Jung Young Moon: Vaseline Buddha

Or perhaps these words were conceived in my mind and had their beginning in the moment I felt severe dizziness as I watched a number of black birds, which had been sitting on a tree, suddenly soaring all at once into the darkening sky when I absently threw a rock while taking a walk in the woods near my house one evening.

(Between the moment when I’m writing a sentence and the moment when the thing spoken of in the sentence actually or fictionally took place, there’s a space like a river that must be crossed by swimming, and I could be swept away by the current to a wrong place while crossing the river.)

At that moment, I thought that I could make certain motifs appear repeatedly in my story — you could say that that’s the only idea I came up with while contemplating this story — while thinking that I could write something about someone who constantly felt dizzy, and at the same time, thinking that I had witnessed in the past scenes similar to that of the birds soaring into the darkening sky and disappearing.

It’s true, however, that around that time, I was thinking a lot about a species of parrot called kea that lives in the highlands of New Zealand, which I happened to read about in a newspaper article, but it’s clear that the fact bears no direct relation to how I came to write this. . But is it so clear?

Through the article, I found out that keas are birds that have feathers with a green tint, are bigger than ordinary parrots and intelligent enough to push or pull an object in a certain order so as to obtain food, are full of curiosity, and go through clothes and stuff people leave lying around, taking a short break while traveling, and take out the things in the pockets or just fly away with the clothes in their beaks, and have a cruel eating habit in which they alight mostly on sheep feeding on grass and make them die a slow, painful death, by delving into the sheep’s bodies using their beaks and claws and eating the kidneys, but the paper did not carry a picture of the birds and I couldn’t see what they looked like.

In reality the sheep may flee, or put up a struggle, at least, instead of having their kidneys ripped out by parrots while quietly grazing on grass, but in my imagination they are quietly grazing on grass even as their kidneys are being ripped out by the parrots. The feeling that sheep, which graze on grass incessantly to satisfy or appease a hunger that isn’t easily satisfied or appeased, feel with the greatest intensity in their life is probably none other than hunger, and it must be their fate to feel constant hunger. (Some facts, though irrelevant to me, lead me to feel pain or think about pain just because they are facts, and the fact about the sheep in the highlands of New Zealand is among them.)

The sheep, unlike some monkeys that, looking very startled, cry out in a quite peculiar way, meaning, Watch out, eagles, when feeling threatened by eagles that prey on them, may think, The only way for us to beat those parrots is to flaunt our fearsome silence while having our kidneys ripped out, and this may serve as a clue in understanding the fearsome silence of sheep. And there’s something humorous about another aspect of sheep in my mind, which is that they release methane, a greenhouse gas, as they quietly, and solemnly, burp. A cycle of revenge is created in which keas, which have lived in the highlands of New Zealand for a long time in my fantasy about sheep taking revenge on humans who have long been slaughtering them, by quietly and solemnly releasing methane, take revenge on sheep, brought by European immigrants, which have invaded their territory, and sheep take revenge on humans (this is one of the many notions I have of sheep), and humans take revenge on everything for no good reason (this seems very human to me). I imagine that herbivores that stuff themselves with things they shouldn’t eat, things that are raised as livestock by humans, because humans force them to eat such things, are taking revenge now only by quietly burping and farting, but that they are quietly and solemnly preparing a great revenge which defies comparison to burps or farts, and that it’ll come as a great catastrophe to humans someday. And this idea arises from the belief that it’s unjust for humans to rule over this world thinking they can do whatever they please with this world.

Picturing parrots that are constantly after sheep kidneys and sheep that could lose their kidneys to parrots if they don’t watch out, and which live together in their own kind of peace, though not at peace, I thought about the connection between things that are difficult to connect, and a performance by parrots and sheep held on the stage of the highlands of New Zealand seemed, to me at least, something more surreal than (or as surreal as) any surrealistic painting or film or play, and led me to think that I should like to include in this piece a surrealistic element, whose meaning I’ve reconsidered for a long time, and which is an important literary legacy, though neglected today, and also led me to think that I could make some other possible attempt by doing so, and that it could be one of the features of what I intended to write.

And now, momentarily lost in an unrealistic fantasy, I think that in order to see, understand, accept, and describe the reality of a moment, you need to make an effort to not see reality as it is, an effort at distortion, to see it from another angle, from another level, and in another way, and not merely evade it, and that there’s a reality that can be reached only beyond realism. And I think that surrealism, with its obscure boundaries, lies not beyond realism, but could become undeniable reality within reality. It seems that I think somewhat lightly of realism — this could mean realism in a broad sense in some cases, and in others, a narrow sense — but it occurs to me, too, that there’s something in realism that could be taken somewhat lightly. And I think about what an unrealistic world I live in, and that perhaps the world in which those unrealistic things come back to become my reality is the very place I can feel comfortable in. And I feel that the highlands of New Zealand I picture in my mind, at least where there are sheep having their kidneys ripped out by parrots, are an undeniable reality to me, though it seems like a surreal world, and that I undeniably exist before that undeniable surreality.

Perhaps I could add here a scene that has something to do with me seeing a flock of swallows that came flying from somewhere repeatedly swooping down, brushing against the surface of the water in the pool that no one entered because the water was too cold, and flying away as I lay reading one afternoon at the poolside at a hotel in a resort (I’d been in Nepal for several days at the time, but I was in a state in which I couldn’t tell why I was there, and the fact that someone told me that he saw me die a terrible death in a foreign land in his dream, not long before I went to Nepal, had nothing to do with the trip. Actually, I had vaguely intended to go to Tibet or India, not Nepal, and vaguely thought before I went on the trip to Nepal that I wanted to see the yaks in the Himalayas where I could see snow-covered mountains right before my eyes — I’d seen on television how the yaks, full of suspicion, ate only the salt that their keepers fed them, even though salt was something that was essential for them, so I wanted to see for myself if that really was the case, and above all, I wanted to feed the yaks salt with my own hands, and told the people I met around that time that I was going to the Himalayas to see yaks, and it felt like the truth — but it wasn’t to see yaks that I went to the Himalayas. But yaks were at a higher altitude than the altitude to which I climbed, and I ended up not seeing a single yak and had to come down from the Himalayas after getting an eyeful of nothing but donkeys. One of the things I realized while climbing the snow-covered mountains of the Himalayas was that you have to be more careful to not trip and fall over the donkey droppings that were scattered all over the road than to not fall down the cliff that was thousands of meters deep. Of course, you’d also have to be careful not to fall down the cliff that was thousands of meters deep by tripping over donkey droppings.) Several days earlier, standing before the impressive snow-covered mountains, over eight thousand meters high, I’d summed up my feelings about the mountains in the words, Here are some very, no, somewhat high mountains that are covered with snow, but so what? And the emotions that were stirred up by the snow-covered mountains became trapped in those words. Actually, the majestic view of the snow-covered mountains was decent at first, but then it wasn’t as decent as it was at first, and then it was just so-so, and looking at them was similar to listening to a majestic but boring symphony that caught your ears when the performance began, but soon made you feel nothing at all.