. . . and thats okay.
andrew went off with peter. i insisted.
so now i have the semi pseudo solitude of my bed enclosed in its curtain, with something appropriately loud on headphones to drown out ambient noise.
what im listening to right now.
[link to track to be added later.]
Depeche Mode, "Useless."
mr cho, my best friend by far that ive made in the cancer ward, checked out today.
i never imagined i would feel jealousy for people with colon cancer, but its by far the most common cancer being treated on the 10th floor (i cant speak for the other floors), and they have a veritable assembly line set up. even with complications, mr cho only stayed 10 days, and mr park was through in 7 days flat. meanwhile i languish here, watching the comings and goings of roommates and caregivers.
i will miss mr cho but feel confident that i will stay in touch with him. he and his wife were among the kindest and most inquisitive people i have met here. i wish them and their family the best. here is a picture of his wife, him (already in civvies) and me.
the wife or relative of one of the other patients. she has been quite social with me. she calls me 미남 [minam = handsome man]. like anyone, i am vulnerable to flattery.
while i was slogging through my breakfast juk, andrew went down to the cafe in the lobby and got his own breakfast. when he returned, as has been our evolving custom, he gave me a few tablespoons of coffee "just for the taste."
"your little taste of heaven, sir," he said like a deferential butler.
"oh thank you, good brother," i replied. i pushed my tray of half-finished hospital cuisine toward him. "and here is your little taste of hell."
we had a laugh, and then when my coffee was done i said, "my heaven is concluded."
andrew riffed on this into a joke. "a man dies and goes to the gates of saint peter only to find them closed and dilapidated. the guard at the gate is surprised to see someone. he says, 'this place closed years ago. that experiment is definitively concluded.'"
for some reason this caused me to laugh longer and harder than i have in a long time. we went on to discuss the novelistic potential of running with the idea of an "outsourced" or "privatized" heaven.
looking at bukhansan eastward shortly after dawn.
i only retain some snapshots of a convoluted dream i was dreaming an hour ago.
i and some other patients decided to escape from the hospital, because we wanted pizza. in reality, escape from the hospital would be trivial – take an elevator to the lobby and walk out. anyone in a position to wonder would assume a purposeful movement of patients was authorized by someone else, because as ive noted, patients have wide autonomy here.
in the dream, escaping was harder. we had to bribe some nurses. mostly it was me, mr cho, mr park (who checked out the other day) and a few other nameless but friendly people with whom im on a nodding-in-the-hall basis. we had to sneak onto an elevator.
having gotten out through the main lobby amid a slapstick chase of screaming nurses and IV-stand acrobatics we met my entire HSTEPS class in some bushes in front of the hospital. jaehwan had a car, and yeonju and seosumin had disguises for us.
“oh, now pizza!” mr cho declaimed with his gentle, laconic voice.
but instead, we ended up meeting a russian submarine at the imjin river. i had other friends meeting me on board, including people from my gradeschool years, like jeannine and tammy.
oddly, professor lopez from the university of pennsylvania was there in russian uniform. “no sabia que eras capitan de la marina rusa,” i said to him.
“veras muchas cosas insolitas de mi,” he observed in his precise castillian accent. his eyes sparkled and he straightened his glasses. jeannine became obsessed with making us escapees comfortable, while professor lopez gave a tour of the submarine to our 9th grade accomplices. somehow jaehwan turned out to have learned spanish (something hes always saying he wants to do). that was good since lopez was refusing to speak english.
jeannine became frustrated with the condition of the blankets she found. she opened a hatch onto a wall of water, tossed the blankets through nonchalantly, and slammed the hatch shut again – it was like a cartoon, with a frozen, lingering image of a surprised fish getting slapped by a discarded blanket.
“lets forget that and watch tv.” the tv offered only a selection of korean historical dramas. mr park was pleased.
i woke up and got myself my now standard “pre-breakfast” of fruit and yogurt without andrews help – he seemed too happy to be sleeping through the sunrise.
What im listening to right now.
[update 2013-07-26: link to track added.]
Townes Van Zandt, "Quicksilver Daydreams."
Lyrics:
Well, a diamond fades quickly when matched to the face of Maria
All the harps they sound empty when she lifts her lips to the sky
The brown of her skin makes her hair seem a soft golden rainfall
That spills from the mountains to the bottomless depths of her eyesWell, she stands all around me her hands slowly sifting the sunshine
All the laughter that linger down deep 'neath her smilin' is free
Well, it spins and it twirls like a hummingbird lost in the morning
Then caresses the south wind and silently sails to the seaAh, the sculptor stands stricken and the artist he throws away his brushes
When her image comes dancin' the sun she turns sullen with shame
And the birds they go silent the wind stops his sad mournful singing
When the trees of the forest start gently to whispering her nameSo as softly she wanders I'll desperately follow her footsteps
And I'll chase after shadows that offer a trace of her sigh
Ah, they promise eternally that she lies hidden within them
But I find they've deceived me and sadly I bid them goodbyeSo the serpent slide softly away with his moments of laughter
And the the old washer-woman has finished her cleanin' and gone
But the bamboo hang heavy in the bondage of quicksilver daydreams
And a lonely child longingly looks for a place to belong
My roommate and now close friend Mr Cho taught me the following Buddhist proverb, today – despite himself being a catholic deacon or something like that. Thats the sort of openmindedness that warms my heart.
會者定離. 去者必反.
회자정리. 거자필반.
hoe·ja·jeong·ri. geo·ja·pil·ban.
meet-people-intention-part. go-people-again-come.
This pair of sinisms refer to the great wheel: we all are cycling through the rebirths and deaths. “We meet and then we part again. People go and people come again.”
Incidentally, the vow of silence has been relaxed somewhat, with doctors’ permission.
just now, after an exahusting dinner, i walked past the southeast facing window. you can see the moon at center top.
i just thought of a conceptual connection between two of my struggles right now. the two are utterly unrelated, but i see some thematic tie in the concept of granularity.
the first struggle is rice. yes – quite simple: RICE. almost every meal has rice. i have nothing against rice – i habitually comsume at home not much less than im served here daily. i like rice. but by some twist of fate it turns out that a blob of sticky korean rice is almost ideally designed to confound my new, untrained tongue. upon putting the rice in my mouth the individual grains separate and go rogue. i cant chew them all. . . some escape and lodge in places my tongue cant find or reach. maybe half a dozen grains end up in my lungs with every meal.
unfortunately, it being rice, this creates a social disaster. eating everything on my tray except the rice is perceived as if im refusing to eat. im accused of having a lost appetite (obviously a bad sign), im accused of being a picky westerner, im accused of having a poor understanding of nutrition.
ive taken to calling my neighbors over and showing them the rice grains i cough up after a meal, to prove my point. i can eat things that are creamy, no problem. and larger granularities – chunks of fish or meat or fruit are fine too. "hardness" vs "softness" is not the axis of my problem, but people have so much trouble conceptualizing what im talking about. andrew bought me some apple and a woman complained i couldnt possibly eat it given my other food troubles, but i savored it easily.
the second struggle is with a lack of solitude. i have a social job and those social interactions are important to my psychological well-being, but i also not only enjoy but NEED solitude – preferably on the order of at least 8 hours per day. in the hospital, there is never solitude – nurses, fellow patients, anyone can interrupt into my space at any moment. im like a single grain of rice, where to be isolated from the collective implies a certain risk. the social granularity of cancer ward life isnt per se a bad thing, but for me its proving to be a sort of subtle poison no different from the grains of rice, sapping my strength in a way others are incapable of understanding.
the social space here isnt all bad of course – that is far from my meaning. most people show immense kindness and generosity. but i need my reparative solitude.
