WorldLit #6-2 Metafiction / The Gray

The Gray

“……I’ve told you guys hundred times to find the clue in the PASSAGE!”

             I was sitting in a classroom of a private SAT academy of Gangnam city. Yes, I am the evil of the society, a participant of the burning competition of private education. I am criticized by all kinds of news media for spending enormous amount of money to get into a good college. I am the subject of an EBS documentary about the lack of happiness in this society.

             I looked out the open window. Across the street illuminated a cosmetic surgery signboard that caught my sight. The cosmetic surgery would turn a customer into one of those people on the street, running fast on high-heels and answering on the phone. I realized that cosmetic surgery and private academy have something in common. They both help people survive in this city, which requires excellence in standards of beauty and academic skills that are equivalent to everybody. The survivors have same facial expressions and same behavior patterns.

I averted my eyes. Everywhere was vaguely gray. The 8-line road was gray. The luxury-brand cars were gray. The pedestrians’ suits were gray. The buildings were gray. Even the clouds were gray. I wiped my glasses with my clothes, which made them even blurrier. I put on the glasses and realized that the clouds were lowered, or thickened. The bottom of the dark cloud seemed to approach me. After I wiped the glasses once again, I found myself captured inside the gray, humid air, which hindered my breath. I choked, feeling the urge to get out of this cloud. I had to escape. But where could I? The buildings were gray. The pedestrians’ suits were gray. The luxury-brand cars were gray. The 8-line road was gray. Everything below the cloud was gray.

So I went up. I stretched my wings and elevated vertically, past the window, past the skyscraper buildings, and past the thick cloud. As I went higher, the sticky air became fresh. The air was separating at the tip of my beak. I felt the cold flow of air riding on my skin. I listened to the cheerful sounds of my fluttering feathers. Now everywhere was sparklingly blue. I was feeling so free.

             Perhaps a few minutes later, suddenly I thought, ‘isn’t it too fast?’ Yes, it was. Whirls of winds were fiercely forming around my presence. I closed my eyes because the wind hitting my face was so powerful. My toes were quivering in frustration. The air riding on my skin was now sucking me up. My feathers were fluttering so wildly that they made thunderous sounds. However I could not unfold my wings. Rather, my wings were becoming sharper and sharper, stiffened at their positions. I was flying faster and faster. Wait, was I actually flying? No. I was falling. The gravity was making me fall faster and faster. Now I could see the gray city. Past the thick cloud, past the skyscraper buildings, and past the window……

             BANG! I crashed, right on the chair where I was sitting, as my deskmate slapped me on the back, waking me up.

“Mingyu, how dare you doze in the classroom? Don’t you want to get a good score?”

“……Sorry, I’m so sorry, Ms. Kim.”

“Please pay attention. Everybody turn to page 174.”

And I started dozing again. 

WorldLit #6: Post-Modernism / A Scribbled Bird

A Scribbled Bird

“So, you know, this 14^th waver who went to Stanford……”

             As soon as I arrived home, my mom started to tell me information about all these college admission stuffs she heard in a meeting with other moms. She put out a pen and some notes, and started to explain what specs do colleges prefer and who went to what college with what kind of essay. Mom even seemed to be excited. I couldn’t understand. Man, I came home for the first time since the start of the semester, and I did so to relieve myself, not to hear college information!

             I lost track of what she was saying, almost deliberately. I hold the pen, and started to scribble on the back side of the note. I drew curves, round and round, following the motion of my fingers. Oh, the scribble looked like a bird! I drew a beak and an eye, and plumed its feathers. The bird was flying.

             I was flying. I was stretching my wings in sharply streamlined shapes, drifting on the cold flow of air. I folded my legs in order to reduce the air resistance. The air was separating at the tip of my beak. I felt the cold flow of air riding on my skin. I listened to the cheerful sounds of my fluttering feathers. I was feeling so free.

             Then, suddenly I thought, ‘isn’t it too fast?’ Yes, it was. Whirls of winds were fiercely forming around my presence. I closed my eyes because the wind hitting my face was so powerful. My six toes were quivering in frustration. The air riding on my skin was now freezing. It was almost sucking me up. My feathers were fluttering so wildly that they made thunderous sounds. However I could not unfold my wings. Rather, my wings were becoming sharper and sharper, stiffened at their positions. I was flying faster and faster. Wait, was I actually flying? No. I was falling. The gravity was making me fall faster and faster.

             BANG! I crashed, right on the sofa where I was sitting, as the arrow indicating the direction of the bird hit the bottom of the page. I finished the arrow by marking its tip. My mother asked,

“Mingyu, are you listening?”

“Of course, mama. Keep going.”

“Okay, so his mom said that to be accepted by Princeton……”

And I started scribbling again. 

WorldLit #5: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

             In the realism story <The Lady with the Dog>, the part I thought the most realistic was that the transition was made by not an enormous milestone event but a trivial event that can occur any time in our lives. Gurov went indignant by a vain joke “The sturgeon was a bit too strong!” and made the grand decision of travelling to where Anna lives. Surely our real lives are not composed of dramatic events; rather a continuum of mundane routines eventually makes up a change.

             In the magical realism story <A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings>, the transitions are apparently not at all realistic. Suddenly an angel appears in the courtyard, brings enormous wealth to Pelayo’s family, and flies away again abruptly. However, those changes are described in such a mediocre tone that they seem to be some of our gradual and mundane routines. For example, the first encounter of Pelayo and Elisenda and the angel is described as follows:

“They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar.”

Pelayo and Elisenda’s feeling is no more intense than what they might feel when they find an abandoned dog and decide to nurture it in a chicken coop. They will not be familiar with the angel if the angel is a landmark event in their lives. Moreover, his “miracles” are trivial “consolations”, such as making a blind man grow three new teeth, which are far from grandiose events. Even when the angel flies away, he starts with a clumsy failure, while Elisenda is “cutting some bunches of onions”, an everyday routine. Generally, the angel, possibly a source of significant supernatural transitions of this story, is actually a decrepit man with wings full of parasites, and merely a part of a monotonous routine. This brings the magic elements of the angel into the pool of realism.

This story is also realistic in that it describes the selfish human nature. The relationship between the humans and the angel is absolutely based on needs. After the angel cures their child’s fever, the humans feel magnanimous, and consider releasing the angel on a raft with provisions. However, after they discover that he is a potential source of enormous profits, they confine him in a chicken coop and let him be tortured by the equally selfish crowd. As he no longer becomes a fortune, Elisenda shouts “that it was awful living in that hell full of angels.” Their calculating relationship perhaps reflects the connections prevalent in our contemporary society which lack warmth and altruism.  

The spider woman is another notable theme that conveys how myopic humans are. The spider woman’s provocative story, supported by awful visual evidence, conveys a direct moral to the crowd. The crowd suddenly feels no need to meet the angel, whose miracles do not provide a direct cure, and therefore disintegrates. Even if their motivation to meeting the angel was a religious conviction (regarding that Catholic has been dominant in Latin American society), such belief is abstract and therefore easily overwhelmed by sensual experiences. People tend to take the short and clear paths of which the endpoints are immediately seen in their eyes, rather than the long and obscure ones, which potentially have bigger rewards. Moreover, fear, represented by the spider, more easily prompts people to act right away than hope, symbolized by the angel. In these ways the spider woman portrays our shortsighted nature, a realistic trait of humans.

Personally, I thought that the depiction of Elisenda at the last part was also very realistic. When the angel flies into the air, her feeling is closer to regret than to freedom from a nuisance, as she fastens her gaze on the “imaginary dot”. The ending perfectly portrays how humans recognize a value of an existence only at its absence, just as we realize that we have to serve our parents with devotion only after they pass away. Whether the angel was a source of profit or a source of discomfort, Elisenda gets to miss him when he is no longer there.

<A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings> is a work that successfully blends the magical elements into a realistic tone and theme, as the story depicts magic as a banality, and deals with realistic human nature, such as selfishness and myopia. I really loved the way how magical realism makes sense. During my research I found that this genre is greatly affected by Latin American folklores. I am looking forward to read other magical realism works and perhaps the folklores that underlies as the basis of this genre.



Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Old_Man_with_Enormous_Wings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Garc%C3%ADa_M%C3%A1rquez

Commissioned Essay: Airstream Juggling

“What are you drawing on my window?” The taxi driver asked, breaking the silence.

Awaken from my entangled thoughts, I replied, “Oh, a floating ball, sir.”

“What for?”

“It’s my physics research problem. A ball can float on a slanted airstream.”

             I was thinking about one of the forces that capture the ball inside the airstream. On the wet taxi window, I drew a circle and some curves and arrows.  

“Wow, it’s amazing.”

“Yup, it’s like magic. A juggling magic.”

I was surprised by myself saying this. Truly the floating ball was similar with juggling. You juggle three balls with two hands. The airstream juggles one ball with no hand. As juggling is a continuous cycle of the balls, the floating ball exhibits a cycle of oscillating motion.

I soon became lost in memories, in a Christmas day 5 years ago. I received professional juggling balls for Christmas gift. Excited, I juggled all day so hard. I stared at the juggling lecture videos and scrutinized how the video guy showed a stable command of various skills. I tried to mimic him, dropped the balls, and tried and dropped, again and again. Whenever I was stuck I took a video of myself to see why I had kept failing. At the end of the day I could juggle under my leg, behind my back, and with my hands flipped. Still, there were so many skills left to do with three balls.  

Whoosh, 4 years after, Christmas day again, in a physics research camp. I was given a research problem for a physics debate competition. Thrilled, I conducted rigorous experiments all day. I stared at the phenomenon videos I had taken, searching for the conditions of stable levitation. Various forces acted upon the ball, and various factors influenced the motion. I put the ball on the airstream, dropped, and put and dropped, again and again. Whenever I found myself in a theoretical dilemma I asked myself fundamentally why the phenomenon happens. At the end of the camp I could explain some part of the phenomenon, but still there were so many veiled effects.

Whoosh, to the juggling days, in the National Park, and in a service center. I performed juggling with my team. I juggled two balls and an apple, which I bit in each cycle. Then my teammate stole them away, maintaining the cycle of juggling. I pretended to be angry, and took them back again and ran away, juggling and biting the apple voraciously. To perfect a single performance I had eaten hundreds of apples and had thrown the balls thousand times. Each cycle of balls, a fruit of devoted practice, delighted the crowd in the National Park and the grannies in the service center.

Whoosh, now I was in the final round of the physics debate competition. I made a presentation about my research of the floating ball. With elaborate equations and vivid imagery descriptions, I explained the forces that make the ball oscillate inside the airstream. Only for this presentation I had been awake and struggling till dawn for an entire month. Each explanation of the oscillation, a product of dedicated investigation, elated other student physicists and professors.  

Zoom, back in the taxi. I wondered how come I had been driven back to juggling after 4 years. Then I realized, I had been juggling with life all the time. Life has itself been an incessant cycle. A cycle that requires numerous trials and lessons to unmask some of its extremely various elements, but still the whole never reveals itself. A pure, fundamental inquiry about ‘why’ usually eases the process of knowing its mystery. Most importantly, life rewards only those who are the most passionate.

I looked up the window. The ball and the airstream glittered as the water droplets reflected the sunlight. My juggling cycle had not ended. In fact, it will never end.

646 words 

WordLit #4: The Dead Argumentative + Personal

From a distance, in <The Dead>, Gabriel’s dinner speech that people should not linger on the past may seem to contradict his later epiphany. Certainly, although he says he will leave the traces of the past and rejoice in the present in his dinner speech, he cannot evade the shadow of Michael Furey, a man killed by love. But if you take a closer look you will see that such contradiction does not exist. In Gabriel’s own speech he clearly says, “……still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.” He shows respect to the souls of the past and let them change his life, as Michael’s faithful soul leads Gabriel to epiphany. He never says he will totally ignore the past.

Then why would he have said that he will not remain in the past? Ultimately, his speech is a message to himself at the end of the story. The attitude described in his speech rescues him from irretrievable death in the course of epiphany. From the souls of the past, he realizes that he has been spiritually dead: he has been condescending in relationships with people, his nationality has been vain, and his love has not been truthful. However, he does not linger on his dead self that has been filling him until then. He does not despair remaining in his dead past, as “generous tears fills Gabriel’s eyes” for the sake of dead Michael and his reviving soul. The reflective and introspective tone of the last few paragraphs also indicates a course of maturation rather than complete desolation. Although snow might represent death, it does not last forever: it soon melts away when spring full of life comes. In short, his miserable epiphany does not lead him to absolute death, but rather provides a resurrection with a refreshed, vibrant soul, and this corresponds to exactly what Gabriel has said in his dinner speech. He lets the past souls to affect him, but he does not linger on his dead past, and accepts the renewal of soul at the present. In this sense, Gabriel’s dinner speech is perfectly consistent rather than contradictory to the last epiphany.

Personally, I was glad that I could have at least a slight grasp about what Modernism is, and how it is distinguished from Realism. At first I was uncomfortable that the story seemed to contain three separate stories (Lily, Ms. Ivors, Gretta) that do not have apparent link to each other, and that especially the first two did not have clear correlation with the death. However, I later found out that this misconnection is itself the very property of modernism. Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest Modernist writers, wrote “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” Modernist writers concentrated on reflecting the essence of life in literature work, and they thought that life does not essentially work as a thrilling plot of four clear steps: introduction, development, conversion, and summing up. Rather, life contains several episodes that eventually reach a conclusion, which is exactly how <The Dead> is structured.

The epiphany of the story also follows a trait of Modernism. Influenced by Freud, Modernist writers focused on the true nature of human psyche. By portraying how Gabriel’s state of mind changes and finally reaches a realization, Joyce could draw a deep insight on the internal world. Moreover, Joyce’s epiphany was usually about acknowledging the reality, the true substance of life. Basically, the epiphany in <Araby> was about the vanity of love along with religion, and that in <The Dead> was about human interactions, identity, love, and death. They are the abstract but essential cores of our life, exactly the interests of Modernism!

             I liked James Joyce’s <The Dead> because it clearly exhibited the characteristics of Modernism, which is distinguished from those of Realism in that Modernism deals about the essence of life, which leads to an episode-based structure and a focus on epiphany. 

WorldLit #3-1: Revised Araby Paragraph

* I totally changed the topic T.T

             From a distance, James Joyce's "Araby" might appear to be a tragic love story. After all, when the nameless narrator becomes angry at the very last part, he seems to be angry because he failed the quest of love as he was late for the bazaar. However, on the other hand, his anguish contains a lot more meaning than a mere failure in love has. His epiphany is that his ideal cannot exist in reality, the banal life of Dubliners. Throughout the story the narrator’s ideal is described as desperate, pure, and even holy. While he carries images of Mangan’s sister, he imagines that he “bore his chalice safely through a throng of foes.” In a room where a priest had died, he presses his palms together and desperately prays, “O love, O love!” Araby, in his dreams, luxuriates his soul and “casts an Eastern enchantment over him”. However, such ideal loses its value by the dull schoolwork, his uncle’s lateness, and the train’s tardiness, which are the most typical aspects of his everyday life. When he reaches Araby, which should be a festive and adventurous event, darkness and timidity greet him. The young lady and the two men speak with sexual undertones which insinuate an adulterate love. Finally he gives up buying his love a gift, abandoning the ideal of love. Therefore, it is perhaps more accurate to assume that <Araby> portrays a boy realizing the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality. In this sense, Mangan’s sister and Araby, which represent his ideal, finally turn out to be vain and empty. 

WorldLit #3 Araby: Argumentative Paragraph!

             From a distance, James Joyce's "Araby" might appear to be a tragic love story. After all, when the nameless narrator becomes angry at the very last part, some readers would think that his anguish is because his love has miserably failed as he was late for the bazaar. However, on the other hand, in my point of view, his love never has existed. At first, attracted by the lady's appearance, he acts as if he has a passionate love in mind. He watches her through the window blinds every morning, thinks of her at every moment, and murmurs "O love! O love!" However, his uncle comes home late, and the train departs late, and due to these slightest ordeals, suddenly he forgets the desperate feeling. He "remembers with difficulty" the reason why he had come, which is supposed to be 'love'. If his love has been real, how can it be so easily forgotten? Moreover, he does have the opportunity to buy the flowered tea-sets, but he simply gives up. Why can't he buy them and give them to the lady, saying that those were the last products left in Araby at 10 o' clock at night? Wouldn't it be a romantic ending? It is because he realizes that what he has considered as love is actually a mere attraction. In fact, at the beginning of the story, the priest shows a love that is not vain. In the sentence "He had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister", the priest had preserved love even as he died. The narrator's attitude contradicts to that of the priest. Therefore, it is perhaps more accurate to assume that he has never loved the lady. He has been merely attracted by her appearance, and has deluded himself that his feeling is love. In this sense, at the last part, he becomes angry because he finally realizes what his true feeling was: vanity and emptiness.