The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has this to say about memory, an explanation of its complexity that comforts us and somewhat affirms our preoccupation with our fetal psychic amnesia: “Remembering is often suffused with emotion, and is closely involved in both extended affective states such as love and grief, and socially significant practices such as promising and commemorating. It is essential for much reasoning and decision making, both individual and collective. It is connected in obscure ways with dreaming. Some memories are shaped by language, others by imagery. Much of our moral and social life depends on the peculiar ways in which we are embedded in time. Memory goes wrong in mundane and minor, or in dramatic and disastrous ways.”

Our fetal dreams, our memories, while unworded by us—and mundane, minor in the scheme of things—coalesce to form something: the abandoned, a student of ourself, a stranger, a double, one disowned and re-owned, winged, made of polished horn, in debt, haunted by guilt, monstrous, arbitrary, punished, rewarded, nameless, and renamed.

3. Charles P. Pollak, “Q&A Baby Dreams,” an interview by C. Claiborne Ray, New York Times website, published November 22, 2005, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0D81F3EF931A15752ClA9639C8B63.

4. Hyun Sook Han, Understanding My Child’s Korean Origins (Minneapolis Children’s Home Society of Minnesota, 1983).

Harness

Harness

Facts      Flesh ghost

[bowing]

Mannaseo bangapseumnida

It’s nice to meet you.

How should I address you?

To Say

“The Korean language strictly reflects the hierarchical order. Speech styles are divided according to a system of honorifics, and this system is complex and richly textured. In fact, it may well be that no language on earth has a more finely differentiated system of honorifics.”5

Iksop Lee and S.Robert Ramsey The Korean Language (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 224.

Drown

The bi-archy. Doppelgänger. The woman who split away. Mutually unintelligible. An order of intimate estrangement.

Meet. When bending over a simple plate of water. Through the gates.

The gorgeous, drowned oneironautics.

If we speak in tongues. Sewn to my heel.

What

All these wild breakers to recede.

Water

Graveyard of names. Deck of cards. Stone teeth.

Leaks and bursts, a balloon, a boat, a floating thing.

Blanks

Occupation era. Hermit no more.

Invasions

Mongols (1231)

Japanese (1592)

Manchus (1627)

Japan

Three stages of the Japanese Colonial Era:6

Hildi Kang, Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005).

1. “the dark age of” Subjugation (1910–19) “where the military ruled by threat and violence”

2. Cultural accommodation (1920–31) “after the Korean Independence Movement in March 1919” “allowing some freedom in schools, newspapers, and businesses”

3. Assimilation (1931–45) “renewed tightening of controls and forced participation in the Japanese war effort”

Ur-Father