Collecting Bones, Korea and Korean Literature. Being Part One.

First, I have to admit that this computer teases me. Old number 10 at the PC Bang always starts up trying to load its "Hamachi adapter."

But it always fails and the sushi is never mine!

O cruel fate...

Anyway.. here's the beginning of a 1 to 5 part thing on borders, korea and its literature. 1 is if I get bored. or distracted..

Hey, is that Rain?

OH...
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Dokdo
(From Korea.net)

Somewhere in “Snow Crash” Neal Stephenson notes that, “interesting things happen along borders – transitions – not in the middle where everything is the same.”

Which is, of course, why I am in Korea.

Many years ago I collected skulls.

This began when my mother and sister moved far up into some ridiculous mountains for which they should have been issued lisps, stalks to chew on and banjos to play whilst contemplating the sodomization of lost flatlanders. I would visit, and on one visit – lo and behold – I found the skull of something.

As a suburban lad I was shocked and secretly pleased. I grabbed a stick and used it to carry the skull, which was not entirely cleaned by nature, back to my mother’s house.

People shrugged.

Sheep skull.

Sheep were herded in the meadow I had travelled. At the spot where, beginning to walk up the surrounding slopes, I had found the skull, ecologies collided. Wolves skulked in the trees and any sheep unlucky enough to wander out of the meadow risked a brief and lethal interaction.

Food chain.

Still, I was obscurely proud of having found the skull and began collecting animal bones.

I have also always been a fan of trains. I’ve ridden them, legally and illegally, for years and as an inveterate walker have worked out that they work as something like trails. In even the most rural or urban environments you might expect to find some train tracks to walk on. And so I do. I would find the most interesting things there. The tracks in Soda Springs often contained, between them, the creosote-covered bodies of dead frogs. I never quite figured this one out. I guessed the frogs got between the tracks (there were safe watery havens on each side of the raised tracks) and then, in the mid-day heat, could not quite navigate their ways back out. How they got creosoted is still a mystery to me. It had to have something to do with the trains that passed above their corpses, but I could never tease out the exact thing. Possibly, they were quite aware of the tracks they had to hop and were optimistic about how the whole thing would turn out. Right up til that unfortunate moment the… (“whatever”)…. creosoted them.

I wish I could get some kind of grant to explore this phenomenon.

It occurred to me that the railroad tracks were a condensed microcosm of the meadow and the hills and that what I was seeing was the interactions of the borderlands. On the train-tracks, ecosystems collided on a razor-thin border. Train tracks being one ecology, the three yards on either side of them being the next ecology, and then the “normal” world beyond.
In the big city, where I primarily lived, dogs and cats would die, or be disposed of, on the tracks. Occasionally a school child or drunk would be harvested by trains, but I was never allowed to get close enough to this event to win a skull.

Still, I thought “border” and, less charitably, “food chain.”

When I lived in Newark California I frequently found dead chickens on the tracks. This was a different kind of border. These chickens were losers (Other than the “SuperChicken” animated comic of my youth, I am at a loss to point to many times chickens have been winners). Hispanics in the neighborhood had cock-fights and knew they couldn’t toss chickens out in their garbage or they’d be turned in. So they looked for the next ecosystem and tossed their loser chickens there. Once I found some fish that had been tossed out and had resolved to nothing but their cartilagineous and bony cores. I still have on of those fish on a kind of art-thing that I put on the mantle of any home I inhabit. I think everyone should have a little “Yorick” thing in their homes. Just a reminder.

Then I moved to Korea and found the mother of all borders. A land that had no land – it was all borders.
(continued Monday)