Bloodsuckers, a Revolution, and a Recollection of Past Loves: Taipei

If I’m not careful I become obsessed with all sorts of little things that bring me no happiness whatsoever and mean very little to me. They are little sponges I strap to my body with cords of altered reason. When I tie them down they are damp and cool and help me bear the afternoon heat, but when they dry up (and they dry up all too soon) and flake away, I realize that underneath they are not sponges but leeches, full to bursting with my blood. It often takes a jolt to realize what is sucking your life from you. To get you to look down at the black slugs clinging to your skin. Often there is no one to shake them off for you. Often you will not let them. You still believe the leeches are damp sponges.

This is why I have shaken off alcohol. Not because it laid on me any great tragedy, indeed it afforded me many wonderful nights, but because it does not lay at my heart. And anything done for reasons apart from the heart, slowly sap up it’s blood. Slowly turn everything and everyone against you. Until the conspiracy drives you mad, and in spite you turn further from your heart. I do not blame alcohol in particular. Indeed the culprit could just as easily be any number of more ‘noble’ pursuits: a girlfriend, a career, a parent, a duty, a religion, an ideal. Every leech must be exposed and shaken off for your heart to pump its purest blood.

I think of Thomas Jefferson and his call to revolution for every generation. Perhaps for a nation, this will suffice, but for a person, he must be constantly revolving, like a pebble tumbling in the stream. Until he is worn down to his essence. Then he will know what he wants and he will get it.

So it feels returning to Daegu. My visit to Taipei was like looking in the mirror and picking off these parasites. Travel is intoxicating. It may sound odd from me, seeing as I’m living so far from “home” as it is. But I suppose to me, home is a place to escape from. And if a place requires escaping, it has become as much as home.

Taipei did not embrace me. It did not intoxicate me like Berlin or Budapest. It did not mesmerize me like Beijing. It slowly got beneath my skin. Worked it’s way into my veins. It is impossible to know someone in five days. Yet after sleeping on her floor, wandering her dirty streets, eating her delicious food, sweating in her unbearable heat beneath her unbearable sun, I felt on departing, melancholy. Not for the place and the things in the place, but for the personhood of the place. The spirit of the place. The spirit that I breathed and lived within for five days.

You will chide me. Smile knowingly. Thinking the same thought that I hold back now. That mistresses make lousy housewives. For this reason I fear Beijing. I cherish those three magical nights, but they do not belong to this world. They were stolen from the next. Or from a dream in childhood I have long forgotten. Leaving Beijing was indeed like awaking from a dream, but to a world more familiar, more like home. And when I dream at night, I lust for those nights to be repeated.

But Taipei was different. Not like a magical gallavant into fantasy, but like a good conversation begun, but never finished. It was not overwhelming magnifiscence but the normalcy transcending normalcy that was so appealing. More so even than Berlin, another city whose conversation was cut short. The shabby buildings becoming more than shabby buildings, the bustling streets becoming more than bustling streets, even the heat, the unbearable heat, bore the mark of significance. These are cities waking up, everything is coming alive, even the cold weather beaten brick has a heartbeat.

Perhaps a day will come for Korea too. I feel that Seoul is trying to awaken itself. Perhaps it is beginning to succeed. Daegu is dead. A husk of a husk. And it’s hollowness is echoed in the black spaces of my bowels in the pains that only medicine can subside.