Currently Blowing My Mind: Poet Ko Un. . .

The Boy in the Cave


Each and every person’s eyes all shine in the sky.
The sea under the sky
is limpid through and through.
It seems the crying of countless newborn babes can be heard
emerging from the sea
230 feet down
260 feet down
that far down everything can be seen in the sea
limpid
limpid.

Above the sea the sun eventually sets.
It will rise again tomorrow.
Rise
and set again tomorrow.

Ah, the sunset glow over the whole East Sea!

Some hundred miles out from the shore
out in the East Sea’s open sea
amidst
the surging of golden, fire-hued sunset waves,
an island
now
beginning to breathe—
Ulleung Island.

Ulleung Island’s Taeha Cave.

There was a child
born at sunset.
Soon he had grown to be a boy.
Possessed by spirits, he would talk with the stars
when the wind dropped
he kept company with ghosts.
When one fisherman sailed out and failed to return
he comforted his sorrowfully weeping wife:
Your husband’s alive.
No one believed his words.
Nine days later the fisherman came back home alive.

In the evening sunset
spirits invariably came down into the boy’s face.
When night fell he kept company with ghosts.

He’s possessed, they said,
he’s crazy,
and in the end the boy was rejected by the village.
He can’t catch squid, they said,
he can’t row either
all he does is play with the stars
play with ghosts
forgetting errands he’s given
he reads and rereads old books
till they’re worn to shreds
he reads books that are no earthly use
out here in the middle of the sea,
he’s cursed with bad luck, they said
spitting as they spoke.
He was forbidden to go near the racks of drying squid.

His mother grieved.
His father often beat the boy.
Returning late
he’d beat the sleeping boy with a stick.
Finally he turned the boy out of the house, saying:
There’s no place here for any ghosts.
His mother wept as she dressed him in leather clothes.
Surei!
Surei!
My dear little Surei!
She sobbed.

The boy Surei was obliged to live in a dugout high in the hills.
He spent all the summer nights
bitten by gnats
bitten by mosquitoes.

In a dream his deceased grandfather appeared to him.
In his dream
he raised up the reclining Surei.
In his dream the beard, that had been black in his lifetime,
was a white beard reaching down to his breast.

Quick, go into that cavern further up.
There is your place.
There
you’ll find a book to read to your heart’s content.
A book containing tales of your great-grandmother
your great-grandfather
thousands of your ancestors.
A book where some day
will be written tales of tens of thousands of your future descendants.
A book you will have to read without end
is there waiting for you.
Get in there, quickly.

He woke from his dream.
The sea sunset was at its peak!
Gazing out at that blazing sea
that blazing sky
he called out:
Mother!
Mother!
Then he entered the cave his grandfather had indicated in his dream.

The moment he stood before the cave
the boy’s soul changed completely.
Every kind of ghost vanished,
every kind of nonsense was abolished.
He found himself with a quite empty heart,
a quite empty, blank-page soul.
He grew full of memories of tens of thousands of years before
presages of things to come in tens of thousands of future years.
All is limpid beneath the sea.
Surei gained a new soul from the darkness down beneath the sea.

A blind owl flew up above the cliff.

The boy Surei entered the cave.
At first he crawled forward.
Then he began walking.
Bats swarmed past him.
Surei advanced as though someone was guiding him.
He felt no trace of fear or uncertainty.
The familiartity of things new
familiar novelty.

Boom

The space inside the cave reverberated.

Boom
Boom
Boom

In the darkness a bluish light vibrated.

Boom

There was a stone slab
and on the slab a stone book.

Boom

The grandfather he had seen in his dream appeared then vanished.
From that day on young Surei
turned page after page of the stone book
and the cavern resonated
with the sound of his reading.

From that day on, whenever the boy
turned over one by one the heavy pages
one tale after another
passed ponderously over.
The world’s lives
the world’s joys and angers
all the world’s tales
the world’s deaths
tales of all the world’s sentient and insentient beings
one by one all those dew-like stories
one by one all those cloud-like stories
one by one stories
like flowers
like floods
like hurricanes
like breezes
like tears and laughter
so short-lived
so short-lived
and by that shortlivedness avatars of eternal nature one by one
every time he turned a page
passed over, without lingering.

Gradually the pages of the stone book grew lighter
light as butterfly wings
as dragonfly wings,
as leaves that dance as they fall.

The world’s time did not exist inside the cave.
No telling if it was autumn or no
if the winter had come and gone
when all the island cried out and howled
in blizzards
if the next year’s spring had come
if the wild poppies had blossomed and shed their petals
or how many years had passed.

In the outside world
one year went by
another year came
a century ended
another century came
a thousand years passed.

Because of you, this world is full of sunsets,
this world’s long-lasting long stories will never end.
This evening too the stories
of ten thousand lives, of people’s living and dying, will have no end.

At this moment the outside world is in the hair-ruffling wind.

Eternity’s young boy Surei! Eternity’s stone book that knows no end! Stone songs! Stone tales!



. . . . .

From Maninbo [Ten Thousand Lives], volume 30. Copyright Ko Un. Translation copyright 2010 by Brother Anthony and Lee Sang-Wha

more shadows and also scenes from birthday chaos life with surprise cookie at the end

here is a letter to you, dear friends. thank for birthday wishes i am sorry i haven't replied to them yet-- if you in your busy lives have even noticed my lack of reply and lack of presence here on this blog (unlikely!). but here i am back for a brief window of breath and hello! the good news is the thing that has kept me super-busy up to today was the preparation of a teaching portfolio that is the equivalent of a first interview for a full-time teaching job i applied for at the college where i currently teach. it is exciting! also i received the news that i made it to this first tier of interviews last week! and then it was that by today i had to gather and order and contextualize those teaching portfolio materials! and i did manage to send it off today, by the skin of my teeth as per usual, after spending way too much time going through every single sheet of paper i've taught from and graded in the past 5 years. . .f***###!!!!^^@@!!!! actually, it was fun. but i am just slow at these things. i did my best. i did my best. and i was true to who i am as i completed, gathered, and wrote what ended up being a 60-plus page document. . .

on my 34th birthday i went with finn to the natural history museum and met w. & e. there, then went to lunch at delicious fairgrounds;;; and then did pleasurable errands like buying myself a star lamp i've wanted and a caterpillar/butterfly poster and an iowa native plants poster and a good speaker to play music through my computer;;;and a sleepytime cat made by a fabulous grace, and more than all this i feel rich and blessed! to be honest i was afraid this year i would be very sad on my birthday but indeed i was not:::the day in its ordinariness still had the special birthday feel.


here i am doing goddess pose as a shadow:: this is how you should think of me, how i am, at age thirty-four::::::;--;;;;::::::::::

then finn in this next shadow series runs up to me::::;



love of sun on water, sun on water, sun on water, changing things:::::

went to the kid's museum:::finn painted::::he painted a moving castle, which is the only thing he paints, talks, and thinks about:::he murmurs moving castle moving castle (no scary parts!) in his sleep (( howl's moving castle is his favorite movie))

also f & e played at the lego table, so did the mamas, because legos are the funnest:::::::

this is what my bed looked like on my birthday::::notice how new sleepytime cat loves to curl up with sleeptime owl:::::they love each other::::and we all love maira kalman, jon kabat-zinn, anne carson, h.d.& barabara guest and being uncertain as the main quality of our lives:::

the lamp i love::::

birthday room of chaos and strewn-about papers (which matches the surrounding decor of house with strewn-about toys, pee-d in pants and undies, dog pee, fleas, 55ish unread ungraded student papers, book piles, undone dishes with crust, and general pleasing hairiness with dirt salt and snow, perhaps a little more pee or snot, somewhere, and a poop cookie ((as finn said today--not trying to be gross, not even understanding really what grossness is--this was in the midst of our list of other kinds of cookies; we were making a list of cookies as we drove to home ec to get a cookie, dreaming of all the possibles: fig cookies,peanut butter, raspberry, chocolate chip, poop cookies))


and thus ends my letter to you my friends! it is refreshing to write and be back here with you! love blue

shadow-play and snowmelt creek::::::in days that the sun came out, last week. . . .

we discovered so much at hickory hill park, this day last week which was a little window into spring. everyone got excited about spring. . .and then it snowed again, you know, last couple of days. i was going to get myself some tulips, said to myself: i must have some tulips for my birthday. today, went to get myself the belated b-day tulips, and they were a sad sight at our iowa grocery store, let me tell you: browned at the edges, sickly looking. no. instead i got the red berry-like flowers, not sure what they are called. but they are surely a february flower. . .and i was, after all, born in february. as were several amazing new babies, i've heard (welcome rowan! welcome curran! so glad you've arrived safely you little february baby boys!!)::::::


also, finn discovered his shadow in a big way in the park on this day. he really wanted to know where it went to when it was gone. it was interesting to try to explain how light works, and where the sun goes, etc. quite a job, this mothering thing! also yesterday finn put his arm on my lap and said, mama, play with my arm please (usually, it's some little animal that's plopped,and mama, play with this horse, or this dinosaur, please)

the latest in his bath documentary: bath at 2 and a half!

the way we play, lately

we play with hedgehogs in this dollhouse, picked up at a garage sale when finn was a little baby. . .& lately peter and i both add little embellishments; he's been fashioning paper fireplaces, clocks, fridges; i cut out little pieces of blue felt and made quilts, pillows, a rug--

finn is into the animal imaginative play now, so into it. he still plays with his trucks and cars, but now he loads them up with animals. or else he creates characters for them as well, always starting the conversation with something like "hi! are you? I am a car! want mac-n-cheese baby?" (ordino, penguin, cow, hedgehog, etc.) yes and his "how are you" is always missing the "how". . .

affirmations, drawings, creatures [there was a woman so ecstatic her belly was clear and you could see inside it and there were babies in there]

i have found myself recently drawing lots of doodles with babies inside bellies;;; i kind of can't stop. it makes me realize how much i yearn for next baby, if ever there is to be one. not very soon--if ever there will be one--but o, not very soon.

it's okay. here we have winter going on. last night i listened to the show on "being" called "the soul in depression". . . i am going through lots of self-helpy steps towards getting out of mine. it is working! here are some of the results of some of the steps i've been going through--

blizzarded