Jung Young Moon: Vaseline Buddha

And having returned to my room at dawn, I lay motionless on the bed in the room which had a very high ceiling and imagined that there was a clown with a painted white face on a very long trapeze hanging from the ceiling, the kind you see at a circus, who was sprinkling over me a mysterious white powder that immobilized people, which was why I couldn’t move, and that I wouldn’t be able to move until I made him fall or dragged him down and immobilized him. In my imagination, the clown was swinging serenely on the trapeze, and already rendered immobile by him, I couldn’t find a way to divert his attention from giving me a hard time. If there was such a thing, that is, if the clown had some kind of a weakness, for instance, being afraid of the sound of a cock crowing, I could find it and immobilize him, but I had no way of knowing if he had any kind of a weakness. No, actually, it seemed that I was the one who was making the clown immobilize me. It seemed as if I had in my hand invisible strings attached to the clown’s head and arms and legs, and could make the clown move, the way you manipulate puppets, but I couldn’t move my hands. In the end, I could move only after making the invisible clown look no longer like a clown, turning him into something that wasn’t a clown, and wasn’t anything else, either.

But I liked the high ceiling, and felt that I could stay lying down forever if I was under that ceiling. One of the reasons why I almost never left the room was because I loved how high the ceiling was in that room.

But from that room, too, I could see various little movements. Beyond the garden out the window, I could see an old woman walking uncomfortably in the house, with the help of a stick, and a man making something late at night, and strangely, all this made me feel at ease. And through a window of the house to the left of my room, I could see a young woman who lived with a dog. Her dog was very big, and was actually almost as tall as she was when it stood straight up, and sometimes, I could see the dog stand upright on its hind legs and jump at her as if to attack her. I wasn’t able to find out what took place between the dog and the woman in her bedroom because of the closed curtains of her bedroom, but I thought, without any real grounds, that the dog was from Iceland, and even if she had physical relations with a dog, man’s best friend, it would be a very natural thing. Anyway, thinking that the garden, through which I could see all this, but which wasn’t much to look at in itself, helped me pass such difficult days, fully experiencing the comfort and discomfort brought on by lethargy, I look at the garden in front of my house now, which isn’t much to look at, either.

Now winter has passed, and so has spring, and summer has arrived. No, it’s not full summer yet, but it’s approaching summer. In the meantime (I finished translating To the Lighthouse, which ends with the death of some of the Ramsays and the guests who were invited to their home, and with the several who remain taking a boat to the lighthouse) I looked over what I’ve written, and added some stories and removed others, and corrected what could be corrected, and revised it on the whole. In the process, the story again moved in a direction I wanted or didn’t want. And I still haven’t put a title to this story, and again, I feel tempted to title it Vaseline Buddha or A Cat Walking on Piano Keys. But Untitled could be a fitting title for this story, which I feel says a lot about a lot of things, but hasn’t really said anything at all.

Several days ago, I went out for the first time in a while, because I suddenly wanted to see the dog I named Baudelaire, which looked even more stupid with a tattoo on its eyebrows. But something must have happened to the dog in the meantime, for I never saw it. So I wanted to see the Christian fundamentalist who, standing with a cross in his hand, startled me by shouting loudly when I was walking down the street one day, but I didn’t see any such person. But I was startled because a beggar who was sitting on the ground on a street somewhere slapped my leg, and the beggar, a very old woman, asked me for money with desperation on her face, the kind of desperation I hadn’t seen in a long time. I glared at her for a moment, upset that she had slapped me, but I was reminded of the woman I’d met in Amsterdam who had spinach stuck between her teeth, and in the end, could come home after giving her some money.

Now there are three cats walking on the roof of the house across the street. I’m not sure if they’re the cats I saw walking on the roof last year at the beginning of summer. But cats liked to spend time on the roof, which was sunny, and you could often see a cat, awake from a nap, arching its back all the way and stretching.

Among the cats is one that I saw on a rainy day several days ago, wet and walking in the rain. It’s hard to remember the face of a cat that doesn’t live with you, but I’d studied the cat’s face carefully and remembered it. The cat comes almost every day to the roof of the neighboring house that can be seen out my window, and leaves after taking a nap. We ran into each other a few times in an alley, and every time, the cat glanced at me for a moment and went on its way. One time I was holding an umbrella and I felt as if the cat were looking at me with ridicule, or contempt.

A gray mother cat takes its place on the roof, with a cat that looks like its baby, pretty big but smaller than its mother. I’m not sure if the mother cat is the kitten that had cried painfully, trapped in pumpkin vines, at the beginning of this past summer.

Cats lead a wandering life. No, they lead a roaming life. Perhaps they lead a wandering life, in their own way, as they roam. Thinking about the roaming or wandering of cats makes me think about wandering again. Anyway, the best travel book of sorts I know, as well as autobiography of sorts, in a broad sense, is Beckett’s Molloy, and in fact, when I travel, I take Molloy with me and read it in my hotel room, or lying in a lounge chair by the pool. But actually, Molloy is more of a story about wandering than about traveling, and perhaps one of the greatest misfortunes in the modern times is that the great spiritual human act of wandering has virtually disappeared, and wandering in the true sense is no longer possible. Now, travel is nothing more than an escape from everyday life, which is nothing more than an illusion. And travel is merely an expansion, as well as extension, of everyday life, not really an escape from everyday life. What I actually found during travels undertaken to break free from everyday life was everyday life that was somewhat unfamiliar, or not unfamiliar at all.

Now the cats on the roof are passing the time quietly. A magpie is sitting still on a persimmon tree, and I’m quietly staring at the cats and the magpie. I don’t see anything that’s vigilantly waiting for an opportunity to do something. There could be some such thing in the pumpkin vines, although I don’t see it. The cats and the magpie and I are absorbed in our own worlds, irrelevant to each other. We will stay that way until there’s a movement, a noise that catches our attention. After something like that occurs, we will again return to our own worlds and time. Like summer bugs that look like they’re flying around heedlessly, or like the bodies of dead stinkbugs or spiders piled up on a windowsill in winter.

In any case, the fact that the cats and the magpie are unaware that I’m writing about them pleases me for no reason. They live in their own worlds. The same is true of myself. And yet they’re with me in my imagination and in my story. And I think that I too barely exist in the story I’m writing, and am with myself in the story.