North Station. Suah Bae
But the moment I heard her say those words, I felt an abrupt, unlooked-for assurance that I was not alone. If I lived here, why, I could have it all, that kind of thought. All meaning both her and writing. At that, a feeling of relief swept over me, filling me up. Fulfillment such as I’d never known . . . it’s been a long time since then, and now, as you can see, my circumstances are very different from what they were. I broke up with her, and married a Mandarin-speaking woman who came here after 1999. My wife writes poetry, you know. My life back then, and the way this place looked then, will sound strange to you as I describe it now. Over the past few years, there’s been a huge increase in the number of mainland tourists who descend upon this place. Though it’s true that I have no plans to leave, I don’t want to say that it became my hometown at some point. At least to me, ‘hometown’ has long been nothing more than a word in a dead language.”
At some point or other, I stopped loving the first writer. And the second writer became “my writer.” We made plans to go and visit the second writer just as we had with the first. This time you had a good knowledge of the locality where the writer was living. You called it the supreme land on earth; meaning, of course, that the natural environment was beautiful. In the meantime, I was drunk on anticipation. It swelled my body and tongue, made the rain fall endlessly in my dreams. Even while asleep, I had to wipe away the grass-scented rainwater flowing down over my forehead and cheeks.
One day you asked me what question I would ask the second writer if I did manage to meet him. I said there were two, and that one was about the relationship between writing and ecstasy. Of course not the drug ecstasy, I was referring to the word that derives from the state of religious rapture that can be achieved through meditation. And added that my question had absolutely nothing to do with everything that word generally connotes. You confronted me then, claiming that the state of religious longing that arises from piety—in other words, from the desire to be submissive that human beings have always known, and which can on the surface be something obscene—is also and thus a comic struggle to make a clear division between ekstasis and ecstasy, though in any case both have the same meaning, with the one being the Greek, Latin root of the other. “And one more vague thing that’s impossible to distinguish. I doubt whether your ‘first writer’ and ‘second writer’ are really two different people. I’m starting to think that the reason you so abruptly switched to thirsting for your second writer was that you were trying to overlay him onto the first writer, and thus conceal from yourself the fact of their separate existences. In other words, you selected both the first and second writers on the grounds of their being people you had never met, people with whom, from your individual point of view, your ‘association’ can only be indirect, given that they are both so famous, and who must always be plural, and fatefully far away, thus satisfying the desire for non-specificity; though you keep saying that it has always been your dream to meet them, deep down you fear that meeting them in person would bring to an end the sense of distance and one-sidedness that establish the relationship’s necessary tension. Of course, the reason you need these individually ordinary human beings to be vague and mysterious is that this will amplify and perfect their perceived greatness, a greatness that you deeply long for. Do you remember what your first writer said in one of his interviews? ‘The point in time at which writers like myself acquired a kind of greatness was that at which human beings stopped believing in a god, and came to want a substitute for divinity.’ Most ordinary people would call that nothing more than vague envy. Envy has always had the character of a daydream. And persistent envy is a flight from something inside oneself.” You continued. “To you, then, is it a flight from ecstasy, or an ecstatic flight?” I told you then that you were no better than a porn addict, that you were unable to talk about dreams without making them into something dirty and vulgar. I could see that you were pleased, though too shy to want to show it.
I spat out what was inside my mouth. The taste was unbearably poisonous and bitter. I didn’t know what it was, but its absolute inedibility was clear. The thing that I’d spat out was quite a large lump of excrement. I was shocked. The lump fell onto the widespread expanse of an enormous petal. The balcony was crowded with brilliant-hued flowers, but I kept feeling as though I would vomit . . . I thought. A while ago I put a poster up on the wall right next to my bed. It was a photograph in which the light-and-dark contrast of shade and sunlight was clearly defined. The shade was a black that looked deeper than darkness, thick and viscous, and the part where the sunlight shone was brighter than streaming sugar, and whitened as the real sun’s yellow light fell softly upon it. If I briefly woke up in the middle of the night, my eyes would always drift to that poster. Of course, in that kind of hazy dreamstate in which you haven’t completely woken up, I am never aware of it as a poster. It seems to be something other than the image I know from the daytime. And each time something different. It would generally be connected to something I’d seen in a dream, or an extension of the dream unaltered. If I started awake from a state of dreaming the bright part of the photo glowed a brighter white, jumping out at me as a different being each time. That night it appeared in the form of a luminescent well. The well from which light was streaming stretched slowly up into the air, becoming a huge pair of pale lips that seemed to suck me in. Though afraid, I stretched my hand out toward it. I don’t know why. But when I did, my fingers bumped up against a cold, hard wall. No, it was your wristwatch. A wristwatch with a large, round face. As soon as I took hold of it your wrist elongated like a butterfly’s feeler and before I knew it was pursuing me to the balcony, which was crowded with pots and planter boxes. I hurriedly gathered some petals to cover the disgusting excrement I’d vomited. But it struck me that I’d never be able to cover it completely, that you’d see it and I’d plummet into an abyss of shame and despair . . . There was only one way to avert disaster, nothing else for it but for me to swallow it back inside me. Making my mouth into the shape of a bird’s beak, I bent down toward it . . . Just then, the first writer carried tea into the room adjoining the balcony.
If the world were to become a place in which books are forbidden, and the only way for humans to have a relationship with literature was to learn entire books by heart—this is a hypothesis connected to Ray Bradbury’s novel—my first writer unhesitatingly gave two names when asked which writer’s works he would memorize, or which would be worth the effort even without such a hypothetical ban, and even though it would seem absurdly laborious: Shakespeare and James Joyce. But, he said, the writer I personally admire is Goethe. Though regrettably, he continued, laughing softly, his death makes it impossible to visit him and take tea together. He made a brief mention of Goethe’s house, now a museum, and added, still laughing, when I visited that house I stood in his study and could picture the writer sitting there at his desk, composing his works. When he lived there, Goethe generally employed a secretary to transcribe what he dictated, rather than putting pen to paper himself. I was surprised by this, and responded that in that case it’s hard to believe his sentences are entirely his own, as his secretary would have been able to improvise some minor edits in the course of his transcription, and since Goethe himself could not have remembered every sentence precisely as he’d dictated it, down to the punctuation, even on examining what his secretary produced, it’s possible that he wouldn’t have been able to spot any cuts or alterations. But the real cause for my surprise was that such a method, whereby another personality can squeeze its way into a creative work, was strange to me. The first writer immediately refuted this, saying that such a thing could not be. What makes you so sure? It’s not as though you yourself are Goethe. It’s unimaginable that a writer could compose a piece “through another’s pen.” “The ‘cornerman,’ who was one of those secretary-cum-assistants, took it upon himself to arrange Goethe’s manuscripts, you know. But he wasn’t just an assistant, as people commonly think, who looked after Goethe’s needs or ran small errands for him. Though his reputation has been thoroughly besmirched, a misconception that persists even today . . . the ‘cornerman’ was himself a poet, and had been one before he ever met Goethe. Though of course, some people devalue his poetic worth by labeling him ‘Goethe’s parrot.’ He was the son of a poor peddler, and lived in poverty his whole life. His fellow poets would never accept him into their own artistic rank. But it’s simply impossible to think that he would have put his hand freely to Goethe’s manuscripts. He was Goethe’s helper, but he was also his friend. I cannot think of him as someone who practiced petty deceptions while sitting at Goethe’s side. And since such a thought can, on the other hand, occur to you,” here the