Caveat: 등잔 밑이 어둡다

Yesterday the two TEPS반 refugee boys (by which I mean a cohort that once had 10 students is reduced to only two) were reduced further to just Jaehwan. Hyeonguk, the other student, had disappeared, and we couldn’t find him. The front-desk-lady didn’t know where he was. He’d simply disappeared.
So Jaehwan and I had class alone, the two of us. I always feel weird trying to conduct a “normal” class with only one student sitting in front of me. I feel like both of our time could be better used in some other way, at that point. But anyway…
2013-11-16 13.10.55We worked our way through the questions, and shared some joking remarks about how when Hyeonguk showed up, he’d have a lot of homework piled up (since the rule I have for this class is that the dictation homework is waived for questions with correct on-the-spot answers in class, and since he wasn’t around, obviously none of the homework was waived).
I speculated that Hyeonguk may have been abducted by aliens. I had to explain this by drawing a picture (at right), since Jaehwan was unfamiliar with the pop-culture-referencing idiom “abducted by aliens.”
Then about 20 minutes in, Curt reported in to say that Hyeonguk had been located – in the next-door classroom, where he’d decided to “audit” without telling anyone. I’m fine with that – these things happen.
Jaehwan and I shared a laugh about it, since we’d really had no idea where he’d gone. He knows I study Korean aphorisms, sometimes, so he took the opportunity to tell me one relevant to the situation.
등잔        밑이        어둡다
deung·jan  mit·i      eo·dup·da
lamp       base-SUBJ  be-dark
It’s dark at the base of the lamp.
2013-11-16 13.01.03 The English expression might be, “right under one’s nose.” I wrote it on the board, to be able to remember it.

Caveat: Expansion. Contraction. Silence.

picture
There was something expansive in my illness. It forced me to open out into the world and confront things head on. Guilt and self-recrimination evaporated – there was no time for it. I took on the world, drew it into myself, embraced it.
This last month has felt like a sort of contraction – a narrowing, a closing-in upon myself. And there has been a resumption of guilt and self-recrimination.
It all seems to run like a stop-motion movie of a flower growing, opening, then wilting and dying and falling away. Cancer flower.

Seasons for the wrong reasons: spring becomes fall, through a summer of desperation.
Yet from a standpoint of my simple physicality, doesn’t it seem like the effect should be opposite? Shouldn’t I have plunged into a temporary field of decrescence only to rise out and emerge whole again afterward?
The psychology of this thing has me puzzled.
I have indeed been in a very strange mental place, this afternoon. I’ve been listening to classical music continuously. I guess what’s called “contemporary classical”: John Tavener, Arvo Pärt. Bobmusic, I have called it in the past. When is the last time I did that? Many, many years.
What I’m listening to right now.

Arvo Pärt, “Silentium.”

picture[daily log: walking, 4.5 km]

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