Jung Young Moon - Vaseline Buddha

Another time, in a foreign city, Paris, I think, someone asked me if I weren’t from a country in Central Asia, and although I don’t remember how I answered the question at the time, I do remember that I recalled a country called Turkmenistan, whose capital’s streets, which I saw on television, were lined with massive new buildings that seemed to embody the socialist ideal, which I would have been quite satisfied to see if I were Stalin, but were too empty and deserted, and felt almost surreal, and said that I was from Turkmenistan, and thought that it was a good thing to be of ambiguous nationality, and an even better thing to lose your nationality altogether.

(The things that took place in my life were, like the above, things that couldn’t be called incidents, things that fell short of being incidents — except, of course, my recent loss of consciousness and collapse at home — things that would turn into nothing if I didn’t fix them in my memory by putting them into writing like this. By putting into writing the faint, fragile memories in this way, I’m fixing them, stories that can change again later in a different way, like printed photographs.)

The next day I returned to the café where I’d met the man who asked me if I weren’t an old classmate and had coffee there, hoping to see him again, although it would be okay, of course, not to see him again, and tell him how much his blunder had pleased me. And I thought I could make a movie, combining the scenes in Amsterdam in which I met the woman with spinach stuck between her teeth and the man who mistook me for an old classmate, with my experiences in New York, as well as things I experienced or imagined in other places while traveling, because I felt as if the woman with spinach stuck between her teeth and the man who mistook me for an old classmate came up to me, like characters in a movie, and posed a riddle and then disappeared, leaving me alone in the movie. It would be a very strange movie without a storyline, whose scenes would linger in the mind despite, or because of, its lack of a storyline. It’s a strange thing to dream of making just one movie that’s very strange, but it made me happy, as if I were having an enchanting dream. The previous night I’d dreamt about a naked woman whose thighs and chest were embedded with pieces of translucent mother-of-pearl, put together like a mosaic in the form of a woman. I was tangled up naked with the naked woman, which seemed quite erotic. It was an erotic experience that told you that you could have a truly erotic experience only in dreams. And the woman’s face was as black as ebony, and naturally led me to think of the word death. I thought I could put that dream, too, in the one movie I could make.

During my additional days in Amsterdam, I mostly sat in a café from which I could see the canal, writing down words such as stained stain, sleeping sleep, dreaming dream, drained drain, and smiling smile. And the words became the phrase, a smiling smile that arises on a drained drain of a stained stain in a dream dreamt by sleeping sleep, upon whose completion I left the Netherlands.

Reading what I’ve written so far, I think about how I should move forward, or make it move forward, about all its possibilities. It’s always a pain to read over what you’ve written. Writing isn’t without moments of joy you can’t feel in doing anything else, but such moments are much too rare. And the moments vanish as soon as they come.

It seems now that I am completely lost in what I’ve written. That was part of my intention, of course, and so it wouldn’t be a bad thing to get completely lost in my own story. But getting lost and wandering in a story makes you more clearly aware of yourself as you’re disappearing somewhere, in a way that’s both similar to but different from getting lost and wandering in a forest or the streets. I feel as if I’m somewhere that doesn’t exist, as if I exist somewhere that doesn’t exist as a nonexistent being, as if I’m disappearing.

And I feel that this story has already become a failure, in that I tried at first to keep the anecdotes from turning into stories but didn’t succeed. But that was expected to a certain extent, and won’t be a problem. I may even feel a small private sense of victory in letting this story come, in the end, to a failure.

But still, rambling on — I think that the fact that time is probably the only thing I can waste makes it possible for me to ramble on — is making me very uncomfortable, and even bringing me displeasure that doesn’t come with great pleasure, but that’s probably something I need to risk as well. Anyway, another problem, although not more serious, is that I’m losing more and more interest in this story I began to write without much ambition, or if such a thing is possible, losing interest I never had in the first place, which is because I have a hard time doing something with an earnest desire, or with a desire disguised as an earnest desire. One of the biggest practical difficulties I have in writing is that too often, I lose interest gradually or suddenly in what I’m writing. But what I’ve lost interest in is not just this story. I’ve lost nearly all interest in nearly all things. Perhaps the only thing I have left to do is to write about the slightly interesting process of losing interest in something. Nevertheless, the paradox of writing in order to not write anymore, the paradox that I could write until there’s nothing left to write, that it would be difficult not to write until then, will keep me writing.

I have no choice but to keep going, whether I get lost in my story or find my way. I fumble as I write, as if reading Braille, fumbling in my mind. Perhaps I can write without ceasing, as if I didn’t care, somewhat carelessly, because I’m not genuinely interested. For there’s a kind of interest you can show because you’re not genuinely interested, a kind of concern you can show because you’re not genuinely concerned, for there are such things. I could probably go on writing this, for I know too well that it is perhaps perfectly useless.

If the purpose of travel, in a way, is to shatter illusions about an unknown world, my travels are true to their purpose in that respect. A logic could be developed, a logic that’s perhaps forced, that it’s best not to travel at all in order to maintain an illusion, and in fact, when I considered traveling, I was always conflicted between maintaining an illusion by not traveling, and seeing an illusion get shattered by traveling. I feel the same way about Turin, which I felt an urge to visit at one point, which brings the dilemma of whether to go to Turin, a city where the illusions I had about it were sure to get shattered the moment I set foot there, and see my illusions surely get shattered, or not go there and maintain my illusions. Perhaps the dilemma could be solved by maintaining my illusions for a while by not going to Turin for some time yet in the future, and then going there and seeing them get shattered.

I don’t feel much of an interest in majestic historical relics that show traces of time, or beautiful and impressive natural objects. Rarely did a place or a structure I actually saw surpass what I saw on television or in a photograph. I’ve almost never been moved by a place or a structure the way you should be moved. The Heidelberg Castle, which looked picturesque in a photograph, moved me so little, if at all, when I actually went there one summer that I couldn’t believe my eyes — at least, I was much less moved by the castle than I was by the sight of a black girl spinning around to extricate herself from her long scarf as her mother held on to the end — and the same went true for the old Hindu ruins in an Asian jungle that was very moving. The reason why a certain place or structure looked all right on television or in a photograph was because I could contemplate some interesting thoughts I had while looking at them.