last night i dreamed i was walking. just walking, along an infinite version of the sidewalk alongside the park that is the path to the hospital.
it was like that amnesiac protagonist at the beginning of the wim wenders movie "paris, texas." just walking and walking as if his life depended on it. but not knowing why.
an apt metaphor for life. and i walk, now, into treatment number 12.
almost one third done. . .
last night i dreamed i was in the army again. . but with my current age / body / state-of-health. and i went to camp edwards with some random soldiers only to find it empty and abandoned. . in its current state. there was some kind of alert due to north korea but no one was paying attention. we were living in field tents and everyone wad sitting around playing games on smartphones, including my brother.
then suddenly we had to break camp. russians were making problems. my friend kristen showed up to explain that we had all been captured and would be transfered to a POW camp in siberia. i said what a bunch of bs, i was annoyed.
so with my friend nate and with my brother we staged an escape that seemed to involve mostly walking through various korean malls. we ended up back at the abandoned camp edwards, where we were recaptured by the russians. i told them, "we are only prisoners if we believe we are prisoners."
nobody listened. so i woke up.
last night, i dreamed curt asked me to teach a bunch of debate classes. i was so happy. i was excited to be teaching all my much-missed students again. but i went to my first class and no students were there. i asked at the front desk and they didnt know where the students were. i wandered out into a large furniture store that was surprisingly sharing the same building with the hagwon, and found several students hiding under a table. i became extremely angry and began ranting at them about responsibility and keeping commitments and their wasting my time.
when i woke up i asked myself, where is all this anger coming from?
actually, i think its about frustration with how drawn out this whole treatment regime is.
i go in for radiation 5 of 30 now.
I woke up twice this morning. The first time I woke up was around 5:30 AM. I was restless, as I'd been having a difficult dream.
Someone from the US Army had come to my apartment and told me I had two hours to get packed up and moved – everyone had to move out of the country. Some kind of war scenario – many of the Koreans were going around doing crazy things, too. But it was all very vague.
Two hours is not a lot of time to pack up my apartment. Especially given the fact that I kept finding new rooms full of stuff. I would get stuff thrown into boxes only to discover a new room. Piles of knickknacks on shelves, bookshelves creaking under the weight of too many books like in a used bookstore, plastic containers of who-knows-what piled on the floor, like in my storage unit in Minnestoa.
Some Army guy came around and said I couldn't bring it all. "Take what's important," he said.
I found many things that I didn't even recognize as mine, yet it all seemed important and precious. I found bins of ceramic figurines, mountains of paper with drawings on each page, collections of coins and stamps and price tags. It was a hoarder's fantasy world, and I was being perfectly hoarderish within it.
But time was running out. People would come through and offer to help, but I kept rejecting it. Then Karen came by – Karen is my (ex-) mother-in-law (Michelle's mom). She said, with a sigh, "This was all Michelle's." I sat back in shock – that explained both why I didn't recognize the stuff and why I still felt compelled to save it all.
It was too late, though. The Army guy came by and said to stop packing, we were moving out. Karen was crying, as we left the unpacked stuff behind.
I held only a few boxes in my arms. I didn't even want them. I threw them aside, as we marched, a group of random Ilsan foreigners, toward some waiting buses.
Then I woke up.
I couldn't get back to sleep, so I read my history book for about an hour.
Then I finally fell asleep. This time I dreamed that I was trying to explain to my EHS students that they were very smart and had great potential, but they were complaining they were stupid and lazy. I was trying to motivate them. It makes sense – that's the class I did a substitute gig in last night.
Somehow, the four EHS students and I were in a supermarket. I was trying to cheer them up by clowning around, but, like the incipient adolescent 6th graders that they are, they seemed to mostly find this embarrassing. I said I would stop embarrassing them if they would cheer up. So they tried their best, and we sat down on some benches in a park to try to have class.
It was too hot to study, though. We sat around swatting flies and mosquitoes, as the sky grew dark. "Teacher, my book will get wet," one of them said, as raindrops started to fall.
I woke up again. 9:30 AM. That is the latest I've woken up since coming home from the hospital, I think. I have a sore throat – that is worrying – the last thing I need is to get some kind of cold or flu, leading into the radiation next week.
I ate some vitamin C with my breakfast. Maybe I should take it easy today, and stop having so many adventures.
The dream that I was struggling with as I woke up this morning was not very narrative in structure, more episodic but repetitive. The below is a summary of something that in the dream was more circular.
Andrew and I had ended up wandering around some large underground space (which bears relation to some of our explorations in Seoul yesterday), but I became convinced we were in a space station. Yet, for a space station, or for an underground mall, it was quite strange. Everything was wood, like the interior of a restored wooden faux-Victorian shopping mall – all high ceilings, high Belle Epoque stained glass, wooden floors, balconies and balustrades.
Although the place was very finely wrought and beautiful, it was overlain by decay and disorder. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of squatters living in the various rooms and halls. There were sleeping bags and tents set up, like an Occupy encampment, and there was IT equipment everywhere, just scattered: racks of servers, racks of routers, wires laid out willy-nilly on the floor. Hippies sat cross-legged with laptops, and would reach out and grab a dangling ethernet cable.
Andrew and I were searching for my Great Aunt Mildred (my mother's mother's sister). Andrew never knew "Aunt Mid" – she's not on his side of the family (recall that Andrew is my half-brother, so his maternal relatives are not the same as my maternal relatives). I was quite close to my Aunt Mid before she died in the early 90s, in a strange way. We shared a passion for left-leaning politics and academic-style speculative sociology, and we had exchanged long series of letters at various times on various topics.
I wasn't sure why we were looking for her, because even inside the dream, I already knew she was dead. At some point, because of this, we shifted the focus of our search to finding our sister. We were wandering in and out of the maze of interconnected rooms, brilliant with sunlight shining through high windows and glimpses of dark space, too.
I would ask, "Have you seen my sister?" of various random old men eating bowls of rice or hippy children chanting songs in circles.
Suddenly this woman presented herself, very solicitous and manipulative. She was short but she was quite fat, and had a round, Caucasian face with close-cropped gray hair, like a Buddhist nun. Definitely NOT my sister.
"Who are you?" Andrew asked.
"Why, I'm your sister," she said, nonchalantly. She was trying to get us to go through this doorway. The room beyond was dark. Andrew was very sceptical, and was pulling away. I was following along, not out of trust but more a kind of curiosity.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Trust me," she said, but there was something disingenuous in her smile.
The whole situation played out again, with slight variations. And again.
Eventually, I woke up.
Yesterday afternoon I went to work again, to do more student-speech scoring for the month-end testing. I came home even more exhausted (and hungry) than Monday evening, but brother Andrew had thoughtfully started some dinner so I was quite pleased.
Andrew and I ended up watching a movie (from among my collection of movies, I've been showing him some of my favorites) – this time, we saw The Good, The Bad, The Weird (I've blogged about that movie several times before).
So in fact, I went to bed pretty late. I didn't not experience the blessed, uninterrupted sleep of the previous night. I was restless, and woke many times – more back to a hospital-style sleeping. I'm not sure what's behind that – obviously, tiredness from work isn't the sole factor in providing good sleep.
One snippet of a dream I had (actually from a short nap yesterday afternoon) was funny and worth sharing: I dreamed I was playing with my smartphone (an Android based Samsung Galaxy Tab) and all of a sudden I discovered an app that was labeled "stop cancer." In the dream, I thought, now why didn't I just use this app, instead of all that surgery and stuff? I remember feeling really annoyed, in the dream, that I hadn't found the app sooner. What use is a useful app if it's not well publicized?
I awoke from an evaporating dream-scene.
I had taken the light-rail to the University of Minnesota. That places the dream in a hypothetical future, as the light-rail line going through campus is still under construction as far as I know, and certainly was never a feature of getting to the U that was a part of my experience of it in the 80’s and 90’s.
I stood on the Mall facing Northrup Auditorium, and it was a hot, overcast, humid day just as we have been experiencing here in Seoul. I began to look around more carefully. The campus seemed weirdly deserted. Was it a holiday?
Then I noticed that the Walker Library looked strange. I went closer, and realized it was just a “false front” – like those buildings made for Hollywood movie sets that have only the façade and nothing behind. Looking around, all the buildings were like that.
Looking back toward Northrup, I saw that it, too, was a false front. And so I walked up the stairs and tried to peer around to see what was behind.
What I saw was a breathtakingly beautiful although modestly sized Korean Buddhist temple, the doors wide open and a golden Buddha gazing down. A single monk sat inside the temple, in meditation.
I awoke then and everything dissolved as fiction, like at the end of Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude.
Below, a web image found of Northrup, looking toward it from near the front of Walker Library, I would estimate. Northrup is on the left.
Also, this image of a Buddha inside a temple (from 법륜사, taken by me last September).
I have finally given up my perfectionism and hit the publish button on 6 blog entries dated from July 4th through July 6th, which cover my time in the ICU after my major surgery. I may return and “touch up” some of the writing on these entries, or add some deep thought or insight if one occurs to me, but from here on they are public.
Even before the surgery it had been my intention to blog that period of time, but of course having such limited access to “the world” while in the ICU, and only fragments and scraps of paper to work with afterward, has meant that it’s been a kind “retroblogging” effort where I reconstruct my feelings and experiences of the time.
I had harbored some ambitions to cover some very deep topics, because it was an epiphanic time, and very intense (Intensive Care Unit, right?). But there’s only so much I can put together, now.
Just know that it was near the top of my list of intense experiences in my life, and utterly mind-blowing. Nor were the epiphanies merely transitory – I am confident they will grow and branch as true epiphanies do, throughout the rest of my life.
sitting in my bed, propped just so on my pillows, headphones on, eyes closed, i can imagine im on a train. but scenery never changes, and there seems to be very little interest in the destination. . . its just a ride, without an objective.
after my 5 am pre breakfast of fruit and yogurt, i brush my teeth, clean up a little, walk an orbit or two, put on some music and soon drift to sleep. i had a transparently symbolic dream.
in the dream, i wake up to see a child, maybe five or six years old, standing at the foot of my bed. she has a shy smile, she beckons. i follow her, dragging my iv-stand like a ball and chain. in the hallway there is a half-open door. she races through it, glancing back to make sure i am following.
beyond the door, narnia like, the is a tall stand of creaking redwood trees, and a bumpy, sun-drenched clearing with a scattering of picnic tables. i quickly realize it is nearly impossible to follow the girl, with the cumbersome iv-stand and its tiny, squeaky wheels.
she beckons, but i shake my head and sit down, heart heavy. she quickly becomes distracted chasing a remarkable blue butterfly over, under and around the tables. she laughs, and comes close to me, shyly.
"do you like that butterfly?" i ask.
she nods, makes a fluttering gesture.
who is this girl? i think to myself but do not say aloud.
she comes close and leans against me, whispering in my ear. the simple korean of a child, easy for me to understand. "네 딸" [your daughter] she giggles. in spanish, then, "no sabias?" [you didnt know?]. in a whisper, "물론." [of course]
i awake, then, choked with tears.
things untrue, of such sublime beauty.
this weekend im missing my 30th high school reunion. i wasnt intending to attend – the trip from seoul to humboldt isnt exactly convenient – but through the wonders of the facebook i can watch the reunion unfold anyway.. i had some close friends in high school, but i wasnt particularly social, and in watching my class facebook group im shocked by how many names i simply dont even recognize.
high school, looking back, isnt as painful to remember as the experience seemed at the moment of experiencing it. unlike many people, ive never been one to say “id never do high school again,” but likewise im not the sort to yearn to do it again either. i suppose like many, ive occasionally indulged a fantasy based on the premise “if only i knew then what i know now, why THEN id have a good time in high school.” but i suspect its a bit of a false premise.
ive done a great deal in my life but im still a deeply shy, nerdy guy at heart and im not even interested in changing that at this point. i was proud to be a nerd, even then, and so mostly now im more at peace with my shyness – not to mention my many coping strategies that mean many people dont even realize just how socially awkward i am on the inside.
likely if i went back with todays brain the only big difference would be in my feeling about it rather than big changes in behavior. i really made very few big mistakes in high school – i saved those for college, where with todays brain i can be certain id behave quite differently.
mostly what i feel right now is OLD. i know relative to many im not, but there is nothing quite like sitting in a cancer ward to foreground ones mortality.
i stole this picture below (if it comes through) from the arcata high school facebook group. . . . good old arcata. ive lived so many places. now my home is northwest seoul but ill be back sometime to tromp that eccentric town, stirring up ghosts and making new traces.
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.
i awoke from a dream at about five am. in and of itself, that is a great sign, as with rare exceptions i dont sleep well enough at night these days to even be able to dream in my normal way.
but the dream was completely disorienting. they wanted to prepare me for a new surgery. the doctors were using these little tags to identify potential problems and to get a feel for my psychological state . . this last was important because the surgery was to be a kind of brain surgery.
but they were imposing a maddening rule – every word i used on the little tags could only be used once. over and over i would be confronted with a situation like this: i would write a word on the tag in answer to a question and be told, you already used that word. someone would point to the tag where the word was used in the vast proliferation of tags.
i kept trying to find multilingual synonyms. . i would write one time "pee" and be told nope you used that. "urine" id venture. . nope. hmm, "소변"? no look its written down here. why cant you do this?. . you need to help us to take care of you but how can we when you cant do this simple thing? finally, "orina" and a dismissive smile but quickly dissolving into a new unanswerable question.
the dream went on and on like that. . . a linguists nightmare hospital stay. do you realize how dangerous this will be if you dont have the right labels?
crying tears of impotence.
dreams can be strange, of course. there seems to be no correlation between how long one is asleep and how long the dreamtime lasts.
before explaining the dream, ill explain why i was sleeping just now – shortly before noon on monday morning.
this morning was kind of busy. . . i went to see dr ryu in his office/clinic area on the second floor rather than him coming to see me. i took it as a vote of his confidence in my recovery. as a head/neck oncologist, his clinic area has a lot of gadgets arrayed around dentist-type chairs. i sat in one and he examined me and said it seemed the swelling on my tongue was worse. i confessed i was probably talking too much, too soon. he laughed and said, "well that explains it. you shouldnt."
he said he still felt ready to remove the stitches in my tracheal hole (which will allow it to begin healing closed spontaneously over the next several weeks), but said a lot of non optimistic things about still possible complications with the tongue reconstruction despite current very amazing level of recovery and no evidence of necrosis of the transplanted tissue. i realize its his job to talk about all this, but its hard to listen, too.
he then said that before taking out the stitches he would remove the iv style insert at my left shoulder, bringing my total down to one conslidated iv at my right shoulder – i had four when i woke up in icu. this left shoulder one is a bit different though – instead of being hooked to my circulatory system, its hooked with a tube in my body cavity to either the neck lymphs or the general in-between of things up there – i didnt uderstand which, but i was happy to lose the attached external apparatus as it weighs a bit, and hangs permanently attached at my waist so its another obstacle to getting comfortable.
dr ryu said this wont hurt at all (i hate when doctors say that). after 25 minutes of a sensation of angry mice aggressively operating tiny vacuum cleaners in my neck in the spaces between stuff, dr ryu applied a bandage to the hole, which had leaked a vast amount of liquid with the visual aspect of clear blood plasma out down my chest and into my pajama bottoms.
that done, he moved on to the tracheal stitches, which hurt much less. and then he said "are you ok to go back on your own?" i nodded. i was a bit dizzy. so he didnt even call a nurse escort, just sent me along – that was another post op milestone, being allowed freedom of movement unsupervised – the floorwalking in the ward is as you want but its never really out of the perception of one staff or another. wandering through the airport-terminalesque second floor i had the fleeting thought that i could go outside and no one would stop me. just fleeting.
back on the ward i checked in and i did four or five orbits, getting past the dizziness. then i elevated my right arm like i should be doing, and the dressing on my shoulder began to leak. a lot. it was mostly clear but enough blood color to look alarming. i stood and got a nurses attention and we went back to my bed and she redressed the hole and cleaned things up and gave me a fresh change of pajamas.
so as i said, interesting morning. i was lying on my side on my bed, arm elevated, and i fell deeply asleep, as naturally as ever so far. i slept 30 minutes or so until a nurse came for my vitals, and i had a epic dream. not all is clear, but other parts remain vivid even a half hour later.
i was on an express bus traveling from ilsan to seoul. ive done this, though mostly the subway is more convenient, but regardless, out the bus window i wasnt seeing just seoul but also other parts of korea that i know well by bus window, like jeollanam and suwon. it was kind of random but i didnt feel any alarm or curiosity in the dream. i was bored.
the bus queued in traffic for a slow bridge crossing, and i noticed there was a bus next to ours that was a US military bus. in reality these buses look like korean private tour buses and except sometimes for a handwritten destination sign in the front window or looking at the passengers directly, you would never know. but this dream bus next to mine was american school-bus style and painted olive green, like the ones i used to ride at fort jackson. and lo and behold, staff sergeant jones was driving, looking for all the world as i remember him, a cross between prince and samuel l jackson.
he grinned over at me and i noticed the windows were open on both buses. "hey way," he called out as was his wont – "way" was my only name in the army since you dont really have a first name. "you still in korea? i been looking for you. you gotta come with me." he reached out an arm and pulled me right through both windows and found my self kneeling and coughing in the aisle floor of the army bus. "man way you look fucked up we gotta get you to the hospital."
i laughed, "i know." i settled into the seat behind jones and he told me stories about panama, where had served in the 198x invasion.
outside the window, it looked like we were headed for osan on the gyeongbu expressway. sure enough, we arrived at osan base and went through the gate. apparently they were expecting me, as i showed my korean registration card (national id). once on base, though, the scenery changed. the base went on for hours, and looked like west texas. "i dont remember osan like this," i commented. jones just nodded.
finally we pulled up at abandoned-looking cluster of low military buildings. jones helped me walk inside but ran off even as i turned to thank him. i saw a check in counter. michelle sat behind it. it was clear immediately that she didnt recognize me, yet this didnt strike me as odd in the dream. i said i needed to check in and she handed me a packet of forms. all of them were in korean. "theres no way i can do this," i said, "even if i had my dictionary." it dawned on me i didnt have my dictionary (ie phone), or anything in my bag – my bag was still on the other bus. i looked at michelle pleadingly.
she shrugged. "dont look at me. what is that, mongolian?"
[actually i didnt finish writing this but typing on my phone is quite laborious so im posting it unfinished and will work on it later.]
[update: the details i remember are now long faded but the dream continued quite a while longer. i will outline it for sake of completeness.]
i gave up on michelles help and went wandering the mostly empty hospital. i found a stooped old man in a clown suit with a utility cart of the kind janitors use. i asked if could help me. he was friendly but spoke in a rapid uncompromising korean that was useless to me. then i noticed my friend peter with a mop. i felt relief. but peter just started telling me that nobody seemed to in charge and that it was a do it yourself hospital. he pointed out that there were lots of beds and supplies. peter helped me choose a bed in a relatively clean room and next thing i noticed he was fast asleep on a bench in the hallway.
suddenly a group of soldiers approached us. they woke peter up and told him he wasnt authorized. he asked "what about him" pointing at me. they said i was fine. peter asked them who was in charge. a sergeant said, "that clown. you should know that." we both nodded. thats when the nurse woke me.
[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It’s taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I’ve now managed to finally abandon.]
Sixth Shift Word: Kindness
My last shift was a morning shift, and I had a very competent and cheerful woman with glasses who reminded me of a sort of Korean version of my friend Amy (who is a nurse).
I didn’t really have any major insight during this time. I was feeling stronger, more in control, and after my philosophical exchanges with the night nurse, I’d allowed myself several periods of full-on sleep (as opposed to my microdreaming, mentioned two posts back).
This is a sheet of some my conversation with the morning nurse.
This next sheet is my last paper in the ICU – it’s a brief exchange with Dr Ryu, who did some aggressive poking around in my mouth and throat, removing the oxygen tube completely. I spoke too soon on one note: “I feel good. No infections!” That triumphal note haunted me later, when the neck infection became the largest obstacle to my smooth recovery.
The main point, though, is that by this time I had become convinced, based on my experiences of gratitude and suffering in the previous two days, that kindness was the key.
Doing kindness makes us feel better, too.
It’s not like I never thought kindness was important, before. I remember distinctly a conversation I had with Curt way back in 2008, when he was my boss at LinguaForum, when he asked me what I thought was the most important quality in a teacher, and I answered without hesitation that it was “kindness.” To which Curt, at the time, had said only “hmff.”
Now, though… kindness is not just the most important quality of a teacher. Now, kindness is the most important quality. Period.
Don’t let me forget it.
[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It’s taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I’ve now managed to finally abandon.]
Fifth Shift Word: Suffering
The night nurse of my fifth shift in the ICU seemed to be assigned to me for the same reason as the fourth shift nurse had been: out of my reputation for being “low maintenance” and because she was relatively new or inexperienced. She seemed incredibly young – I’ve had middle-school students who seemed more mature and self-assured. But my fifth shift nurse also turned out to know English the best of any of my nurses.
The fifth shift was by far the most terrible of all my shifts in the ICU – but the reason it was terrible will surprise you – it surprised me. And it ended up being the most epiphanic, too, for that same reason.
You see, the head nurse of the Friday-to-Saturday night shift was a kind of insecure, whiny-voiced Hitler. I call her in my memory and in anecdote “the hitler nurse” – she would rant and rave and berate her staff at any moment whatsoever. She would berate her staff while standing right at patient bedside, criticising their efforts, asking if they were incompetent, insisting they try harder next time. This was bad enough for me, who barely understood, half the time, that this was the content of her rantings – how would be to be a Korean, lying, half-dead and hooked up to some machine or another, and having this hitler nurse standing beside the bed yelling at the nurse in charge of your machine, saying “you did that wrong, you goddamn idiot, etc., etc.”?
I felt guilty, because I felt I had brought the wrath of the hitler nurse down on my own lowly caretaker, and she was clearly suffering because of it. She was agitated. She would make mistakes. She would sit and stare as if trying to gather the strength to continue. She was a person deeply troubled by the horrible treatment she was receiving from her boss and by her own insecurities and inexperience.
At the very beginning of the night shift, I’d asked for “suction” (see previous post). I needed the liquid vaccuumed out of my lungs. Only afterward did I realize my newly assigned nurse wasn’t experienced with this procedure – she was not gentle, she was not fast or efficient, and it was so painful that had my mouth been working properly I would have screamed bloody hell. And afterward I allowed my gratitude to evaporate and I insisted that something had gone horribly wrong during that session of suction, and I made the mistake of showing something written to that effect to the head nurse.
So then the head nurse decided to berate my attending nurse about her failure to care “properly” for her patient for the rest of the night. The hitler nurse yelled at me too – saying well, it’s hard, getting the suction, of course it hurts, what’s your problem, anyway? I was really angry. I was really scared. I wrote the two top things to the hitler nurse – first, 천천히 말하 (talk slowly), and then, 이해못해 (I don’t understand). In both cases, I was digging my own grave deeper, as they are impolite forms.
A bit later, to my own nurse, I wrote the part below, 미안합니다 그냥화났어 (I’m sorry just I got angry). Finally, I tried to explain that in prior suction events it hadn’t been bad, but I think I explain it badly there and I’m not sure it made sense.
I felt so bad. The young woman didn’t deserve it – she was just inexperienced. And she was so shaken by the situation she was making other mistakes. She dropped a thermometer on the floor. She misplaced a syringe for a medicine update. I was terrified. How was I going to recover this mess? I needed to get the attending nurse back on “my side.” I wrote her a note, saying we had to work as a team. I promised to be a good patient.
The transformation wasn’t instant, but suddenly she revealed her excellent English to me. Several hours later, we’re engaged in what can only be called an almost-philosophical discussion of my previously mentioned Scylla and Charybdis (sleep deprivation vs pain – see previous post).
The conclusion of that rather “deep” conversation was that she urged me that sometimes, I will just need to let go of the anticipation of the pain of the suction procedure, and let myself sleep, as that was more important. So, in fact, I slept. And each of her suction procedures improved over the previous, until she was barely hurting me more than the previous nurses had been. I got to be her practice subject for the procedure, and once I’d decided I was going to ally myself with her, it was as if I could stand the pain, better, too.
I ended up making a handwritten thank you card for her on a scrap of paper torn off from my pad, and we developed a good rapport.
I ended up entertaining her with cartoons. And I wrote my epipany in the lower right of this sheet.
The epiphany: “In the end I cannot stand cruelty and unkindness even more than pain.”
I realized with bleak clarity that the cringes and flustered unhappiness produced by the hitler nurse’s constant berations were more painful, to me, than anything I was experiencing physically. That is causing suffering in the human psyche, and for no good reason.
Arguably, my suffering of the body is nothing beside that – for my body’s suffering can be more easily ignored, being in the body, and further, it has a clear reason, which is the cancer and our feeble human efforts to combat it.
What reason is there to be unkind to others?
[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It’s taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I’ve now managed to finally abandon .]
Fourth Shift Word: Lucidity
My fourth shift in the ICU was an evening shift. I was assigned a fairly inexperienced nurse and I think she’d drawn me because I’d developed a reputation by then of being a relatively “easy” patient. Probably this nurse, along with the now forgotten first shift nurse, was the nurse with whom I developed the least rapport. I became very interiorized during this shift, and my proprioception began returning and I finally figured out a clear map of my surgery points and tube insertion points.
The real problem I had, more than any other, during my time in the ICU, was with the phlegm and liquid draining at the back of my throat and down into my lungs. I’ve always had a bit of a snoring problem, and possibly (though never diagnosed), it’s easy to imagine I have had episodes of mild sleep apnea, too. So combine that with an oxygen tube through a tracheotomy and major surgery on my neck and throat and tongue, and you can see how this could become truly terrible.
I was becoming sleep-deprived, because I couldn’t just snore my way through the post-nasal-drip obliviously, as was my normal custom. The phlegm would build at the back of my throat, but it was sufficiently difficult and painful to swallow that each time I swallowed, I was unable to do it involuntarily, and would have to jolt fully awake. On the other hand, if I just let it drip down into my lungs and didn’t swallow, I would end up with liquid in my lungs such that every hour or so I needed “suction” (석션) – a truly horrible invention that the US Government has probably used in combination with their exciting waterboarding program. They shove a snakey suction device down through your tracheal hole and vacuum the juice out of your lungs. It hurts worse than most anything I’ve ever experienced even when done gently, and some nurses weren’t so gentle, either.
So it was a Scylla and Charybdis dilemma: either swallow every few minutes to redirect the phlegm to my stomach, and stay awake to do so, or not swallow and be vacuumed out every hour.
This evening, I had decided I preferred sleep deprivation to pain. So I began to experiment.
I found that I needed to swallow, on average, every 12 or so breaths. I began counting my breaths, and saying short affirmations on each breath. I had this idea that I could “sleep” between swallows. It went like this. I would fix a smile on my face – my “fake Buddha smile” as I call it. Then, begin:
1. breathe in. i am strong. breathe out.
2. breathe in. i am healthy. breathe out.
3. breathe in. i am fearless. breathe out.
4. breathe in. i am dreaming. breathe out.
5. breathe in. i am strong. breathe out.
6. breathe in. i am healthy. breathe out.
7. breathe in. i am fearless. breathe out.
8. breathe in. i am dreaming. breathe out.
9. breathe in. i am strong. breathe out.
10. breathe in. i am healthy. breathe out.
11. breathe in. i am fearless. breathe out.
12. breathe in. i am dreaming. breathe out.
swallow.
repeat.
Over hours, I perfected this, and found that I could actually fall asleep, in a weird, weird way, saying this “mantra.” Each time I would utter the word “dreaming” I could feel my mind snapping into that REM state, and the coherence of my consciousness dissolving. It was quite remarkable. And yet I remained utterly “vigilant” of the situation around me – I heard the nurses, I heard what was going on, I felt the phlegm building at the back of my throat. And the images that would come in the “dreaming” moments were somewhat guided. I could dream about things that I chose – guided imagery.
I know I freaked out some nurses. I would have my eyes closed, sitting slumped in my bed, to all appearances asleep, but when they approached, before they touched me to take my vitals or do some thing or another, I would hear them, and I would snap “awake” and be regarding them, smiling. Utterly aware of my surroundings, yet sleeping, every 12th breath.
I have experimented a little with trying to repeat this experience since then, but I haven’t really pushed that hard, and it’s too easy, now, to “fall asleep” for real. Over time, I intend to explore the relationship between meditation and dreaming and lucid dreaming and semi-dreaming.
Here are a pair of sheets I’m pretty sure I wrote during my 4th shift.
This picture I’m trying to explain my post-nasal-drip problem.
This second picture is more of that, but also I think I made a very interesting “body pain map” in the center bottom – I was rating the pain of the different locations on my body – it really wasn’t that bad, note that I wrote carefully next to the head of the pain map “약없으면” which is my pidgin Korean for “when I’m not taking pain medicine,” while below I wrote “약있으면 다고통 0~2” = “when medicine all pain 0~2.” The pain medicine was working just fine.
[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It’s taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I’ve now managed to finally abandon.]
Third Shift Word: Hermitage
My third shift, the Friday morning shift, I had a slightly pudgy nurse
with a friendly face and a halo of short red curly hair – in Korea this
isn’t as uncommon as you might think, what with hair coloring and
styling and perms and all that. She helped a lot. She was a bit
absent-minded though.
One time, I remember, she detached my breathing tube to clean around the wound there, and she left it lying loose, like a fat, translucent, hissing worm, on my chest, and ended up going away to do something else. It was too early in my stay for me to have the confidence I had later on to lift my arm and place the tube myself – my right arm was utterly immobile, and the range of movement of my left arm seemed limited by the weird holes in my body’s proprioception that I was experiencing. So the tube lay there for some 5 or 10 minutes, while I tried feebly to get my nurse’s attention – anyone’s attention – and point out the situation. I was voiceless, and so unless someone was looking, I had very little I could do to get someone’s attention.
When she finally came back and noticed, she shrugged and put it back in place, saying “sorry.” In fact, I wasn’t in any particular danger, it was just a breathing assist with oxygen, not a breathing replacement. Still, I was deeply alarmed at my sense of helplessness.
Later, toward the end of my stay, I realized I could get a nurse’s attention by holding my breath. This would set off the alarms on the breathing monitor and send someone running quickly. But that came later.
I decided during this morning shift, entrapped in these feelings of helplessness, that this ICU, and this cancer that had put me here, were my hermitage. Why, specifically, would I choose the word and concept of hermitage?
The korean word for cancer happens to be a homonym for the korean word for hermitage (ie. a small hermitage such as Buddhist monks will occupy – not a major monastery but a small mountainside retreat). Both words are the syllable “암” [am]. This time in the ICU was coming to resemble a sort of hermitage. I didn’t have my glasses. I was not allowed my phone. I couldn’t sleep well, not because of pain but because of post-nasal-drip.
My time in the ICU became my 48 hours in the wilderness.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of hermitage. I remember in my “Quaker” phase I would read these little Quaker journals in the meetinghouse library in Mexico City, and there was a series on Christian hermitages, describing different traditions and approaches, everything from Catholic to Finnish Orthodox to Coptic. I remember thinking, Quakers need hermitages, too. And I was then and remain transfixed by the figure of Thoreau (even recognizing that there were senses in which his hermitage at Walden was a “cheat”), or more contemporary writers like Edward Abbey with his Desert Solitaire.
I have often craved and intended hermitage, and there’s a sense in which my “8 hours of solitude a day” requirement is a sort of daily hermitage. The closest I came to true hermitage – the several months living on my uncle Arthur’s land in Alaska in the Fall of 1998, went badly, in retrospect, but it was more because I wasn’t prepared and wasn’t in the right frame of intention to pull it off.
So here, then, in the ICU, I had been gifted with a kind of social hermitage, yet surrounded by dying and suffering people and militaristic nurses.
Here are some pages from my interactions during the 3rd shift – including visits from Dr Ryu and Curt.
The first page is just a journaling effort, and the first entry is from 3rd shift and the second is from 4th shift, q.v.
This includes my visit with Curt.
This seems to be mostly my conversation with Dr Ryu or a surgical intern.
The nurse brought me a radio to keep me entertained.
[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It’s taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I’ve now managed to finally abandon.]
Second Shift Word: Gratitude
The following shift (my second in the ward) was a night shift: there was a
very accommodating male nurse. He was communicative, competent, friendly, and even handsome, to boot. He frequently was off assisting the other nurses, too, so it was one of my “least attended” shifts. But when he was beside me his efforts were always exactly right.
The nurses in the ICU are hardcore. But they are human, they make mistakes, too. I felt so vulnerable to them, and I felt that it was becoming a sort of human-relations puzzle to solve how to get the best care possible, given how limited my communicative abilities were.
So meditating on how to solve the problem of maximizing my quality-of-care (and really, I was thinking in those terms even in such straits), at some point between my first shift there and my second, I realized that the key is gratitude. Not just felt gratitude, as in a prayer or affirmation, but expressed gratitude.
I began trying to remember to write “고마워요” [thank you] on the corner of each new page of note paper that I was using to communicate my needs, and anytime any nurse did anything, I would point to that word – saying, in effect, thank you for doing your job. Some nurses found it amusing, or perhaps it made them uncomfortable. I’ve realized in retrospect that the ICU nurses have to work very hard to avoid emotional entanglements with their patients – especially in a cancer hospital, many of these patients are dying, and many more are in such great suffering that they are unreachable through human contact.
The sheer volume of human suffering ambient in the large ICU room was constantly palpable – there was moaning, there was crying, there was screaming, there were men yelling like babies, “아파” [it hurts!]. There were doctors rushing around reviving patients who had stopped breathing or who were lapsing into comas.
Yet this little quirk of mine, of pointing at “thank you” and making eye contact with the nurses when possible, proved remarkable. The coldness faded a little bit, and they would take extra steps to make me comfortable, or even strike up “conversations” – me writing in my pad in bad mixtures of Korean and English while they phrased simple questions about my background or situation.
I was being forced to write everthing on sheets of paper – I did not
talk at all during my time in the ICU. I wasn’t able to remember to save
some of the papers from the earlier shifts, but I believe this paper is
from the second shift – it’s me introducing myself to my nurse and
maybe some other nurse or orderly.
[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It's taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I've now managed to finally abandon.]
First Shift Word: Joy
Emerging from the haze of anaesthesia, my coworker Helen was there with my doctor to welcome me among the living. My only feeling was happiness to find myself still among the living.
My surgery had concluded at about 7 pm or so – my understanding is that lasted well over 9 hours, total. During my entire time in the ICU, I did not have easy visual access to a clock, and knowing the time seemed, anyway, to be the least of my worries.
Life in the ICU is divided into shifts, and the shift changes are huge happenings – the cycle of life in the ICU is entirely by shift. Nevertheless, the lack of access to a clock for the first part and my own fuzzy-headedness for the second part meant that for the longest time, I couldn't figure out if there were 4 shifts in a day or 3. In retrospect, I'm sure now that it's 3, and since my overall stay in the ICU was just short of 48 hours, I experienced a total of 6 shifts. I will write about each shift separately, as the character of the shift varied according to the character of the nurse attending to me more than according to any progress or change or landmark in my own body or its recovery.
So…
That first shift, I can't in fact remember the nurse's face. After my initial wake up and short talk with Helen and Dr Ryu, I remember almost nothing. I was overwhelmed. I couldn't "feel" my own body in large swathes, and I didn't realize, for example, just how many tubes I had attached to me and how they all worked until well into my second shift in the ICU.
One example was the fact of my catheterization: I simply didn't know, and no one thought to tell me, probably because they thought I knew or that it didn't matter. The thing is, I felt this strong need to pee, but I kept "holding it" – not really, as I later found out, but I managed the sensation of "holding it," and when I mentioned the need to pee to a nurse all anyone ever said was "it's OK," which really didn't make sense to me until I realized my catheterization.
In the end, lying there feeling helpless and frusrated and overwhelmed, my emotional response was unexpected: simple joy. "I'm still alive. That's cool." I repeated it over and over, and there was little else going on in my mind.
Update, 2016-03-06: I was going through old files on my computer and found this photo – I don't think it's ever been posted on this blog but it should be, for completeness' sake. It is the first picture taken of me after my surgery, by coworker Helen when she came to see me in the ICU.
i awoke from a dream at 445 am.
im with a large group of people from all different parts of my life. we are driving aimlessly around new jersey. michelle and jeffrey and i used to do that. we are a large group, so there are several vehicles.
everyone is comparing musical compositions. its like surfing music on youtube. people keep looking, all of us, over and over, at the sky. a storm is coming. but some of the music is haunting. we drive to a place that is like back in time. one of my students says cryptically that it is as he suspected.
a tall, elegant dark haired woman is sitting in a 1930s era car, reading a book. she doesnt notice us. there is a meadow and a tiny stream and a picnic blanket but shes sitting in the car alone. i walk over.
when i reach the car the woman has disappeared like a ghost. my friend curt points to the sky. the storm, he says. but the music im hearing is too beautiful. i lie down on the ground in the shade beside the old car, listening to music i can neither recognize nor forget nor even describe.
i see my friend bob standing nearby. why is everyone looking at the sky? i ask. he says, the storm. who is making that song? i ask. he says, i thought that was yours.
i woke up choked up, like about to cry. after about ten minutes beginning to write this down, the nurse came in saying ah already awake in half english half korean. doing blood pressure check etc. the morning nurse is very cheerful.
One unexpected but happy outcome of my recent announcement on this blog (and hence in facebookland, too) that I have been diagnosed with cancer, is the outpouring messages and notes from distant friends, relatives, and acquaintances. I'm utterly grateful for all of that.
It really makes a difference in my ability to keep a positive outlook on this experience – please don't stop no matter what! Thank you – I love you all so much.
Among these messages, however, there have been some examples of what I can only term "religious outreach and sharing." I don't mean people who are saying they are praying for me – this is nigh universal, and completely unproblematic from my perspective. I mean people who take the opportunity to share something of their beliefs, or experiences with Jesus, etc., and who inquire as to my own religious standing.
Viewed charitably, people are offering me solace with displays of where, in their own lives, they have found their own meaning and solace. Taking a less charitable view, they're seeking to exploit me in a moment of weakness and hoping to gain a "deathbed" convert.
For the record, my faith is quite strong.
I realize these solicitations are meant in all kindness, but I don't take them as kindness. Efforts to convert me – even in the best of times – will, if anything, turn me against the belief system being advocated.
Perhaps it is the case that aggressive evangelism is in some ways admirable. Certainly it is worth noting the level of commitment and strength of faith that it requires, and the depth of human character that it draws upon. I deeply respect if not downright envy people of strong faith of all kinds. Nevertheless, that kind of "vested outreach" ("caring, but with a dogmatic agenda") strikes me as disrespectful to the intellectual autonomy of others.
Try to consider it from my point of view: "So sorry to hear your news about your being sick, but, by the way, what you believe is completely wrong. I sure hope that you can fix up your deficient belief system in the time remaining to you on this Earth, or… you-know-what!"
Ah. Thank you so much for making me feel better.
I am an atheist. If that changes, over time, then so be it, but in this moment, my faith is unshaken, firm and unwavering.
"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." – Thomas Paine
Paine was called a "a demihuman archbeast" in an American newspaper contemporary to him. That being the case, how can we say that the voices in the current media are so alarming?
To digress further, briefly, for no reason, in a different vein: I once owned a horse that I named "Thomas Paine." I thought it a fitting name, as the horse seemed strongly anti-authoritarian and freethinking in character. I probably thought of the name because I was carrying around a slim copy of Paine's Age of Unreason at the time, which was the period of my disillusion with my previous "Quaker" identity. Thomas Paine was the only horse I ever owned. I didn't own him for long. When my several-months-long horseback oddessy in the mountains of Michoacan ended unpleasantly in the Spring of 1987, I gifted Thomas Paine to my friend Jon, who sold the horse later.
Thus when I think of Thomas Paine, and so too of religion and anti-religion and freethought, those meditations enchain to visceral memories of sitting atop a spirited horse in the pine forests of the high country of southwestern Mexico, or of eating carnitas and fresh tortillas and inhaling wood-smoke and shaking scorpions out of my shoes in the early morning.
For me there is a literal, viscerally-felt smell to be evoked for that sense of freedom from the anxieties of dogmas.
I should return to the question at hand: some of my friends' and acquaintances' sudden evangelical zealousness.
I assert that I am a "faith-based" atheist.
Some people might protest that I have repeatedly represented myself as Buddhist in this blog, and… isn't that a religion too?
Well yes… but no. Buddhism is indeed a religon, for many.
For me, though, Buddhism is only a practice, nothing more. It requires me to believe absolutely nothing. When my Buddhist friends talk to me of karma, I choose to interpret it metaphorically, and when they speak of reincarnation I nod politely and try to smile. Most pointedly, though, no one has ever suggested to me that it is a requirement that I believe such nonsense. So I very much appreciate that there exists a group of people that for the most part not only steadfastly refuses to dogmatize their beliefs but is even willing to affirm that I can be "one of them" without having to make any changes or adjustments of any kind to my own beliefs.
I suppose that when I was an active Quaker, 25 years ago, it was similar. Christianity, though, has an undeniable and unavoidable dogmatic burden: it requires of each believer the unambivalent affirmation of God's personal and accessible existence to each of us. No church, therefore – not even the Quakers or the Unitarians – are really able to dispense with all the metaphysical hocus pocus. If you're going to hold the Bible to some standard of eternal truth or even the broadest symbolic sacredness, you're joined at the hip to an irrational worldview. I could never feel comfortable pretending about that. I disliked my own imagined hypocrisy too intensely when I was an openly atheist "Quaker," and I felt unwelcome among Unitarians, too, for the exact same reason. They welcome all views, but, caveat: "hey, don't you think you're being a little close-minded, being an atheist?"
My "faith-based atheism" is strange to many people. Probably, it is even utterly unfathomable. People may ask, "How is it possible to have such a strong belief in, um… nothing?" As if atheism was an affirmational belief in "nothing." It's not nihilism. From my perspective, God is only one thing. So… Everything, minus one thing, is still almost everything. And that's what I believe in: I believe in everything that is in the world, everything that I can hear and feel and touch and see and taste and know and learn and achieve through my own rational mind.
In a way, I even derive some significant comfort from my atheism, in this difficult moment in my life. Where others, who have strong belief systems in benevolent or purposeful deities, would find their faith challenged or shaken by a revelation of their own possible imminent mortality, I am merely affirmed.
Of course life has no purpose, I can affirm in this moment, with a broad smile. And yet… what beauty there is in the world! What kindness other people can show! And how remarkable, then, that this happens for no reason whatsoever.
A miracle – utterly sublime.
Sometimes I have a dream that is so strange, yet so evidently autobiographical and symbolic, that as I caress its memory traces upon awaking, I think to myself, “people will think I made this up – no one dreams like that.”
So I must aver at the outset, I really dreamed this dream.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t make it up, too. Of course, as we awake and shuffle past the curlicues of fog that shrouded our sleeping state, the memories shift and take on form as a narrative that wasn’t really present in the dream. At least some if not most of the creativity in dreaming gets applied here, maybe. I don’t think, however, that that means I made the dream up, in any intentionalist sense.
I hesitate to report it, because as dreams go it was so very strange. But I will tell it, nevertheless – because that’s one of the things I do on This Here Blog Thingy™ that almost no one else does, and somehow, doing so thus means more to me vis-a-vis asserting my bloggish individuality over this peculiar format than most of the other things I do here.
I had decided to return to graduate school. In the dream, it was clear this had been a very fast, impulsive decision – perhaps taken over a long weekend, perhaps taken while drinking soju with coworkers. I had made the decision out of frustration with the current trajectory of my life.
I was accepted into UC Irvine. Keep in mind, in my real life, I have never even visited UC Irvine’s campus, but it has a certain plausibility around it, given my Southern California links. The year I spent working in Long Beach was actually, mostly, a year spent working at a client location in Costa Mesa, only a few miles from UCI. So it wasn’t something utterly random, perhaps.
I packed my possessions out of my apartment here in Korea (where somehow all my possessions in storage in Minnesota were also crammed into my apartment). I loaded everything into my Nissan pickup truck that I owned from 2001 until 2010, and drove to UCI.
I drove. It wasn’t something strange, in the dream. Just driving from Seoul to Orange County. It took a long time – but no more than a day or two. It was like driving from Oregon to Orange County.
When I arrived at the campus, UCI was in a Mexican beach town, but a rather posh one. I suppose that’s actually a pretty accurate description of much of Orange County. It was much greener than what we think of as Mexican beach towns – the green hills around the campus resembled northern Baja in winter, when the rains make everything verdant but trees are sparse. I remember looking down a long street as I parked my pickup truck and thinking there were a lot of nice sailboats in the harbor.
I went into a large, glass-faced office tower to find it divided up into various departments. Oddly, most of the departments were “city government”-type departments – a police department on one floor, a sewer department on another, yet another area had the offices of the city bus system. There was also a retail area with some upscale shops, like the Costa Mesa mall, and a food court, and alongside the food court was the Comparative Literature department. This is the first time in the dream where I knew what subject I’d returned to graduate school to study.
I met a friendly woman at a desk, there. There were stressed out grad students dozing in very stylish-looking cubicles made of polished blonde natural wood, decorated with tasteful personal effects. The woman began introducing me to various people in the department, although remarkably, there were no professors. “The department is run as a collective,” she pointed out. One of the other students muttered something about Juche (the North Korean ideological system). Really?
I was self-conscious of being so much older than most of the students. I was introduced to a man half my age who would be my “mentor” – he had the remarkably fitting dream-name of Earnest Young. He had blond hair and a goatee. He asked me to tell him about myself. I began to tell him a rather redacted personal history, in Spanish, but after a while we ended up talking about my negative experiences with graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. At some point he said, candidly, that his Spanish wasn’t so good, and we switched to English. I had the feeling that maybe he wasn’t impressed with my Spanish and had offered to switch out of pity, but he’d said very little in the language, so I decided I was being paranoid.
We were interrupted by the woman from the front desk, who took me around to meet some of the other students. Then, I was introduced to an older woman with graying hair who was apparently part of the building’s janitorial staff, but she was being treated as a full member of the group. She was laughing at humorless in-jokes being made by a forceful younger woman with “Occupy Philosophy” written on her tee shirt.
I bowed to the older cleaning lady and greeted her in Korean. This impressed the other students, but the cleaning lady returned my bow and offered me a large plate with exactly two orange cheezits on it. I took the plate politely, and was about to eat the cheezits when I saw that written on them were the words “아무것 없다” [“There is nothing”]. I looked at the woman with alarm, but she just smiled shyly and enigmatically, and returned to her cart of cleaning supplies and began dusting an unoccupied cubicle.
I was feeling uncomfortable by this secret message I’d received, so I put the plate of cheezits aside on the desk that had been assigned to me, and resumed my orientation chat with Earnest Young.
He was explaining that we had to teach our own classes under a sort of rotating leadership. My first class that I had to lead would be about Witold Gombrowicz [this is very significant in the context of this dream, but very hard to explain – Gombrowicz is connected in my mind with the problem and aesthetic of apophenia]. There were some administrative details I didn’t understand, but I decided to let it slide for now.
Then I looked back at the plate of cheezits after a few minutes and there was a very small sculpture of a monkey gazing at the cheezits, as if it was hungry. The monkey turned its head and met my eyes intelligently. I shivered, feeling a sort of nervous, conspiratorial fear, as if the universe had shrugged and uttered, “Gombrowicz, indeed.”
I was tired. “Where will I sleep?” I asked.
The earnest Mr. Young glanced at me, surprised. “Oh, you don’t know. We will probably assign you to ‘Camp One.'”
I asked for an explanation. “We take the collective nature of our undertaking very seriously,” he explained, earnestly. Apparently, they lived like Occupy protestors, in large recycled Army tents in the modernist plaza outside the building, where there was a large sculpture in the style of Picasso’s amazing work in Daley Plaza in Chicago [That sculpture is a recurring character in my dreams].
“The views of the mountains are excellent,” the young Earnest pointed out. “And the outside air is invigorating.”
I shrugged, but remembered a problem. “I don’t have a sleeping bag.”
He looked at me, eyes bugging out, as if to say, ‘how could you neglect to bring something so important as a sleeping bag to a comparative literature graduate program?‘
I apologized, and mumbled something about how Penn had obviously habituated me to a different sort of graduate program, altogether.
He grinned, forgiving me. “Yeah, we don’t follow that old Penn style. We’re progressive.”
I nodded, and added for no apparent reason, “Like Columbia?”
“Maybe. I haven’t been there. This is a different world,” he said, gesturing around. The signs were in Korean, now, in the food court, and a large number of people were emerging from what was clearly a Seoul subway station stairway. Yet peering out a large window I could still see the green hills and the harbor with sailboats in the distance. So I had to agree it was a different world.
“I’m really tired,” I finally said.
“You’ll get to sleep, soon. But first, we’re meeting to watch cartoons.” He described a restaurant or bar location across the street from the tents where I would be staying. “Let’s meet there in about 30 minutes.”
“What are we watching,” I asked.
He waxed enthusiastic. “Oh, it’s a fabulous new program,” he exclaimed. “It’s called ‘pork the orkville opiates.'”
This title for a cartoon was so bizarre, so incongruous and yet hilarious, that I began to laugh.
I immediately woke up. Am I the only one who has noticed that a dream state cannot sustain an active, laughing subject? Do I begin to “sleep-laugh” in actual fact, when these dream-laughs occur?
“Orkville,” by the way, isn’t just some random name. When I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, I had a collection of stuffed toys that were perhaps intended to be alligators, but they stood upright and came in unusual colors, like blue and red and yellow. I had decided that these were definitely not alligators (even then, alligators!), but rather “orks.” My mother, a fan of Tolkien before Tolkien fandom was a thing, asked me if Orcs weren’t horrible, brutish and unkind creatures. I told my mother in no uncertain terms that no, those were “C-orcs, spelled with the letter ‘c’.” My orks were “K-orks, spelled with the letter ‘k’.” I clarified that K-orks were, in fact, vegetarians, and lived a communistic life in an amphibious riverine utopia named Orkville. I drew several maps and wrote a constitution for the place. I later invented a language for them, with an abjad writing system. I had one Ork named Barnabus York, and another named Merriweather Shadow. They were metaphysical detectives. I drew geneologies for them stretching back 50 generations, to show they were related.This was when I was 7 or 8. I was smarter when I was a child.
What I’m listening to right now.
Penderecki, “Viola Concerto.”
A Dream Within A Dream
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow–
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
– Edgar Allan Poe
I have been sick for almost a month now. I've been to the doctor 4 times since I finally overcame my Korean-doctor-phobia, but I'm not really getting better so far. I'm not sure what's going on. Some kind of infection that the antibiotics are fighting, I presume. On the plus side, 4 visits to the doctor, plus lots of meds, and I haven't yet managed to spend 30 bucks in copays. That's national health insurance for you. But maybe you get what you pay for?
I awoke this morning from a very simple, unfortunate dream.
My uncle was driving a big old-fashioned school bus. This is true-to-life – he bought an old school bus when I was maybe 13 or 14 and renovated it into a kind of do-it-yourself motor home. These were called “hippie buses” in my experience, but my uncle wasn’t really a hippie. More a kind of anti-hippie.
But anyway, it was realistic enough to be riding with him in an old school bus. I was sitting on some makeshift seat on the passenger side, and he was driving. We were driving on a dirt road in Guatemala. This departs from realism, since mostly when I was with him we were in Washington State or Idaho – although often enough it was on dirt roads. It was clearly Guatemala, outside the windows – I recognized streets and things from when I stayed in Quetzaltenango in November-December of 1989.
The dirt road was climbing a steep mountainside, with a cliff embankment dropping off to one side. There was an old man walking in the road, pulling a hand-drawn cart or wheelbarrow. My uncle swerved to avoid hitting the man, and the bus’ wheels slipped off the edge of the embankment and everything began to move in slow motion as the bus began to tilt and roll down the mountainside. We were going to die.
My uncle said, matter-of-factly, “So. That’s it.”
End-of-dream.
I didn’t take or save any pictures of my time in Quetzeltenango. But here is a picture I found with a simple online image search, of the main plaza, much as I remember it.
Last night I dreamed…
…that KarmaPlus was being run in Folwell Hall. Folwell, at the University of Minnesota, makes frequent appearances in my dreams, since roughly half of my undergraduate career was spent in that immense, old building. I still had the same coworkers and students I do in Korea, but there were lots of people around from previous periods of my life, including coworkers from ARAMARK in Burbank and colleagues from graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.
I had to give one of our routine “month-end” tests to a group of low level elementary kids. I was at my desk in our staff room, but I couldn’t find the test I’d prepared. I was opening folders and going through piles.
Meanwhile, the kids were making problems. They’d taken over a seminar room on the first floor of Folwell and some former University of Minnesota Spanish professor (maybe it was that old marxist, Vidal) was yelling at them to be quiet. I went in and passed out some doughnuts (which was one of my Karma coworkers’ suggestions), but that hardly calmed the kids down. And I was running back and forth between our staff room (which was located near the north entrance in the Folwell basement) and where the kids were (on the first floor).
There were all these people with luggage wandering around, and some PA system was announcing departing flights. Not only was Folwell transformed into a hagwon hosting environment, but it had apparently become an airport, too.
I was at my desk and I was finding things I’d written for work in the 1990’s, essays from my time in college, even on essay I wrote in high school. All stuffed in folders at my cramped desk at my KarmaPlus work area. I gave up looking for the test and went back down to the seminar room, only to find that the students had discovered there was a snack bar selling hamburgers at the back of the seminar room. I went up to the man operating the snack bar – an elderly Korean who looked like the man who works the night shift in the 7-11 in the first floor of my apartment builidng. I asked him to stop selling the kids food, and he pointed helplessly into a back room behind the snack bar.
In the room were most of the members of ARAMARK Burbank’s IT department, sitting on the floor around long tables, Korean style, eating lettuce wraps and grilled pork and drinking soju. One of them looked over and saw me standing at the entrance, and called over an ajumma (serving lady) and whispered something to her. She came over to where I stood and bluntly pulled closed a sliding door in front of my face.
The man at the snack bar was still making brisk sales to my non-exam-taking students, who were playing some kind of tag game among the tables and chairs of the seminar room. A group of men in airline uniforms, toting luggage came into the room, and, assuming correctly that I was in charge of the kids, asked me to please control them better.
I gathered the kids and we went outside, into the courtyard south of Folwell that is in fact the roof of Williamson Hall (which is a modernist underground building). The kids seemed happy, chasing butterflies and eating hamburgers. I felt bad not having found the test they were supposed to take. I was reading one of my old college essays, and thinking what terrible writing it was.
Below, a picture found on the internet of Folwell from the air, with Williamson (with its courtyard) in the foreground.
I tried to write a poem back on April 22. I didn’t really finish it, but I decided to put it here as-is.
(Poem #8 on new numbering scheme)
Sons and Daughters The ephemerality of the world is just a stone wall. There are blossoms on the trees along Gangseon-no. The suburban pavement exhales. The air reeks of density, of garbage of sand of springtime of buses. There are little square patterns of bricks paving the sidewalk. I see a discarded umbrella, broken, its ribs jutting among some weeds. My students exist in a dream. I have a couple hundred children, my alternately charming or obstinate sons and daughters who then each disappear after a year or two. My sons and daughters almost never say good-bye. One day they are in class with me. One day they are not. No beginning. No ceremony. A month. A year. An infinite specificity lies behind this mystery.
The dream was a nightmare.
I don't have nightmares
often, but when I do, the worst ones are the ones I call "trapped in the
dream" nightmares. They are a sort of lucid dreaming, I suppose, where I
become aware that I'm dreaming, inside my dream, but then I am unable
to wake up, despite wanting to or trying to.
This nightmare was exceptional in that not only was it
this sort of dream, but that it was "nested." There was sleeping and
dreaming within the dream, and then I was trapped in that dream and then
I woke up into another dream that I became aware was a dream and tried
to wake up from in turn. It was like the movie Inception, except I
didn't like that movie very much, although my dislike of it was more in
that it elided over the philosophically interesting parts in favor of
incoherent violence. So perhaps the philosophically interesting part got
embedded in my brain anyway, to express itself later in this nightmare.
In the dream, I was camping and hiking with my friend Bob along with a group of my current elementary students.
The area we were hiking through resembled northern Minnesota at first, but as the sun ramped down in the sky, the children were complaining and the land began to look desolate and empty, full of rocks and spindly trees. Everything became brown and gray. We came to a stream that was clogged with algae and autumnal-looking swamp grass at the bottom of a slight incline, and Bob proposed setting up camp.
As we set up camp, the children discovered a skeleton. And, then, another. Soon we realized the entire area was littered with the bones and skeletons of humans and animals, but the sun was setting, so we couldn't really move camp at this point. We made a fire and cooked something bad tasting. Some of the children complained but several were having swordfights with femurs.
I stared around at a desolate plain of bones.
Finally it was late at night and the moon was full. I found a place to put my tent but the air was warm, so I decided to sleep outside. I lay down and fell quickly asleep. It's always very strange to fall asleep in a dream. But it's much stranger to then be inside a dream inside that dream, and thinking, "I'm dreaming."
I couldn't wake up. I had this notion that the stream had risen while I slept, and I needed to wake up. I felt like I was lying in water. I couldn't wake up. I struggled, trying to move a muscle or twitch or blink, trying to wake up. I couldn't. I could feel the water rising.
Then bang, I was awake. My eyes popped open, and I knew instantly I was in another "layer" of my dream. I was in my apartment, but there was water raining down from the apartment above me, through the ceiling. It was logical enough – I'd been dreaming I was wet by the stream because of the water flooding into my apartment. I got up and realized that several Korean workmen had already entered my apartment to try to figure out what to do about the leak, but the were utterly ignoring me. It didn't strike me as odd they'd entered my apartment while I slept, but I was disturbed that they weren't talking to me.
"Am I a ghost?" I pondered. "Or just an ignorable foreigner?" I tried to move some of my possessions, that were getting wet from the flood. They were heavy, and the water was everywhere. Then I noticed a doorway, with an open door, in one wall of apartment. "Now where did that come from?" I wondered.
I went through the doorway to find a closed, musty room, full of junk. Like my father's living room – it smelled of too many books and the arid, oppressive atmosphere of Los Angeles in late summer. But it was dry, I reasoned. So I'll move my things in here, away from the flood.
I started to carry things but everything was very heavy. The workmen, after bashing a hole in another wall and my ceiling, had mostly staunched the flow of water but everything was damp and there was trash and rubble everywhere. They were crouched around a portable gas stove in the center of my apartment's floor cooking ramen and doing shots of soju and yelling at one another cordially. They continued to ignore me, and I felt very conscious that I was somehow "broken."
So I went into the musty room and lay down on my damp bedding which I'd unfurled onto the floor, and fell asleep. "This time, I can wake up for real," I said to myself, reassuringly.
But I couldn't wake up. I pushed against the cobwebs of sleep and couldn't push through. I clawed and cried out and spun my head on the pillow.
"Can't. Wake. Up." It was the sort of nightmare where you just know you're screaming, or moaning, or moving around.
Finally, I awoke. I'd planted my face against the heating cabinet – had I hit myself on it?
It was morning and my apartment was bright. I have to go to work early today – it's Saturday. Full schedule.
What I'm listening to right now.
Trauma Pet, "1."
Last night I dreamed I was giving a lecture to some business school. I have no idea why I was invited to give a lecture at a business school – I think lately, I've been thinking a lot about "business school" type things, in the light of the flailing business conditions at my current place of employment. As a consequence, my dream world invited me to give a lecture at a business school.
I was explaining something related to "dispositional" versus "compositional" analysis. Yes, I'd actually put those words onto powerpoint slides and was explaining the difference. Here's the thing: I don't think the meanings I was giving these two terms are really their meanings in some business context, but what I was saying made some sense, if viewed as philosophy or semantics.
I said that "compositional" was about finding the elements that make up some object or process or whatever, while "dispositional" meant finding the intent behind the object or process. This makes sense etymologically anyway, but it made for a very boring dream.
Because that's all I remember. Why do I dream this way? Why, dispositionally, I mean?
Yesterday was very springy here in suburban Seoul. Spring in Seoul always reminds me of winter in Mexico City. The temperature ranges tend to be similar, they are both fairly dry, and there's the smog factor – spring is Korea's smoggiest season – I think it's because of the prevailing winds from the west, which bring us the Chinese eco-disaster, with an admixture of locally produced smog, too.
Having said that, yesterday wasn't the smoggiest I've seen. It was only that the blue sky failed to make it down to the horizon, fading instead to a sort of pale gray.
There's a blogger over at the Website Whose Name I Don't Like, who writes by the name of Jason Kuznicki. I'm never sure on that site who's going by pseudonyms and and who's "real." But regardless, I agree with so much of what he writes. I may have just run across a post he made last year that dovetails nicely with some of my own feelings about the nature of the universe, of god, and the "purpose of life."
I'm not really interested in trying to summarize his ideas, as he makes his point very well, himself, talking as he does about evolution and Azathoth and God-shaped holes (which is a concept originally due to St Augustine, if I recall correctly), so I suggest you go read that post of his and then come back and read the rest of my thinking here, if you're really interested in watching me think about my faith.
Jason seems to be a variety of transhumanist. I think I am too, though perhaps not so optimistic as he is, but still more optimistic than many bitter atheists of my sort. It's interesting that he brings Azathoth into it – I perhaps had Azathothian tendencies long before I "became" atheist. I see my own atheism as a defense against that sort thinking. I think Azathoth makes a good symbol (OK! like most Lovecraft, a great symbol), but nothing more than that.
You might have noticed I have described myself as an atheist, and yet I used the words "my faith," above, too. I don't see any contradiction in that. It may sound like a joke, but I genuinely consider myself to be a "faith-based atheist." That's because while I am atheist at core, I arrived at my atheism through irrational experience: it came to me as part of a near-death experience and was as bright and clear as the many Saul-to-Paul-like conversions associated with other religious traditions. Furthermore, I am utterly uninterested in challenging or arguing religion with other people – I feel no need, a la Dawkins or Dennett or Hitchens, to change other people's minds. I accept that my atheism is my belief, and other people have other beliefs. When people try to convert me, I get deeply annoyed, and I assume they would feel the same way if I tried to do the same to them. Let's all treat others the way they would like to be treated.
Some of my Christian friends are, of course, deeply puzzled by the fact that I am adamantly atheist and yet also have become increasingly comfortable calling myself a Buddhist. This is like a sort of double-blasphemy vis-a-vis Christianity, and the most hardcore among such friends seem to feel almost affronted, wondering if I'm somehow deliberately doubling down on my heresies.
There are two key reasons for my embrace of Buddhism. First, unlike with many other religious traditions, there is no requirement, in the Buddhist framework, that we believe anything in particular, or anything at all. There are Buddhist dogmas, but there are very few Buddhist dogmatists. I'm speaking of my own experience of course – and that's not to say that I haven't run across a few dogmatic Buddhists in my time. Ultimately, though, Buddhism seems to be not so much a dogma or a religion (although it can be be that, for those who want it or need it or grew up in such traditions) as it is a practice. As such, it's open to anyone who sees benefit it its practices. The second reason I'm comfortable calling myself a Buddhist is even simpler: it's because the Buddhists don't seem to mind having an atheist among them, whereas I've never met a Christian, however kind-hearted and tolerant he or she may be, who didn't carry in his or her heart at least some germ of discomfort with my assertion to my peculiar brand of born-again atheism. For the Christian (or any Christian, anyway, who buys into the key Christian messages of salvation and forgiveness and grace), there will always be an underlying hope or desire or expectation that I will somehow see the light. Unfortunately, I already did see the light – and it made me who I am. No group of Christians, no matter how liberal and tolerant and touchy-feely they may have been (I'm pointing at UUs and Quakers here, among others), has ever succeeded in making me feel welcome as I am, without offering up some subtext of, "gee, we hope you can see what we see, someday." What they see is God, of course.
Jason writes, in his transhumanist vein: "Either we are the immortals, or we are their progenitors. We should live accordingly." This is something that dovetails nicely with Buddhist practice, as I, at least, conceptualize it.
Here are some pictures from my walk home earlier today – Spring treeblossoms on a drizzly April day in Ilsan: Azathoth doing some ineluctable thing.
The back side of Munhwa Elementary.
A pedestrian area nearby.
The intersection at Gangseonno and Daesanno, halfway between work and home.
I have a book that I read from sometimes, entitled Oral Literature of Korea, compiled by Seo Daeseok and edited by Peter H. Lee. In a section called Classical Archival Records (i.e. I'm assuming they're things written down from the Joseon dynasty period from 1400's to 1800's), there's a story called "Chosin's Dream" [pp. 215-17]. The compiler says it's from a document called Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, which would make the story much older than Joseon, since the Three Kingdoms were pre-668 AD. The story's first sentence mentions Silla period, however, which would put the story between 668 and 900's.
Chosin's Dream
During the Silla period, there was a manor of Segyu Monastery in Nari county, Myeongju, and the monastery sent the monk Chosin to be its caretaker. Upon arrival, Chosin fell in love with the daughter of the magistrate, Lord Kim Heun. Infatuated, he often went to mount Nak and prayed before the image of the Bodhisattva Who Observes the Sounds of the World to grant him his wishes. In a few year she married another man. Again Chosin went to the bodhisattva, complaining to her for not answering his prayer, and cried till sunset. Worn out with longing, he fell asleep.
In a dream Lady Kim suddenly entered the room, smiling, and said, "I have long known you and loved you. I could not forget you even for a moment. I married another man because I could not go against my parents' wishes. Now I have come to be your wife."
Overjoyed, Chosin took her to his village, and they lived there for forty years with five children born to them. Their house had only four walls, and they could not provide even coarse bread for their children. They wandered about in search of food. They went on like this for ten years, roaming the hills and fields in rags. Their oldest child, aged fifteen, died of hunger on Haehyeon Ridge in Myeongju. Chosin wailed and buried him on the roadside and moved on with the remaining four to Ugok district, where they built a thatched cottage. The couple, old and starved, could not even get up, so the ten-year-old girl begged for food. She was bitten by a stray dog, however, and collapsed in pain on her return. The parents sighed and wept.
Wiping away her tears, the wife suddenly spoke. "When I married you, I was young and beautiful, had many clothes, and was clean. We have shared every bit of food and clothing these fifty years, and thought that our deep love must have been ordained. Now we are weak and sick, our sickness gets worse, hunger and cold get worse, and no one in the world wants to give us shelter or even a bottle of soy sauce. The shame of going out begging weighs down heavier than a mountain. We cannot feed and clothe our children, so how can we enjoy married life? Red cheeks and artful smiles are nothing but dewdrops on the grass, and the fragrant pledges of love are like willow catkins in the wind. I am a burden to you, and I worry because of you. Our former joys must have been the beginning of our grief. How did we come to this pass? I would be better to be a lone phoenix (luan) calling its mate in the mirror than like many birds dying together in hunger. It is intolerable that lovers should meet in prosperity and part in adversity, but it is all beyond our wish. Meeting and parting are ordained, so let us part." Chosin was relieved. And when they about to leave, each taking two children, the wife spoke again: "I am going to my old home. You go south." At this parting, Chosin awoke.
The candle was sputtering, and night was about to end. When the morning came, his hair and bear had turned all white. He had no more thought for the world. Though tired of the hard life – the hardships of so many years – he felt the greed in his heart melt away like ice. Ashamed to face the holy image of the Sound Observer, he could not suppress his remorse. When he returned to Haehyeon Ridge and dug up the grave where he had buried his child in his dream, he found a stone image of Maitreya [Maitreya is the returned Buddha – a sort of Buddhist second coming]. He cleansed it in water and enshrined it in a nearby monastery, went to the capital, and resigned his position. With private funds he build Pure Land Monastery and performed good deeds. We do not know how he died.
I remark as a comment: after reading the story and closing the book and recalling the past, I wonder, how could Chosin's dream alone be like this? Human beings know the joy of mundane life; sometimes they rejoice, sometimes they toil, but they are not yet awakened. I write this poem as a warning:
With a moment's accord, one's mind is at ease.
Unaware, sorrow made a youthful face old.
One should not await the cooking of the millet,
Now I know – a life of toil is a dream.
Cleansing the mind depends on a sincere wish,
A bachelor desires beauty, thieves treasures.
How could you only dream on an autumn night
And attain the clear and cool with eyes closed on and off?
I have a book that I read from
sometimes, entitled Oral Literature of Korea, compiled by Seo Daeseok
and edited by Peter H. Lee. In a section called Classical Archival
Records (i.e. I'm assuming they're things written down from the
Joseon dynasty period from 1400's to 1800's), there's a story called
"Chosin's Dream." The compiler says it's from a document
called Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, which would make the story
much older than Joseon, since the Three Kingdoms were pre-668 AD. The
story's first sentence mentions Silla period, however, which would
put the story between 668 and 900's.
Chosin's Dream
During the Silla period, there was a
manor of Segyu Monastery in Nari county, Myeongju, and the monastery
sent the monk Chosin to be its caretaker. Upon arrival, Chosin fell
in love with the daughter of the magistrate, Lord Kim Heun.
Infatuated, he often went to mount Nak and prayed before the image of
the Bodhisattva Who Observes the Sounds of the World to grant him his
wishes. In a few year she married another man. Again Chosin went to
the bodhisattva, complaining to her for not answering his prayer, and
cried till sunset. Worn out with longing, he fell asleep.
In a dream Lady Kim suddenly entered
the room, smiling, and said, "I have long known you and loved
you. I could not forget you even for a moment. I married another man
because I could not go against my parents' wishes. Now I have come to
be your wife."
Overjoyed, Chosin took her to his
village, and they lived there for forty years with five children born
to them. Their house had only four walls, and they could not provide
even coarse bread for their children. They wandered about in search
of food. They went on like this for ten years, roaming the hills and
fields in rags. Their oldest child, aged fifteen, died of hunger on
Haehyeon Ridge in Myeongju. Chosin wailed and buried him on the
roadside and moved on with the remaining four to Ugok district, where
they built a thatched cottage. The couple, old and starved, could not
even get up, so the ten-year-old girl begged for food. She was bitten
by a stray dog, however, and collapsed in pain on her return. The
parents sighed and wept.
Wiping away her tears, the wife
suddenly spoke. "When I married you, I was young and beautiful,
had many clothes, and was clean. We have shared every bit of food and
clothing these fifty years, and thought that our deep love must have
been ordained. Now we are weak and sick, our sickness gets worse,
hunger and cold get worse, and no one in the world wants to give us
shelter or even a bottle of soy sauce. The shame of going out begging
weighs down heavier than a mountain. We cannot feed and clothe our
children, so how can we enjoy married life? Red cheeks and artful
smiles are nothing but dewdrops on the grass, and the fragrant
pledges of love are like willow catkins in the wind. I am a burden to
you, and I worry because of you. Our former joys must have been the
beginning of our grief. How did we come to this pass? I would be
better to be a lone phoenix (luan) calling its mate in the mirror
than like many birds dying together in hunger. It is intolerable that
lovers should meet in prosperity and part in adversity, but it is all
beyond our wish. Meeting and parting are ordained, so let us part."
Chosin was relieved. And when they about to leave, each taking two
children, the wife spoke again: "I am going to my old home. You
go south." At this parting, Chosin awoke.
The candle was sputtering, and night
was about to end. When the morning came, his hair and bear had turned
all white. He had no more thought for the world. Though tired of the
hard life – the hardships of so many years – he felt the greed in his
heart melt away like ice. Ashamed to face the holy image of the Sound
Observer, he could not suppress his remorse. When he returned to
Haehyeon Ridge and dug up the grave where he had buried his child in
his dream, he found a stone image of Maitreya [Maitreya is the
returned Buddha – a sort of Buddhist second coming]. He cleansed it
in water and enshrined it in a nearby monastery, went to the capital,
and resigned his position. With private funds he build Pure Land
Monastery and performed good deeds. We do not know how he died.
I remark as a comment: after reading
the story and closing the book and recalling the past, I wonder, how
could Chosin's dream alone be like this? Human beings know the joy of
mundane life; sometimes they rejoice, sometimes they toil, but they
are not yet awakened. I write this poem as a warning:
With a moment's accord, one's mind is
at ease.
Unaware, sorrow made a youthful face
old.
One should not await the cooking of the
millet,
Now I know – a life of toil is a dream.
Cleansing the mind depends on a sincere
wish,
A bachelor desires beauty, thieves
treasures.
How could you only dream on an autumn
night
And attain the clear and cool with eyes
closed on and off?
This morning I woke up too early. This happens to me, sometimes. And… I can't get back to sleep.
I'd been having a rather vivid but utterly pointless dream that consisted of a conversation with some unknown interlocutor, in which that person would ask me questions in the vein of: "what do you think of…?" To these questions I would pontificate a little bit, and then… on to next question.
The last question in the dream that I remember, before waking up, was, "Why is Vancouver so green?" See what I mean? Weird questions. But I was talking about the cold north Pacific Ocean currents, the incidence of temperate rainforests in "west-coast" upper latitudes, and rainshadow effects. And blah, blah, blah.
Then, right as I was waking up, I dreamed I was driving through Vancouver. I don't even know the last time I was in Vancouver. Maybe 1998? If then, only just passing through. It would have been while driving from Portland up to Prince Rupert (and thence to Ketchikan) – Vancouver isn't really on the way, for that kind of road trip: you cross the border, and pass through the Vancouver suburbs on your way inland toward Kamloops and Prince George. More likely, I was last there 1989. But I have a pretty vivid mental map of the city, from the many, many visits there during my childhood. Probably it's an outdated perspective, however.
How accurate was this "dream Vancouver" I was driving through? It seemed to consist mostly of strip malls and highway interchanges, and, oddly, railroad crossings – in this respect, it was more like "dream anywhere-random-in-North-America" than "dream Vancouver" specifically.
I don't think this dream means anything at all.
I guess I'll drink some coffee. I seem to be stuck awake.
I had a dream that I was driving around Illinois collecting pennies in exchange for teaching debate. It was like a cross between a) my current job, b) some kind of replay of Lincoln-Douglas that involved stopping at truck stops and Wal-Marts, and c) a winter road trip.
At each stop, after teaching a debate class to involved or unfocused or somnolent children (all a blur), I was paid a single penny. I had a jar on the seat in my car, beside me. I would drop the penny in the jar, and then drive in lightly falling snow down the highway of some dream-version of Illinois (that mostly looked like the real Illinois, because, although far in the past, I've done my fair share of driving around Illinois and other midwestern states).
What does this dream mean? Why do I have so many "driving around dreams"? – I haven't even owned a car in half a decade.
What I'm listening to right now.
Mice Parade, "Tokyo Late Night."
It was mostly just incidental that I happened to learn that Joseph Kasun passed away recently – I'm not in touch with any of my onetime high school teachers, but someone's posting on facebook caught my attention and so I came to know that my high school history teacher, Mr (Col) Kasun had died. His obituary is here, in the Times-Standard, Humboldt's newspaper-of-record. Here's an internet picture (right) showing him with ice-cream in front of a recognizably Arcata High Schoolish building – perhaps even his classroom (at the windows)?
I didn't have much of a personal connection with Mr Kasun. As a student, I remember not thinking much of him – he seemed theatrical and reactionary and prone to pendantic declamations that suited his record as a veteran and former Army officer perfectly. As a disconsolate youth with hippie-commune parents, to me he seemed both dangerous and buffoonish, like the bizarre uncle in the movie Harold and Maude. But he was, in fact, a fairly effective and most definitely memorable teacher, and he was principled enough not to spout his extreme conservative agenda too blatently into the classroom – I knew he was conservative (his wife was a major figure in the Humboldt pro-life movement and a Reagan activist) but I didn't ever feel he was trying to convince me to be conservative.
And here's the thing – I think of old Col Kasun often. Not quite on a daily basis, but he comes to mind several times a week, and in fact he'd been on my mind the same evening that I got home and saw the facebook post reporting his death. How is it that this should be so?
I'm a teacher. I'm not a high school teacher, but I teach gifted middle-schoolers, which is close enough. And even though I am, primarily, an EFL teacher, my methodology is deeply wrapped up with teaching "subjects-but-in-English." Specifically, I often find myself being a history and social studies teacher, such as was Mr Kasun. It's inevitable when talking about topics such as democracy, fights for independence, or social policy, that Mr Kasun's passionate and sincere style will sometimes come to mind. He would stand up at the front of the class and gesture his pointing finger while making oratory on the topic of our hard-won American freedoms or American exceptionalism. What's weird is that I can unintentionally channel Mr Kasun in gesture or tone, while the topic is, instead, Korean hard-won freedoms or Korean exceptionalism, while the kids stare up in that perfect teenage mixture of awe and boredom. And I find myself thinking to myself, 'jeez, that was a fine Colonel Kasun you just did, wasn't it?'
And I go home to read that he has died. I never had been in touch with him, since high school.
There are teachers you really like, in school. But as a teacher, those aren't always the teachers you think about, much less the ones you channel or become.
I really liked Mr Mauney, and Mr Meeks, and Mrs Williams (who had a different name, maybe, later, due to divorce or remarriage) and Mme Dalsant. But I rarely think of them in my teaching. Instead, I meditate on Mr Kasun or Mr Dohrman (sp?), both of whom I find myself channeling, sometimes to my own deep chagrin. Or I contemplete Mr Allan Edwards, who terrified me so much as a high school freshman that I never really recovered, and all these years later, I sometimes remind myself that, whatever else I may have as positives or negatives as a teacher, at the least I'm not terrifying my students to the extent they contemplate suicide. At least… I desperately hope not. I admit I've caused the occasional first or second grader to burst into tears – who hasn't? – but that's a far cry from inducing so much fear and loathing in a 15 year-old that he still has nightmares about you 30 years later.
That's a little bit off track, vis-a-vis a sort of obituary on Mr Joseph Frank Kasun. But the point is, I think of one past teacher or another almost every day – especially those teachers that left indelible impressions, be they good or bad. I think there may be something to the aphorsim that goes something like: it's better to be remembered as a teacher, even if disliked, than to be forgotten.
RIP Col Kasun.
