Saying Good-by to the Vanishing-away

Last year (2010) was particularly tough for me to have got through. I had to stick constantly to my dissertation work which had been going on for years. I spent most of my time—from morning till night including holidays—in the office. My mundane/domestic life, moreover, made me helpless. My expectations for many things had no rooms for their own. I would have been disappointed with my family and friends and I was often hovering between trials and errors and committed some blind faults definitely. I oscillated between Heaven and Hell several times. Though I’ve been regarded excellent in my work/study almost all the time, I often fell in despair. In fact, the good judgement on me was just about the surface, my shell. It was not that for me and I was not that.

I’ve been struggling with some dreadful shadow pretending me and now the same. Whenever the inner void with its mouth agape scares me to be absorbed, I would run away from it, to wander among people, searching for a shelter or stumbling to hide. It is deadly hard for me to stand alone unlike I seem to be and every moment I need someone. Last year my dearest friends seemed to forget about me and I didn’t want to call them for help, because I knew they couldn’t help me actually. All has been on me, just my problem which I myself should deal with. Just one right beside me at the moment can give a hand to me now and then.

Anyway I passed the final examination with my dissertation in December and I shall get Ph. D on Literature (of course, on British fiction) in coming February. The time is vanishing away into the past. Doubtlessly I know it’s not the end, but another start. I don’t know what would come up before me, though I’ll go on as ever.

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Even if there's not him, she could make through her life anyhow. But it would’ve been much tougher and drier-as-dust. Though he doesn't give her replies in all cases she needs them, he makes her days emotionally wet and has her feel alive. He saves her years from the typical. She is often impulsive and irrational, while he is always rationally careful and even seemingly calculated. Sometimes she feels bitter at that, but she knows he is warm inside, he cares for her, and he holds her in respect all the time. She thanks him for having been beside her in spite of all, for embracing her arbitrariness as ever, and for assuming her independent knight. That’s why she cannot hate him.

Though her majesty can make standing-tall-all-alone, she still needs her knight. She always misses him even when he is in. I often tell her that she mustn’t do. Like for me, however, for her it was not easy to behaviour like an adult, and so it would be now and ever.

Brit…

A Weird Day

What a weird day yesterday (4 Jan.) was, though fantastic! Many things came up all at once. Such a day has never been and would never come, I think.

After morning class I had lunch with Ms Hwang, my colleague as well as wife of Prof. Im.

On the way to office, I came across our Dean who was coming back from lunch with two female staffs. The Dean is my supervisor and ever-supporter. I’m using his personal office as if it’s mine because he currently works at Dean’s. His personal office is a treasury of books on our field.

P said he had missed . . . he wanted . . . he would expect . . .

Prof. K of our Chief dropped by my office. He had arranged a work for me and thankfully he wanted to know how well got on my work. I like him so much, but his usual reserve has kept some distance between us.

Gen. phoned me in the evening and at the time I didn’t reject it.

At night HK phoned me after long silence. I don’t remember the last time when I listened to his voice. . . . He spoke of something ever-lasting in his mind. I know he has constantly loved me as a friend (maybe more than that) all the time for 10-more years. He is the only one who has emotionally never changed.

Prof. P sent messages to me. He is one of the Acting Consciences of the time in Korea and I like and respect him.

Brit…

Is 'A Time for Us' about to Begin or End?

My new semester already began. Regularly it begins in March, but I’m charged with one of the special programmes for [would-be] freshmen of our university during the winter vacation. I’d be busy as ever with lecturing, proofreading (of my diss.), and preparing for [regular] spring semester whole through the winter. My editing work of Newsletter of College of Humanities also goes on this year round.

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Busy life is good, but I’m afraid I’d forget myself now and then. I always need reflexions of my days and my soul. You know, one of my nicknames was “the Addicted to Thinking (생각쟁이)”. Boss Hwang (MS’s nickname) used to call me with the nickname. In fact, without thinking, my existence wouldn’t be as much as just I look surface and the real ‘I’ would disappear. My romanticism, which I cannot give up, would be forgotten, too. Maybe it’s good to forget the romanticism, because I’m too old for dreaming of it.

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P sometimes hurts me with breaking illusions that he often provokes first. In my current days, it is him who both gives to and takes away from me an illusion, which I often delude myself as a romantic dream. I cannot love him and I want to hate him. Then I would break my fantasy and stop making the fairy-tale at the worst, or I would wake up from my self-delusion and recover my self-consciousness at the best.

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One cruelly wakes up another’s deep and long sleeping instinct and fired on it for another’s desires to flame up. Then they became unknown how to control it, that is, they don’t know how to take their control back as before. Maybe one knows, but another doesn’t. They can't help themselves at times because they fall for and need each other all the time. Sometimes they are Guinevere and Lancelot from the legendary fairy-tale, the hopeless couple. They cannot give each other what they want, however. Perhaps they even don't know about it—what they want— exactly. Both of them are desperate fools and evils. Intended sparing a little distance from each other saddens their egos anyway.

Brit…

Easy relationship

Michael insists, “Relationships should be easy. If it's not, you're doing it wrong.” Maybe he is right—but partly true and partly untrue depending on situations, I think. Anyway, according to his logic, I'm doing it wrong all the time because my relationships are usually—almost always— not easy. I don’t like the word “easy” in this case except when “easy” means comfortable—especially in man-woman relationship, “easy” often means light and temporal like just a physical enjoying.

Michael’s words seem so much American. I suddenly realise that he is a real American, no more, no less, like my P is. Probably there is a certain unstoppable gap among us—between them and me, which is remarkable difference in thought and emotion. It may be why I’m frequently hurt. Mightn’t the American emotion fit me? I’m saying this in spite of the fallacy of generalisation. All Americans are not that, yet mostly perhaps.

I think a serious/sincere relationship at least cannot be easy unless the word means comfortable. Now and then, and just now, so many “I”s, bustling inside me, torment with one another.

Do I have to break my fantasy which might be just an illusion or self-delusion and from which I’m making a fairy-tale? The knight of the fairy-tale constantly encourages my amnesia, but my self-consciousness often interferes in. I can’t help it. I don’t know what to do then. In fact, it is not important which one is stronger, in both I’m already lost. I would not delve anything from this fairy-tale land—probably. Even if so, I cannot give it away, I can’t. I’ve thought that love is blind and usually foolish. In that sense, I am not in love because I can see all things I can’t understand, though often emotionally foolish I am. I don't like to come into his basket despite those all. I don’t embrace them. Dreaming of romanticism becomes more and more exhausting thing as adding years.

Brit…

(Paradoxically, sometimes I also maybe want easy relationships, though. . . . I'm not good at relationships and they are always difficult for me.)

Rain, Snow, Love, and Chance

It’s raining all day like a summer day. It must snow at this time of the season, but we often have rain in the far south-eastern part of Korea. If I lived in the northern part of the country, I could see snow more frequently!

My hometown was a snow land in the winter even though it didn’t resemble Yoko’s snow country (in Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari) or Lara’s snow plains (in Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak). In my youth, I would think of Yoko whenever it snowed windy. Like her I used to have sung in bathroom (the habit is still going on now) and I would replace myself into her in my bathroom. When morning came after heavily snowy night, I would go out for first treading on the snow piles in the playground of my school. At then, I would think of Lara, her pathological appearance of desperate love. Yes, I was a precocious child. There lies so much memory with snow in my mind. Today, I was rather provoked to long for snow by the rain.

Love . . . the cruellest name which elevates us up to Heaven and simultaneously drags us down to Hell. I’m afraid of falling in love as much as I’m afraid of losing it.

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At short outing in the morning, I came across professor K. (our vice-Dean) around the front gate of our campus. What a coincidence! I was thinking of him then, because we are to meet together on Thursday with the New-letter business for our college. I saw the sparkling light in his eyes and he might see mine. We stopped and talked a while as if we were old lovers. :)

Professor K. used to have been a good hand for me and my editing work on the news-letter would be tough without his help. He is humorous—witty man and always works well with his literary competence (he majors in German literature). Very tall he is. Now and then his slim height overwhelms me, a short woman. Maybe he is the tallest professor in the College of Humanities of P.N.U. Most of professors in our university—especially in our college— are not tall. So his tallness would be special merit or attractiveness. Suddenly I found a few grey hairs on him and they are adding him with romantic vision.

Brit…

I don’t care?!

Do you think I really didn’t care about it? Well. . . What can I say? I did or didn’t? Ridiculous it is! That’s absolutely not that, you know. Don’t you know the ironic? That was not some metaphor you couldn’t understand. It’s just a sarcastic irony.

Yes, waiting is not my nature. Is there anyone who has waiting-nature? One just waits when there’s no alternative. From my youth I used to wait for no man except in particular cases, because it would often give miserable feeling in most cases. I didn’t wait for any man before it was requested and there’s no man who dared to make me do it without my consent. It meant good-by for me.

Do you know how much time I've wasted on vain waiting in my life? I would wait for someone/something I mustn't wait or couldn’t be waited for. I cannot repeat those follies, I must not. Nevertheless, I’ve waited for you all the summer. That’s not all. I spent the whole autumn compromising the miserable with the bluff. I had to stand the hurting cruelty of the situation, which consumed my soul. What on earth can you imagine? What on earth do I have to do more?

Brit…

The Knight of Shadow

His “Her majesty” is frequently disturbed between self-consciousness and amnesia. The self-consciousness, harshly cold and merciless on her state, tries to keep her world in order by the convention, but the delusive amnesia shadowed and protected by her knight often wins and rules her world. Very short order and much longer illusionary chaos! Keeping balance between the two is far away from her world. It seems like another planet’s efficiency anyway.

In the heart of the chaos then, she felt that something went wrong. She thought that there had been a certain misperception or misunderstanding. Or, insensible mistakes might have lied there. She was scared and trembled. The problem was that she absolutely didn’t catch the situation, knowing nothing. The only comfort was that, however, whatever it was, it’s not between them or didn’t do with them. Yet all the stressful pressed her down and she felt like standing alone in the wilderness at the moment.

A guard, whose bosom wide, was the knight of shadow. Though nothing known or explained, all the concerned melted away within the shadow of the knight and it wasn’t her problem anymore in his arms, which always give her tender and warm easiness.

Brit…
(Written on 8 Dec. 2010)

Now I'm pondering . . . whether I would go on story-telling or stop it. I'm stumbling on this fairy-tale.

Along the riverside

She walked and walked and walked . . . thinking deep, as if the road was endless. She didn’t know where to stop and return.

Maybe she was lonely, regarding to her unnecessary night prattle. Sometimes she does, when feeling indescribably lonely. Prattling is a way for hiding her negative feeling from herself and others. It is like a strategy to struggle against some helplessness that even she herself often cannot catch the reason why she feels lonely at the moment.

Of course, he mightn’t know, never he, that she eagerly wanted him to hold her then. She said nothing as always, though, just smiling and pretending natural. Men usually don’t know anything about women. Men just delude themselves about their ladies without sensing their unsaid bottomless sorrow. Her knight . . . so does he.

Wish he knew her wavering, or someday he would lose her.

Brit…

The Game

I’m afraid that I cannot go on this game. I’ve held on to it for a long time as if it’s my final destination. It has consumed much of me and now I feel fainted, that is, a kind of nausea about me and this world. I cannot separate myself from it—the game. I cannot distinguish mine from others’ in it and vice versa. Moreover, I myself have been probably lost already. Like straying a labyrinth, indiscernible shadows frequently haunt in my way, and I’m overwhelmed by fear of loss. Where am I? I wonder whether this is I or that is I. At some time I seem to be neither this nor that. Have I here ever been me?

All the pastiche of the world makes us blurred into one another. Make-believe or fake displaces the real that I doubt its existence, nevertheless, pursue. I’m disappearing more and more and the distorted something in me has revealed many beings I don’t know, which soon branches out. Every time in my life I’ve searched for me myself performing perfect strangers and somehow I’ve been barely getting along. Then my space of the stage gets narrower and I think I’d have to down. I’m scared and I don’t think the time has come. I even don’t want to think about it. The time is not mine, however. It is I, not the time, to be subjected.

Brit…

Crossing

1. Fake Reality or Inaccessible Fantasy

Now and then in front of P, I feel like talking to the wall. He gives no answer and no temper, absolutely no reaction to my grumbling—often sarcastic. He would be angry or depressed, because I would purposely do such things—to provoke his temper, but he totally controls it all the time. It is always I who first get sulky. Soon I become exhausted with so many thoughts which torture my mind. I might be a helpless idiot or dummy, really I am a fool. At then, I remind of Echo, one of tragic figures in Greek mythology, who never get a reply except her own voice. The poor Echo, I feel like her. Can’t the reality be grabbed by me, which lies between P and me? Maybe he is not my reality and I delude myself he is. Perhaps he is a man whom my imagination created. I think I’ll have to say good-bye to him. I can’t/mustn’t love him.

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2. Diversion: A part of real life today

Hun phoned me after about three months. He said he wanted to buy me decent lunch, but I didn't want expensive one. We had seafood spaghetti and vegetable salad, talking incessantly. The topic was mostly about me, my dissertation and my tough days, and also about music and literature. I often become talkative when I talk about my favourites. Thankfully Hun usually likes listening to me and even he encourages my talkativeness.

After lunch we’ve been to Karaoke because I’d eagerly like to sing. I thought that singing could reduce my increased stress. I urged him to come together and he was willing to do. For more than three hours I’ve sung, calling out my old repertoires. Hun, with smile on his face, patiently listened to my singing—he sang only three songs. Walking our beautiful campus together in the evening was a bonus. Thank him so much! He assumed the very company at the very moment I needed one. Finally I gave my today away to diversion and robbed a day from him.

Brit…