The Test of Time

Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind. What if nothing could move them?
-from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent


I.
You have to be in the right mood to take in Nirvana, and I can't say that I was. But the video they made for “Heart-shaped Box” had crept into a dream some months ago, and kept nagging me like an old injury until I saw it again. The sudden flash of the fetus stewing in the IV unit, feeding the decrepit old man; the crows perched atop the empty cross ready to scavenge the martyr's meat; another fetus or two hanging from an ancient tree. There it all was. On “youtube”. Don't know whether I had been, in a dream, testing its relevance 13 years later or merely trying to satisfy a certain longing, but now it felt like a mistake: a preconscious terror, if you will, threads itself throughout the video, which we can only vaguely identify with, akin to Dorothy waking up in Oz: some things are better left to dream: reality is just too tenuous. Apparently the guy next to me in the PC Bang wasn't in the mood for Nirvana either—perhaps he'd just paid for an abortion—because he got up and changed computers. Gradually, that warm old fecund nostalgia came over me like a flood, carrying me back ten years or more to a time when it wasn't nostalgia at all, but the violent reds and yellows of the set's backdrop that fixed me. Only now the two seemed to work together: I found myself flailing in the eddies of my misspent youth, floating in the current towards the home my mother sold years ago, aware all the while of the director's intimation of apocalyptic sunset that betokened the end that was from the beginning, a something inevitable as nightfall itself, that sensation that you're too late to see what you'd wanted to see, or maybe you'd already seen it, in dream or memory only, in light of which, there is nothing to see. That's why there's music. The fat lady, naked to her insides, and the fetuses, dead before birth, gave me a chuckle and then a shiver, but it was the thump of the bass drum and the raw emotion of Cobain's vocals that really resonates, passing the test of time. The video, like dream itself, as great as it may be, was just background noise: music is always more than video, which deceives, distracts, dies.


~



I see myself back home, in the house my mother sold for little more than she and my dad had bought it for twenty-odd years earlier. I see me in the back yard now, the backyard which holds my earliest memories--that past that's somehow with us, the pain, the expression of pain, and the aftermath. I see the wiffleball soaring into the weeping willow and unfalling with the falling branches; the poplar with the treehouse and the boards nailed to the trunk I could barely scale to reach the little box where Marty jerked off with porno mags: I am there, but they are not. They are all gone now, the willow, the poplar, the people, and the neighboring pines that made a cool canopy in the summer heat. I see myself suddenly in a war zone--and that's what we called it--when the Labor Day storm of '98 hit and left 30,000 casualties: a veritable pile of fresh death-in-wood. But by then I had seen enough senseless destruction to be numb for a century or two. Such musing led me to Oakwood cemetery which never looked the same anyhow. That's where I went to get away from my dead and that's where I decided one crisp Autumnal dusk to go abroad. I'd been chasing a gorgeous French au pere named Amelie Lambec for whom I played Tchaikovsky's violin concerto on my bedroom stereo and somehow didn't lay her. I know why now. On a bench by the plaque with the Lord's Prayer and the surviving trees standing around listening passively to my plan: one more paycheck, buy a round-trip ticket to Portugal before moving to San Francisco to get my degree and from there, Asia?...Asia is the place to be...bamboo, geishas and delectable mushrooms, the likes of which Kurt suggests fertilizing.




II.


As I walked out of the PC Bang into the drizzling forenoon gloom, I got the feeling that I was living in the past. Some people are doomed to dwell here, it's true. That all of our current thoughts and actions are connected so intimately with what we've done and been, as to render what is happening and what will happen to various lucid states of knowing already, what your friend is gonna say before he says it, what the news will report before it's reported—that memory & meditation therein fills us to bursting with a distillation that we pour out onto the fleeting again and again, on and on, into the future. It's our hubris, perhaps. But we are not arrogant, and we are very religious. If religiousness is a state of devotionless devotion, unattached dependence, to a prison of freedom in which we move--if only just a little--between rock and hard place, to jump from one fire into another, to grip the bars and scream into the void the words that will ultimately amount to our history, the accidental history that no one will ever chance to read.


The drizzle smacked of Seattle. And no, I was not necessarily thinking still of Kurt Cobain, feeling sorry about his suicide there in his greenhouse perched over Lake Washington. No. That case was closed. Just as my father's death--although it too was a bad death, a mysterious death--there's no use dwelling on things that are final. Whatever either man had to leave us was received, once or twice, or a million times until it became a part of us, period. And here we are to reshape it, as the ebb and flow of time changes it, as it changes us, in our very hands. No, I was actually feeling nostalgic for a time in the place where I now found myself living that was long gone, which maybe only lives in my mind and which never did exist in this place or any other place, not even the cemetery where I dreamt it, or in the history books that suggested it. The storm struck with raging winds, immaculate lightning, and torrents of rain, and twenty minutes later we walked knee deep in water down streets as dark as prehistoric night in a town we once knew so well by the trees which now lay at our feet. Home. Yes, it was something about being home and home now being Korea. And I began to regret, almost grieve, a time when Korea was something other than an experiment in westernization. A time when technocratic consumerism, which Solzhenitsyn once said amounts to “liquid manure,” wasn't the raison d'etre of this lovely and rather engaging little nation. Sure it boasts being the first most-on-line country in the world, sure it has a strong economy which allows foreign fools to come and teach English for 40 or 50 bucks an hour, but there is something wrong with the way people live here, top to bottom: CEOs and I are liable to buy a woman even though sex is better one knows when its gotten by love; drinking cheap booze begins to snowball so that feeling shitty the next day, one drinks more; sometimes on a mountain path we see a pile of stones, built by human hands, an organic pagoda of sorts, each and every stone a wish...well, rather than adding one, I often consider taking one off.


The rain more or less stopped, so I decided to climb one of the ubiquitous mountains to get away from the hum of engines, the ping of the hammer, and the people driving 2 km between department stores to shop, and shop and shop.


The beauty of the Bundang District is in its system of streams running in depressions along wide boulevards, through parks, all the way to the lake with no boats and where no human swims. Instead, the brave make use of the bungee jump on the lake's west bank. Bundang-Gu has apparently won international awards for urban planning and civil engineering. Truth be told, it is a suburban nightmare growing everyday by the hundreds; a trap for bad business with no equity, a revolving door for those venturers who think they will, but won't, get rich quick. In spite of the rooftop parks, pseudo-European plazas, and plenty of imported cars and goods, it is a dull place without any soul. Yet somehow it remains one of the most “livable” places in the country.


After waiting five minutes to cross at the crosswalk, I opted to shoot down a steep bank to the Bundang stream. I skipped under the bridge and headed east toward the lake. It happened to be Lunar New Year, so the paths meandered along without the usual bikers, joggers, and speed walkers. There was the occasional old man hobbling along by himself, and I would nod to him and then raise my head to inhale the gentle mist and the scent of mud. For weeks it had been bone-dry and bone-chilling, false sun and ubiquitous ice, combining to make for skin-cracking aridity that made you wary of washing at all with water. I had heard say of people able to feel the coming rain in their joints. Now I felt sympathy for them. I could feel mine thawing and loosening, a dull pain, in the damp breeze as I walked. I noticed the ducks and stopped to watch a couple swim in the patches where the ice had melted and dunk their heads. I saw a magpie light on a branch, call twice, and fly away to the adjacent ginko tree.


In time I reached the lake and it seemed like everyone was there, family after family, riding rented bikes for one and two, and red pedal-carts for three. Gossiping mothers and bored fathers; lap dogs scurrying, children playing and grandparents lounging: a family day. My mind wandered back to the old men moseying along, separate from the herd. I made my way around the lake to the road which leads up through a small farm to a trail which goes into the woods. Approaching the farm, I noticed a massive cherry tree I had never seen before. How many times had I done this hike and never noticed it. I gazed in wonder at its broad, stout trunk next to which sagged a small lean-to used for relief from the summer heat. I shivered as I neared the tree, and couldn't help but notice the aluminum sign beside it estimating its age to be 300 years. I touched its bark. It reminded me of an elephant’s skin. As broad as an elephant’s long, I was thinking, when I heard footsteps on the path behind me. Slow and methodical. I turned and found a hunched old woman, negotiating the muddy path, swinging one leg forward and then, and then, the other. Her hands folded over the small of her back which was nearly parallel to the ground. She was an arm's length from where I stood, yet somehow, it seemed, she hadn't noticed me. I greeted her in her language and still, she pulled herself along, looking straight at the mud without making so much as a sound.




III.


When I got to the top of the mountain there was not much of a view. Just a few dozen high-rise apartments to the north and west, and to the south, my neighborhood, which was barely visible through the mist, and behind which more mountains that you struggle to see even on a clear day because of the smog, loomed invisible. Besides, the trail was used for other things, things other than sight-seeing, such as stretching and weight-lifting as was apparent by the equipment built into the grounds.


On my way down I came to the site of a vast highway construction project. A few month ago, some friends and I had discovered a pair of smoking holes on the side of the mountain down which we'd just come. Construction had apparently proceeded with some efficiency for now the holes were outlined by concrete arches, which made it clear that they were tunnels cutting through the mountain, probably for cars, and trucks. Also, there were tall metal barriers separating the site from the farming village, and consequently my passage to the creek and eventually home.


The trail stopped somewhere around the middle of the barriers, having been destroyed in the process. I had to high-step some weeds and vines that were brittle, yet cumbersome. I tripped a couple of times, and once sank suddenly into a cleft of rock and banged up my knee pretty good. I was trying to find the end of the wall. My mind drifted to that lady, that monk, who was now somewhere around 100 days into her fast, a fast she undertook alone, in protest of the the KTX “bullet train” construction that was currently tunneling through Chungchung-nam-do or thereabouts. Crouched over, rubbing my knee, I burst into laughter at the absurdity of a bullet train in a country the size of West Virginia, and of the need for yet more roads and tunnels to accommodate all the cars. There seemed to be more than enough already. I recalled hearing a “business English” student I once taught say that Korea needs to do whatever it can to survive in a global market, or something to that effect. That was the same guy who said he cannot tolerate Koreans marrying foreigners because it taints the race. Meanwhile the roads are veritable parking lots on holidays and the Korean society is an aging society that needs people more than racism and tunnels.


Just as I was about to turn around and go back up the mountain to find another way down, I came upon a gap in the divide. I passed through and scurried down an unsure pile of dirt on the other side. It felt like running on border land and that's exactly what I did was run for the village. Once, I looked back over my shoulder and saw staring at me the holes blasted out of the mountain, like the eyes of some shocked and suffering animal.




IV.


When I got back to the terrific concrete tower called home, I sat down and iced my knee. I found myself meditating on the hegemony--or whatever you call the force of unnature--that does as it pleases, using hapless humans as its agents to shape the world to its perverse design. I thought of the explosions of dynamite in the heart of the hills and the will of the world to destroy or preserve 10 or 10,000 species a day, and all in sparking a fuse, or not. There are multitudes ready to die for the former and still others willing to die for the latter. And then there are the epidemics running rampant with enough or not enough vaccination being delivered. Multitudes ready to die so that it happens and others equal to preventing it.

As the cars whirred past my window, which is higher than last year, moving faster than they moved last year, I wondered if the earth wasn't just an aborted fetus hanging from the tree of creation we call the universe. Maybe that's what Kurt was getting at. My thoughts turned too to D.H. Lawrence, and his idea that God can do without man. I tried to recall which book it was and, pulling Women in Love off the shelf, I opened to the page reading, “...just as the horse has taken the place of the mastodon...if humanity ran into a cul-de-sac...the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation...” Closing the book, I took a shallow breath of stale air and grimaced.