Bird Rider

Living trapped by viruses, surrounded by culturenature, and exposed to all kinds of media—writers, self-help books, chefs, singers, filmmakers, even comedians—I don’t want to be comforted, yet they pounce on me, to comfort me, to empathize. Startled, I get frightened. And, conversely, I become even more frightened when I’m asked who my poetry comforts. Therefore, when someone even utters the word comfort, I want to run and hide. I don’t think I’ve ever comforted anyone with my writing. Moreover, I think literature betrays the readers’ desire to be consoled. Perhaps literature crosses into a zone where consolation can’t intervene, evaporating any possibility of comfort. Just as there is no geometric or genetic consolation, literary work merely constructs an afterimage or alternative symmetrical pattern of the event that occurs. The ventriloquist lives inside literature. Ventriloquy is a deception. The writer first deceives herself. And she deceives the reader. Both are aware of the deception. The persona crosses into a zone of literature, the symmetrical world of existence. Thus literature is a lie. Fiction set as reality is a lie; poetry set as language is a lie. The ventriloquy of literature moves, riding the spiral of lies. And so there can be no consolation at the end of the lies. There is only failure, grief, and self-erasure. Behind the lies there’s only the poet’s pale, sick face. The mask, which is the poet’s face, the face behind the mask, the poet endlessly looks back at the back of her head. There is only technique, rhetoric, parody, and paradox in order to hide the lies. Literature isn’t sacred. It’s a failure. Defeat. It’s not a drawing made by language. Not even misery painted by language. Only that despair gives birth to technique.[1] Despair invents ventriloquy.[2] No comfort can exist between the writer and the reader. Only the taut symmetrical world exists like the Yi Sang inside and outside of the mirror. The Yi Sang outside the mirror speaks for the Yi Sang inside the mirror. Ventriloquy. Strange though. The Yi Sang inside the mirror is more vivid. But the twins of the inside and outside of my mirror are playing jump rope. They’ll endlessly give birth to twin families.

In my country, male poets rarely succeed at speaking in a woman’s voice. The male poets who lived under the Japanese colonial occupation mostly wrote poetry through a female persona. Inside their poetry, the male poets acted like women and spoke with a woman’s voice. Though they were living in a colony, they conveniently set up the colony inside their bellies. They comfortably fitted themselves with wombs, then took them off like bras. They automatically ventriloquized women whenever they were overcome with farewell, sorrow, loss, nation, racial identity, discontent, crisis, blame. To live out whatever little eros was left in them. To divulge their shameful desires. To resent the power that abandoned them. They needed the woman, the colony within, to express their natural desires, to realize their compassion and remorse. At the time, it was impossible for them as men to utter such emotions or desires. Literature was no different from the numerous pop song lyrics of farewell produced during the colonial period. The male poets longed for the women they parted from to live inside their hearts, to comfort them. They wanted the women to mourn on their behalf. Whenever gendered metaphors are used without technique, rhetoric, or camouflage of form, woman appears. When the ventriloquy ends, the woman is erased again. So, which one is the doll? Is it the man who is ventriloquizing or the woman hidden inside his belly? Or both? Or is it the real woman who remains silent outside of them?

That I live, that I continually experience. As a living organism, I interact with things that surround me. I have an animal body that’s connected to the natural world, as well as to my body that imagines. The imaginary experience doesn’t leave the sensory experience alone. Deformation begins. I think of Time as the “doing” of the imaginary experience. When Time intervenes, my sensory experience emerges as an irreducible shape. I write. As I write, as I begin the evocation, the continuity of the sensory and imaginary coheres. The binding force between the two becomes stronger. This is why, beyond time and space, Nature and I are inside the wholeness, inside the synergy. My imaginary experience becomes somatic. My body, unsevered from Nature, resides in what I call “a field-of-doing.” My writing involves composing the field-of-doing. As in Yi Sang’s line “ventriloquism, ultimately, runs the storeroom of language,” my writing is the ventriloquy of the two experiences. Running the storeroom of language is my writing process.

Two birds flew by my kitchen window. The birds’ necks were as thick as a human’s. I could clearly see the bird flying in front, and the bird next to it looked blurry, but I could tell that they were of the same species. As the first bird flew near me, I saw its face. The bird had a human face. When I woke up from the dream, I knew my daddy would soon pass away. I don’t know why I thought this. But it didn’t occur to me then that the blurry bird was my mommy. Mommy passed away soon after Daddy. I was angry at myself for not asking why two birds had appeared in my dream. I felt as if my face had been buried in the sand. I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I’ve never been. I went to Jeju Island and visited the 4.3 Museum[3]. I also went to an art gallery to look at paintings that depicted the massacre; then one evening, I spoke with an old woman who had survived the anti-communist slaughter. I recorded the old woman. I couldn’t understand the dialect she was using, so I asked someone who worked at the café to translate what the old woman said. Everything she talked about concerned death. All kinds of death. That night in my dream, I saw birds hanging from a tree by their necks, like ribbons. I couldn’t tell if the birds were alive or dead, but their feathers fluttered in the same direction. It looked as if the birds all had something to say. I kept having more bird dreams. If I didn’t jot down my dreams, bird would fall from sky. I also thought of the ventriloquy of sky. Sky, ventriloquizing through the mouths of all living things. My breath enters the breath of the sky and speaks. Sky’s breath enters mine and speaks. The more sky breaths enter the closer I am to death. I’m like a piece of paper the birds suspended in air stomp on, leaving their footprints. I think of the letter left by the dead tied around my neck. While I was writing Phantom Pain Wings, every morning when I opened my eyes, I felt as if I were trapped inside the two-dimensional paper. Or I felt as if I were water spreading and seeping into dirt, like a dead bird. When bird flew in to snatch a piece of paper with its beak, my blanket lifted, and I could sit up as in a three-dimensional world. It felt like bird was “doing” me.

After Mommy died, my trypophobia intensified. Now I can’t stand seeing clusters of holes. I can’t bring myself to open any containers filled with matchsticks, toothpicks, and cotton swabs. I refuse any dishes sprinkled heavily with sesame seeds. I have to close my eyes before them. So, when someone said, “Sesame seeds sprinkled on a wound,” I wanted to strangle her. I can’t bear looking at pipes stacked up on trucks, orderly decorative holes on the outer walls of buildings, or even soldiers marching in line. Photos of rows of people’s heads taken from above. Now I can’t even bring myself to read. When I open a book, the first thing I see are the holes of the consonant ㅇ[4]. Those little vacuous holes stare at me. Soonㅎ[5] consonants. Next are consonants ㅁ[6], then ㅂ[7]. I had no choice but to read books in English. But then I found “o’s” in English. I begin to detest the letters “a,” “b,” “d,” “p,” “q” in this order. Also capital “Q” and “R.” I can only read after I black out the letters with my pen. But there are still too many hole letters. The book eventually is completely blackened. I throw out poetry books filled with blackened letters. After Mommy dies, I fall into selective mutism once again.[8]

I erase the ㅇㅁㅁ consonants from 엄마 ŏmma [mommy] and leave only the ㅓ,ㅏ vowels. ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ,ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ[9]

Erased consonants look for me, or don’t. What’s found is the erased, so it’s no better than not looking in the first place; the not-looking acknowledges the erased, so it’s also no better than not looking. Therefore, I keep erasing until the erased consonants pat me, hug me, take me away, and speak to me. ㅇㅁㅁ, ㅇㅁㅁ, ㅇㅁㅁ, ㅇㅁㅁ[10] the sound of Mommy crying from somewhere. The sound of me crying when I take myself away as I leave this world ㅇㅁㅁ, ㅇㅁㅁ, ㅇㅁㅁ. The sound of my real mommy crying.

— Kim Hyesoon
Seoul, February 4, 2021