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I loved hearing my voice shatter her songs like a fist through glass, I loved the way our eyes reflexively met in the first breath after a song ended.

“My question though is, who wouldn’t want to dance with Whitney Houston? Like seriously!” “Right,” I said. “But I think it’s not so much that people don’t want to dance with her, I think it’s more that she can’t let them dance with her. Like she’s so depressed she can’t conceive of a world in which people would want to dance with her, so she dances alone.”

He never got to see my revision, he never got to meet my final form.

Are you turning yourself into a man to correct our parents’ mistake? — goddamn

..when you’re living your life, you don’t search for signs of another person’s unhappiness or despair or suicidal thoughts or rage or desperation or hopelessness. At least I didn’t, he said. Did you?

I thought of the authors who did that, the ones who wrote the same story over and over instead of using their imagination and radically reinventing themselves with each book, they chose to tell the same story, orbiting, stalking, obsessing, drawing closer and closer to their wound and their desire for it, picking at their scabs; writers who did this were probably the least defensible.

To put it plainly, I had to pretend someone who was living never existed in order to write a book about someone else who was dead. I made other changes, too.

Thomas Bernhard said you must write the story in your head before you put down a single word, if you start off with the wrong sentence, the wrong syntax, the wrong silence, the entire foundation will crumble later on. Thomas Bernhard said writing isn’t writing, writing is playing the piano; that’s how literature is made. So far I had twelve pages.

..when I told him during office hours I had solved the mystery of my brother’s suicide, he stared at a spot above my head and said a suicide is never over. Suicide is continuous, he warned me. Your brother’s suicide is a small river that flows into a big river. Suicide is a river that will never dry up. And now I will tell you a joke, Thomas Bernhard said. He told me a joke, I remembered, but I didn’t remember

She strained her voice to pray and begged God to bring my brother back to life, any kind of life, it just needed to be a life, life, alive, living.

“You wanna make penis soap?”
“Antibacterial penis soap. Check it out.”

“How dare you grief-shame my baby! Have you no decency, woman?”

“No, I mean you thought I pushed powder? I don’t move coke. Jesus. Well, not anymore, at least. Too much work. Most clients aren’t druggies—they’re normies. Working-class parents. Teachers. Government employees. The uninsured, the undocumented. Some people just can’t get what they need when they need it. You said it yourself—drugs are necessary.”

Rose (mother) says some more things about motherhood being tricky and how some women aren’t meant to be mothers, and I watch Wolf continue to drink his coffee like it’s normal for a mother to have this conversation in front of her child. When he sits between us, I try to read his face, but there’s nothing, leading me to believe he’s either too tired to react or too trained to stay quiet.

*Tell vs Show issue

“Lemme ask you,” Betty Mayo says. “How hard is it to sell an orgasm?”

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?