created, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah Milena, Milena, Ecstatic by Bae Suah
Why I’m reading
Continuing to read Bae Suah bibliography. This one has a new translator, Sora Kim-Russell – who translated the other Bae Suah work I have yet to own – Highway with Green Apples
No particular reason for choosing this one over the others, besides perhaps the length.
for her, existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeing concepts.
Every person and every procedure marches on at a measured pace. That’s how things get done, just as the less delicate components of a machine submit to the will of the machine without any conscious thought or shred of volition while being steadily ground down. So while I was busy not having conscious thought, I became a cog.
“Is this how all your lectures go?” “Of course not. I make it a rule to read directly from the textbook. If I want to confuse the students, I read the chapters in reverse.”
Each step he took seemed to kick up a breeze.
perhaps after more time had passed and Cheolsu had matured and grown older and sprouted a few white hairs and wearied of time, and I too had wrinkled lips and ruined looks and reached an age where there was no longer any trace of a flirtatious smile and no one would find me pretty, then maybe we would truly end up married.
If you gently stroke my lips and the palm of my hand right now, you will find them strangely cold and icy, a feeling of endless distance that even I can sense. Someone once said to me, “You’re so cold that I shake with despair. The whole time we’re together your lips never once flush, and your body is like slippery ice. You have the eyes of a wolf-girl whose heart has never once been moved. When I press my ear to your chest, I hear only wind and emptiness.”
I tell him, “All you have is my emptiness.” “Then where are you? The you that bleeds when I devour you like this?” “You don’t see? I just passed outside that window and now I’m gone. This is the first and last time I will encounter you in this life. Give me some water. Sweat pours off me like rain. You’ll forget about me for the next hundred years. But leave your voice behind; when I come back to this place a hundred years from now, the moment I open the door a colony of bats and your voice will greet me.”
Dark, shining faces I could not tell apart.
”Let’s take a picture.” We held hands in front of the camera. His hand was hot, as if he had a fever. Then both of our hands were sweating. If I never saw him again after that day, I would think of him a hundred years from now. That photo of him was the last I would see of his face. His final face in some distant future. My brother and I clasped hands tightly, sweat slicking our palms, as if we planned it that way from the start.
You were born with a knife in your heart. That’s why I’m not surprised by anything that comes out of your mouth.
Never will you lie at rest in a royal tomb. And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time.