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My knees hit carpet.
“Miss Keening—!”
“I’m sorry. Ah!” I try to crawl back down the carpeted steps, try to flee, but the tight woven rug scrapes my knees and inner thighs, throwing stars before my eyes. I crush my paper exam in my fist, overtaken by sound—the sharp, gnawing crinkle—and the carpet’s erotic, crude, scratchy ply licking my legs. Oh, God, I wanna fuck this carpet.

“Fuck your mom, doll. Don’t get me wrong, I liked her a lot, and she wore great kaftans, but she’s gone, and she owes me a debt. That’s what happens when parents die. We acquire their debt. And I’m going to need you to pay that debt off. And quick: I have bosses, too.”
“Do I look like I have eight thousand dollars?”

.. a spell of newfound bitterness has cast itself over me, its angry magic growing more impenetrable by the day. The more I accept her silence—the more I wait for the urn to waddle or the toilet to flush beneath me when I pee—the angrier I feel.

I found another way to use the mirrors and their light. It’s about taking the light reflected by the mirror and then reflecting it once more. It makes me happy when the light slants across the leaves—a feeling I assume is now a part of human nature itself, the result of evolution shaping us to live symbiotically with plants.

Shouldn’t I be writing things that speak of life, while life yet remains?

I had reached the conclusion that what life I had left held no peace or hope, that everything would only get worse. The strange thing is, the more I worked on the novel, the more I began, gradually, to live. Little by little I could sleep for longer, and over time, the nightmares grew less frequent. How could this be possible, when the novel being written was so full of blood and corpses and bones?

Anyway, routine returns. Every day I read one book of poetry and one novel, to be recharged by a density of sentences.

One thought—a resolution—floats to the top.

I can just write again: another novel. Because that’s the only way to be connected again.

But what am I being connected to, through writing? Is it for that, the thing only writing can connect me to, that I have so readied myself, stripping bare? So the current is not interrupted, catching on some bump of the uneven ego?

I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through her body into my sentences. As if I am sending out an electric current.

When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands.

Where is love?
What is love? (April 1979)

x

Why is the world so violent and painful?
And yet how can the world be this beautiful? (Autumn 2021)

For a long time, I believed that the tension and internal struggle between these sentences was the driving force behind my writing...Had I really only begun asking myself about love—about the pain that links us—after the Korean publication of Human Acts (2014)?

As always, it’s impossible to predict when anything will be completed, but I will go on writing, however slowly. I will move past the books I’ve already written and continue on.

Life seeks to live. Life is warm. To die is to grow cold. To have snow settle over one’s face rather than melt. To kill is to make cold.

Humans in history and humans in the cosmos.
The wind and the ocean currents. The circular flow of water and air that connects the entire world. We are connected. I pray that we are connected.

The book was published nearly seven years after I had dreamed of those black tree stumps, that surging sea. In the notebook I kept while working on that book, I made these notes:

Does love beget pain, and is some pain evidence of love?

Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living?

Back in my mid-twenties, I had written these lines on the first page of every new diary: Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead?

As a child, I hadn’t grasped the political significance of those images, and the ravaged faces became fixed in my mind as a fundamental question about humans: Is this the act of one human towards another? And then, seeing a photo of an endless queue of people waiting to donate blood outside a university hospital: Is this the act of one human towards another?

This book contained photographs of Gwangju residents and students killed with clubs, bayonets, and guns while resisting the new military powers that had orchestrated the coup. Published and distributed in secret by the survivors and the families of the dead, the book bore witness to the truth at a time when the truth was being distorted by strict media suppression.

By then, I am no longer as I was when I began, and from that changed state, I start again. The next questions follow, like links in a chain, or like dominoes, overlapping and joining and continuing, and I am moved to write something new.

Each time I work on a novel, I endure the questions, I live inside them. When I reach the end of these questions—which is not the same as when I find answers to them—is when I reach the end of the writing process.

I didn’t write my novel to become immortal, I say.

A fossil, the placard read, isn’t a bone embedded in stone, but in fact the deposits of minerals carried by groundwater that have crystallized in the shape of the cells of the original living creature. Not the bone, but the stone’s memory of the bone.

Writing didn’t require my body, not the way painting had; in fact, writing asked me to absent my body, to forget it for long periods while I worked. Language was supposed to be my perfect transmission, my power, my mark.

Sometimes it feels like there’s a voice in my head, a distorted, fucked-up voice that tells me it’d be easier if I didn’t exist. But the only thing, the only thing that makes it stop, even just for a little bit, is the work. If I can prepare a canvas, I have something to work on for the next day.

And you’re supposed to be happy about being alive. You’re supposed to be glad you exist. But there’s something wrong with me. I can’t do those things, those things that seem to come so easily to all the other animals. Sometimes I can’t move. Sometimes for days.

But it had always come from life; the life it came from was mine.

In the novel I made them fight more, architecturally, baroquely, when in real life we had hardly clashed; it was I who always acquiesced to his demands. At a certain point the book stopped being an exorcism and became a project of craft and form. Then I grew totally absorbed in the writing, in the tuning and pitching, bleaching event into fiction.

What was the core pain of nostalgia—that it wasn’t true, or that it didn’t last?

To feel the pierce of first experience again, not because the puncture itself was repeated but because the memory could be stored somewhere, and accessed, and never changed? Or were we doomed to always choke our own histories with sentiment or regret—to flatten them into narrative..