Vaseline Buddha

by Jung Young Moon

  The dog, however, wasn’t actually a dog accompanying the old woman with whom I spent afternoons in a park in France. The dog belonged to another woman, middle-aged, who came to the park at a certain hour. The reason why I said that the dog that belonged to the middle-aged woman was the old woman’s—it was the middle-aged woman who made the dog stay still, and it was she who was horrid—was because by putting a leash in the old woman’s hand, I could picture a scene in which the woman and the dog walked across the park side by side on their way home, looking lonely, and funny at the same time. In any case, the fact that I’m talking about an old woman knitting in a park in France, and telling an anecdote about a dog that was mesmerized by something, whatever it was, may suggest that this story will be about certain thoughts that mesmerize and afflict me.

  When put this way, what I’m saying may sound like the truth, but this story, at least the part about the dog, isn’t true. I actually saw the dog recently in the garden of a café near my place. The dog came into the story somewhat arbitrarily because I put it in a past story in my memory. Anyway, the dog does go into convulsions from time to time, and usually seems stricken with fear. When someone approaches the doghouse, the dog, which is always in the doghouse, begins to bark loudly at once, at first out of gladness because it’s always alone, but while barking out of gladness it changes its mind instantly, realizing that it’s afraid of something, and begins to bark in a fearful voice, no longer glad, but no one can tell what it is that makes the dog tremble in fear.

  Actually, the story about the old woman itself isn’t true. I’m making up new stories by mixing up my memories and thoughts, and linking together things that have nothing to do with each other. There actually were old women who came to the park and sat on benches for a long time, but there wasn’t one who spent all day there. (What I’m saying is that I’ll be telling a story in which gazes fixed on certain things, and memories and thoughts, are jumbled together.)When I take my eyes off the people who come to the little old park, I see myself sitting blankly on a bench, afflicted by a number of thoughts. I was able to leave the city, where I spent my time for some obscure reason, after going to the riverside one winter day and coming across a large, dolphin-shaped tube floating down the river—many things floated down the river in my memory, because ever since I was little, I always liked to idly watch the river—and while slowly walking by the riverside with the tube alongside me—I pictured in my mind a clumsy-looking band slowly marching along the riverside while playing a slow tune—saw it finally disappear from my view.

  I spent the summer and autumn that year lying among the shrubs on the sandy plain along the river, looking at the river and feeling that my life had expired or I had entered a thoroughly wrong path. No, I thought I had yet to go down many more wrong paths in order to enter a thoroughly wrong path.

  At any rate, the dolphin-shaped tube I saw, which could have been thrown out by a father who was angry at his child, or by a child who was disappointed in, or felt betrayed by, his father, or by someone in the family who was angry for some reason or angry at nothing other than the tube itself, which caught the person’s eye at that moment, or which was floating down the winter river for some other obscure reason, did not come to me as some kind of a revelation, because to the end, I did not let the tube, which hadn’t come to me as a revelation from the beginning, come to me as a revelation. Nevertheless, the dolphin tube gave me enough motivation to leave the city—perhaps I took the tube, which hadn’t come to me as a revelation, as some kind of a suggestion—which was perhaps because I was occupied with thoughts about the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” composed by a linguist, which I’d read around that time but hadn’t understood the precise meaning of, and vaguely thought, when the tube had floated down the meandering river and could no longer be seen, that I may end up writing something, something about the difficulty of existence, the difficulty of talking about the difficulty of existence, the double difficulty of it, and that it would begin with me leaving the city. (How easy is it, though, for such words to be without truth? Thinking about the colossal gap between truth and falsehood, the gray area that can’t be named, and thinking that the gap must be filled by fabrication, as inadequate as it is, I think that this story, too, will consist mostly of such fabrication.)

  Watching the dolphin on the river, which was disappearing from my view, I regretted that I wasn’t wearing a black fedora, because it seemed that the act of taking it off, hanging it on a branch of a bare tree on the winter riverside, then leaving the spot—I have a habit of calling up specific objects when I can’t carry on with abstract thoughts—would serve as a gracious farewell to the dolphin that could no longer be seen, and would perhaps, if lucky, reach the sea, which would suit it better, and float around among real dolphins, triggering their curiosity, as well as a farewell to a certain period in my life. Furthermore, I liked to think, although it wasn’t true, that the dolphin tube I saw floating down a winter river made for me a decision that I myself had difficulty making, and that the course of my life had thus changed slightly, indeed ever so slightly, because it was a good thing, at least in my mind, for the course of my life to change, be it slightly, by a dolphin tube I happened to see floating down a river one day, or by something that had nothing to do with me, like the tube, something that was almost nothing at all.

  I myself couldn’t say whether or not this was true. But there are thoughts that, despite having occurred in the mind, become more real in the mind than things that have actually taken place, which is the case for the thoughts above. And the thoughts may be telling me that I already know that what I’m writing will be about things that tell me nothing. And talking about things that tell you nothing is probably the same as thinking about things that remain obscure to the end.

  In effect, what I really want to talk about is something that’s nothing, or things you can’t talk about. Although most of them are difficult to talk about, you can talk at least about the ways in which you can’t talk about them, and how inexpressible they are, or how inexpressibly expressible they are, in which, perhaps, lies the ultimate something of speaking.

  Or perhaps these words were conceived in my mind and had their beginning in the moment I felt severe dizziness as I watched a number of black birds, which had been sitting on a tree, suddenly soaring all at once into the darkening sky when I absently threw a rock while taking a walk in the woods near my house one evening.

  (Between the moment when I’m writing a sentence and the moment when the thing spoken of in the sentence actually or fictionally took place, there’s a space like a river that must be crossed by swimming, and I could be swept away by the current to a wrong place while crossing the river.)

  At that moment, I thought that I could make certain motifs appear repeatedly in my story—you could say that that’s the only idea I came up with while contemplating this story—while thinking that I could write something about someone who constantly felt dizzy, and at the same time, thinking that I had witnessed in the past scenes similar to that of the birds soaring into the darkening sky and disappearing.

  It’s true, however, that around that time, I was thinking a lot about a species of parrot called kea that lives in the highlands of New Zealand, which I happened to read about in a newspaper article, but it’s clear that the fact bears no direct relation to how I came to write this. . . But is it so clear?

  Through the article, I found out that keas are birds that have feathers with a green tint, are bigger than ordinary parrots and intelligent enough to push or pull an object in a certain order so as to obtain food, are full of curiosity, and go through clothes and stuff people leave lying around, taking a short break while traveling, and take out the things in the pockets or just fly away with the clothes in their beaks, and have a cruel eating habit in which they alight mostly on sheep feeding on grass and make them die a slow, painful death, by delving into the sheep’s bodies using their beaks and claws and eating the kidneys, but the
paper did not carry a picture of the birds and I couldn’t see what they looked like.

  In reality the sheep may flee, or put up a struggle, at least, instead of having their kidneys ripped out by parrots while quietly grazing on grass, but in my imagination they are quietly grazing on grass even as their kidneys are being ripped out by the parrots. The feeling that sheep, which graze on grass incessantly to satisfy or appease a hunger that isn’t easily satisfied or appeased, feel with the greatest intensity in their life is probably none other than hunger, and it must be their fate to feel constant hunger. (Some facts, though irrelevant to me, lead me to feel pain or think about pain just because they are facts, and the fact about the sheep in the highlands of New Zealand is among them.)

  The sheep, unlike some monkeys that, looking very startled, cry out in a quite peculiar way, meaning, Watch out, eagles, when feeling threatened by eagles that prey on them, may think, The only way for us to beat those parrots is to flaunt our fearsome silence while having our kidneys ripped out, and this may serve as a clue in understanding the fearsome silence of sheep. And there’s something humorous about another aspect of sheep in my mind, which is that they release methane, a greenhouse gas, as they quietly, and solemnly, burp. A cycle of revenge is created in which keas, which have lived in the highlands of New Zealand for a long time in my fantasy about sheep taking revenge on humans who have long been slaughtering them, by quietly and solemnly releasing methane, take revenge on sheep, brought by European immigrants, which have invaded their territory, and sheep take revenge on humans (this is one of the many notions I have of sheep), and humans take revenge on everything for no good reason (this seems very human to me). I imagine that herbivores that stuff themselves with things they shouldn’t eat, things that are raised as livestock by humans, because humans force them to eat such things, are taking revenge now only by quietly burping and farting, but that they are quietly and solemnly preparing a great revenge which defies comparison to burps or farts, and that it’ll come as a great catastrophe to humans someday. And this idea arises from the belief that it’s unjust for humans to rule over this world thinking they can do whatever they please with this world.

  Picturing parrots that are constantly after sheep kidneys and sheep that could lose their kidneys to parrots if they don’t watch out, and which live together in their own kind of peace, though not at peace, I thought about the connection between things that are difficult to connect, and a performance by parrots and sheep held on the stage of the highlands of New Zealand seemed, to me at least, something more surreal than (or as surreal as) any surrealistic painting or film or play, and led me to think that I should like to include in this piece a surrealistic element, whose meaning I’ve reconsidered for a long time, and which is an important literary legacy, though neglected today, and also led me to think that I could make some other possible attempt by doing so, and that it could be one of the features of what I intended to write.

  And now, momentarily lost in an unrealistic fantasy, I think that in order to see, understand, accept, and describe the reality of a moment, you need to make an effort to not see reality as it is, an effort at distortion, to see it from another angle, from another level, and in another way, and not merely evade it, and that there’s a reality that can be reached only beyond realism. And I think that surrealism, with its obscure boundaries, lies not beyond realism, but could become undeniable reality within reality. It seems that I think somewhat lightly of realism—this could mean realism in a broad sense in some cases, and in others, a narrow sense—but it occurs to me, too, that there’s something in realism that could be taken somewhat lightly. And I think about what an unrealistic world I live in, and that perhaps the world in which those unrealistic things come back to become my reality is the very place I can feel comfortable in. And I feel that the highlands of New Zealand I picture in my mind, at least where there are sheep having their kidneys ripped out by parrots, are an undeniable reality to me, though it seems like a surreal world, and that I undeniably exist before that undeniable surreality.

  Perhaps I could add here a scene that has something to do with me seeing a flock of swallows that came flying from somewhere repeatedly swooping down, brushing against the surface of the water in the pool that no one entered because the water was too cold, and flying away as I lay reading one afternoon at the poolside at a hotel in a resort (I’d been in Nepal for several days at the time, but I was in a state in which I couldn’t tell why I was there, and the fact that someone told me that he saw me die a terrible death in a foreign land in his dream, not long before I went to Nepal, had nothing to do with the trip. Actually, I had vaguely intended to go to Tibet or India, not Nepal, and vaguely thought before I went on the trip to Nepal that I wanted to see the yaks in the Himalayas where I could see snow-covered mountains right before my eyes—I’d seen on television how the yaks, full of suspicion, ate only the salt that their keepers fed them, even though salt was something that was essential for them, so I wanted to see for myself if that really was the case, and above all, I wanted to feed the yaks salt with my own hands, and told the people I met around that time that I was going to the Himalayas to see yaks, and it felt like the truth—but it wasn’t to see yaks that I went to the Himalayas. But yaks were at a higher altitude than the altitude to which I climbed, and I ended up not seeing a single yak and had to come down from the Himalayas after getting an eyeful of nothing but donkeys. One of the things I realized while climbing the snow-covered mountains of the Himalayas was that you have to be more careful to not trip and fall over the donkey droppings that were scattered all over the road than to not fall down the cliff that was thousands of meters deep. Of course, you’d also have to be careful not to fall down the cliff that was thousands of meters deep by tripping over donkey droppings.) Several days earlier, standing before the impressive snow-covered mountains, over eight thousand meters high, I’d summed up my feelings about the mountains in the words, Here are some very, no, somewhat high mountains that are covered with snow, but so what? And the emotions that were stirred up by the snow-covered mountains became trapped in those words. Actually, the majestic view of the snow-covered mountains was decent at first, but then it wasn’t as decent as it was at first, and then it was just so-so, and looking at them was similar to listening to a majestic but boring symphony that caught your ears when the performance began, but soon made you feel nothing at all.

  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.