Jung Young Moon: Vaseline Buddha

But I couldn’t fall asleep right away even after taking sleeping pills, and could go to sleep only after a long process of picturing green cats, blue elephants, red cats, yellow hippopotamuses, and so on, or drawing a circle with a chalk on a chalkboard and writing the number 100 in the circle, then erasing the number and the circle with a chalk eraser, and then writing the number backwards.

And whenever I fell asleep in that way, I thought calmly and carefully about the question of taking my own life, as I often do when I become steeped in a sentiment brought on by feelings, and by solitude and thoughts on solitude, that come over me when I’m in a room in a foreign city or other such places. I’ve thought countless times, of course, about what someone called shy homicide but I considered bold homicide, and the thought of suicide was something that stayed with me, but I didn’t come to a decision about it or anything, just as I’d never thought about it before to the point of coming to a decision. And yet I thought once again that I couldn’t accept a death of natural causes, that I would end up choosing suicide, a means to end this absurd life in an absurd way, not a final revenge on life, but an ultimate realization of your will. But I couldn’t decide on the specific method and time for the execution of suicide. Yet regarding the method, I had a notion that it should be somewhat tragic, but not without dignity — for losing dignity would be the most tragic thing of all. And the time would be at some point in the far or near future, a little before, or much before, the time of my natural death. The time, not specifically appointed, could be appointed in the near future or somewhat far future. So before deciding on the time at which I would go through with suicide, I had to decide on the time at which I would make up my mind about it.

The room I stayed in, thinking such thoughts, wasn’t the best place to sleep in, but a moderate amount of noise that created a cozy feeling could be heard from time to time, and although it was cold outside, it was warm inside, and looking at the huge poplar tree in the middle of the garden that looked at least a hundred years old, and was spending the winter in the bone-chilling cold, I felt a sort of satisfaction in that I, at least, wasn’t trembling in the cold, and looking at my body, which was as skinny as that of the old Jewish man who lived next door, I thought that my weight remained the same when I almost never ate, but that sometimes, when I ate more than I usually did, I lost weight, but I didn’t know the reason why, and wasn’t even sure if it was true. And I thought about how once, I had a dream in which I was lying on the floor of a wrecked ship, and things like chairs and drawers and pillows were floating around in the water in the cabin of the wrecked ship, a dream that in itself was like a wrecked ship, and how I thought afterwards that the ship, which sank, unable to bear the weight of my body, would be able to rise above the water only after I disappeared without a trace, or if I sank into a deeper dream, and continuing on with the thought I had in mist-shrouded Venice, I thought about a giraffe that escaped from its cage and was poking its head in through a second story window, opened by someone in the confusion of war or revolution, and continuing with that thought, I thought about lonely declining years made up of days I would start or not start by opening a window, through which a giraffe I was raising would poke its head, and I would pat my cherished giraffe, keenly feeling that the giraffe was all I had left but thinking that it was enough, and of course that was something symbolic, not real, but to me, it was quite real. And continuing on with that thought I thought that perhaps the problem with my life was that for some time now my life has been a full-fledged fight against realism, a fight that was long and difficult, and tedious but pleasant, and felt a vague yet tangible anxiety that the rest of my days may or may not pass in the way I vaguely thought they would, and wondered why I almost never thought about going to the zoo here in Berlin, although when I visited a big city, I always tried, if possible, to go to the zoo that was bound to be there, although that didn’t mean that I’ve been to a lot of zoos, but I couldn’t figure out why.

One day, the old Jewish man told me that the poplar was dying of a disease, that nearly all the poplars planted at the center of the countless buildings in Berlin had come down with the disease, and that for some reason, the Berlin authorities were leaving the trees, which were an exotic species, to die. Strangely, the fact that the poplars of Berlin were dying in this way saddened my heart.

Later on, when I was a little better, I took a short walk in the streets around my place from time to time, had a meal, had coffee in a café on the first floor of the building I lived in, then came home. The rest of Berlin seemed too far from me, and it seemed hardly possible for me to go there. At the café, where I became a regular customer after just a few visits, I talked to the café owner, a French man, about Germany and the German people, but mostly he criticized them and I concurred without giving it much thought. He rambled on about how weird and boring the Germans were, and I agreed, saying that in general, people who were weird were interesting, at least, and it was a terrible thing to be just weird, and not interesting at all. And yet he lived in Germany, and had a girlfriend who was German. Regarding that, he said that Berlin, although it was a part of Germany, wasn’t like Germany at all, and that his girlfriend also hated the Germans. He said that most of the people living in Berlin were people who hated Germany. According to him, there was no part of Germany, no field or forest, that was untouched by human hands, and the Germans continuously maintained everything in an almost compulsive way, not letting nature stay in its natural state, as if they couldn’t condone it. Actually, while traveling in Germany before, I’d felt very uncomfortable, seeing that everything from the fields to the forests was artificial. The French café owner said that in Germany, a country that was like a well-manicured garden in itself, there was no countryside like the French countryside, and that Berlin was the only place in Germany where you could see weeds, and that was the reason why he lived in Berlin. It suddenly occurred to me that the Germans of the past could have made the rash attempt to turn all races into the Aryan race because of some kind of an obsessive compulsive disorder, like the kind that kept them from letting weeds grow anywhere. But thinking about how they tried to make everyone look like them, when they weren’t that attractive in general, I thought how ridiculous their scheme was. Even as I sympathized with his expression of antagonism against the Germans, I didn’t tell him about the antagonism I’d felt against France while living there.

And one day I ran into a German woman at the café and became friends with her, and we grew somewhat fond of each other, and took a late night walk together from time to time. I thought that she wasn’t the type of woman I liked, but I did like her in some ways, perhaps because she was six feet tall, the same height as mine. My feelings for the woman, who looked like a volleyball player even though she wasn’t, would have decreased considerably if she was just an inch shorter or taller than I was, I thought (Later, when I learned that she weighed 145 pounds, the same weight as mine, my feelings for her became indescribable). It was an odd criterion for liking someone, but the fact that we were exactly the same, as far as the length of our bodies went, made me like her. To tell the truth, I met, along with her, another woman who was at least six feet tall, and it was this woman who showed more interest in me. To be precise, she showed a little more interest in me than the six feet tall woman did, and I was more attracted to the six feet tall woman.