Jung Young Moon: Vaseline Buddha

But watching the swallows brushing against the water and soaring at the poolside reminded me of an experience I had in a little airplane flying precariously among snow-covered mountains over eight thousand meters high, and the swallows washed away all my regret for having come to Nepal. The old airplane of a small airline company, named Gorkha after the historical little kingdom in Nepal, began to rock with the updraft, and it seemed that it would crash any minute. Not only was the seatbelt broken, but the seat itself was shaking and I had to hold on to the back of the seat with my hands. No, things like the seatbelt didn’t even matter. If the plane crashed, it would be difficult just to salvage the dead bodies. It seemed that the plane was playing out a situation just prior to a crash. Anyway, in that urgent moment when my life was in peril, I suddenly recalled the apple in my bag that I took from the hotel cafeteria that morning, and so, looking out the window in the rocking airplane at the snow-covered mountains, thinking that I could easily die that moment, and chewing the apple as though in quiet meditation, I thought what comfort it brought to eat an apple for the last time in an airplane that could crash, and as I did my heart did in fact calm down and great joy came rushing in (and it was while I was quietly eating the apple on the dangerous airplane during the half-hour flight that I came up with a story about an apple with teeth marks on it on a bench in the kingdom of Budapest, which will develop into a story about dentures in the end, and which I may tell here).

I couldn’t tell why the swallows were doing such a thing, but they looked as if they were deriving some kind of a pleasure from doing it. I suddenly recalled that when I was little, I saw the same thing, meaning swallows swooping down and brushing against the river and soaring, countless times at the river in the summer, and that I swam in the river, and at times jumped from the branches hanging over the river.

Anyway, I raptly watched the swallows that seemed rapt in doing what they were doing, closed the book I’d been reading, and very much enjoyed the stunt being performed before my eyes. I wished that the swallows that swooped down and brushed against the water and soared would keep on doing what they were doing, and the swallows kept on doing it as if it were nothing at all to grant such a wish, and kept on doing it even when, after a while, I thought it would be all right for them stop now, and kept on doing it, giving me no heed, when I shouted to them in a loud voice, in my heart, to stop it this instant, and kept on doing it when I said in a somewhat dejected voice that I wouldn’t tolerate them if they didn’t stop it this instant, now, so I said, in a faint voice, that they should keep on doing it if they had to, if they had no choice but to do it, if it was something that couldn’t be helped.

The performance by the swallows went on for over an hour, and in the end, I whispered, What you’re doing has nothing to do with me, but what’s more, it has nothing to do with yourselves either, and only after a while did they fly off somewhere else as if nothing had happened in the meantime.

But even after the swallows stopped doing that strange thing and flew off somewhere else, I calmly made my swallows go on kicking the water and flying up for a long time in my heart, and I actually felt excited, as if something somewhere inside me were giving me a kick and calmly soaring, and therein lay my idea of a moment of fiction. Perhaps it was because I am infinitely drawn to things that are caught up in some kind of a blind passion, and feel driven to describe such things.

And the excitement continued until after I had a dream that night about a bird suddenly appearing out of a bowl of soup, lightly beating my face with its wing, and soaring into the air and flying out the open window, leaving a little fish, with only the bones remaining, floating in the soup bowl (I’ll probably be talking about the somewhat strange dreams I’ve had as well).

It’s difficult to trace the details of how I came to write this story, its origin, or source. The source of everything can be either nowhere or everywhere. Saying this, however, doesn’t help at all in finding the source of something. And at times, revealing the source of something does not lead to an understanding of it. But what lies at the source of something? This question doesn’t help, either, so let’s narrow down the question and ask, what lies at the source of thought? What do you finally reach when you cast a thought back to another, like a fish that swims upstream, or like the act of going upstream to find the source of the river itself? But you can see, without thinking deeply about it, that empty thoughts lie at the source, just as nothing lies at the source of everything. And perhaps thought in itself is something whose source cannot be reached and the source of a thought that can be conceived is something that can’t be reached even in thought. (Here I have no choice but to give up on thinking. I may also be making an attempt to circumvent the source as I write this, or I may be growing distant from the source but, at the same time, going toward it.) Perhaps you could say that there’s no source to this story, or that there’s a myriad of sources.

Thus I feel tempted once again to think, perhaps to my own convenience, that contrary to what I’ve said so far, this story began when I was sitting on a rock in a forest a while ago picturing a manuscript, like an unfinished posthumous work, that’s on or near a hand of someone sleeping or lying as if dead, or lying dead, in the faint moonlight shining down on a forest of perpetual night in which eagle-owls are flying from tree to tree.

But this story may have begun in another moment, when I found myself walking, quietly listening to the sound of my own footsteps, on the stairs leading downward to a dark basement and upward to the roof where bright light was shining through, and through corridors with open or closed doors, while carrying something that looked like a birdcage — but no sound of birds came out from within — whose contents couldn’t be discerned, or which didn’t contain anything, or a lamp — but no light leaked out from within — in a building I somehow ended up entering in a strange city. Or it may have begun in the moment when I, in mist-shrouded Venice, thought of something as I pictured a child jumping on a trampoline somewhere in the city (I’ll probably talk about that moment in this story). But it’s probably useless to look for the source in this way.

With that, I’m not prepared to begin, but I will. But how, and with what, do I begin? It doesn’t matter what I begin with, but I’d have to choose among countless stories, since I’ll have to begin with one. (I have already begun, and have come a little ways from where I began, and what I’m writing is headed in an unknown direction, but it feels as if I haven’t even begun, as if I’m hovering outside this story without even having entered it, and I could go on feeling, even as I go on writing this story, that I am just beginning, that I haven’t even begun when the story is over, that I’m back to square one in the end, and in order to make that happen, I may have to wrap up with a story that makes you feel that it’s going back to square one. Nevertheless, I feel that this story has begun to manifest some kind of an essence in some kind of a form.)

I should limit what I talk about to certain subjects, since I can’t think about everything, and talk about everything I think about. I could begin with certain thoughts that have a strong or loose hold over me, and certain subjects made up of a series of these thoughts, things I’ve thought about for a long time and thought about linking together, death and travel and everyday life, for instance, and an overlapping mixture of these things, and see, with a bit of curiosity, how the subjects that I think could link together do link together in the story. In the process, I’ll add thoughts to certain memories, bring memories into certain ideas, and link separate images into successive images (this story is also a story about the process of writing a story).