A Greater Music (13 page)

It was a misty morning in early spring, the sky's uniform gray seeming to have become a constant presence in our lives. In the yard belonging to the apartment block, the caretaker's dog was running through the damp grass. Now that we were further into spring, the green light preserved by the woods, the cemetery, the park, and the trees no longer seemed to portend anything in particular. We didn't speak of other things; of Erich, that is, or the future. M seemed depressed. Perhaps it was the fault of the hospital, a place to which M was naturally averse. She'd had her hair cut short during her convalescence, and had taken to wearing a large black hat at all times, refusing to take it off even inside. The slope of her shoulders appeared ever so slightly asymmetrical below its brim. I carried the dining table-cum-desk over to the window and we sat there to drink our tea. M asked when I would be leaving; in two weeks, I replied. She didn't ask when I would be coming back. Instead, she fretted about my accident, when I'd fallen into the water. At the time, when I fell in, I'd felt sure I was going to die, and it still feels like a strange twist of fate that I didn't. It could so easily have proved fatal. I remembered almost nothing about the accident, so was unable to explain to M how such a
thing could have happened. M didn't stay long. We were together for an hour and a half, but in all that time we barely spoke, just sat and listened to Mendelssohn. The window looked down onto the paved road, still blanketed with unmelted snow, the yard where the dog tracked back and forth, the bicycle fastened to the iron railing. Rather than destroying the silence inside the house, Mendelssohn's string quartet seemed to exist alongside it. We'd said all we had to say to each other, we'd drunk all the tea, and then the music came to an end. We turned to look at each other as the last notes died away, as though the kitchen was a concert hall, and we were both making sure that the other was ready to get up and leave. M's gaze was steady and direct, without the slightest hint of equivocation. I would have avoided her eyes if I could, but they held me against my will. Looking back on it now, describing those moments when I was unable to tear myself away from M's gaze, I can speak with perfect detachment, even coldly, about how dark and hot it was, stupefying the senses, about that feeling of being deep underwater, cut off, isolated from the world above the surface. Uncompromising, fearless. But there was something else written in M's eyes that day. She was ashamed; ashamed of the crude, underhanded way she'd contributed to ending our relationship, of how, nevertheless, I was the one who'd made a clean break of it, while she found herself unable to let go. That petty sense of shame was the reason M didn't let a single word pass her lips about all that had gone between us, the hope and happiness we'd once shared. She'd overcome it sufficiently to be able to visit me, but it was clearly distressing her the whole time we were together—ashamed of her shame, just as I'd been of mine. It prevented us from being friends, or even strangers. A slave, then, or perhaps just a lookout, a gardener, but no, even that was beyond us. What I saw in M's eyes was blame, anger, disappointment, and worse than all that, the
final gestures of despair. I only wish I could say otherwise. When she eventually turned to say goodbye I saw a faint strain of hope materialize in that admixture, a pitiful, weak, selfish kind of hope whose very existence M seemed intending to refute through the cold set of her jaw and the firm line of her mouth. I can't be sure any more, but it's possible that M would have perceived that same hope in my eyes. But though our hands trembled and our ears seemed to pick up the sound of our hearts breaking, not as a clean crack but as a wrenching of fibers, there was still that unaccountable shame over the love that had once existed between us, the fact of this existence now uncomfortably indelible, making the future seem filled with fearful portents. The news came on the radio. M got up from her seat and picked up her crutches and we said a brief goodbye, like people who know they'll be seeing each other again in a few days. I offered to help her to the front door, but she refused. The door closed and left me standing in the hallway, listening to the clumsy, irregular tap of M's crutches as she slowly descended the steps.

If only M had taught me music rather than language. If only I'd been able to perform in front of her, a long stage recital of some string piece I'd learned. If our conversations had revolved around music, rather than language, then I might never have learned anything about her, or the opposite, ended up knowing everything there was to know. She would have been either utterly beyond my grasp, or utterly my possession. The language through which we attempted knowledge of each other was a mere dialect, a mimetic representation of the two entities that were M and myself. Our relationship's reliance on language meant that “I” came to bear less and less resemblance to me, while “M” grew progressively further from M. Had music been our sole means of communication,
perhaps things would have turned out differently. The act of its dedication does nothing to music; the music itself remains unchanged. Its value isn't something that can be paid in any other coin, not even with the name of a king. Its blanket forgiveness of human faults is a product of the perfect disregard in which it holds these mere mortals, the immeasurable distance by which it exceeds the minor compass of their lives. Music materializes within these lives, within that roiling mass of pettiness and hunger, greed and want, while at the same time remaining outside, able to fix them with an objective gaze. Or gaze, perhaps, beyond them. “Listening to music” is a rather limited way of describing that self-beholding which human beings can only achieve through the medium of music. Representation—this, after all, is what language and music have in common. Music, though, cannot say all; or even, in fact, anything. Its lips are sealed. Understanding music is not a gradual process. And yet, all of this gets collapsed into that trite expression “listening to music.” As M said to me, that time in my rented flat with her own gaze holding me rapt, “Music is the one thing which, of all humans' so-called ‘creations,' will never belong to them.”

10)
As time passed, two opposing desires began to form within me. The first was to carry on as I was, with only my work to occupy my solitary days. I was constantly talking to myself, while I read, while I wrote, while I listened to music, which did away with any need for a social life. It wasn't as though I'd deliberately cloistered myself away when I first came back to Korea, it was simply that I'd lost interest in those acquaintances from my former life. This was a shame, but not something I made any attempt to conceal, so old friends began to distance themselves, leaving me isolated. I was perfectly happy with this state
of affairs. One day I went to the movies with Sumi. The name of the film isn't important, all that matters is that I found it nauseating—not just the film itself, but the whole experience. Even if it had been one of those especially “high-brow” features that do away with all frivolity, coming across as profound and meditative, I doubt whether my reaction would have been any different. Admittedly, the horror I felt as we stood outside the theater wasn't really all that severe, but I couldn't just shrug it off as I would have done in the past, or even put up a fight against it. Of the hordes of people milling around in twos and threes, some were chattering away to their friends, punctuating their conversation with lively gesticulations; others wore smiles of quiet anticipation; others still were stony-faced, their carefully calculated expressions of boredom designed to convey that they had come to see this film quite against their will, that they preferred films of an altogether higher caliber, and though they might fritter away a little time or money on a film like the one they were about to watch, there was absolutely no way they were going to waste any of their precious seriousness on it. Those at the front of the line were being already sucked in to the theater's black interior, but the line still stretched quite a way back, possibly all the way to the nearby subway station. It was strange, but for me there was something deeply unsettling about this long line of people all heading in the same direction. I'd had a similar feeling at other times, and equally keenly, but the incongruity of having it prompted by a theater line, of all things, made it seem ridiculously out of proportion. Even I found something suspicious about it, something stubborn and inexplicable. But I still couldn't shake that sense of unpleasantness. If anything, it was getting stronger. The people in the line weren't pushing and shoving, there was nothing rude in their behavior, nothing repugnant in their appearance, more like the opposite, in fact; their
outfits looked perfectly innocuous, and their faces were wreathed in smiles. They were entirely ordinary moviegoers. If it was the case that crowds are always repugnant in and of themselves, then that unpleasantness would have been felt by everyone there, who were as much a part of the crowd as I was. After all, in a huge metropolis like Seoul, it often feels like we're all just a part of one gigantic crowd. But the issue wasn't simply one of quantity. The regimented forward movement, all buoyed by a single aim; the air of anticipation generated by the crowd's volubility; the bright skies and warm sunlight, the neat orderliness of the paving slabs, the smooth-contoured splendor of the building which housed the theater; the fact that this mass convergence of humanity, though an anomaly, still gave off such a luster of organization; the way the film was drawing this crowd toward itself, its influence akin to the way the laws of physics act on dust particles, causing them to coalesce into a single mass; the tempting, honeyed nature of this crowd; these scenes which struck the eye as so ordinary, so animated, so innocent; all of this taken as a whole was so repellent, so frivolous, so unbearably ugly, that it actually caused me physical pain, proof that coming here had been a terrible mistake. Rather than dissipating over the course of the film, this feeling gradually rose to a peak. The images that unfolded on-screen, designed to seem so attractive and tasteful; the impassioned performances, the actors working to convey the very extremes of emotion; the shadowy figures of the audience; the consistent flow of the plot, which never once deviated from the predictable norm; the stultifyingly conventional use of time; the world of the screen, so far removed from that of the written word, its obsessive focus on detail an apparent attempt at exhaustive realism, a realism determined to depict everything “just as it is”; and people, too many people, all those people it aimed to please with its blatant nods and knowing
asides; the experience of actively colluding in the production of a kind of groupthink, one whose existence nevertheless depends entirely on this same collective consciousness, without which it could never have come into being. I sat there, one of the crowd, struggling to think of a convincing explanation as to why all these things which, in the past, would have filtered straight through me and disappeared without a trace, without any of this excessive repugnance, now felt as stomach-turning as being ambushed in the street and pelted with sewage. But I just couldn't talk myself out of it. I couldn't laugh at the obvious puns, or the witty repartee cleverly inserted at points where the film might otherwise have threatened to become tedious. Even the big final twist, the hallmark of this particular director, did nothing for me. It was all too repulsive, and I quickly became incredibly distressed. The ordinary enjoyment of ordinary people, their means of entertainment, the minutiae of their daily lives, had seemed like nothing so much as a terrible injustice. “Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun . . .”

To a certain extent, Sumi was aware of how the film was affecting me. I clearly hadn't enjoyed myself, at least—I'd sat in silence the whole time, hadn't laughed or even smiled. But she was patient with me. When she'd suggested the trip to the movies and asked what kind of film I'd like to see, I'd told her I didn't care. Now, she apologized for choosing a film that seemed to have bored me, though of course none of it was her fault. I explained that it didn't really matter either way whether the film was boring or not, and that I hadn't actually found this one particularly tedious, it was simply an unbearable celebration of the conventional, a sickening aestheticization of conventional values whose display, moreover, seemed to form the film's entire basis, and in such a blatant fashion it couldn't help but feel degrading, and finally, that I found it
difficult being here, swelling the ranks of the audience for something so flagrantly crass.

Sumi told me I was strange. Rather than agreeing with what I'd said or trying to refute it outright, her chief concern seemed to be bringing me around to her own opinion.

“I'm really sorry if you didn't like the film, but it's not exactly my thing either, you know. I just thought, well, the students are all raving about it, so let's go. If you have that kind of mindset then you can just take it for what it is and not get too serious about it. Films, love, youth—these kinds of things are always going to be ‘conventional,' as you put it. Coming to see something conventional, and then complaining that it's conventional, well, isn't that a bit strange?”

“Well, I don't mean that the film itself was particularly, unexpectedly, excessively conventional. What I'm trying to get at, what bothers me, is the whole experience, the event, all these people gathering en masse to have a certain collective image instilled in them, before they all file back out of the building. Somehow I feel damaged by it, though of course that's not your fault, you've done absolutely nothing wrong, so please don't think that's what I'm trying to say. I hope you'll forgive me if I can't explain it properly.”

Sumi just sat there and stared at me for a few moments. I was perfectly aware that the film hadn't meant anything special for her. She'd simply wanted a bit of light relaxation, and done nothing more egregious than choose a film that she could sit back and take in with perfect, passive indifference. I would never have said anything about it if she hadn't asked. Now, I couldn't help but worry that I'd made it sound like I was just in a bad mood, my obstinacy no more than the whim of a fractious child. I really hoped I hadn't hurt Sumi, and that my brief explanation had put an end to the whole subject, whether or not it had really succeeded in helping
her understand my position. But if she demanded a further explanation then I'd have no choice but to give in, even it meant the risk of digging myself even further into a hole. Otherwise she might end up misunderstanding me completely.