Vaseline Buddha

by Jung Young Moon

  There’s no other expression of human emotion that has as many qualities and aspects to it as does smile or laughter, which can be preceded by many descriptive words. Laughter can easily arise in inappropriate situations, and in fact, it often arises from the discrepancy between a person and the situation he’s faced with. Smile or laughter itself, of course, doesn’t function as a full emotion, nor is it something that can be categorized as an emotion, but it reveals the complexities of the heart, being linked to various emotions, and establishes the workings of the mind, interacting with the senses. In addition, smile or laughter, which is the most complex emotional reaction, exerts a powerful influence on emotion and thought. For instance, a person can smile or laugh while deep in sorrow, or when his anxiety reaches its height, and such smile or laughter can change or dispel the sorrow or anxiety. Smile or laughter is the most innocent yet cunning at the same time, the most frivolous yet just as profound, and the most naïve, yet evil. But it’s difficult to contemplate evil sorrow, frivolous emptiness, or cunning solitude. The smile or laughter of a newborn baby is probably the most innocent and beautiful thing in the world, but the smile or laughter of someone taking pleasure in abusing someone is evil beyond measure. Perhaps the reason why smile or laughter can so easily change in nature is because unlike emptiness or boredom or such, in which state you can’t help but stay for a while once you’re in it, smile or laughter is a state in which it’s difficult to stay, because smile or laughter is something so unpredictable that it can betray itself. Smile or laughter, which is actually a subtle and complex movement of facial muscles and the mind, is an anthropological object of study as well as a psychological phenomenon (I vaguely imagine that the decisive factor in the human evolution from apes was the human smile or laughter, and humans’ awareness of their own smile or laughter). In addition, smile or laughter is a philosophical topic, and many philosophers, in fact, considered smile or laughter from a philosophical point of view.

  But one of the problems surrounding laughter is that today, there’s an excess and abuse thereof. Laughter, in fact, has become a sublime virtue as well as a sublime vice of the day. Laughter, of course, didn’t become such on its own. People seem to be suffering from an obsession to laugh, and steeped in the wrong belief that they can forget past hurts and present sufferings and move forward only by doing so. Fundamental human emotions, such as a sense of emptiness, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, sadness, and unease have become something negative that should be avoided as much as possible, and laughter rules in splendor in the place from which they have been cast out (I picture laughter looking down on the sadness of the emotions it has driven out, without even hiding its nastiness, which, in a way, seems to be the self-portrait of the day). In short, the idea that laughter is desirable, no matter what, is prevalent, like a superstition. But is it true that laughter is just desirable? It’s true that laughter has a great power that makes it possible to endure a difficult life, brings the hope that you can break away from an oppressive condition, purifies the mind the way profound sorrow does, assimilates you with the object of laughter, just as when you experience something beautiful, and that the more painful the present situation is, the more necessary is laughter. But the negative effects of laughter are just as serious as the positive. Laughter, by its inherent nature, can cunningly make an individual turn his eyes away from his life and the situation with which he’s faced, and make him think less or give up on thinking, thus making him stupid. What good is it to laugh in a futile, unnatural way in the face of a reality that won’t change much at all through a little laughter? You could be even more miserable when you face your real self after laughing in vain. In a way, laughter exercises an oppressive ideological function in this era, just as an oppressive system did. I think that the laughter forced upon you by the many soap operas, shows, and movies that you couldn’t possibly watch if you had any refinement at all, that drain you of all energy if you watch them, is putting everyone in a state of insensibility and numbness. What those shows, which tell you to laugh in whatever way you can, to laugh until you’re in a daze, but aren’t funny and only make you sad and furious, really propagate is that you should laugh a lot, for that will keep you from thinking, and your troubles will be covered up by laughter, and won’t exist when covered up, and even if they still exist, you’re happy as long as you’re laughing. (There’s nothing more grotesque than a group of people having dinner, laughing as they watch a vulgar comedy program on television.) Genuine laughter always has its beginning in proper humor, and is not separate from the intellect and the reflective power of the intellect. Genuine laughter has enduring strength, but vulgar laughter is strongly volatile, and lacks humor. Sadly, laughter arising from humor, founded in good sense and requiring a natural process, is growing increasingly scarce.

  Reflecting thus, I laughed bitterly. And laughter, though weak, found me again before long, but it seemed like the laughter of an idiot I met on the street, a stranger, directed at me.

  I continued to be in a poor condition in many ways, but I hadn’t yet reached a state in which the poor condition had continued for so long that I didn’t care, but I wasn’t in a state in which I could do something in a new, bad mood, either.

  Anyway, what kept my poor condition from growing worse, no, kept me, to an extent, from completely crumbling, was my son. Or I should say that the thought crossed my mind. But I wasn’t sure if that was really the case. I kind of thought that my son wasn’t able to keep me from growing worse by thinking worse thoughts. I didn’t have the kind of relationship that most fathers have with their children with my son.

  My son didn’t live with me, and when vacation started, I brought him home and we spent several days together. I tried to spend as much time with him as possible, but it wasn’t easy for me to spend time with him.

  My son, who, as most children do, let me down, by being born as a boy even though I wanted a girl, and let me down again by looking like a girl at first but growing more and more into a boy, seemed bright but somewhat slow in a way, and as for myself, I tried not to be someone he didn’t need, at least, or was better off without.

  Once I taught him how to catch rabbits using a wire snare, not because I thought it was something that all the fathers in the world should teach their sons in all ages, but because we didn’t really have anything to do together when we actually met, and I happened to think of snares. We lay a snare on a path that no one used, on a mountain at the back of my house where no rabbits lived, and when we returned later, there was nothing in the snare, of course, let alone a rabbit.

  And once I bought him a slingshot. It seems incredible now, but as a boy, I made slingshots out of branches and rubber bands and caught birds with them, and I thought about making him a slingshot myself, but didn’t want to bother. (I don’t know about anything else, but I just can’t bring myself to do bothersome things, and although I did unpleasant things even while thinking I didn’t want to, I couldn’t do the same with bothersome things. So when there’s something that I must do, I do it thinking, if possible, that it’s something unpleasant rather than bothersome.)

  With the slingshot we went to the mountain to catch a magpie, since there were only magpies there. I demonstrated how to use the slingshot, but that didn’t go so well, either. (It seemed that there was an eccentric old man in me, as old as could be and willing to lose all his judgment, as well as a boy around ten years of age wanting to remain in the peace of childhood, and the two appeared alternately, and the problem arose when the old man and the boy, who usually got along pretty well, looked down on each other, and a bigger problem arose when the old man and the boy faded away, and an awkward adult who found everything bothersome appeared, and that was the case when I was dealing with my boy.) Nevertheless, he practiced how to use the slingshot as I taught him, but he wasn’t very good at it, just as expected. And yet, after we climbed a steep hill, both gasping for breath because my liver was damaged from smoking, which I couldn’t quit, and his wasn�
��t fully developed yet, something amazing happened, and a stone he threw casually at a magpie sitting on a branch, which missed the target, hit the wing of a magpie that was flying up into the air, which wobbled for a moment, then steadied itself and flew away, and seeing that, he got excited and jumped up and down for joy. Seeing his great delight, I thought that it wasn’t something to get so excited about that you had to jump up and down for joy. Still, I told him something that wasn’t far off, that with a slingshot, you could make something like a roe deer, which lives in bigger mountains, black out for a moment although you couldn’t kill it, and my son, who already has a problem believing most of what I say even though he’s only nine, said with a twinkle in his eyes that we should go to a bigger mountain right away and catch something bigger, and I told him that I knew how he felt, but he should wait a little longer, until he was a little bigger.

  Nevertheless, I instructed him to practice more so that he could shoot a flying magpie for real, and feeling triumphant, he practiced till the sun went down, not to do as I instructed but, it seemed, to shoot a flying magpie for real. But he didn’t practice for that long, because the sun soon went down. He could have kept practicing after dark, but he gave up. He took after me and lacked perseverance.

  I thought that I wasn’t sure what I could do for him, but that I wasn’t sure, either, if I could do anything and everything if it were for him, and regardless of that thought, I thought of things I should teach him as a father, and taught him how to swim. For some reason, I thought that I had to make sure to teach him how to float on water, how not sink when you fell in water. But he gave up soon after swallowing a few gulps of water, and was reluctant to do anything that involved the possibility of having to swallow water. So I taught him how to jump ropes and do sit-ups, which didn’t involve drinking water, and although he couldn’t jump the rope even once, he could do sit-ups quite well, as if he’d been doing it for a long time, ever since he was born, even though it was his first time, and did thirty sit-ups at once the night I taught him, possessed with a strange enthusiasm, as if he took great pleasure in it, and didn’t listen to me when I told him to stop, and did thirty more, and in the end, reached a hundred, sounding out of breath—he made me kneel down and hold his ankles, and count to a hundred, and I thought about stopping him but I stopped myself from stopping him and watched as he, too, counted the numbers, folding his body in half and unfolding it, and gasping for breath, and as I did I felt something like the sorrow of a father who has a son, not too severely, but mildly, no, severely and mildly at the same time—and at last fell asleep, utterly exhausted, which seems appropriate only for a child, but is somewhat strange even for a child.

  And once I taught him how to spin a top, but he didn’t have an easy time learning it, and we were both beset with great difficulty until he could spin a top properly. But once he learned how to spin a top he became hooked, and buried himself in spinning a top both at home and outside. As a result, I had to feel a dizziness that was different from my usual dizziness, watching the top he was spinning, which spun around in a circle that was a vivid black and red and blue, so I tried, much too hard, to focus on the red at the center so that the other two colors next to it would disappear and no longer be seen, which made the dizziness grow worse.

  There really was quite a strange side to him, which I confirmed one day when I finally woke up around four in the afternoon because I’d drunk too much the night before to find him sitting quietly on the edge of the bed with his back to me. He sat by himself without waking me up till that hour, only drinking water like someone fasting, and at that moment he seemed not just strange, but a little scary as well. Next to me, on the bed, there was some kind of a castle he’d built with Lego blocks. He never told me if he hadn’t completed it or if he’d torn it down after completing it because I never asked him about it. That day, I had the ridiculous idea that perhaps I could take him, or make him take me on a journey, and start a true life of wandering as Molloy did, not just go on a trip.

  I asked him what he was thinking, and he, with a look of severe reproof on his face, told me that he couldn’t tell me that, and so I was able to conclude that he was once again thinking negative thoughts about me. It seemed to me that he was thinking about ordering me around and making me do something when I woke up, condemning me in his young heart.

  Fortunately, his anger soon subsided when I bought him a pinwheel. For some reason I wanted to see the pinwheel, which spun quickly when he ran toward me, holding it in his hand, spin more quickly and frantically, so I told him to run faster, and watching him run frantically toward me several times, I thought that we could be good friends someday. But a thought I’d had earlier, that taking after me, he might follow in my ways, came to my mind again and worried me, but I concluded that he would live a life of his own. And when he grew older and life felt unbearable, he would blame me at times, but there was still time before that happened, and it wasn’t something inevitable, so it was possible that things wouldn’t turn out that way. I had trouble falling asleep that night, watching my son sleeping, and thinking about the first romantic relationship and sexual intercourse he would experience, and the many dreams he would have and then give up, and thinking that for now, he could just keep up with doing what he wanted to do, doing sit-ups, for instance.

  Sometimes when we went to the mountain together, he would run around playing, but then sit down on a tree stump and become quietly lost in thought, and when I saw him sitting like that, I would recall my own childhood, when I spent countless hours quietly sitting like that.

  It’s midwinter now. I’m sitting in the afternoon sun, drinking tea, in front of the table by the window on the second floor of the house I live in. The tea is ginger. The doctor told me that it would help with my dizziness. I do some things as the doctor instructs, but not others. The doctor has banned me from caffeine, but it seems boring somehow to do everything as the doctor ordered, so sometimes, I wake up in the morning and have three cups of strong coffee, and when I do, I grow severely dizzy. But being in that state brings me a strange pleasure. I’ve now come to think that there’s something in my dizziness that has to do with something fundamental in my being, and that dizziness may be something at the root of existence. And dizziness is addictive. It seems that there’s something of a religious experience in losing consciousness when dizziness reaches its extreme, or saturation, or freezing point of sorts, which is demonstrated in cases in which people lose consciousness with the help of charms or medicines in certain religious ceremonies. (Sometimes, people make a deliberate attempt to lose consciousness. People on an island in a tropical region dry up the roots of a plant of the pepper family called kava and mix it with water and drink it before performing a ceremony, and then walk on hot stones, and it is said that the drink makes you hallucinate a little and grow averse to light, and that the origin of the ceremony of walking on stones while your senses are paralyzed has to do with eels.)

  In the meantime, I ended up going to an ear, nose, and throat clinic. The third floor office of the clinic specializing in symptoms of dizziness was full of people suffering from symptoms of dizziness. Some of them were sitting with their head against the back of the sofa, or leaning on the person next to them, who had come as their guardian. I wanted to put my head on someone’s shoulder, and felt a sense of fellowship with them, but I couldn’t tell if they felt the same way (perhaps people suffering from the same illness feel a stronger sense of fellowship than that felt among any others). An old man sitting to my right said to a young man sitting to my left, skipping over me, as if I weren’t sitting between them—they didn’t know each other—that he’d passed out a few days earlier and passed out twice the day before he came to the clinic, and he sounded as if he were bragging in a way, and I didn’t dare say a word in front of him about my own swooning.

  I was able to see the doctor at last after waiting for over an hour. He asked me specifically how I was dizzy, but I had difficulty describing my dizziness sp
ecifically, so I wanted to tell him that it felt similar to an LSD trip but didn’t. I’d never experienced an LSD trip, and knew only through a book that there was something similar between LSD trips and my dizziness. The treatment involved making me dizzy through artificial means to find out the cause of the symptoms of dizziness. I had to put up with the ridiculous tests the doctor conducted on me, the process of which seemed so inadequate that I wondered if the cause could be determined through the tests.

  After the checkup, the doctor showed me an anatomical chart of the ear, and told me that there was something wrong with the blood vessel connecting the vestibular organ in one of my ears to the brain, and I thought about my blood vessel that wasn’t functioning properly. And I looked at the three semicircular canals and the cochlea connected to the vestibular organ in the anatomical chart. I looked at them with great curiosity, as I always do when I see body organs in an anatomical chart, and they looked amazing and beautiful, like complex mechanisms. The doctor told me that unlike other organs in the body that were connected to each other through many blood vessels, which propelled other blood vessels into action when one of the blood vessels stopped functioning properly, there was only one blood vessel there, and that a surgery was almost impossible, and I realized that I would be living with some kind of a chronic disease, and felt that another problem had been added to the chronic problems I had.

  After prescribing some medicine, the doctor banned me from cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee. All three were very difficult things for me to give up. And he taught me several physical movements that would be helpful in overcoming symptoms of dizziness. Most of them involved moving your head to make yourself dizzy on purpose, in order to develop tolerance to dizziness. Very much like an idiot, I shook my head obediently as instructed, from left to right, and up and down.