#


What a relief imperfection is!—what a permission to be beautiful. What a stupid thing to have written on a post-it and have fall off the wall into this.

Love is genius.

They do that a lot and, yes, that’s why I do it, because I’m that guy at the desk in the logo with tiger patches on my back. They are like leaves. They are leaves. When they fall they start again.

Tiger cubs look old. How burr oak saplings look like sunken futures.

When noodles bloat, the comradery feels real. They start to seem like my eyes, wormier than not, looser than directed, and that’s where the mantra formulates in my grip. A scythe like a verb.

We get to partake in this.


#


It’s months later all the time, the prospect of dying from what I’m living with highly visible against the smog cosplaying a cloudline. Lately, sudden cold. Everywhere, Mom in shorts, my shorts, shivering from something internal. She likens it to fire, teething. I’m talking about the thing I can’t talk about again: it deforms in my contraption to contain it. Hell. I said something that connected with Dad about it.

It’s horrifying, I said.

He said, It really is.


#


I reconnected with a friend I know will be president. It’s in his voice, even when he’s struggling, which he is, or has been lately. I can feel its distribution across so many pains I can’t imagine and its conclusion that, forward, there is who we need, deliverance. I can feel movement clarifying his thinking as much as it coming from a premeditated place beyond my generation’s generalizable worries. And towards that place’s threshold into ours. It inspires me to something proportionate.

We talk about existentialism and the pace of thinking that doesn’t quit, about faithlessness and lessening the less there. There have been divorces, cancers, murders, disavowals of the highest things in our families, and in ourselves. We fret the details, unable to identify the core. Not that we don’t know it and love it fully and benefit from its structure but we can’t hug the whole tree on our own, can’t be actual in our faithlessness independently. We know only that it’s huge and essential to expose our soft parts to: the parts we’d ourselves rip out for money, or shots at it.

We try not to try too hard.


#


Blood everywhere. On TV. In me. Competing for the current.


#


I screamed it at her, in my weakest element, when God’s strength is most perfect:

Everybody around me wants to die:

But I want to live.


#


This is about trials, trails, A.I., I, following, believing it, rearticulating to a consciousness that it matters when it doesn’t know why it’s doing a perpetual task in conclusion of itself needing to pursue it. This is strictly part of the mandate: to write is to be free of writing. To live is to surrender living to life as proposition of the future.


#


Time had. Then came the prompt to imagine the phrase under which I write, saturated in ambient implication. I ventured a definition, as was my instinct, to name and describe it. Did I consider that articulation at its best preserves complication, sublimates as much as it simplifies?

Do I now?

Trail eyes?

I would walk until I felt better. It would take miles, the way for years I read, for the exhaustion, not the road. I loved those days, as much as I’m incapable of them now. I pretend I prefer today, the incrementality, the accumulative accomplishment of managing to withhold from behavior, to resist depletion.

On the one hand, incurvatus en se, the propensity for selfishness that orients me inward, in spite of the hand’s belonging to the corpus; on the other, still that corpus, the moral arc of the universe, its bend towards justice, I do pray this, and the general gravitation towards that collective trend, that sense of public.

Mouths are fed by hands that clasp the mouths that leak confessions before they’re ready. Hands mouth the truth before it’s ready to be held. Mouths hand the truth its due: diligence, to be said.


#


I am not being paid to feel nor even act on feeling. That is no secret. But I am being paid to toss my thoughts in sentiment that has calculated resonances across metrics that I hardly understand but have a mature and longstanding suspicion of. To be an ambassador of reasons I’ve been granted.

At the embassy, the other artist type, actually one, a painter, said she gets itchy in these environments. She muttered, We’re Korean too, when they proceeded to refer to us as otherwise for the logistical convenience of it. It struck me as scratching. Weirdly I understood both sides, which is my fantasy to maintain for myself as long as it conveniences my survival in this building for the humanities, which was designed to disorganize protesters, to disperse categories attached to our funding, assuming them.

I said just now about that influential person that I love her mind and that it terrifies me. I was close there to exposition, to being who I’m supposed to be.


#


In therapy we talk about anger, finally, we’re not talking about me thinking about the premise of us being here, we’re talking about anger, my being it or having it as part of my condition. I am with angriness. If you know me in some way, this is funny. Because I’m docile until I explode and the whole thing might appear like an opinion. I might apologize for the passion, for myself, repeatedly afterwards, and you’d assuage me so we can just cross the street already, into the sunned side, that description.

The anger is important, that’s the conclusion. It functions to bring to attention what needs to be aired and I’m disallowing it its function by appeasing the formations of voices that become, to my mind, crowds, shadows of buildings. I need to drop more bombs, like fuck. They need not be fucking tactful. It can appear in writing if that’s necessary, and it is, it doesn’t have to be the writing that counts, because to maintain that what counts is the unemotional stuff, the post-emotional remainder, is to pretend I’m a variation on whiteness that defends smartly dying in America as the principal enjoyment in life. I think, They’re not scared of me, and they really should be.


#


My parents can’t walk the way I recognize walking as walking, without labor. They’re shuffling, limping, depending on each other and it’s absurd, him holding onto her for balance when he’s that tall and twice her weight and teetering. Like water in the rice cooker clinging to the rice it’s supposed to enliven. Me between them constantly. Conducting the reluctance.

The sustenance.


#


Metaphors should clarify, not complicate. M. said that. We spoke recently, for the first time in a long time, in our old way, me placating him with my philosophical dumbness and him correcting me from less words, more feeling. Except when complicating clarifies the force behind the heat, I should have said.

It’s not anger.

M. said I should know I’m privileged in Asia. This is true. He said something else that nerved me, for its truth, that I will never be denied anything here but will constantly feel that denial, that that will be my curse and my only true company.

It’s not belief either.

Because what is there to believe about the truth that’s been accepted? When it rains on my need, I don’t believe it, I rejoice.


#


M.’s resisting a move to Europe with his partner who just got a tech job there.

M. is the heir to a technical fortune.

M. is intelligent and, he himself says this, lazy as fuck.

I feel I can’t afford the time intelligence takes to cultivate, the laziness it takes. That’s why I’m a shovel head with no leverage and miles of duty.

Bodies to bury in the proper way.


#


Interesting points, pointing at interesting things, won’t get me there. There must be to some degree the ramp that sets up the expression because acceleration is key to the delivery of nothing in shambles. Energy but not sure why now, at the critical juncture.

I know I’m not the only one deliberating this. That’s why it’s often so quiet around.


#


Q’s apartment cost twenty times ours. I don’t tell Mom this. I could never. She thinks I’m a catch, that we are rare in this world. Q’s family will come around to the reality of this and accept her gifts of cosmetics and tea we regift from Imo’s company. We just have to be patient, forgiving, Christ-like. This is always the plan. We’re plotting, meaning she is out loud, for grandchildren while she’s still strong enough to hold them. Dad is neutral but wary of fundamentalists, so actually deeply concerned, but he is about everything in his way, from afar.

Mom can’t brush her teeth anymore, not when she wants to. She waits for her medication to kick in and pounces on her daily tasks. Spooning herself muck she makes from homemade yogurt and misugaru. I eat with her the muck, listening to her sermons. O has done this for years, since she was twelve. She was an angel, now a human suffering from angelic qualities. It’s my turn to die to myself. O, just now, slept on a houseboat in Michigan, read theory for school. It sounds better than it is, I’m sure, because I know the condition I write from inside in this voice haunts her every waking move, those theories.

That boat’s night.


#


She is less and less able, Mom says about her own body, as if it’s not there in our field of vibrations demonstrating what she’s always had, this tragic awareness of nature. Soon O and I will have to feed her, I think, the muck, because if I have to watch Dad do that I will give up.


#


What makes me angry is the thought that some older people might think younger people don’t think about death. Or maybe younger people not thinking about it think that about other younger people. I think about it daily, death and this probable misunderstanding. I am not as physically connected to the reality of aging, but I am, too, barely here. I think of dying as a never-ending inhalation and it stuns me cold, the availability of that sensation to the imagination.


#


We each have appointments and medical histories that web together. Mom, ridiculously, is the one escorting us around in her good hour. Dad doesn’t like to be seen suffering so he tells us to go on ahead, which makes me suffer, the stuffy air of the people budging each other in the prescription pick-up line, having to walk on ahead towards a cafeteria lunch with Mom and wonder while I listen to her not wonder whether he’s collapsed somewhere where we can’t see him hiding.

Behind, say, that giant potted plant.


#


I’ll be walking and then it feels like my legs are going to fall off, he says to the doctor. There’s an international clinic that’s been good to us. Mom calls them seemingly constantly, about the various overlapping conditions on our insurance policies. In America, this was translational, traumatic. Here, I feel like an idiotic prince-brat. The doctor is kind to Dad, attentive as his explanatory nature sets in. She nods half the session. I am grateful for her comprehension and good humor. It strikes me as noble in the eternal way.

I’m there instead of Mom because he doesn’t like to say these things in front of her. He tells me aside though, while I massage his back once she’s asleep or back from fetching him a Hershey’s ice cream bar that only certain 7-Elevens stock: it’s frustrating to break down. When she’s awake we’re both busy taking turns massaging her thigh, forgetting ourselves into the latest soap opera.


#


I need another MRI, next an EEG, to explain why I see again.


#


The first time I ignored it. And the second time, and the multiples after that. Until the repetitions changed in quality, permuted into permutations, and I knew something was communicating itself to me in the bare minimum possible urgency of another arm growing out of mine.


#


I don’t mean to scare anybody.


#


Love is genius.

#


It’s horrifying.


#


I imagine I’m observing the limits of visual perception, the consequence of overloading the trailer. Eye strain, basically.


Stress?


#


I have followed trails for a long time, by which I mean: Most things don’t work out. The thing that does becomes the way. A line, a shower thought. I have performed this awkward stitch for years into ritual. Method meets mantra in movement: pattern occurs to the traveler.


#


I read On Trails by Robert Moor and think, how fantastic and unaffordable a worldview. I read The Call by Os Guinness and feel no less found, but somewhat more locatable.


#


I think about what I keep going on about internally, not what glides over my attention when I sit down at attention to perform my duties to no one. Images in DMC’s DMZ linger with me like an air installation. O and I agree, it’s best read as blueprint, as spatial proposition, as an annotation of spatial metaphor. An alternative curriculum.

Notes on air, suspended in its setting. Passing through a space it forms, as it forms.

But from where? Higher air? Underground?


#


We get a floor’s-eye view of birds, which is a bird’s-eye view of mountains.

The writing does the squinting for you, so your gaze can laze along, gleaning. It’s like when Q forgot her glasses once so took a picture of the menu on the far wall and zoomed in, ordered off her phone.

I thought, Here we are.


#


All these ways of viewing, ignoring symptoms and seeing signs in their stead. Until the signs grow symptomatic trends.


#


I couldn’t write about this intelligently because I’m all out of that fuel, I’m in the chest voice now exclusively. In nature’s bellow. I should live in it more since it’s where I hope to rest.


#


I read Percival Everett’s The Trees and think, I would read anything by this guy, but he is a mean guy. I read Brian Evenson's The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell and have to stop because it’s extremely scary.

I read Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik (trans. Yvette Siegert) and stop, evidently, before the stone’s extracted.

I read The Open Sea: Its Natural History Part 1: The World of Plankton by Sir Alister Hardy to feel like plankton, which definitionally lack the ability to propel themselves through water, meaning they are at the mercy of water movements, meaning they are intimately bound to water movements, and stop because I feel like a plankton.

I read Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation of Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by Lazlo Krasznahorkai and feel too in my own mind, stop.

I read Words of Farewell by Kang Sok-kyong, Kim Chi-won, and O Chong-hui (trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton) and stop, distracted by Mom, Big Imo, and Little Imo commenting in the next room on my general unavailability and odd, unhealthy marriage to my desk.

I read How High?—That High. by Diane Williams and feel dehydrated, like Pu Song-Ling’s been cosplayed again.

I listen, because I think I can’t read anymore, to Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces, and stop because I’m not following, my shower’s over, and I feel stranger.

I listen to How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang and stop because it’s too heavy, precious, and light at the same time, like the time I’ve become painfully aware of while listening.

I listen to myself say these things—I read them as I write, think: no, this is the time I’m wasting.


#


I’m exhausted from hoping all day that hope counts.


#


There’s too much I’ve not said, too much I’m displaying.


#


I can only write about what I’ve not seen of what I’ve witnessed:

The homes past the levy in NOLA, for instance, boxes on stilts some thirty, fifty feet in the air, surreal until water rises, I imagine, or waters rise, and the beyond is brought over the bridge.

I think of Howl’s Moving Castle, how that feels vaguely problematic, how thought feels vaguely problematic all the time as of late, which is problematic: all the time is not recent; lately is not all of anything but itself, and not even.


#


I think of seeing, colliding with sight of vision cast back at me at the docks where we ate that fire crawfish, bags of which I’d buy later and suck down on a lawn in the city. How then, I sat emptied of myself in like company, companies of varying likenesses: three Asians with the same haircut, I quipped, me included, out of place, on a bench, a long way from our liberal arts societies. In another arrangement, three half-Asians, me included, out of place on those docks. The other two were, like me, male, but both a generation older and built like hardship, to last; unlike me, they were GI orphans, spoke Vietnamese and no English; one was half-Black and the other half-white. They both came from Vietnam as deckhands, grinned at me, gestured to the crawfish and nodded.

Every time I think of this, I nod back.


#


Some of the Vietnamese American community in NOLA are double refugees: displaced once by the War, then by Katrina. Some of those some were in the same refugee camps in Texas twice. Palimpsests of traumas. Some, like the men at the docks, came independent of those events, for the fishing, as if just.

But there is no independence from those events, I think.

But how do I know this?


#


Another Vietnamese American we met that week in spring, an independent fisherman, was literally extending the hull of his boat in a parking lot—by hand—to extend his fishing zone, his maximum safe distance from shore: vanishing coastal ecosystems mean he’s sailing further and further out for his hauls, into deeper, choppier waters.

He’s all smiles as we ask him about the dangers of this reliance on independence, the ocean.


#


I remember my professor working through a conversation in Vietnamese, her heritage language, at the NOLA Museum of Art, where we met with the curator, an alumnus of our university, on a different morning to talk about curatorial practice and the museum’s experience with floods. How a Vietnamese American man on maintenance staff saw and approached her, my professor, having caught wind somehow that she was Vietnamese: he was so happy to see her, though they were only about to meet.

Her heritage tongue, spotlit, split: straining and relaxing.

Waves.


#


Those men at the docks who resembled my racial composition, I’d later learn, were undocumented. They slept in windowless storage containers and never went inland.


#


I thought, the thought dissonant, as our eyes met: This is how far war goes.


#


The women who pick and sell strawberries in the fields near my grandmother’s in Damyang, Korea, outside of Gwangju, who I bump into on my evening walks whenever I’m down there, usually just before sunset, are, too, Vietnamese, and live in storage containers, two stacked on top of each other. Always little fires going along the paddy road. Ten years ago, my sister and I were anomalies in the valley, the only racialized evidence of empire around, as the farming community was almost all Korean then. But as that generation leaves the fields, younger Koreans have not replaced them. Other people, from elsewhere, have.


#


Near my other grandmother’s home in Albemarle County, Virginia, Mexican migrant workers rent the trailer homes at the neighbor’s farm down the road, where my father spent his summers in high school helping out with the horses, the gravel road I walk each evening whenever I’m there, feeling a world away from Korea. Only the errant bamboo grove by the neighbor’s barn reminds me I am not the only thing that’s been transplanted. As of last Christmas, a Mexican restaurant has moved into the gas station off the intersection into town.

As of this spring, there’s pho for sale in Damyang, Korea.


#


Back in Seoul, from the cafe I haunt that recently finished its basement seating area that’s conceptually unfinished, I consider the rock sculpture they’ve hung in its cave-like quarters. To be clear, I’m upstairs where the music’s lyricless, thinking about what I saw down there when I poked around for an even quieter setting. But the chairs were stools, the lighting too trendy.

It’s many small rocks, blasted sections of concrete, it seems, hung at varying lengths from the ceiling so the hung units assemble the semblance of one spherical mass with equidistant emptiness. A freeze frame of symmetrical explosion, or an extraction from the asteroid belt? The thin strings are near-translucent, like classical guitars’.

#


The space-time theme is everywhere, it feels, relative to everything, occupying, defining, eschewing occupation and definition. Tiring me.


#


I imagine Michael Joo’s Perspectives exhibition here, project it onto the surfaces of the cafe, which may as well have been a gallery, might very well become one—because I couldn’t see it at the Sackler Gallery in 2016—because a cafe only lasts so long in this city—because I didn’t know it existed when it existed, only now after its gone do I feel attached.

I’m going to miss this cafe when I go back, when I can’t.


#


I’ve been chasing sculptures—sections of installations—in my mind for long enough to have some rapport with their afterimages, the palinopsia that grew real, some longing to project and negotiate. DMC’s DMZ in Berlin. The Real DMZ in Norwich. The DMZ’s birdsong at the MoMa. It’s why close reading this particular set of works feels impossible now, though necessary to put down, because that type of interaction assumes a material that isn’t first recalled, that is firsthand before it’s a legend. That is, I can’t recall interaction, only interact with fabrications of recollections, projected fabrics of the mapping process.

I can only perceive the trail once it’s been perceived, conceived by my perception.


#


The riffing on the 이/ Ee vowel sound in DMC’s DMZ, like a thumb on a standard tuning’s bass string, reminds me of all the parallels that become possible once you’ve proposed it. You could imagine an engagement with the text in another state of pending: in line at the DMV, the American universality of it, the desperate creatures of our republic, waiting and seeing, working and playing to escape the wait.

You could flunk the eye test, see a V where there’s an S, read “read” when it’s “read” in the sentence “The professor made us read all of S/Z.”

That’s “Zed” in this context.”

As in my name over a river.


#


I called the presentation “The Nth Parallel” because it sounded like my suspicion that the slides could go on forever, warranted. Of all places to be abstract, Korea’s foremost institute of technology, at a table with scientists with methods. They showed me love, though, gave me feedback over bento lunch. I met Dr. C. in Cheorwon, on a crane count along the DMZ and she invited me to the campus for the occasion. I discovered gradually that I was the “round” table’s one presenter. The four-person audience had simply transferred rooms from another conference where they’d been discussing satellite imagery from the border region.

As if on topic, I discussed Michael Joo’s ceiling installation which assembled weighted rods approximating satellite imagery of red-crowned cranes’ migratory routes to/from Korea. The piece critically transposes the imagery so what’s viewed from “above” in the images is as if held above a viewer from below: we look up at below: the bird’s-eye view is superimposed on the human’s. In one photo of the exhibit, Joo is pictured on his back gesturing to colleagues in the intervening air. In view against the horizontal wall is another of the works in that exhibition, the ghostly specter of a century-year-old crane carcass impressed into a metallic mist, its surface as if smeared by an external presence, an obscure mingling of apparitions achieved through glass mirroring, a process involving toxic silver nitrate that Joo calls “perhaps alchemical.”

The son of scientists once on track to become one himself, Joo concerns himself with that foundation as the basis for departure. Method scaffolds form.

What doesn’t fall away as emergence is emergence.


#


Lorenzo Thomas notes the note that slides away from the proposed. That proposal is perpetual, as is the sliding, so long as music: the score disintegrates.


#


I wrote in quarantine, at one beginning of this, that I want to find an animal in me that can go the distance, a willfulness, so that I can stop being it.

I want to surrender the organism, want, and I, to the organism.


#


After the last parallel, the last arbitrary meaning, the arbitrary last, the group broke apart and I relocated to another room, Dr. C.’s office, where she shared with me her ongoing research, its concreteness like a snowball to the face. I’d heard a bit about the project but not yet the details. A multi-year endeavor involving regular fieldwork in Cheorwon and support from the Center of Anthropocene Studies at KAIST, she and a team of graduate students at a robotics lab have been testing A.I. species-recognition technology on wildlife in the DMZ region. Advancements in this technology could revolutionize the accuracy of seasonal counts such as the one we participated in together in February for cranes, and could make that counting more or less continuous, rather than intermittent and dependent on caravans of human volunteers with clipboards. Instead, that regional volunteer labor could be directed to the upkeep of the cameras, a task that she was currently managing on her own with a few student assistants. Moreover, the A.I. could—and was already—affording close-ups of species formerly too elusive to approach with a camera in person.

Stationed in habitats frequented by target species, A.I.s would help close the gap, make the impasse an encounter: visualize, recognize, and categorize sightings into databases, at which point the task would shift domains, from navigating restricted political and ecological zones to the virtual, remote arena of data. Ultimately, theoretically, sorting and analysis would be more manageable than braving mud, snow, and unmarked landmines.

Yet I wonder, what is so manageable about a dozen robots’ gazes?

Which is why I didn’t attend the likes of KAIST.


#


I wonder, because I’m conditioned to the drama, if those gazes eclipse mine. I think about primacy, primates, privacy, primitivism, prisms—that flash paradigm.


#


The way it works currently, or the way it did when I was in the passenger seat of the process for cranes, is the same basic technology I use to express this, pen and paper, annotations of represented spaces. Satellite images of the fields where the cranes congregate were printed in color; people were assigned sections, maps, vans, pens, and followed a simple notation system wherein letters corresponded to species’ color identifiers (White-naped = W; Red-crowned = R). Juveniles, usually accompanying their more-or-less-monogamous parents within a reasonable radius, were marked as subscripts to their parents on the page.

All of this relies on the reasonability of approximation, and people having motivated patterns to their choices.

Only the most seasoned counters can estimate the largest flocks, in units of dozens or hundreds if they must. They tended to use their hands to focus, like they were snatching dust particles. It becomes, in these cases, highly circumstantial, impressionistic, and inevitably human, especially the greater the distances.

It starts to feel like art.


#


The deeper the war, the more human the cost.


#


Can what’s pictured be claimed to have been seen?


#


There are things I need to do today that I haven’t, like tend to this more closely, like synthesize my worries into claims about life and my arrangement in it, like consider the world inconceivable and accompany Mom to the paint store, to the roof with the paint, to the ill-advised Greek yogurt shop she funded so my cousin could have something to her name that wasn’t debt, like file the new claims and chase the reimbursements on the old ones, like call about the prescriptions and whether simultaneous ingestion is or is not directed in the event I see part of a face I love look off, odd, then fade in important sections, shifting recognition into specters of misunderstanding, and then growing fields of iridescence, relieved comprehension, hours of darkness. Like make important statements to people while they’re near, make internal ones that could change the course of my behaviors, check my account statements, my submissions, my emails, my motivations.


#


I should buy a new pen before this one runs out and I use that as an excuse to not be a person. To not sit with Dad in the afternoon’s light. To not walk with Mom through the market.


#


Everyone says, Stay honest, but did I start?


#


Sound recruits logic from the cave.


#


Meaning?


#


I woke to Mom crying for the suffering of others, namely Imo, who works so hard, Halmuni, who worked so hard for everyone, for herself, her body, for us having to be burdened by her trembling, and for the slaves who built the pyramids.

The whole world is suffering, she says.

I say, That’s enough YouTube.


#


I’m racing the sun and our orbit.


#


I should contemplate why that translation came easily when for years there’s been such blockage at the merest suggestion. I just entered it, to imagine it in English, to get to know the conversation’s field of implications through the moment’s elongation through my exaggerated attention to it. Tabling, importantly, all discussion of ability. That was not in question in anyone’s mind, according to the transcript, is why I felt welcome, never mind the clear toggling points: the notions of human habits and recurrence, of tracing writing so “the aura of writing” emerges from stencils of intent.

Never mind that the drawings themselves crackled with an energy I received even through pixels, the power of the familiar withheld and then beheld by me later.

To peer through a blizzard at a painting of a blizzard.

To see vision snowing on air.

Again.

Love is genius.

Again.