On an outdated atlas

The veil enshrouds the treasure of the other. Immense my heart swells, pulsing with the blood of the once was, never was, inescapably impossible, unreachable, distanced by a void of space and time unbridgeable. Records remain and they themselves are legend.



Reading the population of Siam at the turn of the century sends a chill down my spine as I imagine in a split second all those lives here and vanished. Returned from the grave for a glimmering moment they hover before my eyes, barely ghosts, encapsulated in a digit of a number. The potency of these little characters, these apparently harmless shapes. They are sleighs pulled by the horses of imagination across the fields of time. How great the strength of the mind. What a fine artisan, sewing threads across oceans and histories.

I see on a map the nation of Chosen (Korea) and a pinpoint indicating Tai Ku (Daegu). What are the heights of forbidden ecstasy? To find yourself woven inextricably, yet unknown within the fabric of the universe. To discover traces of your footsteps before you had feet, before even your mother or father had feet. Yet, there it is, undeniable, a physical ancestor. The indication of the cartographers hand, wise to geography but blind to time, unknowingly plotting my trail.

I know the farmers in the field of this small village. In my heart I know them. Of course it is impossible, but perhaps at the bottom of the well of my longing, a reservoir runs to other wells in other lands, in other eras.

What a mysterious and magical chest is this book of numbers and maps. What spell has it cast upon me that the bonds of time would dissipate in my mind, yet leave my body in shackles? These yellowed, cracked pages are the same pages of their time, when these maps and numbers represented facts, cold information that had not yet learned the magic that causes them to glow today.



If I had a wish, a single wish, it would be that in death my soul would dissipate into all time and all place and I would no longer long, for the veil between myself and the other would be lifted.

What Hong Kong is

HONG KONG AIRPORT

Free wireless internet in the Hong Kong Airport. How perfect.
Leaving in an hour on flight CX701 to Bangkok.


They say Hong Kong is the city where East and West collide. I suppose that is true, though no doubt more so forty or fifty or one hundred years ago when it was still a dangerous port town full of pirates, opium dens, rickshaws, and thieves. Somewhere along the road they were gradually removed and replaced with yuppie housing developments, living room art galleries, glamorous shopping streets, and glitzy bank towers. Of all the places I’ve been in Asia, this city felt the least Asian. Every sign had English subtitles, every waiter and public servant spoke proper British, the cars the roads, the street signs, all lacked that exotic appeal. But here let me digress. Something that occured to me as I wandered back alleys in Central looking for stray graffiti sprays was this idea of exotic and how my perception of it is drastically changed. My reference point when seeking the exotic or even speaking of it, is no longer America as much as it is Korea. In fact I think I would probably find returning to the USA more of a culture shock than visiting Hong Kong. We shall see as my journey progresses if I retain this sense of familarity. But to return to the subect at hand. Hong Kong feels much less like a collision than a tacit agreement between to merchants. For what is good for one is good for the other. Hong Kong seems to belong to no one. It floats on clouds of prosperity like a hovering spaceport free for the whole world to enjoy. We all dock our ships, buy, take a few photos, and leave.

But to be frank, I still don’t know what Hong Kong is.

Passing out, I Daydream

I come home and it's all blah blah nonny nonny in my head. So I spread myself out
on the couch legs dangling at the calf forearm resting against forehead tussling my hair. And David's got some spittle spattle hum buzz coming from the stereo. Should I ask who it is? Or should I already know? Less effort, say nothing. My mouth is aching from the second and third ulcer spreading tiny pale deadskinned
fingers along the southern-most edges of my gums. So I talk quiet and slow like a cowboy mouth full of chaw. For dinner I'll eat that room temperature rice sitting in the wok, maybe that's why I have these sores. Maybe I don't eat enough bananas these days. Maybe I'm not taking care of myself again.
I daydream of Thailand.
Tuk tuks clitter clattering down dirt roads pockmarked and long running scars bleeding deep brown sludge. I'm standing there mesmerized by the buzzing bells of newness. The rain just stopped and the leftover drops slowly find there way down my red mountain anorak. I'm waiting for the bus. The clang-clang, tin-and-twine number that'll take me down to the coast. Down to the pier. Down where the people move slow and easy. Where the beaches are glittering and endless. Down where the tall blond Germans don't go. I'll cover my body in perfect white sand and lay all day by the jade colored water until the great red god in the sky dips his toes, then torso, and finally his head into the sea.












This week could take all year...

Outlook Upon a New Year

The wind stung my face as I stood atop the rocks and overlooked the sprawling, devouring city of Seoul, a mass of buildings like a giant circuit board stretching to the horizon in every direction. Just twenty minutes up the trail and already the noise and smog of the street was gone. A pervading stillness enveloped the mountain trail. I climbed a crooked staircase through an empty Buddhist village, past a chalk white dog, and through a low concrete canal to find the entrance to the trail. An old Shamanist route on the outskirts of the city. I found an alcove where the blackened stone testified to a great number of candles burned at the spot. I sat where the sun was warm and the wind was blocked and listened to an old woman chant an ancient oscillating lament to the wind and bang a cymbal in time, now quiet, now loud, with the heartbeat of the mountain. Calmness wrapped its arms around me, the city down below slowed to the pace of the mountain, all was still, but for the swooping flock of synchronized pigeons. I sat without moving for more than an hour. Till the sun’s warmth began to wane and the approaching night bade me move on.

In Seoul as I wandered the neon lit streets bustling with coats and mittens, scarves and faces I felt my soul rise in the presence of itself. I find being alone in a great city as sublime as standing before a cascading fall or a mammoth cliff. Overwhelmed by the power of the city and my own insignificant place within it, I could hear clearly a description of myself. A lonely passerby in this ancient world. One recently born and soon dead. One who could easily be crushed beneath the thumb of this mightier beast. One who is at the mercy of so many forces. The city spoke so honestly to me, concealing nothing, that I couldn’t stop a smile from creasing the edges of my lips.

Alone in the coffee shop, the subway, the tunnels, the palace, the museum, the bar, the streets, the mountain. For two days I wandered alone in the frigid cold in a strange city and felt once again myself emerging within this skin. I felt a joy welling up to bursting. The more sensitive organs swelled with anticipation. For life spread out before me like a banquet and at that instant I was ready to devour everything, the appetizers, entrees, and deserts, the napkins, the wine glass, the silver fork, the knife, spoon, porcelain plates and ice cream dish, crunching and tumbling down my bleeding gullet to my cavernous stomach below. I could scarcely sleep that night. Lying on the hard floor of the house of a generous stranger I wrote and wrote. I wanted to call everyone I knew. But I had nothing to say, no words to express. I simply wanted to scream to them, to release upon them this energy, if need be to devour them as well.

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.

Casper the Friendly English Teacher

“It’s a lot like being a friendly ghost in someone’s house.”
-David-

That’s the best description I’ve heard yet of teaching English in Daegu. We were sitting on high backed purple felt couches that could have been lifted straight from the set of Willy Wonka, alone in an empty world music bar listening to very sedating folk songs by artists I had never heard of. David sat across, quiet and more detached than usual, Ara to my left pressed her face against the concrete wall. A couple bottles of empty Budweiser and a half consumed dry squid sat on the table before us. I slouched deep in my chair. Sinking into that exaggeration of myself incubated in the warm glow of coffee grinds or beer steins, hatched in moments of giddy excitement when I’m less afraid of the fool I know that I am.

We had spent the day roaming around Busan, Korea’s second city and the third largest seaport in the world, taking photos with our new friend, Ara, our gracious host in this bustling cosmopolis. She guided us through the buses, subways, and taxis en route to see some of the major city attractions. From Jagalchi, the famous fish market on the coast, to the enourmously popular and surprisingly beautiful Haeundae beach, to one of the very few Krispy Kreme donut shops in the country. We ate a spicy North Korean noodle dish for lunch, who’s name I have forgotten, but who’s greasy stains remained on the crotch of my pants the whole weekend in spite of my every effort to remove them.

Leaving Daegu is like waking from a dream. Exiting a cloudy netherworld into the land of the real where people have weight, their eyes have depth and their steps purpose. It was strange to make eye contact. To see the crowd seeing you and acknowledging your existence. I had nearly forgotten what that felt like. To feel that people were not afraid of you, did not judge you differently from the rest. Even enjoyed you. To feel your blood warmed by stranger’s passing smiles. Stranger’s with whom you have no bond but humanhood. Hope and fear and desire.

I wonder if Daegu is not unique in the world. A conservative hub in a conservative country. A pergatory between Seoul and the sea. A city that is not a city. A halfway house where people live, but are not alive. Existing, peacefully asleep on the tightrope separating birth and death.

I am and I am not here. A spectre between two dimensions. But the longer I stay the more safe and solid this world becomes and the more hazy and frightening does the other. For indeed, in spite of all it’s shortcomings, I am happy and contented and safe.

I’ve often wondered what sacrifices we’d be willing to make to secure the world we preach. If we could ever fully understand what is possible and what is at stake...