S.’s Reviews > dd's Umbrella > Status Update

"Had dd lived and their shared life continued, would the two of them have also, eventually, inevitably, reached this juncture? It was a brutal thing to consider. A feeble, contemptible tableau. But how beautiful it would have been all the same, to weary of life alongside dd, to waste away to nothing amid the various objects they owned separately and together. But robbed of life as well as a physical form to disintegrate, dd never would be part of any such scene. As for me — the realisation dawned as d stood by the doorway and searched Yi Seung-geun’s face — it will come: A life emptied of even apathy and disillusion, and stripped of all warmth. This is the face I will come to wear, and I will have to bear it alone…"

"The signs are always there, Park Jobae said.

What signs?

d turned to face Park Jobae, their eyes bleary from the exhaust. Emergency is another word for the extraordinary event, those times when something out of the ordinary occurs, Park Jobae explained, but the extraordinary always manifests in the everyday. There are indications. Sudden is never as sudden as we make it out to be.

When we say something’s happened out of nowhere, we’re actually admitting to feigned ignorance, our refusal to look at the everyday, he went on. When in fact they’re all around us, all of the signs are right there in broad daylight. Think about wars. Every war has a context. Radiation? We wouldn’t have leaks without the portent that is the nuclear power plant. The same applies to what’s happening now. For me, the present is always an omen. This moment right now, it’s like the interwar years. The period between the first and second world wars was full of portents. I can feel the same rumblings now. I can feel the world’s about to break again. Yes, it’s a kind of premonition, but it feels very concrete, very certain. The world’s fucked again, and this time it’s going to be decisive… I can feel it. Just look at the art produced between those two wars, especially the music. Classical, jazz, whatever, you can hear the artists singing and playing as if they’re facing the end of the world. I think they definitely felt something. The same thing as I feel now, a sense of the coming catastrophe in the air around us. What we’re facing is very similar, we’re on the verge, the before… and that’s why I think it’s better to have scenes like this. Park Jobae pointed to the bridge with his chin.

Look at this. Look how transparent and how fucked up it is. The fuckedupness out in the open for all to see. I say this is infinitely better than imploding in quiet denial."

"When I think of death, this is what comes to mind. Moments that definitely happened or seem much too real not to have happened. Moments that are all in the past and on pause. As if they have no ties to the present and are destined to remain cut off and unrelated and forever without an after… Forever frozen in time. Even now, I feel it. When I’m sitting still as I’m doing now but also when I move, when I think but also when I’m not thinking, I sense death. This very static now. It’s so inert, I can’t imagine what comes after and I don’t wonder about it either. The now is already here anyway. It just slips in, as you put it. Slip, and there it is… We don’t need to imagine it. So no, I don’t wonder about a world after this one. When I think about the past or the present, it is always death. And death is death, not a divide between this and that world, and all death can only ever be categorised as one of two. At least that’s what I think. It’s either witnessed or it’s unwitnessed. Isn’t it?