Praise for Bae Suah
“Bae Suah offers the chance to unknow—to see the everyday afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering.”
—Music & Literature
“With concise, evocative prose, Bae merges the mundane with the strange in a way that leaves the reader fulfilled yet bewildered, pondering how exactly the author managed to pull this all off.”
—_list: Books from Korea
“A compact, personal account of anomie and withdrawal in a time of rapid social and economic change. . . . An easily digested short book that nevertheless feels much very substantial—a very full story. Impressive, and well worthwhile.”
—The Complete Review
“The mystery, like the achievement of [Nowhere to Be Found], occurs not in space, but in time.”
—The National
also by Bae Suah
Nowhere to Be Found
Copyright © Bae Suah, 2003
Translation copyright © Deborah Smith, 2016
This English edition is published by arrangement with Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.
First edition, 2016
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-47-2
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
Contents
Greater music, the voice said. The voice governed the whole world under the rain-streaked, cloud-wreathed sky. Dense with moisture, the air pressed in through the open car window, forming droplets on M’s right cheek and the exposed side of her hair. M and I wanted to listen to the sound of the rain falling on the fields. The rainwater trickled down M’s pale, almost ghost-like forehead, down over her eyelids, still more sunken after her recent cold, and over her slightly downward-pointing nose. When she tilted her head upward, her lips appeared unbelievably thin and delicate, tapering elegantly even when she wasn’t smiling, flushed red as though suffused by the morning sunlight. The delicate, languidly prominent scaffolding of her cheekbones, the cheekbones for which they had teased her at school, saying they were like an Eskimo’s; the muscles directly below them trembled momentarily as if in a spasm. Far over the fields, lightning flashed slowly. If books and language were the symbol of M’s absolute world, then music was her inaccessible mind, her religion, her soul. We were descending the low-lying hills on which the rain was quietly falling. On both sides of the hills lay mown fields. The edge of the black woods was receding over them, but it was impossible to tell whether these woods existed in reality or were merely a shadow cast over the ground by the rain-laden clouds. That morning I’d stopped by the government office to sort out an issue with some documents. Before that, M had gone to get her doctor’s permission to go on a short trip. Up until her death a week ago, M’s aunt had been living in the city’s outer ring, and M and I had decided to go and collect her things. M made no comment when Shostakovich came on. Greater music, said the voice on the radio. That recorded voice always reaches us after a certain lag, like the light from distant stars; the precise span of its existence in the world remained unknown. All we could do was listen, though what we heard didn’t always correspond to the absolute value—the modulus, m—of existence. Nevertheless, without music, what kind of meaning could existence have? Greater music, saying “the voice” is surely more honest, rather than endowing it with the concrete weight of a human individual. When I heard those words on the radio it never occurred to me to personify the voice as “he” or “she.” Greater, greater music, the voice said. The word “greater,” which usually describes a comparison, isn’t appropriate in this instance. The voice used “greater music” as an expression like greater beauty or greater sadness, greater distance, greater pain, greater solitude. More x-adjective music. We never say “greater death,” death being an absolute value that does not admit comparison. Like one’s hand, which can be flipped to show either the back or the palm, it’s something that can only exist as one of two possibilities. Music is absolute, just like death. Just as “greater death” or “lesser death” is a logical impossibility, so the same can be said of music, which is of the same order as the soul. A comparison cannot be made between listening to Beethoven’s Concerto no. 2 or no. 3 as if one were “lesser” and the other “greater.” Similarly, if one were to listen to a single one of Beethoven’s concertos three times in a row, or listen to three different concertos one after the other, it would make no sense to declare that one of these is greater and the other is lesser. Might it be possible to use “greater music” as a way of expressing music as it is listened to, rather than a mere list of musical works? Can a word that expresses either something still more musical, a still deeper thirst for music (persisting in spite of much contemporary dross), or simply music itself, contain within itself the possibility for the many meanings that it connotes and suggests to be further amplified, to be somehow greater? Can it permit its own territory to be ambiguous, bounded by a far horizon incapable of clear demarcation? Greater music. Where might such words come from? The voice never made any association between Beethoven’s Concerto no. 2 and no. 3. Perhaps, all things considered, “music is greater to me” might be a more appropriate expression. Greater death, greater nakedness (as opposed to an increased number of individual naked bodies), a more primordial human (but only one individual), a greater universe, the soul of greater music, a greater rarity, a greater distance from the present location, greater Mendelssohn, greater M, and that greater winter.
In the beginning there are memories. Conventional memories whose essence is either visual or aural, shifting eventually to those which, through their own agency, reclaim past scenes inside remembered soundscapes. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Strasse, immersed in the music I am oblivious to the fact that the train that I have to take has already pulled in, the passengers have already boarded and the train has whisked them away. Clara Schumann’s portrait gleaming pale above paper money, the Shostakovich corner in the LP store, a gramophone discovered in an antiques store on the craftsman’s street, a museum of musical instruments down a small side street not marked on the map, music schools. More music. Raindrops fell, and were overlaid above with more drops, and above them still more. They fell continuously, layer upon layer, and an instinctive lifting of one’s gaze sees severally existing worlds unfurl over the fields, stretching away beyond the gray barrier that marked the edge of the motorway. Air heavy with rain, overcast with clouds, churned by gusting wind, the melancholy color of a seemingly shadowed evening, earth and water and air and color. Of all the discrete chords pursuing infinite freedom each on their separate path, each in possession of their own language, a musician singled out one. That chord, which layered raindrop over raindrop, extended the domain of the original droplet throughout the world that lay beneath the massing clouds, beyond the fields and low hills and what had at one time been wilderness. On stage, at an orchestral concert I’d attended with M, an oboist mistakenly played a sharp note. It had happened at least twice by the time they were halfway through the movement, which wasn’t a particularly long one. Overall, a disappointing performance. During the break, people milled around in the hall, wineglasses full. The sound of the wine lapping against the delicate glasses differed according to whether it was white or red. People in black woolen clothes gathered there, the sounds of their conversation filling the lower part of the cavernous space like smoke dispersing at a low height, before being gradually absorbed into the walls and