Ingwon

[ingwon]

Oh God Not Another New York Essay - Find Your Beach by Zadie Smith

Across the way from our apartment—on Houston, I guess—there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year. Whatever’s on that wall is my view: I look at it more than the sky or the new World Trade Center, more than the water towers, the passing cabs. It has a subliminal effect. Last semester it was a spot for high-end vodka, and while I wrangled children into their snowsuits, chock-full of domestic resentment, I’d find myself dreaming of cold martinis.

Before that came an ad so high-end I couldn’t tell what it was for. There was no text—or none that I could see—and the visual was of a yellow firebird set upon a background of hellish red. It seemed a gnomic message, deliberately placed to drive a sleepless woman mad. Once, staring at it with a newborn in my arms, I saw another mother, in the tower opposite, holding her baby. It was 4 AM. We stood there at our respective windows, separated by a hundred feet of expensive New York air.

The tower I live in is university accommodation; so is the tower opposite. The idea occurred that it was quite likely that the woman at the window also wrote books for a living, and, like me, was not writing anything right now. Maybe she was considering antidepressants. Maybe she was already on them. It was hard to tell. Certainly she had no way of viewing the ad in question, not without opening her window, jumping, and turning as she fell. I was her view. I was the ad for what she already had.

But that was all some time ago. Now the ad says: Find your beach. The bottle of beer—it’s an ad for beer—is very yellow and the background luxury-holiday-blue. It seems to me uniquely well placed, like a piece of commissioned public art in perfect sympathy with its urban site. The tone is pure Manhattan. Echoes can be found in the personal growth section of the bookstore (“Find your happy”), and in exercise classes (“Find your soul”), and in the therapist’s office (“Find your self”). I find it significant that there exists a more expansive, national version of this ad that runs in magazines, and on television.

In those cases photographic images are used, and the beach is real and seen in full. Sometimes the tag line is expanded, too: When life gives you limes…Find your beach. But the wall I see from my window marks the entrance to Soho, a district that is home to media moguls, entertainment lawyers, every variety of celebrity, some students, as well as a vanishingly small subset of rent-controlled artists and academics.

Collectively we, the people of Soho, consider ourselves pretty sophisticated consumers of media. You can’t put a cheesy ad like that past us. And so the ad has been reduced to its essence—a yellow undulation against a field of blue—and painted directly onto the wall, in a bright pop-art style. The mad men know that we know the Soho being referenced here: the Soho of Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, the Soho that came before Foot Locker, Sephora, Prada, frozen yogurt. That Soho no longer exists, of course, but it’s part of the reason we’re all here, crowded on this narrow strip of a narrow island. Whoever placed this ad knows us well.

Find your beach. The construction is odd. A faintly threatening mixture of imperative and possessive forms, the transformation of a noun into a state of mind. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. On the one hand it means, simply, “Go out and discover what makes you happy.” Pursue happiness actively, as Americans believe it their right to do. And it’s an ad for beer, which makes you happy in the special way of all intoxicants, by reshaping reality around a sensation you alone are having. So, even more precisely, the ad means: “Go have a beer and let it make you happy.” Nothing strange there. Except beer used to be sold on the dream of communal fun: have a beer with a buddy, or lots of buddies. People crowded the frame, laughing and smiling. It was a lie about alcohol—as this ad is a lie about alcohol—but it was a different kind of lie, a wide-framed lie, including other people.

Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if—as in the case of this wall painting—it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty.

In an exercise class recently the instructor shouted at me, at all of us: “Don’t let your mind set limits that aren’t really there.” You’ll find this attitude all over the island. It is encouraged and reflected in the popular culture, especially the movies, so many of which, after all, begin their creative lives here, in Manhattan. According to the movies it’s only our own limited brains that are keeping us from happiness. In the future we will take a pill to make us limitless (and ideal citizens of Manhattan), or we will, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy, use 100 percent of our brain’s capacity instead of the mythic 10. In these formulations the world as it is has no real claim on us. Our happiness, our miseries, our beaches, or our blasted heaths—they are all within our own power to create, or destroy. On Tina Fey’s television show 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy—the consummate citizen of this new Manhattan—deals with problems by crushing them with his “mind vise.”

The beach is always there: you just have to conceive of it. It follows that those who fail to find their beach are, in the final analysis, mentally fragile; in Manhattan terms, simply weak. Jack Donaghy’s verbal swordplay with Liz Lemon was a comic rendering of the various things many citizens of Manhattan have come to regard as fatal weakness: childlessness, obesity, poverty. To find your beach you have to be ruthless. Manhattan is for the hard-bodied, the hard-minded, the multitasker, the alpha mamas and papas. A perfect place for self-empowerment—as long as you’re pretty empowered to begin with. As long as you’re one of these people who simply do not allow anything—not even reality—to impinge upon that clear field of blue.

There is a kind of individualism so stark that it seems to dovetail with an existentialist creed: Manhattan is right at that crossroads. You are pure potential in Manhattan, limitless, you are making yourself every day. When I am in England each summer, it’s the opposite: all I see are the limits of my life. The brain that puts a hairbrush in the fridge, the leg that radiates pain from the hip to the toe, the lovely children who eat all my time, the books unread and unwritten.

And casting a shadow over it all is what Philip Larkin called “extinction’s alp,” no longer a stable peak in a distance, finally becoming rising ground. In England even at the actual beach I cannot find my beach. I look out at the freezing 40-degree water, at the families squeezed into ill-fitting wetsuits, huddled behind windbreakers, approaching a day at the beach with the kind of stoicism once conjured for things like the Battle of Britain, and all I can think is what funny, limited creatures we are, subject to every wind and wave, building castles in the sand that will only be knocked down by the generation coming up beneath us.

When I land at JFK, everything changes. For the first few days it is a shock: I have to get used to old New York ladies beside themselves with fury that I have stopped their smooth elevator journey and got in with some children. I have to remember not to pause while walking in the street—or during any fluid-moving city interaction—unless I want to utterly exasperate the person behind me. Each man and woman in this town is in pursuit of his or her beach and God help you if you get in their way. I suppose it should follow that I am happier in pragmatic England than idealist Manhattan, but I can’t honestly say that this is so. You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. “A reality shaped around your own desires”—there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

It is also a fair description of what it is to write fiction. And to live in a city where everyone has essentially the same tunnel vision and obsessive focus as a novelist is to disguise your own sociopathy among the herd. Objectively all the same limits are upon me in Manhattan as they are in England. I walk a ten-block radius every day, constrained in all the usual ways by domestic life, reduced to writing about whatever is right in front of my nose. But the fact remains that here I do write, the work gets done.

Even if my Manhattan productivity is powered by a sociopathic illusion of my own limitlessness, I’m thankful for it, at least when I’m writing. There’s a reason so many writers once lived here, beyond the convenient laundromats and the take-out food, the libraries and cafés. We have always worked off the energy generated by this town, the money-making and tower-building as much as the street art and underground cultures. Now the energy is different: the underground has almost entirely disappeared. (You hope there are still young artists in Washington Heights, in the Barrio, or Stuyvesant Town, but how much longer can they hang on?) A twisted kind of energy radiates instead off the soulcycling mothers and marathon-running octogenarians, the entertainment lawyers glued to their iPhones and the moguls building five “individualized” condo townhouses where once there was a hospital.

It’s not a pretty energy, but it still runs what’s left of the show. I contribute to it. I ride a stationary bike like the rest of them. And then I despair when Shakespeare and Co. closes in favor of another Foot Locker. There’s no way to be in good faith on this island anymore. You have to crush so many things with your mind vise just to get through the day. Which seems to me another aspect of the ad outside of my window: willful intoxication. Or to put it more snappily: “You don’t have to be high to live here, but it helps.”

Finally the greatest thing about Manhattan is the worst thing about Manhattan: self-actualization. Here you will be free to stretch yourself to your limit, to find the beach that is yours alone. But sooner or later you will be sitting on that beach wondering what comes next. I can see my own beach ahead now, as the children grow, as the practical limits fade; I see afresh the huge privilege of my position; it reclarifies itself. Under the protection of a university I live on one of the most privileged strips of built-up beach in the world, among people who believe they have no limits and who push me, by their very proximity, into the same useful delusion, now and then.

It is such a good town in which to work and work. You can find your beach here, find it falsely, but convincingly, still thinking of Manhattan as an isle of writers and artists—of downtown underground wildlings and uptown intellectuals—against all evidence to the contrary. Oh, you still see them occasionally here and there, but unless they are under the protection of a university—or have sold that TV show—they are all of them, every single last one of them, in Brooklyn.

[ingwon]

A Tiger Gets Married 호랑이가 장가간다

I’m trying not to think too much about this glacier inside me when a dragonfly wanders past the windshield as my mother and I sit in the idling car, waiting for the light to turn green. “Oh,” she exclaims in delight, before explaining to me that in Korea, the appearance of dragonflies signal the arrival of autumn. Of course, anyone standing outside here in Daejeon on this late August morning could tell you that, dragonfly or not; the very air sways with a cool excited sense of anticipation. Good riddance! It seems to whisper to anyone who will listen, having shed itself of the woolen layers and layers of muggy heat that burdened it only a week ago.

It’s an unassuming Monday morning, and the streets are nearly empty as we make our way through a few winding alleys to my mother’s favorite flowershop. She parks the car, leaving me in the passenger seat, my mind still lingering on the dragonfly from moments earlier, and emerges shortly carrying two bouquets of flowers wrapped in newspaper. In a short time we’re going to pick my dad up from his office at the University and make the hour-long drive to our ancestral burial ground and pay our respects. She tosses them on the raised rest between our seats, and on the crumpled black-and-white newsprint I can make out the headline of an article from yesterday’s edition: ‘Fourth Tiger Attack of Month Claims Two Lives; Authorities Confounded.’ It goes on to elaborate about how two brother farmers were mauled on the walk back home after collecting some firewood, after which the article wraps around the back of the bouquet, but I don’t pick up the flower to turn it around and continue reading, because I already know the gist of the story.

You see, for the past month, the collective attention of the nation has been seized captive by a series of tiger ambushes across the mountains of the peninsula that have driven journalists, ecologists, politicians, historians, farmers, clerics, conspiracy theorists, netizens and schoolchildren to a mad frenzy. The first attack occurred the day after the Opening Ceremony of the Rio Olympics, the victim an old farmer’s wife, her mauled body replete with claw marks found by a bus driver by the road a few hundred meters away from a mountainside bus stop half a mile from the town of Wonju. Video footage from a traffic camera showed a large adult female tiger pouncing on the poor old lady from out of the trees as she carried her wares home from the local market. It was of course assumed at first that the tiger had escaped from a zoo, as the last public sighting of a wild Korean tiger was in 1922, having been hunted to extinction by Japanese Imperial soldiers during the occupation, but when the four zoos in South Korea all reported their tigers well-fed and accounted for, the news and footage became viral.

Was she alone, a sole remnant of some brood that had escaped notice and survived in the deepest recesses of the Gangwondo mountain ranges for a century? Ecologists wondered. Perhaps she had made her way south from the DMZ, the land-mine strewn buffer zone of land between North and South Korea, where the absence of humans for the past fifty years had resulted in a flourishing abundance of flora and fauna. In the days that followed, the government conducted a sweep of the mountainside near the attack, but could find no trace of the tiger – not a single pawprint, droppings, or scratch marks on bark – leaving authorities scratching their heads.

The second and third attacks took place on consecutive days a week ago, right before I boarded a flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to come to Korea to begin my two week vacation. One took place about an hour’s drive from Gyeongju, a city in the southeast tip of the peninsula that was once the grand capital of the ancient kingdom of Shilla. A young family of four, whose six-year-old son needed to relieve himself, stopped along a mountainside road. They brushed their way through about ten meters of green thicket before coming face to face with a tiger the size of a couch, which pounced on the ten-year-old daughter and pawed at her briefly before turning and disappearing into the forest. Fortunately, she survived with chest wounds. The victim of the other attack, a homeless drunkard half a kilometer from a rest stop near Namwon, wasn’t so lucky, and the authorities had a difficult time identifying his mangled remains.

I’m here in Korea ostensibly to see my cousin get married and spend time with my parents, but I’ve also come because for the past few weeks I’ve felt an incredibly opaque but immense force within me. Because it’s so opaque and deep within my chest, I’m finding it very difficult to accurately describe in words, but the closest I’ve managed is that it feels like a glacier, slow-moving but inevitable, and it seems to be telling me to slip away from the stream of time in which I am hurtling forth. I’m turning twenty five in less than a month, so maybe this feeling is like how Halley’s comet comes and goes around the Earth once every lifetime, at regular intervals. A quarter century of living, after all, does sound auspicious, and perhaps once my birthday passes, this force will disappear like a closing portal, and life as I know it will resume.

But for now, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s car, idling at an intersection in Daejeon, on our way to pick up my father and drive to our family burial grounds in Jinan. Vacation is a strange feeling now that I’m no longer a college student. I graduated two years ago and I’ve been working since at an American investment bank in New York City as an interest rates derivatives trader. What exactly that entails isn’t worth going into here but the nuts and bolts of it is, I buy and sell things that fluctuate in price depending on how the economies in the US and other developed countries are doing, and I try to make profits for the bank. The work’s interesting enough, if stressful because of the sheer amount of money at stake. Since interest rates are the foundation of every financial product out there, I get to see first-hand the plumbing of capitalism, the metaphorical pipes of the entire system. Outside of work, it’s the usual New York City mid-twenties yuppy life: drinks with friends, chasing girls, fending off loneliness.

It’s been a strange summer by any standard, I can tell you that. Every week the news channels fill with these kinds of headlines: a terrorist attack on a summer resort town in France, Britain leaving the European Union, Donald Trump saying crazy things about Mexicans, black people unnecessarily murdered by cops for the stupidest reasons, ancient tigers discovered alive in Korea. Odd things are happening in my line of work too – the pipes that comprise the plumbing of our global economic system are twisting into weird dead ends and loops. Interest rates are negative in some countries, which means instead of earning interest for holding money in savings accounts, people have to pay interest to keep money in banks.

Coincidences, strange coincidences; like an endless pour of jigsaw pieces. A little over two months ago, one of my closest friends in the city got hit by a cab walking home from a night out with me. The subsequent brain trauma has left him in a coma, a divine intervention that leaves him in an inaccessible dimension between reality and unreality. A month after my friend’s accident, a drunk off-duty cop plowed into four students, three of whom went to my alma mater, on a sidewalk in Williamsburg ten blocks from where I live. It’s a testament to how much of an emotion-stifling, breathless whirlwind that the early-twenties work life in New York City can be that the grief truly plowed into me a few weeks ago one Sunday afternoon, like an impassive glacier, and I had to rest my head on my hands, such was the weight of it all.

This strangeness is like a new religion, something that I wonder if should be hitting me on quiet summer nights or Sunday afternoons. Then again, there are no quiet summer nights in the city – my friends and I all rush forward relentlessly through our individual slipstreams of time, news segments flashing in our periphery, sometimes intertwining and merging with each other, always eventually settling back into our own secret lanes.

I am hurtling forward towards my death now with my parents – towards the burial site of my grandparents and ancestors on my father’s side – and it is beautiful. The mountain roads are empty and winding, and the forests are green and dark and lush, containing all kinds of secrets. The blue summer sky is daubed with occasional thick grey clouds pregnant with impending rain. Sure enough, at the bottom of one valley, as we lurch up another incline, the roof of the car begins drumming with the metallic patter of rain drops, and my mother flicks on the windshield wipers. The rain is fleeting, here and gone in just a few minutes.

“There’s a traditional phrase we have to describe when it rains while the sun is still out,” my father says, never one to miss an opportunity to share an idiom. “A tiger is getting married.”

“What’s the story behind that?” I ask.

“I don’t know, actually,” he says. “That’s just always what we’ve said.”

The sun is shining and there’s no trace of it having rained by the time we park the car on a dirt road by a plot of red peppers and pumpkins and get out. The graves are a hundred meters away, via an unmaintained narrow path where blades of grass grow past the waist and tug at our pants. The percussion buzz of insects greets us, faint like the beginning of Ravel’s Bolero but in random ropes of rhythm. We eventually reach a clearing, where seven mounds covered in grass await, with stone inscriptions at the foot of each one. My father lays the bouquets we brought by the foot of the newest mound, and bows to his father. I feel a stillness in the clearing, despite the gentle breeze that all the plants sway to. There is such a sudden density of life, here in this future place of my death. Unkempt long blades of grass shoot up from the mounds covering my grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ bones like tufts of hair on a newborn’s head. Soon the stillness of the clearing engulfs me, and I feel the weight of the glacier within me receding. I walk over to the furthest mound, and run my finger across the birth year of my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather on his tombstone: 1809. The strange summer is over. I can feel it in the cool autumn breeze.

In the distance, I hear a low rolling noise, like the rumble of rain clouds, like a tiger’s growl.

[larmoyante]

Some people are born with tornadoes in their lives, but constellations in their eyes. Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea.

Nikita Gill, Perspectives (via larmoyante)

[ingwon]

The Tragic Tale of the Baron and His Wife by Witold Gombrowicz

The Baroness was a charming creature. The Baron had taken her from a family of high principles and had no reason to mistrust her, despite the fact that the tooth of time had already gnawed into him quite deeply . . . And yet a disquieting element of grace and charm lay dormant within her, which could easily complicate the practical application of the Baron’s imponderabilia (since the Baron was a bit of a stickler). One day, after a period of conjugal life graced with the quiet bliss of marital duty, the Baroness came running to her husband and threw her arms around his neck. “I think I ought to tell you this. Henryk has fallen in love with me . . . Yesterday he declared himself to me, so quickly and suddenly that I had no time to stop him.”

“And are you in love with him, too?” he asked.

“No, I don’t love him, because I have pledged my love to you,” she replied.

“Very well then,” he said. “If you are in love with him but do not love him because it is your duty to love me, then my esteem for you doubles and I love you twice as much. And the young chap’s suffering is a well-­deserved punishment for his weakness of character—losing his heart to a married woman! Principles, my dear! Should he ever make another declaration of love, tell him that you also have a declaration to make—but of principles. A man of unshakable principles can walk through life with his head held high.”

But soon after, the Baron received some dreadful news. Henryk had no pluck in him whatsoever. Spurned by the Baroness, the young man took to drinking and carousing, then he became melancholic, nothing interested him anymore, the world lost its charm, and he seemed to be at death’s door. According to widespread rumor, his imminent demise was due to unrequited love. “Fine doings, these!” said the Baron to his wife. “Here we are eating canapés while he can’t get anything down . . . Do you realize? . . . Because the image of you is preying on his mind. I wonder what he sees in you. I’ve been living with you for all these years and I’ve never had any feelings for you that could be called violent. In any case, this is a serious business and I am surprised to see you looking so well, knowing that wretch is suffering because of you.”

A week later he was in an even fouler mood. “Well, bravo!” he sneered. “You should be proud of yourself! Your charms have proved most effective—Henryk has one foot in the grave.”

“What can I do about it?” she replied with tears in her eyes. “I never led him on, I have no reason to reproach myself.”

“Good grief! You are the cause of his hopeless state, your arabesques, your curves and features are the germs eating away at him.”

“What can I do? He’s gone mad. Do you know what he suggested the day he declared his love? Divorce!”

“What? Divorce? You’re not a strumpet yet, are you? Yes, of course, you’ll get your divorce, but you know when?—when I die, when I breathe my last, while still professing the same unshakable principles.”

“And what if he dies?”

“Dies!” exclaimed the Baron furiously. “That’s blackmail, for which I refuse to break my vow to keep you until my dying day!”

The Baroness suffered bouts of terrible anguish. The last thing she wanted to do was to act unethically, and yet her heart bled at the thought of Henryk’s misery. Besides, the Baron, a member of many societies, had ­developed a distinct aversion to her. He simply could not bear to look at her beauty. Her bodily functions started to disgust him. One day he asked her, “How about a bread roll?” And when she declined, he laughed with ferocious scorn: “Ha-ha, he is at the point of death, and she is unable to eat a bread roll.” As she floated around the house, gracefully swinging her hips, as she smiled wanly, as she slept or combed her hair, all he saw in her actions was shameless cruelty and dark eroticism. One time she tried to show him affection. “Pray do not touch me,” he shouted. “You hellcat! A fine mess you’ve got me into. Not another word out of you! Now I can see that a morally responsible man should never get involved with someone else’s carnality, under no circumstances whatsoever.

“Right!” the Baron continued. “It can’t go on like this. This morning I heard that he made an attempt on his life. Are you even capable of grasping that to push a man into suicide is far worse than to strangle him with your own hands? That unprincipled whippersnapper is going to ruin us as well as himself. I have made up my mind—we cannot burden our conscience with such an ­awful responsibility. If there is no alternative—too bad, I give you my blessing, I’ll jolly well go along with it; and now you, in the name of higher ­necessity, go ahead and play your part—do as your filthy womanhood dictates.”

“Darling!”

“Too bad! Could I have foreseen when I married you that one day you would be forced to choose between murder and adultery?”

“If there really is no other way out, and if you believe it’s the right thing to do, I’ll go along with it,” she said. “As for my part, I will find it hard, but as God is my witness, I am entirely blameless.”

“Ptooey!” said the Baron.

At this point the young man started to recover. The Baroness, however, was visibly wasting away. Her domestic life was hell on earth. Her husband required her to dine apart at a little table and had her use a special set of tableware. One day she accidentally touched him. “You are besmirching me,” he said with cold indifference. “Look here! You touched me; now I must interrupt my reading and go to the bathroom to wash.” He ­frequently blurted out the insulting word adulteress. At four o’clock he would take out his watch: “Now then,” he would say, “it’s time for you to go, don’t be late for your wanton philanthropy.” She tried in vain to explain that she was ­innocent. “There is one thing I ask of you,” he replied. “Please refrain from introducing an atmosphere of indulgence and tolerance of sin into this house.Otherwise we might as well invite common streetwalkers for luncheon—after all, it is God’s honest truth that they are just as innocent.” The distraught Baroness tried several times to break off her reluctant affair, but each time the young man threatened to kill himself, and it was clear that this was not mere rhetoric.

“No,” said the Baroness, “I cannot bear it anymore. My life has become unspeakable torment. I have fallen into atrocious sin—but why? Because I am alluring. No one can understand, without personal experience, how strange it is in moral terms to be alluring. I am fed up with it. I shall disfigure myself, only I’m not sure if Henryk will be able to cope with it.”

“That’s more like it!” exclaimed her husband enthusiastically. “This might indeed plunge Henryk into madness, but our sorry plight requires us to take certain risks, and besides, we will prepare him for it. And to prove that I, ever the loyal husband, always stand by you when it comes to the moral burden, I shall disfigure myself, too.”

“You won’t have that much to do,” she replied.

They went to their rooms, and soon there emerged two hideous scarecrows. The Baron hugged and kissed his wife. “And now Henryk must be prepared for this blow.” So he wrote the following letter:

Dear Sir,

It is with great sadness that I must inform you of my wife’s frightful ­accident. One of her lovers, in a fit of jealousy over an admirer who had recently ceased to be a platonic friend, threw vitriol in her face. The poor woman has lost the charms that she was so good at putting to use all around her. Please come and take a look at her. Nota bene: in my attempt to rescue her I, too, was horribly maimed.

“There, we have done our duty,” he declared.

It looked as if Henryk would go insane, but the news of his lover’s unfaithfulness gave him strength. He got over his feelings, which could not withstand that monstrous sight. The Baroness, however, started to sink fast, and it soon transpired that the cause of her pernicious anemia was her love for Henryk, which erupted with elemental strength following the end of the affair.

“Is there a curse on my house?” cried the Baron. “Here she goes again!”

The dying woman asked to see Henryk, and the doctors ­endorsed her wish. “For God’s sake,” the Baron whispered to Henryk, “she is ready to die with a declaration of sinful love on her lips.” “Have you gone mad?” he shouted at his wife. “In your place I would prefer to enjoy a clean conscience. I don’t think you realize how dreadful you look. And as for the lover who used to burn for your body, he has been scorning and disdaining you ever since you disfigured yourself for his sake. Break it off and you will soon ­recover and return to the world of principles.”

“This time I won’t be fooled,” said the Baroness, and expired.

The two men were left alone with the corpse.

“She perished as a victim of duty,” said the Baron. “I hold you responsible for her death.”

“It’s your wife,” replied the young man. “It’s your corpse.”

[ingwon]

Itinerary by Adrienne Rich

i.

Burnt by lightning    nevertheless she’ll walk this terra infinita

lashes singed on her third eye searching definite shadows    for an indefinite future

Old shed-boards beaten silvery hang askew as sheltering some delicate indefensible existence   Long grasses shiver in a vanished doorway’s draft a place of origins    as yet unclosured and unclaimed

Writing cursive instructions on abounding air

If you arrive with ripe pears, bring a sharpened knife Bring cyanide with the honeycomb

            call before you come

ii.

Let the face of the bay be violet    black the tumbled torn kelp necklaces strewn alongshore

Stealthily over time arrives the chokehold stifling ocean’s guttural chorales                                                     a tangle of tattered plastic rags iii.

In a physical world the great poverty would be to live insensate    shuttered against the fresh

slash of urine on a wall low-tidal rumor of a river’s yellowed mouth a tumor-ridden face asleep on a subway train

What would it mean to not possess a permeable skin explicit veil to wander in

iv.

A cracked shell crumbles. Sun moon and salt dissect the faint last grains An electrical impulse zings   out    ricochets in meta-galactic orbits

a streak of nervous energy rejoins the crucible where origins and endings meld

There was this honey-laden question mark this thread extracted from the open throat of existence—Lick it clean! —let it evaporate—

[ingwon]

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder towards the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed. Yet one thing cannot be robbed of her futurity; our daughter Cady. I hope I'll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters - but what would they say? I don't even know what this girl will be like when she is fifteen; I don't even know if she'll take to the nickname we've given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past. That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

The last words penned by Paul Kalanithi, to his daughter, from When Breath Becomes Air

[ingwon]

Tunnel

I remember the tunnels, the gossipy chatter of shoes against cool concrete Over the way our hands clasped so tight Amidst the bright fluorescent light. We hid in those tunnels, crawling around tangled in white cotton blankets Hibernating as bombs fell around us. And when you spoke Of stillness and robot love and the future How your words burrowed straight to my heart Even now as I dig I think of the tunnels As I feel with my hands The cool hollow weight Of empty soil after soil after soil.

[ingwon]

stoked about my latest acquisition, it really adds some.. pop to the living room #lichtenstein (at The Abbot Hall Club of New York City)

[ingwon]

NON $IBI #Exonians #shenanigans #nonewfriends (at The 13th Step Bar & Grill)

[ingwon]

#August #MaryOliver

[ingwon]

Autocorrect

Today I began composing a text to my brother that began with the word "U" and my phone auto-corrected it to the word "I".

[ingwon]

Thoughts, Amuse-bouche

I. A few weeks ago at a dinner with my visiting parents and younger brother and a family with whom we had been close since I was a toddler, it hit me that I have now reached a point in my life where the earliest of my memories are starting to become the earliest of stories. By this I mean that there was this one incident that my parents and this family we were getting dinner with loved to bring up every time we got together, which is the time when I was probably five years old and my brother three and the similarly-aged daughters of this family got together for some play-date and we were playing barbershop in the playpen of their house and I was the barber with real scissors and I cut one of these girls’ hair to Tomboy pieces and everyone freaked out and the girl was crying and my mom was furious and my brother didn’t know what to do so he just stared wordlessly like a startled baby, which I guess he was. And when, over the course of this dinner, these girls’ parents inevitably brought up the story with nostalgic glee, I reflexively laughed and tried to recall the memory when I realized soon after that I was unable to - that I could not no matter how hard I tried wading in my muddy mind, dredge up this memory - the smell of the carpet the grey walls, nothing. And as I felt a sort of empty click in the back of my mind, I came to realize that I had had the metaphysical experience of witnessing and understanding of the limits of memory. Our minds store memories the way directors capture footage on film, but at some point the supply runs out and the earliest materials must be wiped to make room for new ones. And just like that, I realized that a memory had become a story. 

II. Living in your twenties in New York City is like hurtling down a roaring stream so much faster than you anticipated that you instinctively reach out flailing with your arms to grab whatever seems familiar enough to ground you when suddenly you wake up with a start and feel the hot stream of the shower you were dozing off in and you hope you won’t be too late to work. 

Q. Some time ago we used to hold discussions in brick-walled dorm rooms and brightly-lit underground tunnels and among the faint earth smell of algae at the boatdocks by the Charles in vague hours of the night of topics I no longer know other than plastered to the wall of the Whitney as installation art in pink neon light, filtered by the iPhone 6, seen on my instagram newfeed. You now flicker in and out of existence, the way “art” and “philosophy” and dining halls do, on brightly lit screens with only #oneword captions like hints to an unsolvable puzzle. I feel a deep sadness that you may becoming a story, the ending of which I may never know.

IV. Life is beautiful and dangerous. I dream of the twitching restlessness of sleeping orca whale calves, the undisturbed mountains of underwater glaciers, and the pleasant summer breeze two hundred years ago. 

[ingwon]

The Gift by Mark Strand

A man has died, but in his casket, in his skull’s gray dungeon—the world’s tiniest theater, his last thought remains. Down in the ghetto of the dead, the terminal second of an existence otherwise unimportant is kept in perpetuity. Henry is about to walk out of his house into a night that is quickened with the radiant zeal of the stars and cautionary gaze of the moon. He is just under forty, and wears blue jeans, tee shirt, and loafers. His freedom can be measured by the eagerness of his eyes, his confinement by the distance of his hand from the doorknob. His one passion is to leave, to be out of the house. He has left the bed strewn with sheets half-fallen to the floor; clothes cascade from open drawers, chairs are heaped with towels, the floor is scattered with socks and underwear. It is a tableau of dishevelment whose duration he could not have foreseen. In the scented summer night, in the damp, vegetative kingdom of Henry’s garden, Cathy waits. She has run all the way from her house, without clothes. Panting lightly, staring at the door from which Henry will never emerge, Cathy seems cool, her flesh milk-tinted, phosphorescent, luxuriant. In the moon-drenched blaze of rhododendron, Iceland poppies, Persian buttercups, small ovals of shadow cascade over the spectral hills of her blue-white bottom. Poor Cathy! About to run in and get Henry, she has been years in a half-crouching, half-standing position, the recipient of unceasing moonlight pouting down. It is as if Henry can see her there, can see that she has nothing on, for he carries a few of his wife’s things on one arm, while his wife, Gloria, strangely serene in her silk kimono of exotic birds flashing their crimson and blue feathers in a green convenience of branches, sleeps in the chaos of the bedroom. She is a small jungle, a breathing heaven of birds immemorially lush, miraculously silent, settled upon the chalky dead-white expanse of the bed. She claims nothing of Henry’s attention, whose eyes are fixed on the door that separates him from Cathy. Fateful attention! Had Henry not lost precious moments, grabbing some clothes for Cathy, he might now be gazing at her with undying pleasure instead of at the door. Were it not ongoing, this might be a scene to remember; Henry and Cathy caught in positions that compromise them forever. The wrong moment, precisely the one that offers least satisfaction, is their immortality, fortune’s rebuke to their intended indiscretion. Enacting a luminous version of our frailty, they are martyrs to passion, pilgrims trapped in the ghostly screen of a dead man’s surviving thought. And the dead man, does anyone know who he is? Was he Henry or dreaming up Henry? Whatever the case, the scene endures, its everlasting bloom a secret of the dearth and of ourselves to whom it is revealed. For there are occasions when such truths are given to us, when we hear the barely palpable whirr of time’s monotonous monologue and when we see, in the abyss, a house suddenly appear under the full moon of a summer night. It lasts for a second, as long as the dead man’s undying image, but no one complains. It is a gift.

[paradoxicalsentiments]

my favorite Frank O'Hara poem

[ingwon]

The Story, Victorious by Etgar Keret

This story is the best story in the book. More than that, this story is the best story in the world. And we weren’t the ones to come to that conclusion. It was also reached by a unanimous team of dozens of unaffiliated experts who - employing strict laboratory standards - measured it against a representative sampling taken from world literature. This story is a unique Israeli innovation. And I bet you’re asking yourselves, how is it that we (tiny little Israel) composed it, and not the Americans? What you should know is that the Americans are asking themselves the same thing. And more than a few of the bigwigs in American publishing stand to lose their jobs because they didn’t have that answer at the ready while it still mattered. 

Just as our army is the best army in the world - same with this story. We’re talking here about an opening so innovative that it’s protected by registered patent. And where is this patent registered? That’s the thing, it’s registered in the story itself! This story’s got no shtick to it, no trick to it, no touchy-feely bits. It’s forged from a single block, an amalgam of deep insights and aluminum. It won’t rust, it won’t bust, but it may wander. It’s supercontemporary, and timelessly literary. Let History be the judge! And by the way, according to many fine folk, judgment’s been passed - and our story came up aces.

“What’s so special about this story?” people ask out of innocence or ignorance (depending on who’s asking). “What’s it got that isn’t in Chekhov or Kafka or I-don’t-know-who?” The answer to that question is long and complicated. Longer than the story itself, but less complex. Because there’s nothing more intricate than this story. Nevertheless, we attempt to answer by example. In contrast to works by Chekhov and Kafka, at the end of the story, one lucky winner - randomly selected from among all the correct readers - will receive a brand-new Mazda Lantis with a metallic gray finish. And from among the incorrect readers, one special someone will be selected to receive another car, cheaper, but no less impressive in its metallic grayness so that he or she shouldn’t feel bad. Because the story isn’t here to condescend. It’s here so that you’ll feel good. What’s that saying printed on the place mats at the diner near your house? ENJOYED YOURSELF - TELL YOUR FRIENDS! DIDN’T ENJOY YOURSELF - TELL US! Or, in this case - report it to the story. Because this story doesn’t just tell, it also listens. Its ears, as they say, are attuned to every stirring of the public’s heart. And when the public has had enough and calls for someone to put an end to it, this story won’t drag its feet or grab hold of the edges of the alter. It will, simply, stop.

[ingwon]

The Story, Victorious, II

But if one day, out of nostalgia, you suddenly want the story back, it will always be happy to oblige.

[ingwon]

Esse by Czeslaw Milosz

I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.