Am I a Seeker?
I just finished reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I first read it a long, long time ago. I even used it as one of the readings in a class I taught at Mount Holyoke College. This time around, its impact was stronger. It grabbed and shook me.
Toward the end of the book, this passage gave me pause:
Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal . . . in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.”
Much of the time, Don and I lived life as seekers, always with goals–large and small goals–often obsessed with reaching them. In Don’s physical absence, with so much past behind me, I do not want to seek goals any longer. I just want to live.
And yet, I am still obsessed with getting a few more tasks done–publishing our memoir being at the top of the list. How do I reconcile this obsession with what my heart increasingly desires, not to have any goals?
I wrote about this conflict to my friend, Grace. She wrote back, “Well the artist is different from the seeker. And you have transitioned into artist (while not losing your other attributes) for the artist enters the unknown without understanding the outcome. And the product is the result of discovery.”
A wise response, but am I now an artist, free of seeking? I might worry less about the outcome, but I am still seeking–if not consciously, then unconsciously.
Siddhartha learned from “the many voiced song of the river.” I am looking at the Hudson River through my window. If the river sings, I am too far to hear it. But I know that the river sings many songs to let me know that life is in perpetual becoming.
I will let myself flow with the river–sometimes a seeker, other times an artist–but always with love in my heart, the love that Don and I shared and continue to share. And as an extension of that love, love for the less fortunate.
As I grow older, the more unreal time feels. With that, the dividing line in life–between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil–grows more faint every day.
It is not as if I am here and Don is there. We are together–death has eternal life, just like life has dying. We are approaching more closely, all the time, in life and in death.
And I live with love.
Habanastation: Human Spirit in Friendship
A friend invited me to the opening film of the 13th Havana Film Festival New York on April 12. I was not familiar with Habanastation but tagged along because I wanted to see a Cuban film described as “a fictional story about reality.”
Well, Habanastation warmed my heart beyond my wildest expectations. It is the first feature-length film by a young Cuban, Ian Padrón (born in 1976). His previous works include two noted documentaries: Dreaming in Blue, and Van Van Fever, which became a box office hit around the world. I believe that his documentary background prepared him to make a fictional story so moving, imbued with a strong sense of reality. The two young actors, Ernesto Escalona and Andy Fornaris, are delicious—such mature acting conveys the feeling that they were are not acting, that they are just having the time of their lives. If the young director is completely in sync with the two boys, he is equally tender and comfortable in his portrayal of animals.
The film’s narrative is simple: we follow two classmates, Mayito and Carlitos. Although they attend the same school, they are like oil and water, coming from homes that are worlds apart. Mayito belongs to a privileged class, pampered by his father, a jazz pianist of international renown, and his mother, a snobbish and pretentious woman. Carlitos lives with his grandmother; his mother is deceased and his father in jail. An accident brings the two boys together.
After the May 1st parade at the Revolutionary Square, Mayito gets on the wrong bus and is let out by the driver in La Timba, a slum in western Havana. He stumbles through the neighborhood, utterly lost and scared. Along comes Carlitos to find his rich, well-dressed classmate–clearly in the wrong place and hopelessly sticking out like a sore thumb.
The film gives a revealing depiction of present-day Cuba. It shows the enormous discrepancy between the rich and the poor in a society that is supposed to be classless. Instead, the gap is growing wider.
The very heart of the film is, however, the friendship that emerges between the two boys at the end of the day. If life is hard for Carlitos, the generosity of his spirit fills up the huge hole created by poverty. As poor as he is, Carlitos knows how to enrich his life with kindness, humor, and zest for living. It is awesome to watch Carlitos guiding Mayito around his turf with witty dialogue, radiant smile and biting humor. True, Carlitos is irresistible, but it is also to Mayito’s credit that he enters a world so alien to him with increasing appreciation of each new experience. He discovers that there are things in life other than PlayStation3, his father’s recent gift from a trip abroad. He is enticed into the pure glee of flying a kite and playing barefoot in pouring rain. The increasing warmth of Mayito’s heart enables Carlitos to tell the truth about his father–that he is in prison, falsely charged with murder.
The most memorable statement made by the director, Padrón, during Q&A: “If Cuba’s socialism has a lot of problems, that socialism also makes it possible for Mayito and Carlitos to attend the same school.”
I sought out the director and told him, “Habanastation is one of the most beautiful, powerful and inspiring films I’ve ever seen. I will pray that you will make many more films like that! I will be looking for them.” He was pleased by my remark, but he came dangerously close to losing me when he asked, “Are you are a Japanese?” With many people standing around to talk with him, I could not go into Korea’s colonial past with Japan. I was able to forgive him, grateful enough for the gift of his film that renewed my hope in friendships among people.
Riding home on a rattling A train, I prayed a silent prayer that there will be more friendships like that of Mayito and Carlitos among young people around the world. I am still riding along with two school boys on an unforgettable journey in which a relationship with a complexity of feelings emerges, yet the story’s simplicity is so deep and touching that I want to cry with blissful joy.
Easter
“But what makes a dead person different from someone who becomes serious and goes into seclusion to quietly consider the answer to something that has tormented him for a long time? Maybe the dead are the people who had withdrawn from everything in order to reflect upon life.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God)
“The grace of Easter is a great silence, an immense tranquility and a clean taste in your soul.” (Thomas Merton)
Waiting for the fourth Easter since Don left, I think of what meaning Easter may have for me.
I immediately ask if Easter has any meaning without death. It sounds like a rhetorical question, but much of the time we celebrate Easter’s promise of resurrection and eternal life without giving due attention to death. Perhaps we hear so much about death that it becomes a mere word or image that comes and disappears in a flash, if not from our eyes then from our consciousness. For many, thoughts of death don’t entice us to linger.
I suggest that we cannot value life fully without attributing dignity or reality to death. We know that as an integral part of life, death is a universal phenomenon from which nobody can escape. But many of us are not aware of our tendency to make death impersonal, as we live in a world full of violence, turmoil, crimes and shattering events and noises. It behooves us to have a personal relationship with death.
Born and reared in a Christian family, if I trembled at the terrifying force of death, I rejoiced in the resurrection of Jesus as a triumph over death. I could overcome the sorrow of death with the joy of Christ’s resurrection. Alas, I am no longer such a Christian.
Now, with my loss of Don, the weight of death is heavier than ever. All the more reason why I struggle to find a new meaning for Easter.
Perhaps, Easter is for me a moment that silences all the noises of destruction. It is the intense silence in which I can revive my dormant soul, forgotten and buried under worldly and physical noises. I can’t vouch for other dead people, but I believe I can for Don. To me, he is the person “who had withdrawn from everything in order to reflect upon life.” Easter is a moment when Don teaches me to wake my soul up and feed it in tranquility.
Every day I try to find Easter, in which the souls of the living and the dead find life together.
The Living Who Remain
Don and I both read the The Woman in White (1860) by Wilkie Collins and liked it. That was a long time ago. Recently, I read another one of his mysteries—The Dead Secret (1857). It was not as good as The Woman in White, but I was engrossed in it. Deep into night, as I was closing in on the end of the book, the following drew my eyes.
No popular saying is more commonly accepted than the maxim which asserts that Time is the great consoler; and, probably no popular saying more imperfectly expresses the truth. The work that we must do, the responsibilities that we must undertake, the example that we must set to others—these are the great consolers, these apply the first remedies to the malady of grief. . . . Time may claim many victories, but not the victory over grief. The great consolation for the loss of the dead who are gone is to be found in the great necessity of thinking of the living who remain.
Living in the absence of Don’s physical presence longer than three years, I confirm myself to be a non-believer in the time-healing maxim. I have been also proving Collins’s “remedies to the malady of grief” to be true. For my survival, I made work dominate almost every day of my life. So I was heartened to discover these surprisingly resonant remarks about grief, time and truth by the 19th century master mystery writer.
More than anything else, I was struck by the impact of the last sentence of the long passage. “The great consolation for the loss of the dead who are gone is to be found in the great necessity of thinking of the living who remain.”
Who are the living that remain for me? I ask myself. The answer comes instantly: starving children of the world.
The huge eyes, the bloated bellies, legs like thin sticks, the small bodies shrunk to skin and bones haunt me and put me in shame every day that I have food to eat and they don’t.
I recall Don’s story about the starving children in Armenia. As a little boy, he had to scrape every morsel from his plate as his mother ordered him not to leave any food, always admonishing, “Think of the starving children in Armenia!” Don often wondered about the wisdom of his mother’s insistence, especially the part about the starving children in Armenia. Gradually, he began to see that perhaps his mother simply wanted to teach him not to waste food when some children starve. But he continued to question how his forcing food into his full stomach helped children starving far away. How would his stomach ache brought on by overeating help those children?
Don and I talked about his mother’s “starving children in Armenia.” Granted, she might not have been as far-sighted as we made her out to be, but we admired her for linking Armenia and Iowa. Don also had to hear my stories about the Korean War and how I learned what it was like to be hungry. Ever since, how I’ve wanted to do something to feed the hungry, especially the children.
We sit in America, frequently with more food on our plates than we can (or should) possibly consume, when so many children in Armenia, Sudan, Congo, Indonesia, Mexico–and right here in the States–suffer malnutrition and may starve to death. I sometimes fancy Don’s mother’s response if he asked for more, “Don, you had enough. Let us think of the starving children in Armenia. Let us save your second helping and send them some food.”
Yes, I want to do something for the living who remain.
Looking for Don – Evocations
One of my dearest friends wrote and called me several times in the course of reading Looking for Don: A Meditation. She had been concerned about my bottomless, persistent grief. She is an artist, and her responses moved me so deeply that, with her permission, I want to share with you readers.
# 1
Dearest Dai Sil,
I just want to tell you that I started on Looking For Don. Trouble is I just can’t find the right words to express my feelings. Maybe I could say he is up there like the shimmering rays of sun radiating down on you, and us, too? Don already reached 하늘 (sky) and you are still on 땅 (earth) yet the love between the two of you forever binds you even across the greatest chasm, never to separate the 어깨동무 (shoulder friends) and soul mates!
Your love and incredible pain made Looking For Don a profound work of art!
Looking For Don is a masterpiece!
Thank you for letting us share the innermost feelings of your heart.
Love, W
#2
Dear Dai Sil
I did not want your book to end. So I could not read it for a few days but today I finished it. Dai Sil, it is the greatest love story, ever! There are so many unforgettable passages.
Even as he lay in the ICU, Don was concerned about you. Have you eaten?
There is also the story about the special cap you had brought for him from Korea, the one with the natural persimmon dye. He loved it so much that he wouldn’t take it off except for sleeping. Then one day the wind carried it off, that precious cap he treasured so much. Too weak to chase it, all he could do was just watch helplessly as it rolled farther and farther away until . . . .
There are lighter moments such as your returning home from shopping and claiming that you had saved so much money by buying something on sale. Don humors you with chuckles–ha ha.
Your landscapes, even those of Don’s beautiful Iowan corn fields, though they are very beautiful works of art, because they are similar in style to others, I am not as powerfully moved by them as the portraits of Don. His portraits are very exceptional. Intensely powerful! You see, when I see them, I feel the hot tears and the excruciating passion with which you created them, and the effort you put in to capture the very soul of your beloved Don. His mischievous grin, the exact color of his eyes, and the mustache that must have tickled you no end . . . . The force of your ardor in those portraits almost brings Don back to life. When the two of you looked out of Don’s window that first winter and saw the ice particles floating on the river, you were reminded of Monet’s Water Lilies. That’s when you lovers gave birth to ice lilies. I can feel the thrill you must have felt that day, standing by the window with Don–à la 어깨동무(shoulder friends)–looking down at the mighty and freezing Hudson River.
Yes, Looking For Don is definitely the greatest and truest love story.
Love, W
#3
Hi Dai Sil,
I feel but can’t express how I feel about Looking For Don. You touched on something very close to redefining the meaning of death as humans understand it. I feel your relentless quest may have led you to a dimension beyond normal (mortal’s) experiences. You may have made it possible for Don to find his steps half way back on that final bridge in order to enable you to meet him at the midpoint where you could almost touch each other.
As much as you wanted Don to be with you to the end of your days, he had his dilemma. Even as he was ready (after endless suffering) to take the ultimate cure for his failing body, he was too torn to take that option because he knew how that would have affected you. Oh, how he loved you, his wife, best friend and soul mate–the one he loved more than his own flesh and blood!
You are one special pair of lovers!
Love, W
#4
Dear Dai Sil,
Hi, again. It looks beautiful and sunny but the temperature is only in the upper 30′s.
Yes, all your portraits of Don have very special power and intensity. Every ounce of your love, devotion, sweat and blood are visible in each of your brush strokes. And there are countless in each of your many, many paintings of your soul mate.
Professor P . . . [was] one of my most respected and beloved teachers, ever. He invited us to his house once and showed us some of his prized souvenirs from China such as many original Shang and Zhou bronze vessels and mirrors, for example. They were breathless treasures encrusted with rich, turquoise patina.
But there was something far more special. He had traveled to many temples and caves in all part of China in search of art works of the past. Of course much of that related to Buddhist paintings and sculptures as Buddhism was first introduced from India and its art changed gradually through time in style.
During one of his visits to a temple somewhere (I forgot where), the head monk of that temple had presented him with a very special gift: a bound, hand-calligraphed religious text on rice paper.
The color of the ink was brownish. The monk had written the entire text in his own blood!!!
Now, after over half a century later, I get exactly the same feeling when I think of your brush strokes on Don’s paintings.
Love, W
The Sky
I don’t know why, but these days I often think of my first year as a foreign student in Boston, long ago–starting in the fall of 1962.
I lived in a graduate school dormitory on Bay State Road. After breakfast, I gathered my books and a brown lunch bag containing two hardboiled eggs and some carrot sticks (a light lunch kept me from nodding off in the afternoon) and left for class. As I walked along the Charles River, my straight black hair cascading down my back could have blown away with fallen leaves, had it not been anchored to my head. Hearing the sound of my own footsteps, I tried to transmute my feelings of loneliness into stoic resignation in order to tackle another day of struggling with abstract concepts in a foreign tongue.
With the river at my side, September turned into October and leaves donned the brilliant hues for which New England is deservedly famous. In that very first autumn away from home, my heart raced to the sky across the Pacific, my soul crying for home. For me, autumn was always the season of glorious beauty, softly embraced by sadness that defied description. It was the season of big sky that drew my eyes and mind faraway, to an unknown land of destiny and love, a season that brought feelings of homesickness, even when I had been at home. I delighted in it and cried in it.
When I met Don in Washington, D.C., many years later, one of the first things he talked about was Iowa sky. Whenever he brought up that sky, his eyes traveled far away, as though reaching for that sky. I did not feel left out of his private journey there. I loved him for his love of sky, the sky he often described as “filling everything, especially at night.” I knew then that it was homesickness for Don that had filled my chest as I gazed at the sky in Korea.
Last October, I lived a solitary life in Tuscany. There, I rediscovered my Korean sky and Don’s Iowa sky. In awe of the Tuscan skies, I whispered to Don, “Here, we have our joint sky, your Iowa sky and my Korean sky.”
Upon returning to New York, I started painting what I remembered as Tuscan skies. While my feet are grounded on earth, my soul is immersed in the sky.
I try to walk to the garden in our apartment complex every evening. We held Don’s memorial there in April 2009. I sit on a bench and look at the sky. One evening, I heard myself saying, “Don, you brought the Tuscan sky here for me!”
On that bench, as I imagined Don’s soul soaring in the sky, the following came to me.
Look at the sky.
Look up the sky.
Let the sky wrap you around,
your body, mind and soul.
The sky will sprout
a thousand wings,
and fill your eyes with vision
sublime and remarkable,
your ears with rhythms
of God’s earth and
stay with your troubled
and lonely heart until
it becomes an oasis of light.
The Drunken Mule
Looking for Don is now available, and people are ordering it. Better still, they are reading it and are sending me comments. Every time I see a comment pop up on my computer, my first impulse is to run to Don’s room and show it to him. “Read this!” Then realization hits me.
The commotion surrounding the book’s release stirs my emotions, often making it more difficult to bear his absence. Urgently, I feel the need to bring him back in my memory and into the experience of my life–now, in this moment.
As I travel back into our life, the first thing I hear is our laughing together. We were able to laugh even during his final days in the Intensive Care Unit! We were often drunk with laughter. With the sound of our laughter, I see his dancing eyes. Then, I remember that neither Don nor I could dance.
I recently went to a performance by the New York City Ballet. The ballet had three parts (Agon, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, all choreographed by George Balanchine). The first part had no stories, but consisted of a series of dance movements in simple costume. The movements were simplicity made most beautiful, eloquent and impeccable. I was soaked in them, far away in the balcony, my heart joyously dripping praises without words.
As I wished that Don were there with me, I saw him waving at me and heard him, “Go mad with beauty while you can. You and I never danced like that. But we had our own dances, dances with our eyes. Now our souls dance with movements astounding and uplifting.”
For sure, we could not dance with our bodies, but we tried to see and hear dancing sounds: in the noises around us, in the passing wind, in the rustling of leaves, in the laughter of children, in the movements of clouds–most of all, in our laughter.
I feel drunk with memories, as we were in our laughter. As I wipe away tears that fill my eyes, I find a poem by Hafiz that speaks to my emotions. Here is the last stanza.
The Mule Got Drunk and Lost in Heaven
The mule I sit on while I recite
Starts off in one direction
But then gets drunk
And lost in
Heaven.
I see Don laughing with this poem. I hope Don got drunk with that mule and lost in heaven.
