(4/2)

When it comes to luck, a day is too short and a week is just right

It's interesting that the French word for diary is journal intime which makes it fun to think about the opposite: journal extérieur, dehors, and so on. In Korean, a diary is something you write day by day, so the only opposites you can imagine are writing less frequently, or in shorter or broader intervals and there isn't much else. While reading Yuka Ishii's horoscope column, I found myself thinking: when it comes to luck, a day is too short to expect anything from, and a week feels about right. Year-long or three-year plans are nice because you can imagine far into the distance all at once, but perhaps because the span of time is so grand, somehow you forget them almost immediately.

Not yet in the habit of it, I find myself writing my diary not before sleep but only after a full day has passed, looking back at yesterday. Once morning comes, the previous day doesn't come back easily, and writing becomes a struggle. To review my day, I refer to my calendar notes.

10:30 Received a phone call — I got in
11:30 Rode my bike out
12:00 Celebrated with sweet-and-sour pork and gan-jjajang —27,
13:00 Read A Midsummer Night's Dream, marveled at its modernity
15:00 Wrote emails, started cleaning, organized the bookshelf
20:00 Feeling a cold coming on — went out for a bowl of gukbap — 10,

(4/3)

One’s own existence seeps through in one’s speech

From last December through mid-March, I spent my time in the house across from my parents' place in Busan. The closer I got to home, the more incapable of doing anything I became; I experienced the most intense symptoms I've ever had in my life. Inside the walls where my voice originates, I felt something sharp stabbing at my throat, as if thousands of birds were pecking from within. Swallowing what you have to say is this dangerous. But is the throat the trachea or the esophagus?

The idea that the further you move from your origins, the better you come to know yourself must mean that when you gain enough distance from your mother tongue, a gap opens up: a space where you can convert into language the silence that lies between your existence and language itself. Like how a camera lens pressed too close against its subject sees nothing at all. Perhaps when French writers, one after another, attempted exterior diaries, it was around the moment they realized their own existence was already seeping through in their speech and so they tried their hand at a wordplay on the word diary. These attempts bring to mind Lacan's concept of extimité.

At the same time, external forms shape our interior. The screen on which I write, the size of the paper, the landscapes I look at every day are already forming the shape of my mind. When my symptoms are at their worst, if what I face is nothing —nothingness— could I capture the contour of infinity in my writing? I've given the name narrative-real to the kind of writing I've been exploring.

Writing my diary in the evening, I discovered that reviewing my day without waiting until the next morning feels unfamiliar to me. My calendar juggles plans and execution like a juggler, toggling between the two many times a day; it also doubles as a household ledger. Time on the calendar is divided into thirty-minute intervals, meaning that it is closer to approximate than to precise. Writing always gathers speed.

(4/4)

A diary written in the morning, trying to look away from the concept of diary

Just once in my life, a day I began without a single thought, in Angoulême. I had gone to a market that opens only a few times a week to buy vegetables, when at a five-way intersection, with a wide-open road stretching out right before my eyes, I felt I had reached a dead end. The sensation of having arrived somewhere from which one more step forward would be the complete outside, facing a road that opened endlessly ahead, and yet not knowing how to leave. The day I first encountered this feeling of having touched the very edge of existence.

The windows and thresholds that appear so regularly in French literature are perhaps markers erected to declare that something can only be called art when you step outside of yourself, and only be called love when you love another who is not yourself.

If you were to shed the tendency to assign greater value to what is connected to you, then perhaps art and love have yet to arrive in the language of the country where I was born and raised. How popular a work becomes has nothing to do with its vitality. Consider, briefly, that the most dated thing is last year's trend. But this statement should be forbidden to those who have never once tried to be stylish.

Attachment blinds people. Those too close to a parent or a language tend to see things happening right before their eyes and yet not see them, constantly reshaping reality to fit their own inclinations. Like children who think their own mothers are the most beautiful, when I stand before people who unconditionally praise whatever is connected to them, a person or a project, I'm at a loss for how to respond.

At the same time, I admire those who, when something society calls a scandal occurs, are able to take their friend's side regardless of the circumstances. It might sound like the opposite, but both require the same watery capacity, which is the flexibility to absorb personal loss, or to think independently from the group. If you begin to count how many people write in praise of their own factions to protect their own interests, you may soon find that nearly everything around you is exactly this.

The more one pledges loyalty to the power structure of the patriarchal system, the more one finds unattractive anything that doesn't resemble one's own father. Likewise, using attachment to one's mother as a standard of judgment places an opaque veil of fantasy over our eyes. I know mixing languages bothers people — and that is precisely the intent — this norm and that norm... both dull.

There are words that entered from outside, even more so than when I was learning English or French as second and third languages. The word jeong-rip (“establishment," "systematization") was added to my writing by Mirae, who was my editor when I wrote my first essay. The rough, foreign feel of that word is still vivid, like reading a translation. Being unable to settle and stay in place may be my weakness. But Lispector wrote that having a shell is humiliation. If existence is the flesh and the words and images that define me are the shell, then I want to be like a haenyeo, skilled both at diving and at cracking open shells. Ideally, I want to do both well.

(4/5)

Yesterday’s diary

When I think of what a diary looks like, two diaries come to mind. One is Daniel Pennac's Journal d'un corps, and the other is Virginia Woolf's diary. In Journal d'un corps, Pennac records without reserve the moments when his body fails sexually, and by social standards. This stands in vivid contrast to the paranoid writing of Korean male authors, who don't merely fail to record their sexual failures but actively erase them from their own narratives. It is suffocating to live everyday life in a society where you can freely read a book like this alongside people who receive those same passages as insults.

Woolf's diary was recommended to me a few years ago by Ariane, with the suggestion that I read it in light of Woolf's life following the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. I recently learned, through the poet Park Chamsae, that Woolf's diary also reveals the meticulous process by which she conceived her work, which has made it all the more interesting. This reinforces my growing conviction that there is no need to read the work of writers who pass off information received from others as their own thoughts, or who live lives entirely at odds with what they write.

In the past, I used to feel guilty about reading a writer's diary, which is a text not intended to be seen by others. Having repeatedly encountered writers whose public and private selves are so thoroughly at odds, I now feel that reading a diary full of confessions the writer never imagined would be seen is the better option. But these days, even writing in diary form, people write, already conscious of the audience who will attend their funeral, which is why perhaps diary became an extinct form… With no space left for the self that exists outside of others' gazes, writing a diary — long considered trivial and personal — has become almost an act of resistance. But then again, how many dead writers actually didn't know their diaries would be made public? Looking at Kafka, who spent his time writing letters to his friends asking them to burn all his letters and diaries instead of simply burning them himself...

Since COVID, I feel the social repression encoded in language growing ever stronger and more conservative. I dislike that people process things internally in order to prove their own moral rectitude.

On moving day, while I was impressed by the real estate agent's ability to smooth over any situation, he put a call to the building management office on speakerphone to fill out some paperwork . Back came a response in the characteristically hierarchical tone of an older man holding a position without social prestige: if we were moving in, both the landlord and I, the tenant, were to come that very day, show our faces, and sign the paperwork in person. As of now, it was his lunch break, so only after he had finished eating. At that moment, the landlady — who didn't want to wait — made an instinctive and impressive move: she took the phone out of the real estate agent's hand and handed it to her husband, who was sitting on the sofa at the back of the room.

What happened the moment the presumably seventy-something man said annyeonghaseumnikkka!(“Hello!”) in the voice of an aged father was almost magical; the stern manager's voice immediately went meek as a rained-on dog, and his unilateral, dictatorial manner vanished in an instant. I was so astonished I said:

This seemed to please the landlord; the landlady's plan backfired and the landlord now wanted to go in person and leave his face and voice with the building manager like an official seal. The real estate agent advised him this really wasn't necessary, but the landlord deployed the weapon all fathers have — silence — and got his way. Suppressing laughter the whole time, all of us trooped together to the building management office. The manager had already left for lunch.