Vaseline Buddha

by Jung Young Moon

  And a wisp of wind blew for a moment, and then it stopped. The wind seemed to blow, but then it didn’t. And when I took a deep breath and breathed out long and slow through my mouth, the wind didn’t blow as if my breath had stirred it up or anything. Nevertheless, the moment I thought that there was nothing I could do about this wind it began to blow, as if it had read my thought or was supporting it. Whenever the wind blew, I thought I had something to do with the wind blowing stronger, exhaling and adding breath to the wind.

  And when the wind grew weaker, I exhaled more softly, and repeating the process, I recalled that I liked to treat objects as ideas, and ideas as objects, and thought that the wind seemed like some kind of an idea at that moment. Some ideas are sticky like ice cream melting in a child’s hand, and are fluid, being soft like a jellyfish, but other ideas are solid like a hammer and can be used to drive in a nail, and yet other ideas are fixed, like a nail that’s been driven in, and then there are things, such as certain birds that fly in a formation toward the equator or a polar region, that are ideas in themselves. (Endowing an idea with the shape and characteristics of an object, and coloring an object with an idea, is probably a task belonging to poetry, not fiction. I might be trying to make this become more like poetry than fiction.)

  Thinking, This wind, at least, has a wavering belief, and is faithful to that belief which is bound to waver, I enjoyed the strange game with the wind, and soon got tired of it and forgot about the wind.

  But looking at the grass, wilting in the midday heat and gently swaying in the wind, I recalled some thoughts about my existence that were deeply rooted in me, which were difficult to shake off, and it occurred to me that by thinking that the grass was wilting, I was inflicting injustice on the grass, and viewing it in an unjust light, so I withdrew my gaze, and the thought, and was about to root out the thoughts that were deeply rooted in me, which were difficult to shake off, but then stopped and let them take root even more deeply in me. And among those thoughts, the one that became the most deeply rooted was the thought that I was barely managing to stand, as if floating, on some kind of a foothold I couldn’t quite or ever touch, since it never existed in the first place, that there were no grounds for my existence anywhere, which had more than enough grounds in me, but was groundless in itself if you thought you had found the grounds for it. The idea that everything in existence existed by accident, that inevitability was only a part of a tremendous accident, was something I could never shake off, and made my life so difficult, and yet so easy.

  As I looked at nature spread out before my eyes, it looked as if it were weary, or bored, of being nature, of having no choice but to be nature. By and large, nature made me feel at ease, but at that moment, it looked much too steeped in self-satisfaction, and I felt somewhat uneasy. And the question I’d long had on my mind of why nature always looked natural rose to my mind again. If nature held a power that made everything that was placed in it an inevitable part of itself, what kind of a power was it? And other questions naturally surfaced among my thoughts that seemed as if they would come to a stop, again and again, but didn’t. Were unnatural things something that only humans could create? Was nature, which seemed indifferent, obsessed with balance? Did nature not commit errors? Or was it free from errors? And was it because nature couldn’t be accused of errors, regardless of whether or not it was free from errors? Was nature free of responsibility, and could it not be held responsible for something? Was nature free of responsibility for everything, including itself? But could you say that something was free from errors because it couldn’t be accused of errors? Or could errors exist regardless of whether or not you could accuse something of them? (I wanted to continue on, in any way I could, with questions whose answers it was possible not to arrive at, perhaps because “the question marks weren’t placed deeply enough,” as someone said.) But was nature really natural? Why were some of the things that humans created not natural? Couldn’t it be said, in a broad sense, that everything humans created was also part of nature?

  But, as always when I had such thoughts, I failed to obtain answers to the questions over which natural philosophers of old could have agonized. I thought that the earwig which I thought appeared before me at that moment, although it didn’t, and placed on my hand and watched as it stayed still, as if dead, after squirming for a while—the earwig, at that moment, represented nature—thoroughly ignored my question. So I became a little angry and wanted to mock and slander nature in any way I could, and thought that a modifier was necessary in order to do so, and said that nature was shabby, false, ashamed, squalid, squalid beyond measure, and above all, cruel beyond measure (I wanted to inflict injustice on nature through an excessive use of adjectives), but as could be easily predicted, I was the one, not nature, who was shabby, false, ashamed, squalid, squalid beyond measure, and above all, cruel beyond measure. So I harbored an ill feeling against nature, and thought that I could expose it without hesitation—I could, in this way, harbor an ill feeling against anything at all, and expose it without hesitation—but I just harbored it without exposing it.

  And I looked at the scenes in the landscape, ignoring perspective with my eyes as I’d done before, as if looking at a painting in which perspective is ignored, and switching around the scenes in the landscape which had become messy in the process, I thought that nature was exposing, almost audaciously, the fact that it was perfectly indifferent to everything that happened to it, or hiding it, through its various faces. I looked around, thinking that there might be something that belonged to nature, a squirrel, for instance, that was watching me in secret as I thought that about nature, but I didn’t see anything. Still, I felt as if something were watching me in secret.

  But such thoughts seemed dull, and I decided that I wouldn’t think anymore. Lying still, I looked up. But as often happens when I’m lying on the grass in a forest, thoughts that seemed trapped in a sort of endless repetition floated around in my mind, and they had a delicate but tenacious feel to them, which made me think that their roots were touching the roots of the grass on which I was lying, that they were taking root in the ground.

  As I often do at such times, I tried to fix my gaze on an object so as to break away from tangled thoughts and drive my thoughts to a single point. But there was nothing that held my gaze. I looked around with vacant eyes. Branches were blocking out the sky. Some branches at the top of a tall tree were shaking almost imperceptibly, and the branches, which had nothing really special about them, gave off a very strange, indescribable feeling. It seemed that you would begin to shudder if you looked at them long enough, but I didn’t begin to shudder, no matter how long I looked at them. And yet the strange feeling was indescribable indeed, and although I had the feeling, it seemed that the feeling, in the end, couldn’t be mine.

  Perhaps it was because the tremor of the branches that were shaking so faintly seemed like the waves of a quiet sea, which made it seem as if I were looking up at the surface from under the sea, and as if everything I saw were an underwater scene. At one point, it felt as if the trees were coral reefs, which was a very easy feeling to have, and a feeling that seemed okay to discard, so I discarded the feeling.

  Still, in a brief space of time, I let the sun, which was very gradually passing between those branches, and then between those branches and the branches of a neighboring tree, pass very gradually while I was watching it, although it was of course passing as always at a regular interval, and at one point, it looked as if it were caught by the tip of a branch. It was nothing more than a feeling I had, that I was making things up in my mind, but I let myself stay in that state for as long as I wanted.

  Peace of mind, which came to me so rarely that when it did come at an unexpected hour it made me feel somewhat awkward and uncomfortable, and led me to keep an eye on it, slightly suspicious because I wasn’t unaware that it would soon disappear, came to me like a rain cloud that comes dawdling, but although you couldn’t say that it had nothing to do with the peaceful la
ndscape before me, it wasn’t just because of the landscape. Peace of mind always came for no good reason, and disappeared for even less of a good reason than when it came.

  For quite some time I looked at the branches that gave off an indescribable feeling, and then away from the branches and at the sun which was slowly moving across the vast and boundless sky, and then suddenly leapt to my feet, unbuckled my belt, and began to wrap it around a tree trunk for some reason. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but it seemed that it was an okay thing to do. Anyway, the belt fit the tree perfectly, and I was pleased that the girth of the tree was the same as my own. At any rate, the belt was old, and I’d been grappling with the question of how to give it a proper end. (Even after a long time had passed, I thought from time to time about the tree around which I had wrapped a belt, and felt happy to think that somewhere, there was a tree wearing a belt, one of the few trees in the world wearing a belt, perhaps the only one. And it could perhaps stir up the imagination of those who found it.) And indicating that nature should go on doing whatever it was that it was doing, and hoping that nature, which was always silent and seemed impertinent as a result, would stay deeply absorbed in itself for ever after, I gently bent a branch that touched my hand and then let it go, thus bidding nature farewell.

  I came out of the forest after that and was walking across the hill where animals were grazing in a herd, but I couldn’t tell if they were sheep or goats. The animals, white and gray and black, did not make crying sounds that would identify them as sheep or goats, and there are sheep that look almost like goats, and goats that look like sheep. Perhaps the herd consisted of both goats and sheep. Or there could be a hybrid of a sheep and a goat, although I wasn’t sure if such a thing existed, which would look like either a goat or a sheep depending on how you looked at it. It was also possible that some sheep and goats couldn’t easily distinguish between goats and sheep, which looked so much like themselves, and suspected that they were of the same species as themselves.

  Without really thinking about it, I began to count the animals that I wasn’t sure were sheep or goats. But I kept having to start over at ten. The animals, which couldn’t possibly know that I was counting them, kept moving around, and the herd kept changing in form although it didn’t break off completely (for that was how a herd of sheep maintained its form).

  Recalling that when I had trouble falling asleep I counted sheep or other animals, and that I stayed up a whole night once, letting more than five thousand sheep pass through my mind, I thought that counting the animals that were before me, which I wasn’t sure were sheep or goats, was different from counting animals when I had trouble falling asleep, but that I wasn’t sure what the difference was. Still, I thought that I certainly liked doing something that went on endlessly.

  The sun went down over the hill where the animals were grazing and evening fell, and knowing the pleasure of walking in the evening without saying or thinking anything as mountain shadows lengthened out as much as possible and gradually got buried in darkness and quiet, and everything turned into some kind of an immovable object, I walked in the evening without saying or thinking anything, but pleasure, which seemed on the verge of arising, vanished. If anything, I felt sorrow for no particular reason, a sorrow that might be called the sorrow of evening, whose origin I didn’t know, neither to whom it belonged—and I felt that it was the quintessence of all sorrow—which was similar to what you feel when you have a dream that isn’t necessarily so sad, about yourself dying, for instance, but makes you stiff, as if paralyzed, with such heavy sorrow upon waking, and it seemed that it had something to do with how I detected a faint trace of sorrow at that moment on the hill that was spread out wide and touching the sky even though it wasn’t high. The sorrow I felt at that moment, at least, was a mixture, like all the emotions I felt, of an emotion that was stirred up for good reason at a certain moment, and an emotion that had nothing to do with the moment, which put me at ease even while I was somewhat sad. And the sorrow, along with a certain vagueness there, which seemed infused with nature’s languid sigh, something I couldn’t put my finger on, made me think again that it was Molloy’s town.

  And as I walked out of the story I thought of as “Roaming in Molloy’s Town” and left the town and rode a train I recalled a memory, a memory of my childhood. In the river that flowed in front of my childhood village, there was a rock called the terrapin rock, named for the terrapins that climbed to the top of the rock and huddled together to bathe in the sun. But what I wanted to think about was not the rock, but a terrapin I saw one day on the meadow. A terrapin had come out of the river, and after taking a walk, or doing its business, it was returning to the river, when it ran into an obstacle, none other than a cow. The cow blocked the terrapin’s path, and the terrapin did all it could to return to the river, but the cow, for some reason, was doing all it could to stop it. Did the cow feel a great curiosity about the round thing that was crawling slowly? But the cow had a good reason of its own. The cow pushed around the terrapin with its mouth, and licked the terrapin’s shell with its tongue, and then kept licking it, seeing that the slightly salty taste wasn’t bad, but the terrapin, which didn’t like it, did all it could to escape the cow that was harassing it, to no avail. Things grew worse, for at that moment, two more cows came and joined the cow in licking the terrapin’s shell. Surrounded by the three cows, the terrapin tried to slip out through the twelve legs standing like a fence, but it was no use. For a while, the terrapin didn’t know where to put itself, and the cows had a good time, and in the end, the terrapin was set free only after the cows lost interest in it, having had their fill of its shell, but it was by now as offended as it could be, so it stretched out its neck and did its best to wipe its own shell with its mouth, to wash away the feel of the cow tongues that had touched it, and at last, began to make its way toward where it had intended to go, or, in other words, the river. In summers I used to climb up to the terrapin rock and dry myself after a swim in the river. When I thought of that, the sorrow I felt on the hill where evening was falling once again seemed groundless, and I scattered what remained of the sorrow out the window into the swiftly passing scenery.

  And that night, I went to a city nearby that was somewhat large, where I hadn’t planned on going, and went to a club and met a woman of Indian descent, who was born in Madagascar and had moved to France. (Now, having talked about a journey I took in order to see someone in a story, a journey on which nothing happened, I can finally talk about something that has to do with Madagascar, where I’ve never been and am not sure if I’ll ever go.) We had a drink together and chatted in English—she said she was waiting for her boyfriend—after which we somehow ended up dancing—it seemed that she was using me to pass the time until her boyfriend showed up, and I was eager to be used in that way—and said goodbye, touching cheeks lightly as the French do—her boyfriend never showed up—and I took the night train and returned to where I was staying. Anyway, there was something unusual about her, found in unusual animals living only in Madagascar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. She had moved to France when she was young and didn’t remember much about Madagascar, and didn’t talk much about it, but when I told her about my encounter with a rogue cow around a grazing land somewhere, and how I’d felt tempted to seduce it—the feeling was a mixture of a desire, not unlike the desire to seduce a seductive woman, and a desire that was unlike it, which made it even more complicated—but not knowing how to seduce it—I had nothing to seduce it with, and I couldn’t seduce it with myself—and not having considered what to do after seducing it—we could, of course, look into each other’s eyes, our eyes having met momentarily, or walk side by side—I stayed with the cow for a little while, and then we each went our way, she showed interest and asked me if I was trying to seduce her, with a pretty smile on her face, and when I told her I wasn’t sure, she said that she, too, had once felt tempted to seduce a pretty bird, or even a seductive chair in a furniture showcase. And then she sai
d that the most beautiful scene she had ever witnessed was something she saw as a child, a herd of cattle returning home through baobab trees against a setting sky. I felt as if I could see a little girl driving cattle through baobab trees against a setting sky. But I didn’t know what she felt as she drove cattle through baobab trees, or saw someone drive cattle. Half-Indian and half-Caucasian, she seemed like a chameleon to me, and thinking that on the return train, I thought that I might go to Madagascar someday.

  At any rate, Madagascar seemed like a decent place to tell someone that you might visit even though you weren’t actually going to, and when I was at home by myself, doing nothing, I felt like a chameleon, so when someone asked me why I was thinking about going to Madagascar, I said it was because I wanted to see the chameleons there.

  My favorite moments from travels are those that stir or grasp my heart in gentle but strong ways, which make it possible for me to go on traveling. And the things that happen at such moments are actually nothing at all, things that come to light only through those moments, after which they vanish almost without a trace, but remain etched in my subconscious mind, and are in fact more like ordinary things.

  A long time ago, I went to Rome, and after checking into a hotel near the Rome Central Station, from which the Colosseum could be seen—I’d wandered around downtown Rome for a couple of days, but I hadn’t felt much of anything—I stayed cooped up in the hotel room for three days, regretting that I’d come to Rome without a particular reason. I spent a long time lying still on the neatly made bed, without unpacking my suitcase or taking my coat off, glaring at a shoddy little replica of the ancient Roman Colosseum on the desk in the room. I wasn’t sure what I was doing in Rome, a city of ancient historical sites. Generally, when I was doing perfectly nothing at all, I felt as if I had at least a little idea of I was doing, but that wasn’t really the case then. So I thought that doing or not doing something when it didn’t matter what you did was certainly different from doing something when you had to do it, a thought that made me wonder if I was thinking right, and I thought that there was everything I needed there, with nothing that wasn’t there, and thinking that it didn’t really make sense, I went to the Colosseum in the middle of the night and saw stray cats roaming around, and left Rome as if to flee from them.