Status Updates From Light and Thread

I found another way to use the mirrors and their light. It’s about taking the light reflected by the mirror and then reflecting it once more. It makes me happy when the light slants across the leaves—a feeling I assume is now a part of human nature itself, the result of evolution shaping us to live symbiotically with plants.

Shouldn’t I be writing things that speak of life, while life yet remains?

I had reached the conclusion that what life I had left held no peace or hope, that everything would only get worse. The strange thing is, the more I worked on the novel, the more I began, gradually, to live. Little by little I could sleep for longer, and over time, the nightmares grew less frequent. How could this be possible, when the novel being written was so full of blood and corpses and bones?

Anyway, routine returns. Every day I read one book of poetry and one novel, to be recharged by a density of sentences.

One thought—a resolution—floats to the top.

I can just write again: another novel. Because that’s the only way to be connected again.

But what am I being connected to, through writing? Is it for that, the thing only writing can connect me to, that I have so readied myself, stripping bare? So the current is not interrupted, catching on some bump of the uneven ego?

I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through her body into my sentences. As if I am sending out an electric current.

When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands.

Where is love?
What is love? (April 1979)

x

Why is the world so violent and painful?
And yet how can the world be this beautiful? (Autumn 2021)

For a long time, I believed that the tension and internal struggle between these sentences was the driving force behind my writing...Had I really only begun asking myself about love—about the pain that links us—after the Korean publication of Human Acts (2014)?

As always, it’s impossible to predict when anything will be completed, but I will go on writing, however slowly. I will move past the books I’ve already written and continue on.

Life seeks to live. Life is warm. To die is to grow cold. To have snow settle over one’s face rather than melt. To kill is to make cold.

Humans in history and humans in the cosmos.
The wind and the ocean currents. The circular flow of water and air that connects the entire world. We are connected. I pray that we are connected.

The book was published nearly seven years after I had dreamed of those black tree stumps, that surging sea. In the notebook I kept while working on that book, I made these notes:

Does love beget pain, and is some pain evidence of love?

Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living?