A Personal Statement to My Understanding

There’s all this data I’m left with, like sudden coins, when I get back to Seoul unannounced. I’m spat out of a car. I’m on a bus, on a train. I’m walking back from a sense of incompletion. To my understanding, I’m rounding a corner, that’s positive thinking, the whole world is, into spring, and it’s as confrontational as anything though I’m watching closely the buds when people tell me to.

Today, their goneness surrounds me.

I heard about someone’s calf muscle sliding up their leg in their sleep once, into the cove behind their knee, and they woke seized, in such unique pain, and I think of that, I could never let go of it.

Of course, that spasm’s the whole peninsula, the condition. Everything looks like the face you’re seeking. The ravaged one, the one I prefer as it is now, gone.

I think this too, I engage the hill home, a mild interest in my hamstrings, in all things, feeling quintessential, feeling more or less acute, feeling accurate in my aims, in my fictional powers. The futures as I prefer them unspooling, a nag, feeling my funding running out though that’s months away still, feeling free, still. Months’ muscularity. Months, muscularity. Or trying to.

Feeling worry’s an environmental issue to preach. There’s a problem with Mom’s matrix of government aid. There’s a problem with my residency and my plan for proving it. The problem is we’re not there, I’m not there, though we’re citizens of there and Mom’s a permanent resident of here now by legacy, a claim. I’m here on the premise of my greatness and ability to perform it convincingly to myself.

The empire backs me while it hunts her. This is me surviving as her shield.

But is the translucence convincing, the sense of membrane.

#

There’s all this neuropathy in the family unit, all this eternal lately. My dad’s leg disappearing on the way to lunch, him taking a knee in total traffic but refusing to bear his weight on mine, Mom’s capacity for joy replaced by something like divine helium. Seven immense years ago. O’s patience for the unseen beauty of her life groaning against another dumb labor by the day I want to hack away to free her. My complete recognition of the cosmic edges blurring, the borders’ fictions. I saw that, I tasted the war on everywhere compounding, I focused on the sensation of my swallowing for weeks through a cityscape that could not once address me.

#

I focused on the sensation of gripping my grandfather’s bamboo pipe, his fatal addiction, for a whole summer when I was nine and it was the best summer of my life, as if the only. I spoke Korean then, to my understanding, to the crabgrass, in the hose water, which was clean or something like it, through a plum juice mouth rash. I rescued smaller things from bigger things’ unfairness, I lectured the bigger things from my relative bigness, but with a gentleness I was learning is the best thing about life. That leveling. O confirms me in that. I was a contender in the yard games, to the best of my understanding.

#

Still, I want to be here, I think, though it’s years later, because now is necessary, but there’s this mass in my back, this grinder, multiplying annoyances, growing like a brainstem, like independence, like the flame in my skull. There’s a massive problem with words, not necessarily of language, but a word problem in it, like a grid in a face off kilter, and it’s that I hate them, words, their apparent values when I use them. They keep getting in the way like those tassels teenagers in movies put up in lieu of a door when their parents confiscate their door.

Pretended skins.

#

Cut to the frame, or the torrent in the freeze-frame of raining. I only get to this activity all at once, like a heap of clothes. Lately the proxy isn’t so fussy, I just pick a posture in a café like everyone, pretending to study for this four-letter test, this four-letter word problem, though I’m taking it seriously as part of the conceit. I’m playing in the summer league competitively, so it’s fun for everyone, my diving, epic fails. I’m translating things, on the side, I’m saying, barely, barely. I’m glitching into poems. No, lines, prose.

Just.

I’m just visiting this voice, echoing the pin drop when I first read that opening in the small press mailroom, as if illegally, how the voice felt possible, so hugely spiritual, and yet the greed to know it rushed the flower. To plunder its force. I’m just assuming topical interests that would register and translate anywhere greedy, which is everywhere I’ve been. I belong more to the greed than to its arrangement in a culture. I’m just camping out in social transferability, see, legibility, in other words, allow me.

My personal smile. The delusion is sincere. I’m so impressionable, and someone I respect, someone pure and, I maintain for myself, only incidentally rich, told me I could do it, that I could do anything.

With your mind.

It was, to my understanding, the first time I’ve been told that, in any language, by any agenda, that kind of confrontational opportunity, a test in a world that Biblical guilt, a thoroughly conscripted one like mine, flags immediately in a lurched gut, as truly possibly satanic. The reddest of flags, the freshest of reds. So tasty. I repeated it in my head like a refrain where I needed energy, the sick courage, like a private sin or sun. I imagined scenes of people telling me, and me acting like I didn’t know what they were saying. What was talking. I cried imagining my dad saying it to a younger me in his muted radio host voice, at a time when I imagine I could have used just it to correct my everything, not her to me not long ago in a professional room, in a surge, I suspect, of generosity. Because the world was ending then, if you’ll recall, not long ago.

The words didn’t have to come from Mom, I never constructed that pity, I didn’t need to, this is an annotation of the darkness as I knew it, she who would check the garage for me if I wouldn’t come in right away. A sternness on her face like a river. That’s only so sentimental if you read it backwards. I’m reassuring myself I deserve to confess it in the actual mainstream of the moment.

#

But does the work require feeling? That’s what I can’t stand or figure out the issue of. The work having command or spatial property. I’m avoiding the A-word on purpose, as if it stands for all words. Like the word society in high school, meaning hallways. Or how our philosophy club was thinly veiled group therapy. How did nobody see that? They were distress signals, people, but people clapped, formed a beat.

And now Z. is dead. A character I write into the fraction of the archive of. His mom packed him banana bread one time and he had to rush out of class to reject it. He looked like me, racially speaking, and I don’t speak racially or tend to it, which is a ridiculous lie. I didn’t realize how intuitively magnetic that was to me in our context, farms our border poems. Or how gruesome and confusing the joke I roped him into spectating, into almost refereeing, that he was in on only more or less, the one where I teased—is that even the right word—N. straight from my insecurity, who was bigger than us by a lot and could’ve easily shut it down, clobbered me in a single recognition of his threat to me, but didn’t from his goodness, from his gentleness, the best thing about living. How Z. just kind of nervously rose like a thermometer. I’m sorry I had to pronounce my pain like that, to everyone, my proper name. It’s my archive now to burn and sift in the deep ends of the night and I do.

I’d invent creative ways of killing him, N., and declare them to the class.

Why, Jed.

I’d say, in a voice of pleasantry, as if a cartoon villain, I will destroy you later this evening, N., and secure your utter demise by slipping a rare root powder into the dough of the cafeteria cookies you so appreciate. Until then, enjoy your last morning.

Jed.

Z. was a swimmer, an amazing one. We all knew this. I can’t remember if he said it or if I read a statement of him saying it, I can’t find it online anymore, or in my online imagination, that backed-up hairballed drain of a resource, maybe his family asked the right people to take it down, politely, can you email that email, can you imagine it being written, but I remember or misremember or invent in successive movements the personal statement.

Underwater it’s quiet.

N. was so smart. Last I heard, he’s as smart as ever, and maybe married. Maybe rich. I hope he is all of that, and happier than all of it.

If I said here and with God would that destroy this for all people?

N., Z.,

Have you seen the ghostly shapes after fireworks in an accommodating sky? This work doesn’t talk back to me, doesn’t show its sleeves, because I never talked back except in public, on picnic tables. That’s why my Korean’s atrophied, because I was only a homefield receiver, a perfect pit for the runoff to find.

And now they want me to introduce myself.

#

I’m sorry, from depth.

Mom, in one of her presentations on Korean culture to my elementary school class, bless her.

I’m sorry, I’ll begin.

This one was third grade, the last one, before I asked her to stop, because I was learning that she had an accent, a speech path riddled with uncomely sutures. I should have destroyed everyone who ever laughed at her. I should, I should have forgiven everyone who laughed at her. I should. I should not have laughed at her. She brought in this mask, the traditional Korean kind with the wild, engorged eyes, and told me to wear it. I was standing next to her, always a little confused, in front of everyone white, backdropped by primary colors, cork. She was, after all, my mom. It made sense to be standing beside her while she spoke of us and our being there. Offering, as if through materiality, some implicit defense of our animacy. Then she handed me the mask and told me to put it on. No, she didn’t say that. That was the message but what she spoke was,

Here, okay.

And I knew that meant put it on. Because I’m her son. And I did. And the eye holes being ornamental and unfaithfully apart, the room went behind the inside of the false face, and she said, her voice now my moonlight, my only connection to the stage and its audience,

Now he will dance for us.

And I knew that meant we are goblins.

#

Late teens, Z. still alive, on one of those days with my dad in Madison, a city I now think of as a lapsed open season, a caved world, for maybe learning who he is, which I believed synonymous with earning his affection, we were riding around in our usual premise, deferring blues, running an invented errand on a Saturday afternoon, talking slantwise in the car, watching the road like a movie wide as death because eye contact reverbs the chord company strikes, and took the triangulation to the sidewalk of that part of the city that always felt adequately hip and relaxed to us both, by that record store and the sequence of shops where you can get choosy about fabrics, and we ended up in a place that sold rebuilt stereos, an old hobby of his.

He steered me around through the woody tones and I focused on his warm, worked hand on my shoulder, the boniness of which I was so ashamed of, my shoulder, wishing a denser meat for him to hold onto, me watery eyed because of that, he so interested, occupied in interest, he didn’t notice. He lectured me in his way about the quality of sound, the sound of quality, the characteristics of that recognition. He, for one, preferred, and who wouldn’t, depth over volume. He needed it, dimension, like knowledge of the world. Of broken people. What’s one cardinal on a walk streaking through green of trees, to the cardinal you see on your daily walk, streaking through greenness? The difference is life, home, that the second lives there and you orbit it supremely, obliviously, day after day. These days, and here he laughed at some private turn in his procedure, his reasoning, you young punks love your volume, your sheer volume, but the truth of the art of listening, the true art and the love of the sound is in the depth. Of the world, son, my son.

My universe.

So, thus, build up your speaker system. He said. A cranked, complex signal through a nasally, flimsy speaker won’t stir the body you’re trying to rouse. Won’t oxygenize it adequately. But a low noise, even a quiet one, just a murmur from a powerful system, now that’s a real message, that’s a voicer. That’s a dinger out the park. Then you’re really hearing something beyond the arena.

Of course, he didn’t say any of that. He just talked about the wires, the cables and how not to cut yourself on them, what code. And how to care for the surfaces and spot cheap tricks these repairmen try to pull in these overpriced stores. We’d have to think about it, very carefully, very seriously, with all the lights off after everyone else went to bed. That was his market strategy, remembering our frugality as we’d exit the store. That was his worldview in action, his core commitment to knowing the universe so low to the ground, like we were the denser medium. But I’ve also seen his notebooks, I’ve snooped plenty in the basement we shared, and I will imagine, because I love him from a deep, deep depth, the things he could have said had I, as a son, not been so sullen and frightening a matter.

#

Dance, foreigner. Say your name.

#

I tell Mom today I’ll look at the contract later and help with the call, which is obvious, but I hope comforting. She helped me, after all, get insurance in Korea by pointing to pre-written phrases when the representative grilled me over the phone on the policy and my understanding of it, which is limited to my understanding of that event, visually slashed by her tremoring hand sort of pointing.

Agency, there.

It’s my field, the Word doc, anyway. She does everything else while my dad attends the social distance between the culture and his theology. Singular and singular. He’s an ecumenicalist. O helps us all individually, with what we each need whenever. And then she realizes herself way too late.

Depth. Pronounce your identity. Your clutch.

#

This is about the demilitarized zone, believe it, and the discovery of the thirty-eighth parallel as an architecture for the age. A monument for the future, the nth parallel. I’m 3-D printing a rock. How’s that for integration.

#

In the world as I see it, in the memoir I avoid, I’m always circling back, but there’s the precedence in Korea of an imminence. Surrender is a natural consequence, I’m saying. In summer, the Korea I know best, you can almost step out into Seoul in your socks, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, and feel continuous. Which nobody would ever do.

No such thing in a café, not this one, in a daylight, or along the river I should be walking for my joints, to unjam my jaw and firming literary scowl. Here, or there, in a kind of stale republic, you’ll feel something prying your architecture wide open, closing your soul down in a flash.

It’s the suddenly assimilating banter of newly determined friends after a disavowed stretch of honorifics. It’s the unbelievable plant life this country curates and upkeeps when everybody’s looking at the civic nature of that.

I’m not digging these curly sentences, or my mood. Or as O says, who I’m finding. It’s starting to sound like the thing I critique in every prose pattern I suspect is behaving like a sand dune because it’s ignorant of life as a proper crucible. And the ephemeral thing, that big diss from the hawk-eyed professor-type, I keep doing it, being that problem child, and not the cool kind. It’s prodding a very dark reaction. Of the tragic variety. I’m nonviolent but I believe in the spiritual realm where everything’s dipped in blood.

#

Mom’s threatening to sue. I will help her if it comes to that. I will grow fangs. I will crush ideas of civilizations in my mind while I urge gills onto my throat, into this submerged language I so speak of.

Underwater it’s quiet but for the heritage voice coming back to me through the century, the atomic age growing louder.

In sum, I bring two plans to the day and do the third thing discreetly in a resuscitated corner of my awareness, my hands like rodents’ hurry.

I remember water, dismiss the memory.

I wolf a breaded sausage thing, or count on it.

I’m, like my history, shy, and then not. Still am. Never was.

I thought once, immediately, Of course, God.

I realized later, I’m not a FOB but I still find squirrels notable and that’s transgression number one, the utterance ending.