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…
We 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.
The English expression might be, “right under one’s nose.” I wrote it on the board, to be able to remember it.
Day: November 16, 2013
Caveat: Expansion. Contraction. Silence.
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.”
[daily log: walking, 4.5 km]