Vaseline Buddha by Jung Young Moon

Author:Jung Young Moon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941920350
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2016-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

My favorite moments from travels are those that stir or grasp my heart in gentle but strong ways, which make it possible for me to go on traveling. And the things that happen at such moments are actually nothing at all, things that come to light only through those moments, after which they vanish almost without a trace, but remain etched in my subconscious mind, and are in fact more like ordinary things.

A long time ago, I went to Rome, and after checking into a hotel near the Rome Central Station, from which the Colosseum could be seen—I’d wandered around downtown Rome for a couple of days, but I hadn’t felt much of anything—I stayed cooped up in the hotel room for three days, regretting that I’d come to Rome without a particular reason. I spent a long time lying still on the neatly made bed, without unpacking my suitcase or taking my coat off, glaring at a shoddy little replica of the ancient Roman Colosseum on the desk in the room. I wasn’t sure what I was doing in Rome, a city of ancient historical sites. Generally, when I was doing perfectly nothing at all, I felt as if I had at least a little idea of I was doing, but that wasn’t really the case then. So I thought that doing or not doing something when it didn’t matter what you did was certainly different from doing something when you had to do it, a thought that made me wonder if I was thinking right, and I thought that there was everything I needed there, with nothing that wasn’t there, and thinking that it didn’t really make sense, I went to the Colosseum in the middle of the night and saw stray cats roaming around, and left Rome as if to flee from them.

And I went to New York for several days one cold winter and stayed in the hotel room for most of my time there, and at that time, too, I wasn’t sure why I had come to New York and what I wanted there. Feeling a certain kind of comfort in a hotel room that was cleaned every day, removing of all traces of the person who had stayed there the night before, and in which a neutral world of objects was maintained, regardless of the distinctive or indistinctive nature of the room, I took note of what difference that was there, if any, between the perplexity you feel in everyday life and the perplexity you feel in a somewhat unfamiliar place, and dared not go outside, trying to decide if I should plunge uncomfortably or willingly into the somewhat new feeling of perplexity. And I was led to contemplate a thought that wasn’t new at all, that the perplexity was a result of the boredom that arises from a vague state in which you don’t know what to do, and the awkwardness that arises from a state so comfortable that it makes you shudder.

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