by Nick Caistor
This is the age-old conflict, still latent in Korea: knowledge for everyone, easy knowledge, as opposed to the Chinese ideograms; popular culture or high culture, television versus art. What distinguishes Korea is that this conflict is found in distinct, opposing concepts of time, what could be seen as different ‘poetics’ of time.
At this point the little Buddhist monk interrupted his explanations by saying that if they didn’t believe him, they should try reading the text on the plaque. Why didn’t they read it out loud? All they had to remember was that each sign indicated a position of the tongue and lips.
But they didn’t know the language!
What did that matter? They should regard it not as a text but as an instruction manual, a kind of visual Braille.
They did as he suggested, hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence, and within seconds they were reading fluently. Napoleon Chirac realised that the relationship between the signs and the movements of his mouth were equivalent to that between the light and the flashing of the photoelectric cells when he looked at them on the screen.
Jacqueline commented that she now understood the meaning of the text on the plaque. Her husband agreed: it was the same for him. They could see what a vast difference there was between translation and direct reading. It seemed undeniable that translations were no use at all.
One moment though: how could they possibly understand it, when they didn’t know Korean? They had only learnt the alphabet, not the language. Were they the same thing?
‘I told you it was easy. When something is easy, it is completely easy. But no one believes it. Not even the proof convinces them.’
X
The temple’s emptiness had gradually been filling up. From the moment they arrived monks had been discreetly filing in and wandering around absorbed in their arcane duties or prayers. They drew no attention to themselves, and appeared not to pay any to the strangers. This, however, was a false impression, and when the French couple did look at them more closely, they could tell that they were fascinated by the photographer’s work and that it was only their timidity which, fortunately, prevented them from approaching the camera, touching it and wanting to look through the viewfinder, like savages. They restricted their curiosity to sideways glances and to repeatedly passing by, pretending to be doing things they were not really doing. After each approach, they hid so that they could continue to watch from a distance, but they must have had little practice at hiding, because they did it ridiculously badly, thinking that a trunk of only ten centimetres in diameter or a stone twenty centimetres high was enough to conceal them. Far from discouraging them, the laughter this produced in the French couple only stimulated them to show their interest more openly, which they did with enchanting smiles and slight bows.
Soon afterwards there was a consultation and all the monks withdrew to one of the buildings, only to reappear a short time later carrying bags, bottles and tablecloths. The little Buddhist monk told the French pair they were being invited to a picnic.
They accepted, although Napoleon Chirac insisted it could not be a very long one, as his work was pressing. A chorus of agreement and more bows: they would never allow themselves to interfere in the work of such a distinguished guest – far from it! And it really was far from it because, rather than being pressing, time adapted to all the interruptions.
They had already laid out the cloths on the floor of the shrine and spread different-sized bowls, glasses and chopsticks on them. They all sat down. The French couple were not altogether surprised to see that all the dishes were plastic, and that the crisps and sweets were from supermarket packets. The only drink was Coca-Cola.
After the first few mouthfuls, Napoleon Chirac felt obliged to give a brief explanation of his intentions and way of working. This produced a wave of polite smiles, and more brief bows. It did not matter whether they had understood or not, because they agreed with everything anyway.
Attracted by the smell of food (if this industrially produced food had a smell), a big black dog had come over. The monks greeted her enthusiastically, stroking her and offering her handfuls of nibbles and sweets which the dog devoured with great delight.
‘Aren’t they bad for her?’
‘She’s used to it.’
They filled a bowl with Coca-Cola, and the dog licked it up in seconds, curling and uncurling a huge yellow tongue.
‘What an unnatural colour for a tongue!’
‘They dye it.’
The unnatural qualities of Firefly (that was the dog’s name) went far beyond this. The temple’s sacred pet, she displayed elements of shamanism latent in the sophisticated northern Buddhism. The monks left her to roam freely, and she took full advantage of this because she was both inquisitive and sociable. She always came back, however; and indeed, she was always present, as she had demonstrated on this occasion. To avoid problems, once she had had her first litter (five puppies, which had been distributed among the region’s faithful) they had taken her to a reputable animal clinic to be neutered. It was a routine operation, in this case carried out without problems. The next day, Firefly returned to the temple and to her roaming. Imagine then the monks’ surprise when they saw that male dogs still pursued her as before, and with the same intentions. When they went to the clinic to complain, the vets were as intrigued as they were, and carried out a close examination. No: the operation had been a success; it was impossible for the bitch to be still attracting males because the organs producing the necessary smell had been removed. They even took X-rays to see if by some extraordinary chance Firefly had a second set of glands that had escaped their scalpel. Of course, this was not the case. After the monks’ third or fourth visit, one of the vets came to the temple, where he was able to see that the chasing and hounding continued. They gave up, and that was an end of it. The only explanation they could offer was that it must be a ‘psychological’ case, even though that did not make much sense.
Napoleon Chirac nodded thoughtfully. He said he knew exactly what it was like. Something similar had happened to him many years earlier, when he made his living from taking portraits before he devoted himself to art photography. One lady of whom he had to make a semi-official portrait (she was the lover of his country’s president) had insisted on dabbing on perfume before their session, because she said this completely changed the nature of her image. He had dismissed this as either superstition or mania, but was still sufficiently curious to carry out an experiment, and as a result had to admit that she was right.
The same was true of sounds, he added. The ones coming from the speakers at that moment would doubtless modify the images the camera would capture. If he had time, he would take two series of photographs, one with the music and the other without, to show them the difference. If, that is, he added, his kind hosts would agree to switch off the sound system for a while.
He had suggested this out of politeness, in order to make plausible a bargain that he had no intention of honouring. To his surprise, the monks took this very seriously. After glancing at one another to consider it, they replied that no, they did not agree to turn off the music even for a moment. This was accompanied by their constant smiles and bows, repeated on all sides, but their refusal was so categorical and unexpected that the photographer’s face must have betrayed his dismay, and so they condescended to offer him an explanation. This was more unexpected yet: without music, the temple was too depressing…
How frivolous they were. The presence of the music could not have any ritual function because it was made up of the most vulgar ‘top ten’ radio hits for teenagers; and if they found the temple depressing, why had they become monks? They didn’t seem like real Buddhist monks, or at least not like the conventional image a foreigner might have of their kind. The truth is, there is no reason that a foreigner’s conventional idea or prejudice should coincide with reality, and in general it doesn’t. During their first day in Korea they had been able to correct some of their misapprehension
s, but the little Buddhist monk who was their guide was too small a sample for them to make any sweeping generalisations.
The best way out of this awkward moment was to change topics. The French couple did this, although not completely: they simply went back to the dog, which was still with them. Was she a guard dog? No. There was nothing to guard. But she was very helpful. She pulled the little cart the monks used to go for trips in round the park. This was too large, and its most delightful spots were so far away they would never reach them without the aid of Firefly.
How was this possible? Even though the dog was large, she was not enormous. And the monks were not that diminutive. Another enigma yet to be resolved.
XI
It was true that they were of normal size, but only on the outside; mentally they were like children. They demonstrated this when Napoleon Chirac went back to work, and they started their jokes. Or perhaps they weren’t jokes? A cosmopolitan traveller, the Frenchman knew that ‘jokes’ could easily lead to misunderstandings. If assumptions were different, the humorous could seem serious, and the serious be taken as another token of humour. Often, the lack of understanding between civilisations was nothing more than a gap between the appreciation of a joke. And this mismatch had survived globalisation, which nowadays had converted all civilisations into one. What had replaced extinct exoticism within this unified culture were differences of level: between children and adults, for example, or between low and high culture. However, everything seemed to indicate that these alternatives were one and the same thing, with children, the popular and the humorous on one side, and on the other, the adult, learned and serious.
Looking round him at the monks, Napoleon Chirac wondered about the future of his work. Even if they didn’t wager exclusively on posterity, artists always counted on some kind of historical prolongation. But in the period of history into which he had been born, everything tended towards the ephemeral. Fed on television, the new generations were not storing up time, without which art did not exist. His photos would need many years to ‘mature’ and be surrounded by the aura of a lost world which makes a work valuable. And by that time, if things continued in the same direction, the public’s taste would have fatally degenerated.
And yet, returning to work after the picnic and before he became aware of the monks’ antics, he had felt a frisson of euphoria when he thought of the fleeting nature of light. This was a contradiction, although possibly it made sense in the place he found himself in. Here in Korea, the eternal was produced thanks to what was fleeting, and not in spite of it. And the paradox did not end there…
This wasn’t the first time that his reflections on the artistic process became impossible to communicate, like a vertiginous spiral of silence (or unformulated thoughts). He was left alone, and in his case this meant being separated mentally from his wife. The vertigo inspired by the emptiness of these moments was due to the fact that his marriage was the real story of his life. And the marriage was gradually turning into a dry husk where it was only possible to follow the fossilised remains of the tentacles of the paradox. Paradoxical tentacles. In his youth, he had loved the beautiful Jacqueline Bloodymary madly, when she was a bacteriologist psychically in thrall to the sinister director of her laboratory. After the liberation, they had both chosen the path of art, but it could be said that they had done so from the opposite shores of time: him in the instant of the click of the camera shutter; she in the months, if not years, that it took weavers to complete a tapestry. And yet, for him to reach that click required a great deal of work with space and time, whereas for her, to reach that slow task of weaving she needed only the instant of finding the idea. This contradiction kept them apart. Now as he watched her strolling happily and filled with inspiration among the flowers and birds, he was drowning in a sea of doubts.
Buddhism was becoming increasingly devalued for him. At first he couldn’t believe it, but now he had to accept the evidence: the monks were playing jokes on him. They must have understood that his intention was to photograph the circle of the temple empty of people, and were sabotaging his efforts by walking in front of the camera. They didn’t do this out of spite, but because they were so childish. And they did it just like small children, pretending not to in a way that fooled no one. Giggling, whispering, glancing at him and making throwaway theatrical gestures whenever he looked at them. Two or three of them would link arms and walk directly in front of the camera, holding back their laughter only for it to burst out moments later when they ran behind a tree to watch the following group’s trick or to prepare their own next one. They perfected their manoeuvres with fake excuses, calling to each other from one side to the other, or pretending (clumsily) they had something urgent to tell a colleague, or that they had forgotten something and had to cross again where they had just crossed. Or they sent Firefly: that really amused them. They would throw a stick for her to retrieve, or call her to give her a pat that could not be postponed.
Napoleon Chirac let them get on with it. At first it amused him, but in the end their puerile persistence annoyed him. He did not think the photographs would suffer, because he was keeping the shutter open to take long exposures, so that nothing that moved would be registered. But there was something else, which led him to think they must know more about photography than he had first thought. This shouldn’t have astonished him, if many tourists visited the temple. He noticed that their movements as they passed through the field covered by the lens were not regular. They slowed down at particular points which were always the same, although different for each monk. Not only did they slow down, there was a point at which they came to a halt, before which they changed gesture and posture, only to resume the normal ones immediately afterwards and continue on their way, accelerating imperceptibly until they left the circle. This was done so quickly that he was never sure he had seen anything. But it was repeated after a few minutes by the same people in exactly the same spot. Were they pulling a face, or making a comic gesture? If they repeated it sufficiently frequently and were careful enough to do so in exactly the same spot (a millimetric mistake would ruin the effect), in the end they would leave an impression on the photographic film and the image would be full of monks fixed by the same mechanism that should have rendered them invisible. A triumph of coordination, possible only thanks to that kind of inhuman lifelong training in which the Orient specialised. But what a gratuitous, useless triumph! All it could do was to transform movement into immobility, the invisible into the visible, a joke about motion into a joke about seeing. And Firefly had obviously also been trained.
Since the tripod gyrated on its own, Napoleon Chirac had nothing to do, and so fell into a musing that expanded on these recent reflections. To him it seemed as though destiny might also be fixing in grotesque grimaces a life lived at a speed that no emulsion (God’s ever-open eye) could capture. And all thanks to small, pointless repetitions.
He felt that his art was fragile, that he himself was fragile, and became so panic-stricken that all these thoughts were driven from his mind.
How often did he have to tell himself that it was better to enjoy the moment and forget his worries? To distance himself and lose himself in what was there, which was substantially more than an instant: a sublime afternoon suspended from the trees, the chirping of the birds, the depths of the stilled breeze. But this was easier to say than do. His anxiety was linked precisely to the instant: that is where it emerged from, and to where it returned.
The concertina lanterns with their painfully bright colours continued to be revealed in the photo, continued to ‘appear’, while he tried to think and feel and live in time.
XII
In the meantime, Jacqueline Bloodymary had wandered off along the paths in the park. She was used to disappearing when she accompanied her husband on his photographic excursions (and he always insisted she accompany him), because since the images travelled through 360°, there was no place for her. This was how
she had ended up with a better knowledge than him of the countries they had visited and had built up a store of sights and anecdotes that enriched her conversation on their return. In her mind, it had also come to symbolise the role of women: ‘there was no place for her’ in a man’s work, even if this work encompassed the entire horizon, or because it did so.
Faithful to his strategy of cultivating the wives, the little Buddhist monk followed her. He surmised that she wanted to talk; he had noticed she had been affected by the story of Firefly. As she had listened, an air of deep sadness had shrouded her features, where until then a smiling, polite calm had been predominant.
He found her sitting on a stone bench behind a small mound. She had been crying, and her tears had dried. With gentlemanly tact, without intruding, he talked about the weather, about the vegetation surrounding them, occasionally slipping in an allusion to the melancholy mood of the time and place, in order to suggest the reason for, without explicitly mentioning it, a depressed state of mind. With a similar intention he sighed now and then, but this sounded strange in such a small person; sighs are things giants do, not dwarves; elephants, not microbes. He said that the coloured lanterns adorning the park were the ‘automata of sighs’.
She was not really paying him any attention. She agreed absent-mindedly, and continued to stare off into the distance.
‘I’m disturbing you. You prefer to be alone with your thoughts. I’ll leave you and go for a stroll.’
‘No, no,’ replied Jacqueline, coming out of her reverie. ‘Please stay. In fact, I need to talk.’
And after a sigh which, given her size, sounded more natural, she asked rhetorically, What woman did not need to talk? Wives were traditionally accused of talking too much, but that was unfair. There were so many silences that accumulated in the life of a married woman, so many unspoken words pressing down on the membranes of sleeplessness… In the end, it was like not existing.