I’m seeing the tangled embrace of lovers in the floral patterns of dormitory drapes.
Falling in love — trying to conceal your flaws long enough to make each other enough of a habit, so that it can’t be so easily broken.
Suddenly nothing else matters. I had no idea.
She walked right into my love.
Suddenly, I know fear — the fear that comes with having something to lose. The lover’s the fool who trades for freedom for fear.
Emotions so different from one another that the only thing they have in common is that they keep you from sleeping. Love is not so much love, just a willing or unwilling opening of the dam that keeps emotions in check.
Must I tell the whole world?
It’s too soon to know, but it feels like love. 


Something I didn’t take the remotest interest in until I came to Korea is pottery. Today I saw an exhibition at a hospital of all places. At a time when I’ve been rebelling against the tyranny of the object, these things are kind of a reminder to chill out and retreat from the MP3/digital mania. Abstract concepts don’t exude an aura, do they?

This pottery collection was themed on images of the sea. 35 objects. A big bowl with orange and blue melted together, perfectly matching the color of the setting sun melting into the water — while the spine of silver fish jutted out, snaking their way up the vase. Another object at the bottom was round like another bowl, but then was engulfed by a head of white coral. Another piece of pottery was covered by barnacles. One piece called the “Deep Sea” was at first glance just a big solid dark colored bowl, but if you peered into it from the top, you could see the distortion, the confusion, the warping of vision that you might experience peering into the deeps, the limits of where light can reach. The intensity of color, the textures — this perfect image of the unstable dance of colors of the sea melted into pottery. It was really something else to see.

Riding a rental bicycle around the island under the blackening sky. At the moment, I arrived at the beginning of the path to the rocky cliffs, a downpour started. I waited with the bicycle under a roof. Tourists filed out of the parking lot in droves, as I jealously watched. Then, the rain stopped, and everyone was gone. And the sky still black. I walked along the muddy path, lined by planted palm trees. A growing sense of awe overtook me. With lush green vegetation in the foreground, the swelling ocean caught between the black lava rocks and the black sky is something to behold. Memories of this point in the big island of Hawaii came back to me, when I was staring out at the sea, some Pagan ornaments hanging on a fence in front of me — a similar kind of day, a moment of time that for whatever reason has lingered in my consciousness for 10 years.

And then I glimpsed the rocks. It was breathtaking, beyond what I could have expected. There’s outcrops of rocks about 150 metres in distance, and the rocks are all perfectly shaped into platforms, and rising crystallized hexagrams. And the waves of the ocean break against the rocks, the white crests a powerful contrast on this day when the ocean color is practically black. I’m at a loss to describe it more, except to say that it’s one of the most mysterious places I’ve ever seen it, and it was so powerful to regard it.

Finally, some other tourists came onto the scene, and the rain started up again. Walking my bicycle back to the parking lot, I came upon a van stuck in the mud. I stopped to help — other Koreans joined the scene, but none got as muddy as me. I was trying to improve my Karma, cause I knew I’d be needing it — encroaching darkness, pissing rain, and 20 kilometres back to the town. And sure enough — this bus driver generously stopped in the middle of the road, plugging up traffic, and let me bring my bike on the bus.

Imagine an ocean without the skin of the surface. I had a dream a few days before coming to the island of Cheju (geography: South of South Korea, West of Kyushu, Japan, North of Okinawa and Taiwan), in which I rode on a boat, circumnavigating an island, and I could see a jungle of orange and purple coral reefs all around the island. It was cool, cause this dream projection seemed to be confirmed over this weekend. I got under the skin of the sea, spending two days scuba diving off Munseom Rock, off the South coast of Cheju. By virtue of its more Northern (yet still subtropical) latitude, the cool thing about Cheju scuba diving, in contrast with the tropical diving of somewhere like the Phillipines (which I’ve only heard a little about), is that here there’s 4 seasons underwater, too — the fish and the vegetation change according to the seasons, I’m told. It was a jungle underwater — so much soft coral, in so many different colors, pale blue, purple, pink, these leafy (with silvery glitter on the leafs) orange bushes that you could swim right through, these taller green plants, that reminded me of some evergreen tree struggling for life on a mountain ridge above the treeline. Particurly memorable was this obscure white and pink tree, which struck me as some alien life form.

Why does such beautiful underwater plant life have to be confined to the slopes of tiny outcrops of rocks? Why aren’t there entire fields of soft coral in the same way that there are endless fields of grass in the prairies of Canada? Is it some kind disfunction that I see the most beautiful thing, and think it should be bigger or more abundant? It’s just hard for me to accept that there is so much nothing in the ocean.

My travel reading list seems fitting: The Living Sea by Jacques Cousteau (about adventures in the early days of scuba diving), Eden (in which a group of astronauts crash onto the 4th planet from the Sun in another solar system, and discover obscure lifeforms of various descriptions) by the Polish writer Lem (who wrote a few stories from on which the Russian director Tarkovsky based movies), and Popul Vuh, the ancient text of the Mayan civilization (haven’t opened this one yet).

I’ve found myself once again on a Southern island, as if pulled by gravity. I showed up at the ferry terminal in the port city of Pusan this past Monday evening. That evening’s ferry to Cheju island was sold out, so I made the quick decision that the traveler lives for, and caught a boat to another smaller island. Not many people know it, but there’s literally thousands of tiny islands in the South seas of South Korea — though, with the exception of the southernmost Cheju island, they’re not exactly tropical — mostly fantastic-shaped, jagged rocks without beaches. One of these rocks bore an uncanny resemblance to a lion on its hind legs in mid-attack. I took a separate boat to this peculiar island called Oedo — the only island to be purchased and developed by a private individual. The island has been converted to a large scale subtropical Italian/Greek-flavored garden.

On Tuesday night, I took the 12 hour overnight boat from Pusan to Cheju. Cheju is Korea’s entry into Asia’s resort island club. The centre of the island is a massive dormant volcano called Hallasan. While, the landscape around the island is quite unique, because there’s about 300 mini-volcano-shaped hills. There’s waterfalls, and spectacular coastal rock formations. There’s also this mysterious place called Mystery Road — you can put the car into neutral, shut off the engine, and mysteriously the car or even bus, is pulled up the hill, as if by some unseen magnetic force.

I spent two days at this festival of world island cultures. It was unbelievable to see a group of Balinese playing the gamelan, Sri Lankan dancers to some particularly incredible music, Ecuadorian musicians, Samoans, a polyphonic vocal group from Sardegna, Italy, and my favorite, this group from Hainan, China — the same island where the US plane emergency landed this past Winter. I doubt the Hainan dancers had much to do with tradition — there were 15 beautiful girls in beautiful long-sleeved green dresses, and then tighter, more revealing pink dresses — while a brochure was handed out, advertising Hainan as a golf course and beach resort destination.

I was idling away the afternoon in a park, napping and doing a little studying. This old Korean guy came walking by, and said “Hello, how are you” — nothing unusual, cause a Westerner is still so often treated like someone famous in Korea. Well, I ended up talking to this guy, and it really made my afternoon. I can’t quite express it, but it was beautiful. Love flowed from this guy. Just prior to him coming, I was questioning why I was even bothering to study Korean. But it’s for times like this — we had this amazing conversation switching between broken English and broken Korean. We talked about a bunch of books. He asked me if I’d read Herman Hesse, and actually I’d just read Siddartha. This guy was just so full of energy and life. He showed me these Taekwondo moves, and got himself into yoga positions. He’d been studying English for 2 years, whenever he could. And the reason is that he wants to travel to India, Vietnam, and Thailand. That’s the strangeness of the world, that Koreans study English to go to Vietnam. But this guy’s obviously not got a lot of money. He looked pretty scruffy, like someone who hangs around parks often does. The mobility, the freedom, the options of an English teacher are overwhelming. How different my life must be from this guy’s. I hope he gets to India.

While swimming laps in the Olympic swimming pool, I surfaced to find a fellow foreigner. A man who turned out to be Russian, involved in some exporting. I think he worked for a government office. Russians have quite a reputation in Korea. Apparently, even here, there’s a Russian mafia, and a huge population of Russian women brought in to work in night clubs. But I’m sorry I have to bring all this stuff up, just cause I met a nice Russian in a swimming pool. For some reason, I felt compelled to list the many Russian books I’d read in my life, and compliment him on Russian literature as if he wrote the books himself. And then I continued swimming.

On a recent Sunday morning, I was recruited to hand out pamphlets for an English camp in the annex building of a central Seoul church. There was this huge parkade and all the cars were double and triple parked — everywhere. I’d hate to be a kid forced to church in Korea. Sitting through the service, and then having to wait for the entire afternoon for the parking lot to clear. Wasn’t Sunday supposed to be a day for rest?

I get asked so many times if I’m Christian in Korea. It’s overwhelming. I know there’s persecuted Christians all over the world. But in Korea it’s far braver to admit to not being Christian.

I met a man last week who wrote a very large tome on American history. The man’s never been to America, and doesn’t even speak English. Since the book’s in Korean, I can’t imagine what it says, but it does strike me as very funny. The things that people write about. I wonder how many people all over the world are enrolled in American studies programs.

In the Korean apartments I’ve visited, the males all wear something like a Lacoste or Arnold Palmer golf shirts. And I’ve seen so many indoor putting mats in the various places.

In Korea, you can go to a photocopy place, and get a whole book photocopied and bound. I noticed this when I was teaching a student the other day — she had two copies of John Gray’s Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus. The books looked like publisher’s promo copies. Apparently, she’d had 4 photocopies made.

Apparently, despite the number of practicing Christians in Korea, intellectual property laws hold no sway.

Recently, I’ve accepted an offer for a job in Japan that begins in September. I think there’s little possibility for an active double life in Korea. The biggest difference between Korea and Japan I can locate lies in personal space. In Japan, so much is open-ended and vague, and nothing requires explanation. If you’ve got something to mask, then Japan is definitely the place to do it.

And I think back to Siddartha. This spiritual life, the double life. Could I live like that?

For better or worse, I’ve begun to imagine myself as something like a Somerset Maugham, or at least the writer character of Razor’s Edge, the link between the misanthropes and the society people, the one who can’t belong to either group, but the one that is the only link between these groups that don’t associate with each other.

The beauty of Korean English. I bought a can of Ceylon ice tea — “The Dream of Tea” is the logo. The caption on the can reads:

“Ceylon tea. Now dream of Tea is distilled each pure water drop a tear of joy. A vision of paradise for men lost in their dreams. Sailing the Indian Ocean towards new horizons. Ceylon tea.”

As far as I know, the Indian Ocean doesn’t even exist. It’s just a joke played by the globe. A misprint.

I discovered something today about Seoul Tower. As I’ve already told you, Seoul is a huge city broken up by mountains, so you sometimes lost sight of the size. Every city has its tower, and I’d always seen Seoul Tower on the other side of a mountain. From whereever I am in the city, I can see Seoul Tower just popping its head over the other side of the mountain. A trick of perspective I’ve discovered. The tower is actually not more than 30 or 40 metres high. It’s actually built on top of the mountain, which is why I never saw the base of it until today, when I took a creative jogging route that led me to the top.

From the top of the mountain, Seoul looked indescribably brilliant. Constellations of apartment buildings as indistinguishable as stars in the sky. Housing blocks with multi-colored roofs that seemed like tile floors. The outer edges of the city dissipating into invisibility caused by smog.

I located the Seoul division of the Fight Club along this jogging route. Somewhere along the mountainous paths, there’s this brilliant little park with chin-up bars, abdominal equipment, and a bench press set-up. I’m training now, cause I know if I don’t get in shape now, then I’ll never get in shape. Since I’m not Korean, I’m not required to spend the two years in the army — however, that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to meet the same physical requirements that is expected of a Korean soldier. I don’t expect special treatment simply because I’m not Korean.

Eyes drink, cause they’re moist.

I watched a drunk guy stumbling in the streets, and it was funny because he was clutching to a book. It’s funny when you’re so drunk you can’t even distinguish the type. I’ve enjoyed so many classics under these conditions.

On the subject of Christians in Korea — are you aware of the strange phenomenon that 25% of Koreans go to church? The Seoul skyline is littered with replicated apartment buildings with huge numbers on the side, and in between huge neon crosses rise up from every available pocket. But instead of sweeping it away, Christianity builds itself on top of Confucianism — so, you couldn’t imagine a more binding culture. Japanese sometimes asked me if I was Christian out of curiousity — in Korea, I get asked so often, but it seems to be a test. I think, in Korea, the social pressures of Confucianism force people into Christianity. Someone told me that Japan was like America in the 1950s — I couldn’t see their point, but I would say this is true for Korea. A place which is definitely still pre-post-modernity. The belief in the American dream is strong — the Protestant work ethic competes with the fast dollar in an economy where all that is solid melts into air.

I read this hilarious thing in a Seoul tourist magazine — about how the local people enjoy walking along the beautiful banks of the Han River, enjoy the architecture, and drink directly from the river. If you could actually see that the river banks are a wasteland of dirt and construction, and that the river is spanned by huge, rusty bridges.

Eyes get especially moist, when dirt gets caught.