This is an aphorism from my book of aphorisms.
청보에 개똥
cheong·bo·e gae·ttong
blue-wrapping-paper-IN dog-shit
[…like] dog shit in blue wrapping paper.
This is like that wonderful English aphorism about putting lipstick on a pig – the outside doesn’t match the inside: the problem of false advertising.
What’s the solution? Transparency, transparency, transparency. I guess I’m thinking about work.
Want to hear something funny? Typically when I’m typing up these aphorisms, I will run a google search on them, just out of curiosity or to see if anything interesting comes up. I will do a web google search and an image google search.
Guess what the first image was that came up when I put this aphorism in to google? A picture of former president Lee Myung-bak (이명박) giving a speech, with the title “청보에 개똥을 쌀 놈, 이명박” (“guy who wraps dogshit in blue wrapping paper, Lee Myung-bak.”).
Day: December 1, 2013
Caveat: And why they kept crawling so busily
40. Theodore the Poet
AS a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid Spoon
With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish’s burrow,
Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
First his waving antennæ, like straws of hay,
And soon his body, colored like soap-stone,
Gemmed with eyes of jet.
And you wondered in a trance of thought
What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.
But later your vision watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that you could see
How they lived, and for what,
And why they kept crawling so busily
Along the sandy way where water fails
As the summer wanes.
– Edgar Lee Masters
(from Spoon River Anthology, 1915)
I awoke from a redundant Sunday nap to an apartment’s chill atmosphere which was redolent with uncreated or unsayable sacred texts, only to pick up and read this poem – almost at random – and some others in that book, and then I fell into a kind of reverie, imagining the reader here is like Pedro Páramo, adrift among the dead in Comala.
The imagined ghosts are the ones who become the most alive.
[daily log: walking, 3 km; running, 3 km]