No bovine has yet been to outer space, but the one I saw had such enormous horns that it seemed like it must have been to outer space, because that could be the only way the horns had grown to such an abnormal size. Its horns reached up in the shape of the letter U like the Minotaur’s horns, and the bovine was roaming around the spaceship part on which was clearly printed the words UNITED STATES ACRA as if it had just returned from space or was waiting to go out into space; but the bovine was an Ankole-Watusi from Africa, and there was no telling why this bovine from Africa was on a farm in Texas along with a spaceship part at that. The spaceship part—which NASA couldn’t have secretly thrown away there in the night—was specifically an astronaut’s return capsule, not one that had actually been launched on a spaceship and had returned to earth, but a model much bigger than the actual thing. The Ankole-Watusi was real, though, not a model. There was no telling why the farmer had brought a real bovine—as opposed to a model the size of one, or a model that was bigger or smaller, which wouldn’t have required any tending-to—to the farm; but the real Ankole-Watusi seemed to be doing well on the farm, where weeds and shrubs grew together, without any tending-to.
Perhaps the farmer thought of his farm, with a spaceship part and an Ankole-Watusi, as a sort of theme park, and thought that the park required only the spaceship part and the bovine and nothing else; that, in fact, there shouldn’t be anything else. And he may have thought that the key concept of his farm, which was neglected like the things on it, was neglect, and I thought that if that was the case then everything on the farm seemed true to the concept.
Many times while passing by the place I stopped and watched the bovine, and I got the impression that the Ankole-Watusi had not one face but at least two of the following faces: a face that seemed to say that it could accept it all, a face that seemed to say that it couldn’t accept it all, that it could accept only what it could accept, and a face that seemed to say that it could not accept anything; but that was only the impression I got and there was no telling what the creature was thinking. What the Ankole-Watusi did was graze and then go up to the capsule and roam around it and then go away and graze once again, and all the capsule had to do was stay still like something that had run its course, and the farmer who owned both may have thought, while looking at them, that no matter how he thought about it, a combination of more than the two would be difficult, that thinking of anything other than the two—so much a part of the scenery now—had become impossible.
The farmer’s house—which was deeper within the farm—was hidden behind thick weeds and could not easily be seen, and showed no indication of people; and it seemed that you could say that the real owner of the farm was the weeds covering up the farm which seemed to have been left to grow for years, but there was no telling if the farmer looked at the weeds and thought that the weeds and not he were the real owner of the farm, or if he thought Then what am I, some kind of an inferior species of weed? and there was no telling, either, whether he was neglecting or growing the weeds or if he liked weeds, as I did—once I even grew weeds in my house because I liked them—but, perhaps while looking at them, he thought that weeds on the surface had nothing to do with useless thoughts, but useless thoughts were like the weeds of thought, and that useless thoughts—like weeds that grew back no matter how many times you plucked them out—could not be gotten rid of, or perhaps when he was having too many useless thoughts he thought that the weeds he was looking at were growing in his mind or perhaps he didn’t.
I thought that by placing the capsule—which was part of a spaceship—on his farm along with an Ankole-Watusi, the farmer was conveying a message but didn’t know what kind of message it was. D, who’d taken me there on purpose to show them to me, saying that he himself had never seen any cattle with such big horns in Texas, said that the farmer was playing a joke on people, but I thought there was something more to it than that. The capsule and the Ankole-Watusi seemed to be saying that if you took a careful look at them—ostensibly a combination that didn’t make sense but did make sense in a way—and thought hard, you could either see or not see the message, and that the hint lay in none other than themselves; and, although I gave it some good thought, I could not see the message, and it seemed like a problem I would have to work out in Texas. Whenever I went someplace, I liked to present myself with such problems that gave me—someone who could find no particular reason to stay there otherwise—a reason to stay. Then one day, it seemed to me that while standing there on the farm I saw the message, which said that although there was no need for you to go out of your way to consider the fact, if you did somehow come to consider the fact you should consider this point, that is to say the fact that no bovine has yet been to outer space. It didn’t mean that you should either accept or not accept the fact, nor did it mean that you should either send or not send a bovine to outer space, only that you should consider the fact that no bovine has ever been to outer space. The message was simple, and the answer lay in the capsule and the bovine, which was roaming around the capsule as if to say that it was ready to go to outer space, and all that had to be done was to send it out on a rocket. I didn’t tell my friend D all of this in hopes that he, too, would decipher the message for himself.
After seeing the message, whenever I passed by that place I thought about the fact that there are many animals, including dogs, cats, and humans, that have been to outer space but that no bovine has ever been to outer space. Personally, I didn’t think that bovines should also go to outer space, but I thought that it would be nice if bovines went as well, and that their going to outer space would be wonderful, in a different way from—and much more so than—dogs, cats, or humans going. I’d never seen a person on the farm, and it seemed that the farmer never came out of his house, hoping that, in turn, people would discern the message while looking at the capsule and the bovine on his farm, and determined not to come out until people discerned the message. Or it was possible that he didn’t know what he’d accomplished with the capsule and the bovine on his farm, that it hadn’t occurred to him that they were conveying a message, and that he’d never even in his dreams thought of such a thing. But it was possible that, one day, he would learn about the message conveyed by the capsule and the bovine roaming around it on his farm, and, when the time came, he could say, “How could I not have known this until now?” But the message seemed to come with one condition, and that was that it wasn’t necessarily so.
Perhaps the farmer, who thought the days were made up of a series of things that weren’t at all surprising, looked out at the scenery spread outside the window—which wasn’t worth seeing no matter when you looked at it, and was tedious no matter when you looked at it, with nothing appealing about it—and thought what he needed was just this, this was all, nothing less and nothing more. Or perhaps the thick weeds and the capsule and the Ankole-Watusi among the weeds looked like something absurd in his eyes, so he began the day with the thought that every day he began the day in an absurd way and ended the day with the thought that the day had been absurd, because he could see something absurd as soon as he woke up in the morning and looked out the window and also see something absurd before falling asleep at night. Or perhaps he opened the curtains and looked at the scenery, which made him feel stifled whenever and however he looked at it, whenever he wanted to feel stifled, and closed them when he felt himself grow more and more stifled, and, finally as stifled as he wanted to be, so stifled that he thought it was quite enough; and so the tedious and absurd scenery wasn’t useless to him.
•
My friend D showed me a book that contained photographs of paintings of cattle with U-shaped horns reaching up above the head, a book written by James Mellaart, a British archaeologist who also became famous as a tomb raider after he excavated the ruins of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, Turkey, which flourished around 7,000 B.C. and is one of the most famous historical sites in the world. Looking through the book I thought that although I’d lost interest in many things I sti
ll felt an interest in prehistoric remains among some other things. I’d thought a few times before while passing by a sign indicating prehistoric remains somewhere that I should go see them someday, and yet I’ve never yet been to a prehistoric site. Once somewhere in Korea, my friend and I saw a sign by the roadside indicating prehistoric remains and entered a narrow mountain path, but didn’t see anything that could be deemed prehistoric remains. But there was a little waterfall at the end of the path which wasn’t flowing and seemed to have something wrong with it; but it wasn’t a waterfall requiring treatment or repair due to indisposition, derangement, defect, or mechanical failure, and it was completely frozen in the icy weather.
The water beneath the waterfall, on which we were standing, was completely frozen as well and it seemed that the fish in the water too were frozen, but the ice was too thick for us to be able to see them. Looking at the waterfall my friend and I said that it was too bad that you couldn’t have a job in which you diagnosed, treated, and operated on a waterfall by putting a frozen waterfall on an IV or repairing it by cutting and welding, that if you could have such a job you could go to New Zealand or Norway where there were so many waterfalls that you got sick of them and would then study new methods of treatment or repair for waterfalls, and that it was too bad that you couldn’t put up a sign in front of a waterfall saying “Under Treatment” or “Under Repair,” followed by the words: “Do not talk to this waterfall. This waterfall hates more than anything to be spoken to. If you want to speak talk to yourself, not aloud. If you have an inquiry concerning this waterfall find out for yourself. If you can’t find out for yourself stop being curious. But if you’re still curious write down your inquiry in a letter to the waterfall, in words that the waterfall will understand (or, if that’s not possible, then in words that the waterfall won’t understand) and send it through mail. And do not drive a nail into or beat the waterfall with personal feelings. But if you have been feeling down for the past year for no clear reason you may curse the waterfall in words that aren’t too harsh, or throw tomatoes at it.” We lamented that we hadn’t yet heard of a biological or engineering research that has been conducted on waterfalls for the purpose of treatment or repair, and we sounded like people deranged from frozen heads.
My friend—who after studying philosophy in Germany had caused some kind of trouble and was deported and returned to Korea—was the most abnormal person I knew, and the only thing he was doing at the time was, each day, driving his old father—who had dementia and thought he was still running a company—to the company where he’d worked for decades and which was now being run by his other son, then driving him back home after he ate his lunch, as his father had been doing for years, and my friend said that his study of philosophy in Germany helped him in this endeavor but not at all in anything else, and he didn’t do anything else and the only thing he hoped to do was go on helping his father, who had dementia and thought he was still running a company, stay alive and go to work and come home.
The waterfall—whose column of water was frozen as it was—seemed to be telling us to just look at it, not climb it, without looking at it for too long, but if we really wanted to look at it for a long time we could and yet it wasn’t ever going to reveal another aspect of itself simply because we’d looked at it for a long time, but if we looked at it for a really long time then it might end up revealing an aspect of itself which to itself was unknown, perhaps a rather negative aspect, and I thought there was no need for us to go so far as to see a rather negative aspect of the frozen waterfall although I was curious as to what a rather negative aspect of the frozen waterfall could be, and we agreed that the waterfall we were looking at must have existed long before prehistoric times but technically could not be seen as a prehistoric remain, and we also agreed that we should get out of that place before we froze to death. But we didn’t leave the place right away which wasn’t because we felt we should think a little more about whether to freeze to death or not.
The frozen waterfall, though it was of course a product of nature, looked like a piece of installation art and it seemed that if two men froze and turned into statues standing in front of it, they could be a sort of exhibit along with the frozen waterfall, a work of art created by nature and humans together. Looking at the waterfall I thought of Andy Warhol, not the Warhol who, though he didn’t create a work of art titled “Waterfall” did create “Daisy Waterfall”—a work of art consisting of a repeated arrangement of photographs of daisies on a wall behind a wall of falling water columns—but instead a very old and short Caucasian man with white hair and a stooped back I’d seen at a museum and whose age Warhol might be around if he were still alive, and who seemed for a moment like Warhol in reincarnation. The very old man was standing next to a work of art looking at the caption as if he couldn’t remember the title of his own work, which was a silkscreen piece titled “Electric Chair.” The scene left a deeper impression on me than any other work of art I’d seen before. In my mind I signed my name in a little corner of the frozen waterfall and thought that when I was very old, with a stooped back and white hair, I could come to the waterfall with someone in midwinter and show them the frozen waterfall and tell them that this was the “Broken Electric Chair” I created long ago; but I had no intention at all of living to such an age. I had been living out my declining years for so long that I could hardly remember when it was that I began thinking that I was living out long declining years and now I wanted to shorten these long declining years as much as possible.
A young couple showed up then, a man and a woman who didn’t look like people who’d come to see prehistoric remains. They were fully equipped with helmets, ropes, climbing irons, hammers, and headlamps among other things, as if they were setting out to conquer Mount Everest, and in fact they looked in a way like people who’d been met with disaster on Mount Everest several days before. We just looked at each other from a distance without saying hello and it seemed only natural not to say hello. It seemed that from the moment they first saw us they didn’t like us, standing in front of the waterfall without any equipment and with our hands in our pockets and with no thought of climbing the ice wall, and we too didn’t like them from the moment we first saw them approaching the little frozen waterfall dressed as if they were about to conquer Mount Everest. I knew what they were up to and could see right through their scheme.
Sure enough they began climbing on the ice wall created by the freezing of the waterfall and I watched them thinking that a sight worth seeing was about to unfold. The ice wall was a little over two meters tall and the waterfall looked like a miniature waterfall, and if you reached a hand up you could touch the upper part of the waterfall, the head of the waterfall, as if you were touching someone’s head; and they climbed up in the blink of an eye, leaving no time for us to enjoy watching them, in suspense, climb up with difficulty, and soon they disappeared from view after which we felt as if we’d been tricked. There might have been a decent ice wall of good height that would’ve required substantial effort to climb, but we didn’t see a path next to the frozen waterfall; in order to go up, you had to pass the waterfall, but not being equipped we couldn’t. Whether or not there was a path there that hid itself when someone it didn’t like even at a glance showed up, and then reappeared when someone else it didn’t like showed up—because what it liked most of all, although it liked many things, was to hide itself and then reappear and then trap someone if it really liked them—I didn’t know, because such a path didn’t reveal itself to the end.
A lump of ice that had broken off the frozen waterfall was on the frozen water and my friend smashed it against the ice, saying we should share it as if it were a nugget of valuable mineral, and the lump was shattered and my friend looking at the shards of ice as if they were now worthless picked up one of the shards and sucked on it and said, It doesn’t taste like waterfall at all, as if the flavor of the waterfall has all gone out, and he certainly seemed out of his mind. It seemed to me that before long he
would really go out of his mind and carry on after his father, going to work every morning thinking he was running a company and eating lunch at his office and then coming home, and it seemed that it would be a nice thing to happen to him. He talked very often of things that weren’t helpful in many ways which I thought was the only thing I could learn from him, whom there was nothing else to be learned from. He said that among modern philosophers were people who were making a sort of wager about who could say something more nonsensical, by saying something nonsensical in such an abstruse way that people couldn’t see that it was nonsensical, and he too had a remarkable way of saying nonsensical things.
In the end we had to come down after reaching the conclusion that the couple who’d come ice climbing had come to climb an imaginary waterfall above or to explore an imaginary cave, and while it was too bad that we hadn’t been able to see an imaginary waterfall or cave, freezing in front of a frozen waterfall and standing like statues or like broken-off fragments of the waterfall was perhaps not a good idea for either the waterfall or ourselves, as if it were a conclusion that could only be reached in front of a frozen waterfall we’d discovered in a place we’d come to by following a sign indicating prehistoric remains, or as if it were one of the many conclusions that could be reached in front of a frozen waterfall we’d discovered in a place we’d come to by following a sign indicating prehistoric remains.
I said to my friend that prehistoric remains were something I managed to feel an interest in and that even so I’d never seen prehistoric remains and that this was, in fact, the first time I’d ever visited a prehistoric site, and yet I’d been unable to see anything related to prehistoric remains, and he said that there was nothing he could feel an interest in the way I did about prehistoric remains. He’d been to Catal Huyuk in Turkey but he didn’t feel much of anything about it except that it seemed like a place established by people very long ago; in fact he felt more impressed when he returned from the trip and saw his home in its usual state, which was messy as if someone had messed it up while he wasn’t there.
Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River Page 3