Hope’s Purgatory, and: One White Flatfish Lying on a White Dish, and: Translucent Opacity, and: Dream of Someone Free, and: Plum Blossom Is Mighty, and: Sisyphus’s Stake, and: An Island Called “In Spite of All”, and: Inside of Hope Is God’s Drop of Water, and: Seoul Melancholy 1, and: Seoul Melancholy 2

Abstract

Hope’s Purgatory, and: One White Flatfish Lying on a White Dish, and: Translucent Opacity, and: Dream of Someone Free, and: Plum Blossom Is Mighty, and: Sisyphus’s Stake, and: An Island Called “In Spite of All”, and: Inside of Hope Is God’s Drop of Water, and: Seoul Melancholy 1, and: Seoul Melancholy 2 Kim Seung-hee Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé (bio) and Chung Eun-Gwi (bio) hope’s purgatory [The world] is always in disrepair. But we . . . have a little chance, an opportunity. If we try very, very hard, we can imagine goodness. We can think of ways to repair the damage, piece by piece. Jay Parini, Benjamin’s Crossing So after crossing the Pyrenees and reaching safety in a tiny Spanish village, he committed suicide. This world is always full of such endings. Beyond ways of repairing the damage autumn comes. Such cliffs lie somewhere far away, behind green vineyards and orchards. Where has the owner of the vineyard gone? You cross the Pyrenees one hundred times, crossing, crossing, autumn landscape full of ruins and cliffs. Give an arm, you’ll not be butchered. Give an eye, you’ll not be butchered . . . Prisons beyond prisons, cliffs beyond cliffs, endings beyond endings, passing mountains, beyond, still mountains, mountains beyond mountains, cliffs beyond cliffs, endings beyond endings. [End Page 66] one white flatfish lying on a white dish I think we must forget words such as I or myself, must give up words like my and mine. Before a small wooden table covered with a sea-blue tablecloth, I see the remains of one white flatfish on a white dish and the thought suddenly strikes me. This meal—delicate, proud, shining—is whispering to me: this white-fleshed flatfish, its skin and fins, guts removed, brothers, sisters, parents, home, can you restore all those? The way I cannot become a subject, the way my possessives are all as meaningless as foam on a wave, does that mean the meal is the subject here, that the blue knife handle, the sandbank are subjects? The flatfish with both eyes turned to the right, stripped of its skin, lies on the dish as mere bits of white flesh. Is there really no realistic grounds for hope? Isn’t that basically what hope is? A heart that has gone as far as it can . . . Frustration and agony overcome me, and does anyone write complete novels or sagas these days? Everything is montage, fragments of an ideology. This proud, delicate brilliance, this one meal may be equivalent to the whole world. The most unlovely wreckage on this dish, the outside ever pulls us in with its destructive power. The knife and fork placed before this white dish, prior neurosis. In that way, the day’s star slipped slyly into my slashed breast. [End Page 67] translucent opacity Is that it? Is it invisible? Is that it? Is it inaudible? Is that it? Is it unknowable? Is that it? Is it useless? Is that it? Is it the sun setting again? Is that it? Is it being told to live thus and then go? Is that it? Every day the present is a string of troubles. Is that it? Days flooding and surging without a break. Is that it? Is it saying that tomorrow is the same as today? dream of someone free Someone free . . . That’s a misunderstanding. The sea at the land’s end, the sky at the sea’s end, I say I erased all that from the drawing paper. I say I am gazing as though for the first time at blue waves, white clouds, seagulls. That’s a misunderstanding. Clouds, birds, waves, moving alone, cannot equal freedom. Freedom never goes there. Carrying a can of sin, begging for blood to eat. After fighting all the fights at the marketplace, bright sunlight hemmed in by eyes, as I lay down a bleeding heart in the middle of the market square, a jing booms out, the curtain falls, only by enduring such defeats can you be someone free. Piercing salt, a dream, like the flower perched on a crazy woman’s head. We call such things prisons, hope’s purgatory...