Thoughts from Hangaram

If language is a proxy for our thoughts, it is surely a metaphor. And if language can be a platform for ideas to flourish, arts is a manifestation of those ideas. But I guess it is difficult to assume that it is one directional – thoughts  languages  arts. Maybe these relationships are like a spiral effect or kind of like a pinball effect, where nothing is quite linear. What seems clear is that, in the 1920s, literary figures such as Apollinaire and Andre Breton founded surrealism in Paris, a movement that inspired many other writers and artists to follow, which, to this day, has stoked the fire of avant-garde spirit. The crux of surrealism is that it is anti-reason. It defies stagnation or tradition. It attempts to tap into the emotions or visceral aspects of human beings. What is nebulous – like those seen or felt in dreams – can come alive in stark formations in our reality. 

These thoughts emerged once again when I now think about the exhibition that I attended a few years ago during the pandemic. I took a bunch of photographs at the time, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Going through these photos now, I can now relive the moment and conceptualize how these artworks stimulated my senses. 

At the Hangaram Art Center in Seoul, I wasn’t so sure about seeing the collection on tour, a masterpiece collection on loan by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen for a couple of months. I figured that there would be only a handful of “great” artworks and most quality pieces would be left in Europe. But I realized that I was wrong….and more on this point later. Trying to beat the crowd, I got there in crisp November, but unfortunately a throng of college students or 20-something women were eager to get in through the door. At the time, Covid-19 cases were surging, but that didn’t deter the crowd from enjoying a visual feast for their eyes.

To my untrained eye, aside from Dali, I wasn’t familiar with other names, which gave me incentive to fish around for their works later. Among the three artists, however, I was surprised to see that Dali’s paintings – some on wooden panels and others on canvases – ranged in such great variety. Also, his work spanned from the early 1920s to 1970s. What got me was his detailed brushwork. Many of his subjects/objects on the panel or canvas weren’t decipherable, but they were completed with such care and detail that they can come across like realism. But the whole point of surrealism is that those dream-like images should be as realistic as possible so it would be pointless to paint such images in staccatos of blur. 

But returning to the point about how language is a sort of metaphor, it is possible for an artwork to be entirely incomprehensive to logic. If language is incomprehensible to people who cannot speak that language, why is it impossible for an artwork to be incomprehensible? After all, we will pass on at some point in our lives, not ever knowing some several hundred languages in the world. Many of them have already disappeared from the planet because of decimation of rain forests and marginalization of tribal people somewhere in the deep jungles of Africa and South America continents. Even in China, many dialects are slowly disappearing due to political campaign to “unify” the country. If uniformity should triumph, there is no need for arts. The fact that we can feel or see something different, and how we can process these emotions differently upon each encounter is what probably makes us more human than anything else. We keep revisiting songs, theaters, stories, and galleries. 

Review: “London, 1802”

Again, the summer break is allowing me to take time off from the craze of academics. My English teacher was so adamant about our reading works by some of these renowned poets. Wordsworth, she mentioned, you got to read Wordsworth.

If Wordsworth were alive today, would he invoke the name of another great poet from history, as he had invoked John Milton when he wrote the poem “London” in 1802? I assume that some disenchanted contemporaries would say he would, as the world is seeing stagnation of morals, which surely is deficient in the city that he inhabited back then. What could have been the problems that Wordsworth saw in his day that could have distressed Wordsworth? To long for someone who had died more than a century ago means that Wordsworth had considered many names, but no one could be the exemplar of those virtues like Milton’s. 

First, the poem –

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

In addition to being a poet, Milton was a statesman who fervently advocated for free speech. Ironically, the world today isn’t shy of opinionating. The birth of SNS has allowed people from all spectrums to weigh in on politics and on something as simple as how to apply makeup. I sense that a buffer between people and electronic messaging has allowed people to step out of themselves. And I suppose a few of them are more comfortable just writing down their thoughts instead of standing before a pulpit. 

As for the poem, I read it in two parts. The first, a pessimistic depiction of the then London by Wordsworth. The second, a hope for London’s future with help from Milton. What Wordsworth craves are four ideas – manners, virtue, freedom, and power. Surprisingly, I see some of these in conflict with one another. To have freedom and power may suggest forgoing manners and virtue, at least in the world of the former U.S. President Trump. He had exercised much freedom and power at the office, going back and forth between the two, while throwing both manners and virtue out the window. It is a gargantuan task, then, to embrace them all, to cradle them equally.

The poem’s last two lines impacted me. It reads, “In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart / The lowliest duties on herself did lay.” In Wordsworth’s view, Milton embodies the ideals of both godliness and lowliest (down to earth characteristics), both virtuous in their own ways, to aspire to the ethereal ideals of gods but to be humble and to remain grounded by appreciating and taking on tasks of the mundane.

I imagine that, during the time when Wordsworth wrote the poem, London was seeing the rise of industrialization and everything that could have been vice followed. Greed and disregard for civic goodness must have stung Wordsworth. But if those were the pains of the day, the world is seeing those pains again now, resurrected fully. Corporate and government greed are rampant, as those forces rarely seek the opinions of the working class or the public at large. And, so, it goes. “London, 1802” could be “Seoul, 2024” or “New York, 2024.”  Many of them can be interchangeable. But if there is any ounce of hope, we can pray that, as someone would rise among us, a voice as pure and naked as heaven’s. 

Review: “Chrysanthemums” and “The Things They Carried”

                                                     (confidentwriters.com)

Summer break finally gave me some time to bear down and read short stories that I have put on hold for some time, allowing me time to ponder over human conditions that may not be so foreign to us after all.

In John Steinbeck’s short story “The Chrysanthemums,” Elisa Allen is the hardened and isolated wife of a farmer living in California’s Salinas Valley. The only creative outlet that Elisa can feel proud of is her “planting hands,” which is the talent she has for growing flowers and tending her garden. Ironically, though gardening is her pride and joy and a source of even a “little smugness,” Elisa also manages to bury her femininity and desires with the things she wears and carries as a gardener. However, after an awkward and sexually tense encounter with a nomadic tinkerer who exploits her loneliness and vulnerability, Elisa is finally tempted to get out of her shell—with disastrous consequences that ultimately devastate her confidence and newly acquired sense of herself as a woman. Interestingly, the theme of carrying and then trying to discard the burdens of one’s identity is also explored in Tim O’Brien’s short story about American soldiers during the Vietnam War, “The Things They Carried.” But whereas Elisa actively tries to shed the items that kept her identity hidden from even her own self, the soldiers do the opposite of Elisa: in spite of the heavy equipment and guns they are forced to carry as soldiers, they desperately try to hold onto anything that reminds them of their previous life as a civilian: photographs and letters, good-luck charms, “premium dope,” and memories that somehow weighed more on them than any piece of military gear. 

When the reader is first introduced to Elisa, she is physically encased in the trappings of her passion. She wears a “gardening costume” which makes her figure look “blocked and heavy.” She also wears a “man’s black hat pulled low down over her eyes” and “clodhopper shoes.” Her “figured print dress” is almost completely eclipsed by a “big corduroy apron with four big pockets to hold the snips, the trowel and scratcher, and the knife.” Elisa’s identity as a woman is repressed so that she can function better as a gardener. Moreover, because she lives in an unforgiving environment, Elisa cannot afford to let herself go. At the opening of the story, Steinbeck explicitly makes clear how the “high grey-flannel fog of winter” has “closed off” Elisa’s farm from “all the rest of the world,” covering the valley like a lid over a “closed pot.” Both Elisa and her environment are restricted and contained, unable to fully express their true identity. 

As a result, when Elisa first meets the stranger coming in on his “crazy, loose-jointed wagon,” she can’t help but envy his freedom, his leisurely trip “from Seattle to San Diego and back every year.” Elisa fails to recognize that the man is faking an interest in her flowers to get money out of her, and when he leaves she attempts to shed all of the previous items that informed her asexual identity: the heavy gardening clothes and tools. She symbolically scrubs herself with pumice and notices her body for the first time: “She tightened her stomach and threw out her chest. She turned and looked over her shoulder at her back.” Ironically, however, as Elisa heads into town with her husband, she sees the chrysanthemums that she had given to the man and that the man had callously thrown away on the side of the road. Elisa’s revelation that she had been taken advantage of and that her encounter was a one-sided affair that was of significance only to her reduces her to tears, and she becomes “like an old woman.” 

For the various soldiers that Tim O’Brien profiles in “The Things They Carried,” the weight of their equipment and guns varies with the duties that each soldier has in his unit. However, O’Brien stresses that the weight they carried is not merely physical. “To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump means to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.” For soldiers like Jimmy Cross, then, it is important that they carry the invisible burdens that only they can see, because these burdens are what define them, not the military packs they carry on their back and the weapons they hold by their side. 

When Jimmy Cross’s obsession with Martha contributes to the death of one the soldiers in his unit, Jimmy decides to give up on Martha. “He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach. He loved her but hated her. No more fantasies, he told himself.” In other words, Jimmy forgoes his identity as a boyfriend in order to be a more effective lieutenant. By giving up the one essential thing that he carried with him throughout the war—his memories of Martha—Jimmy kills a part of himself for the good of his unit. Jimmy sheds a psychological weight in order to retain the physical part of his identity, but Elisa sheds a physical weight (the bulky clothes and tools) in order to tap into her sexuality that she has managed to repress so far. However, though both Jimmy and Elisa are guided by different motivations, in the end they both discover that what they have left may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.