments, my mind floods into different aesthetic constructions, filling in each intended curve, cut, word, sound, space, punctuation, or expression. They inflate with life and exist in a highly symbolic separate entity, a distinct existence corrugated with scent and hot breath, a confluence of fictional genius and strict reality.

During these experiences, the emptiness of words becomes apparent and the futility of explanation becomes distinctly obvious. In those moments, there is a non-participatory relationship between the work and the mind, the latter becomes passive, recessive – dominated.

When the experience ends, the mind settles down into a dormancy resembling spiders hanging from cobwebs. The memory of the experience siphons out into the subterranean subconscious with the bittersweet aftertaste of waking up from the most transcendental dream. In my duller state, I grip but do not feel, I speak but do not communicate, and think with a transience that verges on the existential.

Diary of a Madman, X: Slow, Slow Jazz

2008-04-07T10:01:00.001+09:00

The days spilled out of his cup, so he mourned through cigarettes and whisky.

In a dimly lit bar, rather grimy and sweet, he sat on an uncomfortable stool, sipping his drink and puffing beasts out of his cigarette. The flesh on his elbows soaked up the design of the wooden bar-top since he hasn’t moved for nearly an hour. There he sat, smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky, staring at a thick, gelatinous nothingness.

A strange tune filled the air of the bar, something about remorse. In the song, a woman sang along a simple piano rhythm. She sang about a man she was waiting for, someone who left after a night together that was burned into her mind. She wanted to forget him but remember him at the same time.

The ice clattered in his cup.

It was nearly 1:30 in the morning, so the barkeep was wiping the bar down to close. The other customers stumbled out. The bar began to dim its lights, expressing their will to close the place down for the night. He didn't budge. Clouds rose from his lips.

About 20 minutes later, he found himself standing outside the bar, out of cigarettes and a hand that ached from the lack of a drink in it. He wasn’t an alcoholic, no. He only knew when he wanted a drink, and that night was clearly a day that warranted a drink.

The week oozed by, always faster than he expected, and when the weekend came around, time was swift.

He started walking back to his room. There’s something about dormitory housing that is strangely inhumane. People barracked into large facilities. A single room with just a bed and a window that often looks out to nothing impressive. It’s like a cell.

He saw someone ahead of him. That person was far enough so that he couldn’t tell if he or she was walking towards him or away. He pocketed his hands into his jacket and walked briskly. He thought about the unfinished writing sprawled out on his desk. The blankness of the pages yet filled had a bitter existential taste to them.

He was approaching the figure ahead quickly. The figure was a woman, and she wasn’t moving at all. He slowed his pace a bit, considering what he should do. Was she injured? Was she feeling sick?

As he approached, she began to turn around. She looked decent – with a little less makeup, she could be one of those athletic types whose subtle masculinity has a silent charm. She wore a Burberry coat and dark, brick red boots. She looked straight at him as he approached. He felt nervous. What was she doing there so late at night? Was she lost?

As he came into talking distance, she moved towards him. He slowed down and stopped a few feet away from her. A cautious distance.

“Why is life so difficult?” she asked with an uncommon sincerity.

“Excuse me?”

He didn’t know why he said that. He heard what she had said with perfect clarity. He could tell that she wasn’t inebriated. She didn’t slur her words and she stood steadily, almost steadfastly, to the ground. She approached a few steps.

“Why is life so difficult?”

Upon closer inspection, he noticed that her eyes were slightly puffy.

She must’ve been crying, he thought.

He wondered how he could best respond to this situation. Should he buy her a drink? Should he walk her back to where she lived? He just couldn’t understand why she was standing out here in the dark. It was as if she was waiting for him. He stood there, quietly, trying to piece the situation together as she continued to stare at him, patiently waiting for an answer to this impossible question.

It felt like his mind was being pinched. Why was life so difficult? He was at the bar listening to a woman sing about her remorse. Why had he gone to the bar in the first place?

“Life…” he began, his lips parched with confusion.

He wanted to return to his isolated world in the bar, drinking silently while puffing away at a cigarette and listening to a woman sing about her remorse. Wait, did he want to? He wanted to but didn't. That world was too familiar to him. He was forgetting what it was like to have it any other way. He felt like his body was being flushed into a different dimension. He was paralyzed, but his lips began to move:

“Is difficult because we can never understand it.”

Was it he who said that? He didn’t know where it came from. He had never said that before.

Her eyes lit up and glistened in the twilight. He thought she was going to cry again, but instead she smiled.

They stood there for a while longer in silence. She was deep in thought. His mind was millions of miles away from there.

“Life really is difficult, isn’t it? It’s like a marvelous painting. Once you get past how beautiful it is, you find that underneath the paint is an intricate knot of meaning. Why don’t we just go back to admiring its beauty? Is it beautiful because it’s difficult? Or is it the other way around?”

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

2008-03-30T08:46:00.003+09:00

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

2008-03-16T13:26:00.007+09:00

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

2008-03-08T10:22:00.005+09:00

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

2008-03-06T05:24:00.002+09:00

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

2008-03-03T10:56:00.006+09:00

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.

diary of a madman, iv: So It Goes

2008-02-29T08:53:00.004+09:00

There's a sense of endless mystery in every action that I take. I wonder what circumstances have led to me that point when I had to make a decision to act. During that crucial moment, a spectrum of choices in apparently innumerable variations stretches out before me and I'm expected to choose one amongst infinity. Sometimes I take my time in choosing which action to select, like choosing a bottle of wine that'll fit my tastes, or perhaps like selecting a pair of pants for not only their style, but also how easily it can be washed. Other times, I choose my actions temerariously, so in a combination of instinct and minute desire ---- though I don't know which comes first, or which is the stronger.

I fancy myself as a self-reflective sort of guy.

Considering that that's the type of guy that I fancy myself to be, isn't it expected, even appropriate that I think these events through? I wonder if there's been a survey, asking people passing on the street -- though I secretly think that those samples are skewed because it's most likely the same people walking on the same streets most of the time -- inquiring as to whether they believed being self-reflective was a positive or negative characteristic. The women I've met have always had mixed opinions about this characteristic of mine: a few thought it provided me with a comfortable air, while others thought it was a sort of contempt. Anyway, I'm not comfortable discussing this on the internet.

So I've dialectically broke down my free will into two types of actions:
1. deliberate actions
2. instinctual actions

Now there are two cardinal beliefs that I hold that constitute the whole of the matter:
A. I believe in tabula rasa, that all people are blank slates
B. The free will doesn't have any influence from external forces, viz. YHWH, God, etc.
C. We maintain a consistency that provides a definition of who we are. For instance, whether I'm here or anywhere else, I'll always be who I am. There are no environmental considerations when speaking about the immediate identity.
D. Cultural Relativism is held to be fact. I am an aggregation of all those factors that have contributed to my history, in other words, my identity is placed firmly in my history. I am a representative of all those states of my past.

By the way, if you haven't noticed by now, though I find it questionable whether anyone reads this anymore, it wouldn't be extraordinary for you to comment on how I have a long-winded way of writing.This is probably because analytical philosophy and translated verse was crammed down my throat as a kid. This is how I talk as well, but I like to throw in occasional ums and uhs to make it all seem more casual. I'll even throw in a like into the mix so I can fit in.

So, anyway, like, when my free will is confronted with the obligation to make a choice, since nonaction is an action, self-reflexively, it chooses one of those two paths: deliberate or instinctual. Tonight, for instance, I'm going to take a shower then have a glass of zinfandel. That's a deliberate choice. When I hop into the shower, however, it's a whole different scenario.

I think we all secretly relish our shower patterns. It defines us and gives us comfort. I don't have as much time as I'd like to take a long shower, but occasionally, I'll shower for an hour and go through each cleaning process meticulously. When I don't have the time for an hour shower, I let my deliberate free will deal with all the preparations, such as setting the water temperature and pressure, then my mind flicks on a switch that has me functioning instinctually.

Let me tell you, I'm an expert at taking a shower my way. My instinctual free will realizes that it's in shower-mode and like a mechanical set of procedures, my body goes into auto-pilot and approximately 30 to 40 minutes later, I'm clean and dry, sitting at my desk and at my deliberate free will's disposal.

I don't know how safe I would feel laying this down like law, or making some normative claims about my existence, but this is how I generally figure it to be.

So what do you think? I contemplate on these and all sorts of things all the time. Do you find it attractive? Repulsive? Do you think I'm pampered and spoiled rotten? Or maybe you want to have a conversation with me about shower patterns. I'd be happy to have that conversation.

Since I'm always caught somewhere between work and non-work, I can get pretty blue and lonely. So one day, after class and a few cigarettes (all instinctual free will, of course), I took it upon myself to go out and have some fun. I met a few acquaintances and we had drinks together - I haven't adjusted to the American style of drinking yet - and then we went out dancing. The joint was dark, grimy, and even a little slimy. The moment you enter the door, a powerful blast of hot air, humidity (from sweat), and the odor of beer splattered all over the floor overtakes you. In Korea, the clubs are at least ventilated and air conditioned. This was not the case.

Those conditions sobered me up rather quickly. A few moments later, I was my old self again, that self-contemplative self, instead of slightly inebriated and ready to have fun self. In other words, the instinctual free will was again placed in a secondary position to my deliberate free will. The females I found mildly attractive in my earlier state were seen in the clarity of my normal state of mind, only to see that they were acting completely instinctually. There's nothing wrong with that, since that's what we've come here to be. The problem is that when there's one deliberate mind in a orgiastic menagerie of instinctual free wills, the former is out of place. No matter how much I drank that night, my deliberate free will didn't want to let go. It didn't want my instinctual free will to take control.

I tapped my acquaintances and said good-bye to each of them. They were acting instinctually too. They each tried to mutter something into my ear, but all I heard were pants and gasps. Maybe they were speaking the language of the instinctual will, telling my deliberate will to take a break and go off somewhere for a while. Whatever was going on, I walked out of there deliberately.

2008-02-21T16:52:00.003+09:00

As all the dust agitated by change and movement settles, I, too, settle into a tranquil flow. People around me come and go, viewing only very briefly and slightly their thin reflections on my surface. They stand around to gaze and absorb what little fascination a reflection may offer. I'm excited by their presence, by their proximity, but I always stay close to the silent delicacy that my life observes through repetition. My interactions with them are sudden staccatos. I begin to relish in the act of self-reflection: I close my eyes and peel away the layers of the universe until I'm free from the confines of the flesh, spirit, and soul. I contemplate the placement of stars, the color of trees, and clouds, the beauty of others. I open my mind to leave the confines of this world and explore the depths of my imagination. I fish out words to describe my morality, but they're often sloppy and chaotic. The familiar loneliness of this contemplative life weighs heavily and stubbornly on my soul. I want to know to what capacity I am a rational being, to inquire as to the depth of my morality, but, during these exercises, while I wake up with blue flowers in my hand, I hope to, one day, give them to someone important.

What a life!

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

2008-01-29T10:54:00.000+09:00

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

2008-01-04T03:18:00.000+09:00

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

2008-01-02T08:40:00.000+09:00

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.