Recitation

by Suah Bae

  I don’t know what became of my sister. According to my mother, she got married after finishing a long period of study, and is still living abroad. It’s strange, but the foreign city my mother mentioned then was one which, coincidentally, has the same name as the one we’re in now, so who knows, they might even be the same place. Even now, I remember her only as a silent face coincidentally derived from that which was decomposing, leaking out and slipping down; a suspiciously distended stomach, a female singer with a stutter; an old sister whose violent madness might have been the family’s secret heredity. But there are also facts I don’t remember. I can’t remember the scene when my mother called her by my name. The old alleyway where, hearing her name being called, I (she) turned to look back; the fact that gradually, as I grew up, I outwardly came to resemble my old sister; the moment when, being struck by the intense feeling that my face in the mirror very strongly resembled someone else’s, I had the astonishing presentiment that that someone might be none other than my sister; all of these disappeared from my memory. And after all, if you think about it, there’s nothing remotely odd about sisters having similar faces. But I never did get a proper look at her face, so for me she is remembered only as a non-specific older woman; given that, I can’t remember how I managed to become aware of our resemblance. For a time, things were peaceful without her. Not that they’d never been peaceful before, but, oddly enough, after she vanished I was no longer as frightened or nervous of my parents as I had been. Even when my father got colon cancer again, after already having had so much of his intestines cut away that there was barely anything left, though I probably forgot he existed due to the constant hyper-stimulation that is the life of an adolescent, I still didn’t wish for him to hurry up and die. He’s still living now, several decades later. At least as far as I know. Ah, and I grew up, and eventually left home. The dimensions of my body, which had been flat as a sheet of paper, swelled frantically after my sister disappeared, to the point where I was eventually even larger than my parents. Which was how I knew that I’d become an adult. On top of that, after my sister left there wasn’t a single instance when I stuttered! I even managed to get a job reading aloud from books, though I’d already abandoned my singing lessons by that point. I tend to believe that, in their own way, my parents loved me very much. When it comes down to it, I don’t think there’s all that great a difference between someone saying, hey kid, try some of this fruit, and shouting, if your mouth twitches like that one more time I’ll cut your lips into pieces with scissors, you little bitch! Since, to a certain extent, language is no more than a contrived, man-made symbol, like traffic lights or a flight attendant’s uniform, like the sign for the bathroom or for Starbucks. In that way, I prefer the kind of love whose face defies interpretation. And I know how to smile when confronted with a love like that. Only that kind of love knows how to set me alight. But now and then I’m thrown into confusion, groping for words, or else memories, no, for thoughts; on-stage facing an inattentive audience, I wonder, am I the only one who doesn’t notice this? Well, so, it looks like the opera’s finished, people are coming out.”

  It was true. The doors to the opera house had opened, disgorging clumps of well-dressed people who streamed out into the street en masse. During this window of time the cityscape is strewn with clumped lights, which float swiftly or slowly. Orange candle flames on restaurant tables; the enormous ashen shadows that flicker brightly in front of them; bundles of fire blurrily reflected in invisible puddles, and on the surface of the canal; the streets are dotted with these flutterings of orange brilliancy.

  “In the house where I was living a few years back, when I lay on the bed at night I could look through the open window and see aeroplanes cutting across Orion, their lights blinking on and off… like transformed sun gods, the planes travelled the entire length of the dark celestial sphere which made up the night,” Kyung-hee said. It was difficult to judge the precise hour from the scene that was visible beyond the window, a tangle of dust, clouds, and thick fog, but, unlike when Kyung-hee had first entered the Starbucks—is this night?—there at least seemed no doubt that it was night. Small shards of light floating on the Earth’s surface formed straight swift lines like swimmers cutting through water; only once they were very close could you tell that they were electric bicycles. Dark green coats and black coats, blue fabric tied to a pillar, a swatch of dark red velvet in the portrait of a Dutch painter, the long chocolate fur of a dog being taken for a walk in the fog, grubby flags, grains of soil in the flowerbeds, various shades of muddled brilliancy glimmering on the surface of a pearl, constituted the night of this city.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t a plane but a wandering star. Wandering stars do sometimes look as though they’re passing in front of a constellation, you know. But, according to the theory that’s held sway for a few years now, wandering stars are only apparent phenomena, not something that exists in actuality—merely specks of light which appear when the dust clouds on the far side of the sun momentarily exceed a particular density and the spurting explosive spectrum gets reflected; the night sky plays the role of a sleek black mirror or screen, making it look as though the ‘star’ is sliding along a fixed horizontal path. And since, coincidentally, the speed of that movement is similar to that of a passenger jet, the wandering star appears as a distant figure sliding across the sky, visible even for a short while after the explosion on the far side of the sun has subsided,” the East Asian said, gazing out into the street. “And so, certain astronomers have in fact compared the phenomena of wandering stars to sun gods racing towards the morning, across the river of night. Though what’s really surprising is the literature left behind by the ancient Chinese, who were the first to discover wandering stars. To them, the star was like a nymph engaged in a slow, eternal dance, unaware that she had died; thinking about it now, that description is scarily accurate.”

  Is this truly night? The sound of people collecting their thoughts and looking around grew to a ringing in the ears, cut through by a scream. Thief!, that ringing in the ears shouted. No, robber! Oh, this is Amok! Overcome with curiosity, someone who had been leaning against the counter waiting for their coffee ran outside into the street in front of the opera house. A black figure ran into the road, cutting across at a diagonal, and crashed into a man who walking over the pedestrian crossing. The unfortunate man doubled over and crumpled to the ground. A car sounded its horn and the black figure carried on running, thrusting people aside. The lights changed to bright red. Is this night? One man, seized by a sudden madness, was racing into the night’s interior. The police immediately concluded that this marked the beginning of a radical demonstration, scheduled for that day, opposing the expansion of a nuclear power plant, but that demonstration was already underway in a different street nearby, and was in fact extremely orderly and well-behaved. The man who had fallen down on the crossing had been knifed in the side. The criminal had also stabbed a woman and two children, who had been walking in front of a department store two tram stops away, and, blindly wielding the knife when a number of witnesses pursued him, had seriously injured a further two people, both men. The criminal had jumped onto a tram and made his way to the front, hoping to attack the driver, only to be thwarted by the driver’s compartment being locked. Having to content himself with spitting at the passengers and giving them the finger, he then transferred to the underground, went one stop and got off at a park, shouldered his way through the crowd that had gathered to watch a band perform, who started screaming and scattering as soon as they realised what was happening, though by this time an uncountable number of backs and shoulders bore fresh knife wounds; when, in spite of all this, the police had still not turned out in any force, the man continued his blind dash, this time running along the river embankment, even finding time to send two texts to his girlfriend, passed a bus stop and impulsively slashed a poster which an animal protection organisation had put up to indict Chinese bear hunters—the Chinese gather the bile of living bears to
treat toothache!—and went back up the main road, then, without any particular will or intention, governed simply by a rough inertia keeping him on the path he’d started down, on the spur of the moment, stabbed at the buttocks of a person who just then happened to be getting some money out of a cash machine in a secluded corner; as a result of which, the person who had been getting cash out shouted “Thief!”, then, though it was clear that no one was going to come running, shouted again, ‘No, a robber! Oh, this is Amok!’ As this was happening, the man who had been stabbed by the criminal’s knife in front of the department store, in the opening stage of this saga, had just come to his senses in the ambulance and was informing the paramedic that he was HIV positive, and though this whole business hadn’t yet been reported on an official news bulletin, many of the city’s inhabitants had come to hear about it through the radio waves of vague rumour, and the anonymous perpetrator was said to be, variously, a hater of women, or else of children, or of the Chinese, and with all this chaos whirling around her, Kyung-hee leaned forwards in the Starbucks chair, looked down into her empty mug, and tried to focus on what the East Asian was saying.

  “According to the literature of Orbis Tertius, the most important foundation of the Tlön school of philosophy can be said to be the negation of time.”2 The East Asian straightened up as he said this, sounding very sincere.

  “What?” Kyung-hee frowned, baffled by the unfamiliar terminology.

  “Or you might call it the negation of time’s successiveness or continuity. If you take that as a premise, the future has real existence only as a form clothed in our current fears and hopes, while the past exists only as the imaginative form which we call memory. To make it a bit more a concrete, try imagining it like this: the world in which we are living, and all the lives contained within it, came into existence mere minutes ago; at precisely the same time, various fantasies about a continuous history stretching far back in time were implanted whole into the minds of the living, in the form which we call memory. The film Total Recall isn’t a bad illustration of this, if you can remember it.

  If you accept this, it follows logically that this world’s expiration date has already elapsed, and that the sensations and happenings which we believe ourselves to experience, which we feel is life, are no more than the flickered reflection of faint, fictitious relics which the final stages of this by now vanished world have left to linger within the light. No more, in fact, than the death of stars constituting the vacuum which is the great mother, whose optical existence is made possible only due to a time lag.

  Ah, these are not my ideas. Tlön, this is Borges’ concept. And Sebald provides a very fine, lyrical gloss of this concept in his book The Rings of Saturn. All I’m doing is reconstructing his sentences. While I was listening to your story, cities made of time swam into my mind. The kind of cities which you must have seen with your own eyes, that is. You have alighted from the plane, gone through immigration and are standing in front of a bus stop information board, and there it is in front of your eyes, soaring up above the horizon like a white limestone moon, the earliest city, Ur. Ebla, which fills your field of vision with blazing terracotta. Uruk, city of Gilgamesh, king of the abyss, city of orange sand stairs, ruins decorated with basalt, and low hills, city where the hanged necks of condemned criminals form a mountain, city of the stained moon, city of tombs and of protopyramids. Or this city whose existence is simultaneous with these, which we are now physically walking through, just like travellers who discover ‘Starbucks’ shining like a distant lighthouse, illuminating the very heart of the night, their steps carrying them automatically in the direction of a woman of blurred green and grey water, feeling vertigo at the incredible breadth that lies between the very first and very last cities, I imagined cities that you had passed through like that and would pass through again in the future…If you’re wondering why such thoughts came to me unbidden, it’s probably because I had time to kill earlier today, so I spent the afternoon roaming this city; on top of the chill wind and overcast skies, this dull, dismal, depressing air meant that I could neither read a book nor go for a walk. So I got on the first bus I saw and rode it for about an hour, as far as it was possible to go in one direction, got off at some suburban bus stop near the edge of the city, where I’d never been before, stepped into a shabby movie theatre opposite the bus stop that had happened to catch my eye, and saw a film. It was probably some sci-fi B-movie, I’d never heard of either the director or the film itself, and the faces of the actors were also unfamiliar; in fact, now I think about it, it was the kind of film where it’s even difficult to make an educated guess as to the year it was made. Whereas the lighting and direction, the dialogue and the actors’ facial expressions, were, quite frankly, clumsy, the film’s content was actually quite touching, even mysterious. So that the overall experience was preposterous, extravagant, and romantic, yet nevertheless curious, and, in the end, very lethargic, empty, and bloodcurdling.

  The film opens with an unfamiliar man and woman meeting at some anonymous destination, just like we did. Surprisingly enough, that destination is the middle of a rocky desert. A place where withered cacti straggle up here and there from the ruined earth, and bald eagles circle through the sky, on the lookout for a carcass. The bus, which usually comes around once a week, spits the pair out and continues on its way. Believing that they have been alive for a very long time, they have come all the way here in search of the place where they will each meet their own death, a death that will be definite and conclusive. They desired only to make a final death entirely their own. Together, they enter ever further into the desert. At each step forwards, hallucinations unfurl in front of them one by one, wavering like mirages. The figure of a husband and wife eternally unaware that they had died or been separated long ago, memories of passion and of war, sundered people, people who part never to meet again, forgotten memories, memories of before the age of language, prenatal memories, memories, memories, facts and memories that are not facts, memories that are duplicated and amplified… the desert they had come to happened to be a specific place which stirs up memories. But their old memories have crumbled and split apart, and rekindle distorted like a virus within their agitated flesh. It Must Hurt Before You Die, that’s right, now it’s come back to me. That was the film’s title. In certain senses, there’s nothing at all unusual about it. In the modern sense, the couple are no different from patients who have escaped from the large-scale death factory we call a hospital. The price they have paid for this is that their own bodies bear all the burden of pain… gasping for breath, writhing in an agony of soul and flesh, they long for death to hurry up and free them from the countless memories whose revival is causing them such pain. Up to this point, it’s an ordinary drama. But then a UFO from outer space comes flying out of nowhere, flat as a plate. A yellow beam of light screeches down from the alien craft, sucking the couple up. The audience members who weren’t already nodding off burst out laughing at this part. Anyhow, the couple never actually ‘meet’ the aliens, as these latter are beings who have evolved beyond the need for physical form, able to exist as pure consciousness. The aliens take the couple to another planet, around ten billion light years away.”

  “What for?”

  “Well. Who knows how aliens think? Even the director himself didn’t seem particularly interested in their motivation. But my personal opinion is that they were curious about the ‘agony’ of those facing death. To beings who do not possess flesh and blood, that must have seemed a great mystery.”

  “So what was on the planet, then?”

  “A desert, cacti and eagles, and memory.”

  “So you’re saying it was identical to Earth?”

  “No, not that, just that they seemed to have crossed ten billion light years’ of space to somewhere resembling the desert of memory from which they’d been abducted, no, to have returned to that very same place. The audience is bewildered. The one difference is that in the new place the couple, like the aliens, also
exist as consciousness without form. They think. No, they remember. To the audience, they now exist only as a voice-over. Might they actually have ceased to exist…? But if, in spite of that, their memories still continue on…?

  Anyhow, they are not visible to the audience. The image shown on the screen is that of eagles circling through the air, gliding serenely down towards a recent carcass. There is a close-up of the eagles’ glinting eyes, and the sound of their hard beaks crunching the beast’s bones, raking at its flesh and sucking out the blood-clotted fat and intestines, can be heard for quite some time, in all its concrete detail. Takk takk takk. Slurp slurp slurp. But even in the moment of that invisible death, the couple’s voice-over continues. Within the confines of the screen they converse, experience emotions, eventually seem to think, oh Time, stop, this instant, you are truly beautiful. They believe that they have died and come back to life, that, unbelievably, they know passion once again, they enjoy believing that they have fallen in love. They, their voices, their memories, their hallucinations. The moment an eagle plucks an eyeball from the carcass and swallows it, their consciousness speaks: I believe in miracles, I believe in love, I believe that the future will come to me. I believe in life. Oh, Light.

  An odd story, then, but not actually all that unfamiliar. It’s not clear why, but listening to that episode about your sister made me think of that film. Do our memories only ever live inside the house of our bodies? And what is a body, really? A single body, for example, might it be simply a single memory? And I don’t mind admitting that, listening to your story, the Inuit shamanist belief in ‘the soul’s alter ego’ was in my mind all the while. The gist is that your soul, identical in form to you yourself, is your constant companion, a walking stick-cum-ocean navigator which guides your course, who gives a recitation of your life in advance of your actually living it; on the day you genuinely become yourself that soul-cum-alter ego dies, there on the far expanse of white snow (please recall that the protagonist of the myth is an Inuit), leaving only a shell behind. From that point onwards, not even a shaman can tell you anything of the road that lies ahead of you. The visible form of your soul has disappeared, so you must set out alone, in a direction of your own choosing. What your doings will then be, no mouth has yet told.