Vaseline Buddha (6 page)

But death, which someone said wasn't a part of life since you can't experience it when you're alive, passed me by. Or should I say that I passed by death? But even after I recovered somewhat and left the hospital, I had to stay lying down most of the time. On some days I had difficulty just going from my bedroom to the bathroom, and barely managed to do so, holding onto the wall that led from my bedroom to the bathroom and feeling as if I were walking in a desert, utterly exhausted from dehydration and the blazing sun. But my disease, which caused dizziness, didn't develop in a certain direction as I'd expected, or in other words, it didn't just grow worse. In a way, it wasn't progressive, and even seemed to be progressing unfavorably. In a way, that was quite natural. Like all diseases, the disease I was suffering from went through a cycle of relapse, temporary improvement, and sudden relapse again.

But through the disease, I began to change in many, no, perhaps not so many, ways. More than anything, I had great difficulty reading, and had a very hard time understanding sentences. It took several times more effort than before for me to etch a sentence in my mind, and in fact, I had to think as if I were etching words onto a metal plate, using a chisel or hammering a cleat.

Anyway, something else that filled up my mind, which was full of thoughts on death, while I was in such poor condition, was thoughts on everyday life, which became routine for me after I passed out and could do nearly nothing because of my dizziness, which became part of my everyday life, which led me to think about everyday life, perhaps in a completely new way. I thought about the various aspects and dimensions of everyday life, and the everyday life of which I thought encompassed everyday moments or period of time in which I thought about things, including facts that bothered me on a daily basis, such as the fact that humans don't even know their origin, let alone anything else, or rather, that they've never even found a clue as to their origin, let alone their origin, and wondered if they would learn their origin someday, and looked at a sofa that needed to be replaced and had a hard time deciding on the shape and size of the sofa that would replace it, because although it could be easily replaced, depending on circumstances, the replacement would be not so easy when I considered that the new sofa would be with me for several years, and looked at a cat I knew, having seen it many times before, walking drenched in the rain on a heavily rainy day when I also took a walk, drenched in the rain even though I was carrying an
umbrella, and looked at the leaves of a tree gently folding themselves, probably to protect themselves in the heavy rain, and wondered if it was true that certain leaves did so to relieve the shock from the streaks of rain, and thought that those two things were the most memorable of the things that happened to me that day or week, or month, and thought about the thoughts I had even in my sleep, and was amused by the thought that Jains and Zoroastrians existed in the world, and decided that I should put off doing the laundry for a few days, which I'd been putting off for a long time, and had the banal thought that nothing really mattered, and thought about how I'd give my goldfish a proper funeral if it died, and drank some tomato juice, and wiping the red liquid on my mouth, thought about the Battle of Stalingrad, perhaps the most gruesome of all the battles fought in human history, in which soldiers, having run out of vodka, drank antifreeze filtered through the carbon filters on their gas masks and sang in chorus a song that was at times called “Four Steps to Death,” and thought about Stalin, whom I'd caught a glimpse of in a black and white documentary film looking somewhat sulky, as if left out by the two Western leaders next to him who had gathered at the Yalta Conference to discuss issues related to the Second World War after it came to an end and were smoking and laughing somewhat facetiously, and as if feeling uncomfortable at the facetiousness of the two leaders (he looks as if he's trying somehow to show the two Western leaders who are rubbing him the wrong way that he's not happy), and wondered what he must've been like as a boy full of dreams, and thought that perhaps at that moment, he felt deeply offended by the two Western leaders and thought, As soon as
I return to Moscow, the hub of the world, I'm going to come up with a way to teach these offensive people a lesson, and make sure they understand that socialism is a far more superior system than corrupt capitalism, and I thought that perhaps that was the moment when he came up with the seed of an idea that subsequently led to the tragic Korean War, and thought that if nothing in the world was permanent, the current capitalistic world, which seemed as if it would last permanently, wouldn't last permanently, either, and wondered what kind of a world would follow a capitalistic world, and wondered skeptically if any kind of an ideal world could indeed be ideal, and thought about certain facts regarding Hitler, who, along with Stalin, was one of the greatest dictators in history, such as the fact that he had severe mysophobia and took nine baths every day, and being fastidious about his hygiene, he always took a shower if he sweated while presiding over a meeting or giving a speech—being passionate and often using large gestures, he sweated quite a bit, and it's assumed that he took a lot of showers to rid himself of the sweaty odor—and that he received nine injections a day of a hormone extracted from bull testicles in order to show off his stamina and maintain a passionate state of mind—Why did it have to be nine baths, and nine injections of a hormone extracted from bull testicles, a day? Could such trivia serve as clues to understanding Hitler, who drove countless people to pain?—and that he didn't like smoking or drinking and issued a special order to all German officers to eat chocolate instead of smoking (did he think that eating chocolate would help them endure the hardships of war?), and didn't like cats in particular, and grew nervous and looked afraid when he
happened to see a cat, and thought about all the dictators in the world, who in themselves seemed quite fascinating, and about something that could be observed in all dictators, and wondered what that was, and also thought about something that all dictators could have thought about as they fell asleep, such as what they would have for dinner the next night, and thought that they must've thought about how to eliminate those who were absolutely intolerable even by their standards, although they found almost everything intolerable, and thought that all these thoughts occurred to me while I was drinking tomato juice, and thought about how much I hated all sounds that came through a loudspeaker, and wondered why Germans had no knack for humor, and saw a spot on my bedroom wallpaper that looked like a little boat at first when the wallpaper got wet in the rain, and began to look more and more like a battleship, and wondered how the spot would change in shape, and thought about the things I could mock in my heart as much as I pleased, and thought about my native language that still seemed immature as a language, and thought about how indecisive I was, and how difficult it was for me to decide on something, and how often, as a result, I went without eating all day because I couldn't decide what to eat, and thought about how much I enjoyed doing things that were meaningless in themselves and in light of something else, and wondered if I'd ever done anything with all my heart and soul, and seeing my boy do something strange, recalled that I, too, did strange things as a boy, such as hide in a forest of owls where there was no else around, spending my time looking quietly at something or not looking at anything, and hoped that my child would do such
strange things as well, and thought about people who spent their lives doing something I knew in advance that I'd never be able to lose myself in, and about their lives, and thought that remembering the past didn't bring it to the present, but was like crossing an invisible, labyrinthine bridge between a certain point in the past and the present, groping the handrail, and thought about how Kafka laughed repeatedly while reading his own work and wondered if I had ever laughed while reading my own work, and thought about the authors whose works made me laugh as I read them, and thought about how most of the authors I liked were already dead, and thought that when I read their works, I sometimes thought that I was talking to the ghosts who wrote those books, and thought about the works of authors and artists I used to like but now felt were quite banal, and could no longer read or look at, and thought about something that could be called the evolution of a human mind, and thought about the banality I saw in everything, which grew beyond control, which I couldn't do anything about, and wondered what kind of a work I could be captivated by in the future, and thought about certain facts, such as the fact that T.S. Eliot's first wife was in a mental hospital for nine years before she died, that James Joyce's daughter was in a mental hospital for forty-six years before she died, that Paul Verlaine once hurled his three month old son against the wall during a fight with his wife, and that he wrote long novels about wars but he himself handed out cigarettes and chocolate at a facility run by the Red Cross before getting injured by shell fragments, and thought about Hemingway, who served less than a week at the battlefront during the First World War, and about
Hokusai, the Japanese artist, who said at age seventy-three that when he was eighty his paintings would finally make sense, and when he was ninety they would truly be the works of a master, and thought about how Balzac felt his death approaching and said that only Bianchon, the doctor in
Father Goriot
, could save him, and thought about the surrealist poet and architect who attempted to create a surrealistic, ideal garden in the middle of a Mexican jungle in the past century, and thought that an ideal world could exist only in ideal thoughts, and thought, while listening to Eric Satie, about the fact that he lived in extreme poverty in the later part of his life, and wondered if his music conveyed the sentiments of a man facing extreme poverty, and thought about what Salvador Dali meant when he said that Jackson Pollock's style was like the indigestion that goes with fish soup, and thought, while reading the original English version of “Jabberwocky,” the strange poem by Lewis Carroll that's almost impossible to translate, that it could perhaps be translated if long footnotes were added, and also thought about staying in the English seaside village where he is said to have written
Alice in Wonderland,
and thought about how Freud was a cocaine addict, and how Trakl, the poet, drank chloroform and spent time lying on a sofa, hallucinating, and thought about Trakl's younger sister, who, invited to someone's home for dinner, gave a cheerful musical performance, after which she went into the next room and killed herself with a gun, and wondered why I felt at home with bizarre things and felt at ease listening to music that could make you feel uncomfortable, such as Schonberg's “Pierrot Lunaire,” and thought that there was considerable reason for it, and thought that I was eating too much fish, and
wondered how many fish I must've eaten so far in my life, and thought that I asked this question almost invariably when I ate fish, and thought about how I had to make a living by translating foreign languages, and thought about the many dead authors I knew who translated foreign literature and then stopped thinking about them, and wondered what it was that made me reluctant to write something that could be called a love story or novel, and thought about the fact that I was always trying to imagine an unimaginable world, and thought about the frantic nature of certain feelings I had, and thought about feelings that didn't last long, and feelings that, once there, wouldn't leave easily, and thought about the fights I had with mosquitoes from time to time at home, fights that truly seemed like fights, and thought that since plants died most of the time from too much watering, one way of keeping a plant from dying, though not the most sure way, could be to find out how often a plant should be watered by bringing a plant home and not watering it until it was wilting almost to the point of death, thereby finding out how long it can survive without water, and thought about the time I went on watering a plant I had even though it was clearly dead already, unable to easily accept its death, and recalled something that I seemed to have heard from someone, that pouring fresh animal blood into a pot of red roses turns the roses blood red, and thought that I could grow red roses and pour chicken blood or pig blood into the pot, and thought about the way my attention went from one thing to another, and thought about things that were theoretically possible but realistically impossible or unrealizable in the near future, and thought that for some time now my life has been a long and
difficult and tedious yet pleasant struggle against realism, and thought that my favorite part of speech may be adjectives, and thought again about the limitations of my native language, something I always thought about, and above all, thought about a technical way of making long sentences in my native language, which had no relative pronouns, which made making long sentences difficult, and thought about the pain in my knee joint which I felt more often and acutely, and thought, in regard to that pain, about the process in which something physical was perceived, and thought about devoting my entire life to doing something I couldn't finish even in a lifetime, for instance, writing down all the proper nouns—which, even among nouns, were the most perfect in themselves, but unlike other nouns which might no longer be used, whose object of designation was always in danger of disappearing—in all the languages of the world, dead or still in use, and adding explanation and footnotes on those words, and thought, while scratching my thigh that was itchy with a mosquito bite, that you could see the world in a different way if you knew all the proper nouns in the world, although this was impossible, and thought, while having intercourse and looking at the full moon which happened to come into view out the window, about the fact that amphibians liked to mate when there was a full moon, and thought that I thought with too much articulation even though I got tired of doing so at times, and wondered why I wasn't easily drawn to simple and ordinary things, and thought that some of the things I wrote were things I came up with at a cemetery where Christian missionaries of the past were buried after being persecuted and decapitated, and thought that it might make me
feel good to go to an office I happened to see one day while walking on the street, an office that was supposed to be a place of research on the magic art of shortening distances and the art of flight, and listen distractedly to the nonsensical things that the people there talked about, and thought about the obvious fact that if I hadn't been born I wouldn't have existed in the first place, and to that end, and felt indifferent about it, and touching some kind of a lump somewhere on my body, which I happened to find although I didn't know when or how it had formed, wondered what shape it would take on in the days to come, and thought of the times, while seeing something develop in a strange way, I thought of a reason that didn't seem appropriate as a reason for something, and thought that there didn't necessarily have to be a reason, that it was better for there to be no such thing as a reason, or to not try to find a reason, but still tried to find a reason, and after seeing the horrors of a war that's still going on now, thought of the strange goats I saw on television one day, which passed out even at the slightest provocation, such as the sound of applause or the sight of an open umbrella, and smiled to myself, and wondered if the goats, which looked as if they found some kind of a pleasure in passing out, found real pleasure in passing out, and thought that it was after I'd seen the horrors of a war that I smiled, thinking about strange goats, and recalled the masturbating monkey I saw somewhere while traveling, and thought about the misfortune of polar bears that were losing their home because of melting glaciers, as well as their daily hardship, and thought, not seriously, about the issue of Germans and Jews, or not thought about it at all, and thought, above all, about my body, which wasn't healthy, contrary