Jung Young Moon - Vaseline Buddha

Everyday life is often seen as something banal, but also found in everyday life, along with the banal, are the most astonishing, terrifying, and bizarre, and nothing that seems far from everyday life takes place apart from everyday life. And what’s banal is not everyday life itself but certain things found in everyday life. In everyday life there are moments that captivate you, because the moment you step into life’s most ambiguous, enigmatic territory called everyday life you feel a pleasant, unexpected surprise. And such surprises are everywhere, waiting for you at home, in an alley around your house, around the corner on a street, a forest path, or even in an unfamiliar place you travel.

Someone could, while taking a walk near his home, see a sign that says “National Boiler Association” on the first floor of a building in a residential area he doesn’t normally visit and be touched by it in a strange way, although he would have ordinarily passed it by without second thought. He could also think that the place, which according to the sign, was headquarters to dealers who were probably responsible for household boilers nationwide, looked too small to be the office of National Boiler Association, but the place, home to an association of people whose job it was to make hot water flow from boilers in homes nationwide and let you take hot showers, and sleep in a warm room even in winter, could seem even more mysterious than a secret political or religious society, or he could look at the sign and think that the National Boiler Association could be a social gathering of people who did something that had nothing to do with boilers, or a ghost organization that was involved in something suspicious.

Or he could come across somewhere in the city he lived in an office called Teddy Bear Association, but seeing that it was locked, to his disappointment — the place could look shut down already, with only the sign remaining — he could stand before the office for a long time, and suddenly recall the touching documentary film by Andrzej Wajda, the Polish director, on teddy bears, and think that although he really hated being touched by touching things in general, he liked how the film touched him. And he could think that if he hadn’t seen the film about teddy bears that had been with people or people who had been with teddy bears, which, if he remembered correctly, although he couldn’t be sure because it had been long since he saw it, showed the process in which an artist in Canada established a teddy bear museum and collected teddy bears from around the world, and showed faded photographs with teddy bears standing side by side with people nearly everywhere in the world, in a living room, on a beach, on a battlefield, in a spaceship, sharing their joys and sorrows, and showed Hitler in the last scene, looking quite impressive, surrounded by teddy bears, he could have passed by the office called Teddy Bear Association with indifference.

He could also go on a walk around the house he lived in, and see a white mongrel with a tattooed unibrow standing in front of a shop and smile, thinking that the dog, which looked stupid to begin with, looked even stupider because of the tattoo, although there was no telling why its owner had given it the tattoo, and laugh for a change, looking at the dog, which looked like the most dejected dog in the world, thinking that the dog, of course, hadn’t given itself the tattoo, so the owner must have given it the tattoo, perhaps while getting a tattoo himself so that he could always be sure that the dog was his, although there was no knowing what he was thinking. And having a sudden flash of thought at that moment, that, for instance, Baudelaire went around wearing lipstick, he could name the dog Baudelaire, and think that a tattooed eyebrow would have better suited Baudelaire the poet than Baudelaire the dog, and that if Baudelaire the poet had a tattooed eyebrow, he would have written a poem about it as well.

And he could take a walk on a hill somewhere, and find a swivel chair that someone had thrown away in the bushes for some reason, intact but for one missing wheel, and go there from time to time and sit on it, turning himself lightly, and think about the many things that had happened to him in his life, or think about his life in which nearly nothing, you could say, had happened, and pass many pleasant afternoon hours, and remember that once, while he was on an island in the Philippines and sitting in a metal chair on the beach — the chair looked as if it were in use by someone, not abandoned — he saw a fisherman setting out in the evening on his boat with a net, and saw the cross etched on his bare back, thanks to which he was able to wash away the memory of a bad dream he’d had the night before, in which his dead father appeared carrying in one hand his other hand, amputated from the wrist, like a fish, and saying that he had fished it out of some pond — as if he had caught a carp or something — made the strange demand that he decide which of the single hand he was holding in his hand he would have, at which moment he felt an urge to write something solely about a chair, and lie on the grass and feel the world unfolding beneath him, an enormous underground world in which his father, too, lay, and imagine being slowly sucked into the world.

And if there were some sunflowers on the hill that someone had planted, he could fall asleep for a little while under the sunflowers, having gone to see them on purpose in order to sleep under them when they were in blossom, and wake up and for a moment in a dazed state, and, not knowing where he was, recall how once he felt that my existence was unreal, so unreal that he felt as if his brain were in a drawer somewhere in his house, and the rest of his body in the wardrobe, or as if his entire body were hanging on the upper branches of a tall tree nearby, or he could see a yellow sunflower with a short stem right above his head and be overwhelmed with a certain kind of pure joy.

And days would continue, days on which he could see that the gloom that brought him pleasure at times, but not this time, was expanding its range within himself, and feel nearly overwhelmed because of the gloom, and feel so gloomy that he couldn’t face myself, and couldn’t look at his own face that looked so sullen that it embarrassed him, and thus could stand against the gloom as if making a stand against an oppressive and brutal system but to no avail, and so, instead of standing against the gloom, he could try harder to be gloomy, or think that he could meet someone and spend some time in a natural way in order to dispel the gloom, but then think that he couldn’t stand to have my feelings of uneasiness beneath his façade of naturalness pass on in their entirety to the other person, and that he’d have a hard time putting up with the unpleasantness he inevitably felt when he was with people, and think that perhaps he had no friends at all but could be satisfied with the fact, and, one day, he could get up the courage to go out and go to a street crowed with people, and be startled by someone suddenly shouting in a loud voice behind him and flee from the spot, and with a Christian fundamentalist standing with a large cross saying naïve and nasty and foolish things that screech in his ears but don’t touch his heart, vividly demonstrating how terrifying blind faith is, saying that you’ll fall into hellfire if you don’t receive Jesus, that you should repent before it’s too late, he could feel awkward and uncomfortable even though the Christian wasn’t yelling at him, and feel sufficiently rebuked even though he had no reason at all to be rebuked, and feel somewhat grateful to him, even, but because there was nothing he could do about it, he could punish him by glaring at him, and come home feeling repentant, at any rate, and deeply regret his first day out in a while and stay cooped up at home.