Jung Young Moon: Vaseline Buddha

I didn’t know how the old woman had trained the dog to stay so still, or if she was punishing the dog in some way by making it stay still, or expressing love in her own way. In any case, the old woman never neglected to watch the dog even as she knitted, as if she were more concerned with the dog moving than her knitting. Maybe she was knitting a sweater for the dog, and was making the dog wait without moving an inch, at least until the sweater was finished.

Curiously, the dog sometimes stood in place, shaking all over, and it seemed in those moments that it was in some kind of a convulsion. Maybe it was because the dog had remained still for too long, or maybe it was its own way of moving around. Once in such a state, it shook continuously for about half an hour, and nothing could be done about it. The old woman — she was a horrid old woman — would at last glance at the dog as if to make sure that it was her dog and no one else’s. The dog was mesmerized by whatever it was that was making it shake, I was mesmerized in watching the dog that was mesmerized by something, and the old woman was mesmerized in her knitting, and it seemed in those moments that we were all mesmerized, afflicted by something that mesmerized us while afflicting us.

The dog, however, wasn’t actually a dog accompanying the old woman with whom I spent afternoons in a park in France. The dog belonged to another woman, middle-aged, who came to the park at a certain hour. The reason why I said that the dog that belonged to the middle-aged woman was the old woman’s — it was the middle-aged woman who made the dog stay still, and it was she who was horrid — was because by putting a leash in the old woman’s hand, I could picture a scene in which the woman and the dog walked across the park side by side on their way home, looking lonely, and funny at the same time. In any case, the fact that I’m talking about an old woman knitting in a park in France, and telling an anecdote about a dog that was mesmerized by something, whatever it was, may suggest that this story will be about certain thoughts that mesmerize and afflict me.

When put this way, what I’m saying may sound like the truth, but this story, at least the part about the dog, isn’t true. I actually saw the dog recently in the garden of a café near my place. The dog came into the story somewhat arbitrarily because I put it in a past story in my memory. Anyway, the dog does go into convulsions from time to time, and usually seems stricken with fear. When someone approaches the doghouse, the dog, which is always in the doghouse, begins to bark loudly at once, at first out of gladness because it’s always alone, but while barking out of gladness it changes its mind instantly, realizing that it’s afraid of something, and begins to bark in a fearful voice, no longer glad, but no one can tell what it is that makes the dog tremble in fear.

Actually, the story about the old woman itself isn’t true. I’m making up new stories by mixing up my memories and thoughts, and linking together things that have nothing to do with each other. There actually were old women who came to the park and sat on benches for a long time, but there wasn’t one who spent all day there. (What I’m saying is that I’ll be telling a story in which gazes fixed on certain things, and memories and thoughts, are jumbled together.)When I take my eyes off the people who come to the little old park, I see myself sitting blankly on a bench, afflicted by a number of thoughts. I was able to leave the city, where I spent my time for some obscure reason, after going to the riverside one winter day and coming across a large, dolphin-shaped tube floating down the river — many things floated down the river in my memory, because ever since I was little, I always liked to idly watch the river — and while slowly walking by the riverside with the tube alongside me — I pictured in my mind a clumsy-looking band slowly marching along the riverside while playing a slow tune — saw it finally disappear from my view.

I spent the summer and autumn that year lying among the shrubs on the sandy plain along the river, looking at the river and feeling that my life had expired or I had entered a thoroughly wrong path. No, I thought I had yet to go down many more wrong paths in order to enter a thoroughly wrong path.

At any rate, the dolphin-shaped tube I saw, which could have been thrown out by a father who was angry at his child, or by a child who was disappointed in, or felt betrayed by, his father, or by someone in the family who was angry for some reason or angry at nothing other than the tube itself, which caught the person’s eye at that moment, or which was floating down the winter river for some other obscure reason, did not come to me as some kind of a revelation, because to the end, I did not let the tube, which hadn’t come to me as a revelation from the beginning, come to me as a revelation. Nevertheless, the dolphin tube gave me enough motivation to leave the city — perhaps I took the tube, which hadn’t come to me as a revelation, as some kind of a suggestion — which was perhaps because I was occupied with thoughts about the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” composed by a linguist, which I’d read around that time but hadn’t understood the precise meaning of, and vaguely thought, when the tube had floated down the meandering river and could no longer be seen, that I may end up writing something, something about the difficulty of existence, the difficulty of talking about the difficulty of existence, the double difficulty of it, and that it would begin with me leaving the city. (How easy is it, though, for such words to be without truth? Thinking about the colossal gap between truth and falsehood, the gray area that can’t be named, and thinking that the gap must be filled by fabrication, as inadequate as it is, I think that this story, too, will consist mostly of such fabrication.)

Watching the dolphin on the river, which was disappearing from my view, I regretted that I wasn’t wearing a black fedora, because it seemed that the act of taking it off, hanging it on a branch of a bare tree on the winter riverside, then leaving the spot — I have a habit of calling up specific objects when I can’t carry on with abstract thoughts — would serve as a gracious farewell to the dolphin that could no longer be seen, and would perhaps, if lucky, reach the sea, which would suit it better, and float around among real dolphins, triggering their curiosity, as well as a farewell to a certain period in my life. Furthermore, I liked to think, although it wasn’t true, that the dolphin tube I saw floating down a winter river made for me a decision that I myself had difficulty making, and that the course of my life had thus changed slightly, indeed ever so slightly, because it was a good thing, at least in my mind, for the course of my life to change, be it slightly, by a dolphin tube I happened to see floating down a river one day, or by something that had nothing to do with me, like the tube, something that was almost nothing at all.

I myself couldn’t say whether or not this was true. But there are thoughts that, despite having occurred in the mind, become more real in the mind than things that have actually taken place, which is the case for the thoughts above. And the thoughts may be telling me that I already know that what I’m writing will be about things that tell me nothing. And talking about things that tell you nothing is probably the same as thinking about things that remain obscure to the end.

In effect, what I really want to talk about is something that’s nothing, or things you can’t talk about. Although most of them are difficult to talk about, you can talk at least about the ways in which you can’t talk about them, and how inexpressible they are, or how inexpressibly expressible they are, in which, perhaps, lies the ultimate something of speaking.