Jung Young Moon - Vaseline Buddha

In the meantime (from when to when does meantime here refer to? It’s probably the period between when I began to write this, or when I became lost in thought after that, and this moment. And I could also say that it was when most of the trumpet creepers outside my window had fallen, and the grapes in the fridge had gotten all rotten and moldy, and I found that a lot of juice had come out of the plums I put in a glass jar with sugar, and I had finished translating part one of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which ends with the Ramsays and the visitors to their summer home going to bed at the end of the day, and which I had been working on much longer than usual because I wasn’t feeling well. Anyway, I feel as if during that time, I passed through a space like a river you have to swim across, and was carried in a rough current to a wrong place, completely different from where I’d intended to go at the beginning), I would often slip into a state in which I never went outside and let my thoughts float around, thinking about traveling, or perhaps about certain places. As the range of my movement decreased, and I could barely manage to go on with everyday life, let alone travel, I didn’t become more and more desperate to travel.

I liked stories of adventurers, such as the story of Marco Polo, who wanted to reach the end of the world of his imagination, and Ibn Battutah, who traveled, endlessly deviating from his original itinerary, led by revelations and strange dreams — if his superhuman will was the light that led him, revelations and dreams seem like clouds that both blocked the light and let it shine through their cracks — but I didn’t enjoy going on adventures. And I liked to have people tell me about the somewhat strange experiences they had while traveling, but didn’t think about writing a travel sketch, for the experiences I had while traveling, which remained in my memory, were things that most people wouldn’t find interesting.

For almost the first time since I’ve been writing, I think that I might talk about certain trips I took. But even if I do, what I write won’t be an ordinary travel sketch. What I write will probably be as far from an ordinary travel sketch as possible, and not very helpful for many people, or not helpful at all for some people. That would be because essentially, there’s nothing I seek to gain through traveling, and even if there were something, it would be nothing more than little passing impressions or some perceptual experience that would be difficult to explain.

And although traveling, in a way, is one of the only tolerable things that remain for me, there are many things that make it difficult for me to travel. First, I’m not very good at planning or pushing forward with something, but I can’t very well stand traveling with someone, either.

In addition, my whims — alternating in my heart are the desire to do something, and the contrary desire to do nothing, which moves faster — and boredom, which follow me doggedly wherever I go, also make it difficult for me to travel, but the biggest reason is that when I consider traveling, the thought, What would I do if I did go somewhere? Nothing’s going to change anyway, would present itself before anything else. In the end, the moment when it becomes possible for me to travel is when, very rarely, the thought, What would I do if I didn’t go anywhere? barely manages to prevail over the thought, What would I do if I did go somewhere? But even when I end up traveling in this way, I often get caught up in a serious quandary as to why I’m traveling. Countless are the times when not long after I’d set out on a trip I witnessed and confirmed my reason for being there, which may not have existed in the first place, quickly vanishing, and I always regretted taking the trip, and at times gave up the trip midway through. And in part, my disposition itself, which makes it possible for me to feel utterly bored by anything and everything, which in a way is an inherent gift, makes it difficult for me to see and experience something new. What I found in traveling in the end was boredom, which wasn’t different from the dreadful boredom found in everyday things, and boredom, indeed, was something that accompanied me wherever I was, and there was nowhere I could rid myself of it.

Thinking about travel and stories about travel while I was in a state that made it difficult for me to travel anymore, I thought about getting lost in my own story about traveling. Or in other words, making the story continue to deviate — the easiest thing would be to have other stories continue to make their way into the story to get a taste of the difficulty, trouble, and pleasure of getting lost in a story.

And yet there were moments in which I vaguely picture travel spots, which often included Tuvalu, the island nation that’s slowly sinking and will soon be disappearing into the Pacific Ocean, and Madagascar, the island nation in the Indian Ocean. I know why I think of Tuvalu — it wouldn’t be so bad to move to an island nation that will soon be disappearing into the ocean — but why does Madagascar come to my mind? The only thing I knew about Madagascar was that it broke away from a continent a long time ago and has been separated from the continent for a long time, hence its variety of unusual plants and animals, including all kinds of colorful and marvelous chameleons — which isn’t surprising, considering that half of the chameleon species on earth live in Madagascar. Nevertheless, when someone calls me on the phone and asks how I’m doing, I say that I might be going to Madagascar — even though I know for sure that I won’t — and tell them about the baobab trees there. But I could go to Madagascar, just to see the baobab trees which, according to legend, were placed upside down by a god who got caught in one of them and became infuriated.

A memory that has to do with Madagascar suddenly comes to my mind. It starts out with a French girl majoring in French literature, whom I came to know while staying in a small town in France, inviting me to her home in the country at the beginning of summer vacation (perhaps here, where I’m about to talk about something that has to do with Madagascar, I could attempt to get lost in a story by making a detour). Several days later I went to the small town where she lived and called her on the phone and she picked up, but she sounded quite cold, although I had no idea what had happened in the meantime, and told me to go back because she didn’t want to see me, without telling me the reason, and I ended up being abandoned in a feeling of abandonment in the town I had arrived at after several hours of train ride. We sort of liked each other from the beginning, which could have been my imagination, but not quite, for if it wasn’t true, she would’ve had no reason to invite me to her home.

There may have been a good reason for her to do so, or there may have been no such thing as a good reason — there may have been many reasons, or no reason at all — but I was a little angry at first, and after a little while, more puzzled than angry, and then more bewildered than puzzled, but I could accept what happened as something that could happen.

While on the train on my way to meet her, I pictured, with some excitement, a romance that could soon be taking place — it was summer, and thinking that there might be a little lake near her town and we might go swimming together (I pictured the beginning of our romance with us swimming in a lake), I thought that it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t bring my swimsuit, that maybe we could go skinny dipping — and the dismay I experienced upon arriving reminded me of the beginning of another somewhat strange — it becomes somewhat strange as I think about it — romance I experienced.