Unforgetttable moments 2-caves of the heart 2

2.

In his 50s he wandered alone by bus along the seaside of the three coasts of Sourh Korea, starting from the South and the East coast till the West coast. It was much earlier than he traveled to Portland where he happened to met Helena for the first time. And it was also a decade years or so after he recovered from his prolonged illness. At that time he stayed 4 years or so as an alienated TB patient in a hospital located on a surburb of the city and there lying on bed he saw the little sea several times in his dreams.

Strange as it may sound, he went to the sea in vague hope of meeting the little sea, a playmate in his boyhood . He believed that the little sea existed alive somewhere in any coast. The boy met it everyday with a puppy named 'Badugi' under the stone embankment of his house. Then one day little sea was out of sight to the boy's surprise. After that it had never returned to where it was.

He set out on the trip by leaving home for the coast of South sea where in his thought the little sea might play with new seagulls unfamiliar to it, and the next toward the east and finally toward the east. In that way he wandered for a week running by bus or boat , day and night , sleeping in any inn at the spot.

The South coast had a lot of islands on it. Then he selected three islands of them and went there wishing to see the little sea near the coast around the islands. In an island named Yokzi he climbed up to the hilltop of the island and stood for a while in search of the little sea with his eyes toward the outer sea full of the sunlight twinkling silver on the quiet surface. In a matter of course He failed to find out his boyhood playmate there. As we guess, the little sea was just a ghost image of it in his mind. on the top of it he was rather satisfied to hear the endless sound of the waves far down reminding the refined voice of Luciano Pavarotti singing Caruso.

The East sea was different from the South one with beautiful islands in and out of the coast , in that there were no islands to be seen in the remote horizontal line of it. and the rough surface of the sea did not allow him to come near the seaside. The seashore had an endlessly roaring sound which waves dashing into the sand shore. Seen from the windows of running every bus he took,

To his disappointment, the East sea had no indications of the little sea. There was only the enchanting horizone far away with sky and water merging into each other on it.

In case of the West sea coast , what was the most impressive to Inu was the sandy plain along the vast beach, on which the ebb and flow left the wave-shaped forms as if they were carved on the sand bottom. They were thought to resemble fossil remains on the rocks or be the visual traces of ' moments into eternity' endlessly carved and erased on the sands by ebb and flow. The sandy bottom of the beach without no water at the end of ebb tide was hard enough for a Jeep to dash on it. It was strikingly different from the silty estuary bottom of the little sea. Looking over the empty bottom with no water on it farther toward the unclear line of ebb tide , he thought that the little sea had never traveled to this direction. By his judgement, the little sea must have had an irresistable desire to run away farther toward the opposite direction to reach the open sea. By the way the wheel tracks of a prints of car wheels left on the bottom reminded him of Jackson Pollock whose abstract paintings represented a great moment in abstract ｅxpressionism. The moment he meet the West coast face to face was at sunset. The reddish landscape full of emptiness was so triste that he could find no words to express it but a short sound of shouting ' Ah...'.

According his retrospection, the little sea was untamed,but docile and was restless with its tide of inflowing and ebbing out. The Little sea made it a rule to get out to the exit of the estuary in the morning and return to where it used to wait for the boy as its playmate in front of the the house around the afternoon when the boy came home to eat lunch from the playground outside. At night it would played alone murmuring with little waves beneath the enbankment of frontyard of the house , and before dawn it was away to sleep together with wild ducks in it around the line of ebbing and inflowing of the tide. In temper it resembled 'Badugi', which had a habit to keep going out of the house and coming in beyond the boy's control because It couldn't stand being kept on the leash just for a moment.

And he added the last moment of the little sea leaving him in his boyhood like this:

One day in the afternoon in summer when he came back home after spending the time before noon out playing with his playmates , to see at a loss what to do the little was moving away from where it used to be at that time toward the island named 'Dosum' which it used to meet on its coming in from outside and streaming out to disappear behind the island. Since then he have seen it no where.

Inu once said that his writing seemed to be in relation with the little sea, because it was thought to be wandering by the seaside. According to him, he began to write thinking that by writing he might reach the little sea he have kept in his mind since his boyhood on without any particular guide to it. In the beginning he composed literary pieces by visualize in words the images of the little sea vivid in his mind on the paper like a painter at the lower grade painting a landscape as he wished to by describing the objects seen outside . For a while he did them thinking it was not difficult but interesting.

Then doing writing he perceived that it was getting more and more difficult to put the image of the little sea well into words on paper. He did his literary works wishing that they resembled, in color and feeling, Monet's sea landscapes "which have less to do with geography than with anticipation and memory, emotion and visual imagination." But against his expectation, the results were mostly undesirable. His works even made him sad. For they came to have the melancolic atmosphere , in color, more similiar to that of Munch's paintings, dark grey and pessimistic, reminding unconsciously him of the dark-colored Hymalian cida around of the Hospital he had sayed.

At any rate he kept on composing literarary works and in the process of writing he he loved very much Baudelaire's works of 'poetic prose' and a Korean lyric poet named Su Jun Ju. In case of the French poet, one of his works , 'Le Spleen de Paris', a collection of poetic proses ( a translation in Korean) caught his eyes and the Korean poet attracted him with a piece of his poems titled 'a bride'. So after reading the book of Baudelaire, for a while he tried to resemble his writing style. As a result, his literary works seemed to be characteristc of the poetic prose in style, whether his works were essays or fact-fictions. What he meant by 'poetic prose' here was simply kinds of prose in poetic rhythm.

A lot of writers exerted influence on Inu directly through their works . Among many influential writere there was Reiner Maria Rilke, a german essayist, whose words still capturing his mind was roughly as below ( He learned in his heart the phrase put into Korean):

' In order to write a line of poem,

you have to travel about many cities,

to read many books,

meet many people.

And you have to call to your mind

the nights of journey which transiently vanished into nothing

with numerous stars twinkling in the night sky.

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