Introduction to the Series
Between-Bird Clock and Outside Bird Shadow are not a twisted retrospect, but a work-journal that looks at daily life through doorways (문間) where the sun comes in.
It began when she joined Spine's Exterior Diary Club, and was produced as a limited edition of 100 cylinder-bound books.
(3/30)
Dori-tori, Kuku
On the first day after the frantically busy Jeju Book Fair came to an end, I was invited by architecture-studio director Eunji to a combined dinner and afterparty with the people I'd ended up sharing lodging with. Among the twelve of us: members of Gongbujung — a study group looking into the histories of Jeju and Okinawa through the keyword "diaspora" — someone from Satellite+82, a designer who lives in Mapo-gu, someone from the Tokyo bookstore Popotamu, someone from the publisher Loneliness Books, and Abe Taeko, the writer of You Are My Knit. After the meal, we went for shaved ice at a dessert place called Papalagi.
There, we split into two tables of six. At our table, a small disagreement broke out between Eunji, a member of Gongbujung, and Obayashi-san, the owner of Popotamu. Eunji had always believed the bird drawn on a clock she'd received from Obayashi-san was a cuckoo — but it turned out that in Japan, the bird that is called "cuckoo" inside a clock is a dove. For everyone else at the table, the bird became, like Schrödinger's cat — alive or dead only once you check — an unanswerable question: is it a cuckoo? A dove? Kankou kana (カッコウかな)? Hato kana (ハトかな)? No one could say. In this time of the between, before the bird is observed, its identity can't be confirmed — so it exists as something that could be either cuckoo or dove. And at the same time, it is a cuckoo to Eunji, and a dove to Obayashi-san.
The cuckoo clock is presumed to have been developed in the 1650s, and its initial maker is unknown. In the 1850s, in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) region of southwestern Germany, the clock's mechanism is said to have undergone a great deal of development and refinement. Because the cuckoo dislikes cold and has the habit of flying to Africa in winter and returning in spring, it became a symbol of spring in Europe.
In Japanese, the cuckoo is called kankodori (閑古鳥), and just as Korean has the expression "only flies are flying" for an empty, customer-less shop, the phrase kankodori ga naku (閑古鳥が鳴く, "the kankodori cries") represents a recession — the image of a shop so quiet you can hear birdsong. Because this was bad for sales, the cuckoo's "cuckoo" cry was disguised as a "koo-koo" sound, and from the 1930s the cuckoo became a dove. That dove-cuckoo went through mass production in Japan in the 1970s, then was mass-produced in Korean factories in the 1980s as well — and that is the story of how the cuckoo became a dove, and then became a cuckoo again.
In Korea, "Cuckoo" is also the sound a rice cooker makes when it announces the rice has cooked well,⁶ and it can refer to the empty boasting a man throws out to seem bigger than he is when he feels sexual interest in someone. Koo-koo, he flies a cuckoo. The cuckoo flies off. Koo-koo, its call comes flying in and leaves a kiss-mark on your forehead. The cuckoo also pushes out and breaks the eggs already in another bird's nest, secretly lays its own egg there instead, and flies off to a warmer country before the cold sets in — search "baby cuckoo" and you'll often find photos of a much smaller bird feeding an oversized chick.
Looking at the lively doves that live by the sea or in the mountains, I find myself thinking that the listless way Seoul's pigeons stay glued to the ground might be them imitating city people. Magpies flew overhead, bird drawings covered the pavement in downtown Jeju City, and as bird talk kept circling endlessly among us, Myeong-gyu — in charge of planning that day's itinerary — brought up a question: did you know why there were suddenly so many white doves around the time of the '88 Olympics?
He told us: there weren't originally many white doves in Seoul, but a great number were caught and brought in from somewhere to stage the scene of doves being released as a symbol of peace — and then, the moment the Olympic flame was lit right after the release, some of the birds caught fire. To live peacefully somewhere, then get captured for a brief staged scene and end up burned into yakitori — being made into a symbol of something really does seem dangerous. White can mean white people's power just as easily as it can mean peace, so dressing up any color in ideology is a foolish thing to do.
White is the white of paper, black is the black of ink. My heart? Colorful.
All this bird talk had actually started earlier, before we got in the taxi to Papalagi, when Obayashi-san brought up the fact that Jeju Island originally had no magpies at all. As the story goes, in 1989 someone brought fifty pairs of magpies to the island, and since they had no natural predators there, their numbers exploded. Sensing that "Papalagi" might itself be a bird's name, I looked it up — it turned out to be a word that Tuiavii, a chief of the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific, used in his own language for white people or outsiders.
In Japan, an old man who behaves like a baby despite his age is called Konaki-jijii (子泣き爺, "crying-child old man") — the story goes that if you take pity on an old man crying by the mountain road and pick him up, he suddenly becomes heavy, and even if you try to put him down, he clings on and won't let go until he's taken your life. In Korean, he's called the "Waa Grandpa," and Korea has a similar folktale involving a woodcutter. The monsters of East Asian folktales reveal the psychological dimensions each culture finds hard to speak about directly.
When I scrunched up my face and said "Konaki-jijii" out loud, Obayashi-san and Abe-san burst out laughing, while everyone else, not knowing what it meant, just shook their heads, dori-dori (⿃とり).
(3/31)
List of things finished on a day I forgot to journal
1. Wrote up and submitted the move-in contract to the building management office
2. Sent two parcels to stock books at a bookstore; stopped at a convenience store, then went back to the post office
3. Observed my inner state, returning to a neighborhood I used to live for the first time in a year and a half
4. Delivered books to Pieces Home, a ceramics studio in front of Hyochang Park, and chatted for a while
5. Submitted an application for the Literature Translation Institute’s sample/scenario program
6. Filled in cooking at Eiko’s restaurant, since she can’t use her right arm because of a herniated disc
7. Nagged her not to lift anything heavy or smoke while recovering
8. Ate yakitori and had a beer, in the name of cultivating a generous heart
9. Paid back money I’d received as a Seoul city grant — confirmed half of it still remains
10. Replied that I’d forgotten I was supposed to go pick up the knife I’d left behind at the Korean restaurant where I got let go last week
(4/1)
A diary entry written on the move
I'm on my way back from an interview for a writer-in-residence position at the Kim Su-yeong Literature Museum in Dobong-gu. At another place I'd applied to, the Yongsan Library, I mistook a routine notification text for a first-round pass notice, and ended up calling — before any results had even been announced — to ask if the interview time could be scheduled around my work hours. After getting a text two days ago saying I'd failed the first round, I asked whether that question had caused a problem, but there was no way an administrator was going to give me an honest answer. Watching how the interview at the other place actually proceeded afterward, I became certain that adjusting the interview time would never have been possible there either.
While reading Kim Hyesoon's poetics, recommended to me by a beloved senior (sunbae) who first opened up the world of poetry for me, I naturally became interested in the poet Kim Su-yeong. Here was someone born a hundred years ago, who only learned to write in Korean — his second language and yet his mother tongue — once he'd grown into a young man after the period of Japanese colonial rule, and his thinking about the possibilities and limits of language, about love and freedom, turns out to be far more radical than that of most people living alongside us today who work with language. I think this is exactly what should be called Contemporaneity. Contemporaneity is the frontline that moves time forward.
The idea that we, today, are ahead simply because we stand on the foundation of those who have already passed away, is mostly just an illusion — just as I myself am not always a better person than I was before. Ariane tells me that if I stop my analysis, I'll still be stuck on the same problem a month from now, and even a year from now. I sit quietly with that, doubting it, while also thinking about how the people I've watched for nearly twenty years now have stayed trapped inside the same narrative-spell about themselves.
What is it that moves us forward?