Jung Young Moon - Vaseline Buddha

Anyway, what I took care of mostly, in the house I went to in order to take care of a cat, was a plant in that house. It was a sweet oleander, poisonous from the leaves to the roots, and its white sap, in particular, could kill you if it so much as touched your bruised skin. I say I took care of it, but all I did was water it once, and what I did mostly was think about the poison that filled up the body of the plant.

I spent a lot of time thinking random thoughts, sitting naked, motionless like a chameleon, in a wooden chair that was at a corner of the living room of someone else’s empty house, which I left my own house to stay in, and among the thoughts were the memory of looking at the Eiffel Tower, a part of which could be seen through the window, and the wallpaper in the room, in a hotel in Paris, and the memory of the sound of a kitten crying, which I heard in my house once, and the memory of being indescribably touched as a child when I fell asleep one day in the middle of the day, listening to the sound of countless silkworms quietly munching on mulberry leaves in a corner of the room, and then woke up to see them squirming quietly. The sound of silkworms munching on mulberry leaves was a sound that was at the heart of the kind of peace I experienced only in my childhood, a sound that wasn’t quite a noise, although it was a noise, and sounded infinitely pleasant for that reason, and it brought me great pleasure. It suddenly occurred to me that there may never have been a moment in my life when I was genuinely happy, except for the moments when I was happy for no reason at all, and for that reason, I was sad for a moment.

And I also thought for a moment about the person who was taking care of my goldfish for me at my house, and about the time when I watched the goldfish for several hours wanting to learn something about its everyday life. And I thought about a woman I used to know. She had a six-year-old nephew at the time, and although he was very young, he was so wicked as to lead you to reflect deeply on evil, on human nature. It was nothing unusual for him to hit other children, and he touched women’s bodies without feeling any shame at all — he mostly tried to get his hands into women’s skirts one way or another, and not being content with that, tried to get himself into women’s skirts — and went around cursing all the time. No one was able to figure out what extraordinary phenomenon took place in the child’s mind to turn him into such a fiend. It was nearly impossible to change his nature, and he ended up in a juvenile delinquent facility when he got older. When he was little, when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he always said that he wanted to be a soldier in the national armed forces, which was distinctly different from a child saying that he wanted to be a soldier when he grew up.

And I recalled something the woman told me, how when a military coup broke out in the city she lived in as a child and citizens were slaughtered, the first victim in the city was probably a cat, not a person, although she wasn’t sure if she had dreamt it or imagined it (I realized at that moment that the reason why I thought, in mist-shrouded Venice, that the first victim of some wars or revolutions was a cat or some other animal was because of what she told me). Perhaps that was true. Perhaps the soldiers of the armed forces deployed to suppress the protesters had no experience killing, and shot to death an animal, a cat, before they committed their first murder, whereby they gained confidence and carried out genocide. During the French Revolution, in fact, it was a sheep, not a man, that became the first to die at the guillotine. So people used a sheep to test the performance of the newly invented guillotine. Anyway, she thought that an anecdote about the sacrifice of a cat should be included in the history of the well-known massacre.

What I spent the most time thinking about while thinking about her, however, was someone she knew. A friend of hers went on a trip with several people, said he was stepping out for a moment while having a meal at a seaside restaurant, and left, never to return. With that, he disappeared without a trace. No one knew if he was abducted or disappeared on his own. She believed that he must have committed suicide by jumping into the sea. People who committed suicide could show different behavior from usual just before committing suicide, but it was quite possible for them to act no different from usual.

And recalling how I once spent time making a list of things that were neither good nor bad for passing the time, I tried to recall the list, but nothing came to mind other than that I played my own requiem with a few notes on the broken organ. When evening finally came, I took out a handful of wilted lettuce from the fridge and quietly chewed on it, and the first thing I knew, I was chewing, without realizing it, the way a goat chews grass. And eating a banana after finishing the lettuce, as if having dessert, I felt as if I were a goat, as well as a monkey, a hairless ape. I realized that in order to suddenly realize that you were distant relatives with monkeys, it was enough to sit naked, imitating a monkey, scratching yourself without thinking, or eating a banana.

And I thought that the reason why I thought a lot about other animals was because a general lack of interest in human things led me to descend and ascend into an animal world, and into a transcendental world. And there seemed to be a world somewhere between the descent and the ascent where you couldn’t stay, but could at least go in and out of.

And the next day while quietly eating an apricot I’d brought with me, I recalled how I gave apricots to a cow I encountered on a country road in France, and thought about a man who stayed home alone doing nothing for a period of time in his youth, then suddenly became a bulldozer driver one day and drove bulldozers for several years, and then went on an ocean ship for several years, after which he returned home and spent several years doing nothing — or did he go on an ocean ship for several years in his youth, then return home and do nothing for several years, and then one day suddenly become a bulldozer driver and drive bulldozers for several months, and again spend a period of time staying home alone doing nothing? — and was found dead, sitting on a chair in a corner of his living room.

The story about the man, which I wasn’t sure was true or not, was something I heard from an anesthesiologist. When I thought about the man, I always pictured him with his back turned to the world, or, rather, with the world’s back turned to him, and imagined that he drove a bulldozer and got on an ocean ship with the lethargy of his lone years in which he did nothing. For at times, lethargy becomes the greatest source of strength. Could it be that perhaps a strength that was the complete opposite of passion had provoked the greatest passion in him?

I also recalled how the anesthesiologist said that he had signed contracts with several hospitals, and mostly anesthetized patients requiring a big surgery, after which he would spend up to ten hours, until the anesthesia wore off, waiting somewhere near the patient, reading a novel or fantasizing, and how he said he wanted to turn the story about the dead man into a novel. His life didn’t seem all that different from that of the man he told me about. And although I don’t know if it was true or not, he said that sometimes he put himself under anesthesia and indulged in the pleasure of the hallucination that came over him as he was being anesthetized.

The story about the life of the man, who spent most of his time in loneliness despite driving a bulldozer and getting on an ocean ship, had a strange hold on my heart, not because his life was dramatic, but because I could sense a certain majestic loneliness in him.