They—whomever they are—say not to get drunk and read old LiveJournal posts. Well, we’re in luck. I’m only 2.5 drinks in, far from drunk, and it’s not LiveJournal I’m going through, just the collection of half‐started and half‐finished—and there is a difference—blog entries sitting on my computer.
I drink directly from the small Jameson bottle mistaking it for a beer immediately realizing my mistake as my head burns and waters in a wave of sudden whiskey…
In preparation for moving I’m drinking all that’s left in the bottles on my shelf. If I like a bottle, I will leave a little left in it so I’m reminded to buy another one. I don’t keep what I don’t like. And this is almost the same way I treat a blog post on my computer. If it’s still there, undrunk as it were, it means there’s something to it I’m hanging on to. It’s unfinished. So in the spirit finishing what I’ve left unfinished—bottom’s up. I’ve dealt with the Canadian rye and polished off the Irish whiskey. There’s one bottle left and the Dj just mixed Missy Elliot into The White Stripes.
…I don’t know how to delineate the post I’m making now from the scraps I found on my computer from then. They tie into the next two posts I will be making as part of my Departures series as it turns out, a spot of good luck, although Egon Spengler maintains luck is for the ill‐prepared.
Let’s try this—October of last year: I’m covered in cat scratches and there’s half a body’s worth of hole in the apartment wall. It’s my first Saturday to myself in what feels like years. I don’t know what to make of it, so I dig out my old 35mm SLR, walk, and write.
You typed “flim” for the filename—nice.
Shut up.
—
I take the last roll of film I’ve got with me for a Thanksgiving walk. My camera comes too—it all works out.
The previous roll of film I shot was May of this year. The roll before that, almost a year and a half ago. The previous roll before that, likely five years ago. The film I’m using is at least that old.
Digital equipment affords me, usually now anyway, hundreds to thousands of shots—or an unlimited amount with deletes. With film, usually 24. A hard 24. No deletes. There is a finality to the medium I suspect makes me craft a shot more than if I’m shooting digital. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I pass by picture after picture waiting to find that one out of 24.
I think film makes me a better photographer because I think about each shot more. I think film makes me a worse photographer because I do just that. Think. Too much. I think too much. I walk with my 24 shots. The digital vs. film debate not entering into what’s still an empty camera.
And then I remember: take the picture. It doesn’t matter. Take the picture.
—
The film canister sits on my desk—full of pictures. I know what they are, but I don’t at the same time. A USB stick from my dad loaded with preview images of shots I took with him the other day sits beside it. Twenty‐four shots takes up more space than over three hundred.
My mind races.
Is the stick of files more real than the undeveloped film? I can’t look at either without an interpreter. For one, electronics. And chemistry. For the other, chemistry. And electronics.
It doesn’t matter. Take the the picture.
I start to think about black holes again. Fascinating objects. All you ever see of them is what just crossed into them. An echo of something that was there that now isn’t.
An abusive relationship.
The title of this post— 한 —is Korean. Pronounced han it haphazardly translated and highly‐simplified means grudge but has also been described to me as a feeling of unfinished business.
Like many nuanced concepts in other languages there is no direct translation into one English word. Do we have a way of encapsulating the feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined into a single word? Not that I know of. Lucky me, right? But this concept is woven into Korean culture. It’s part of an identity. And as an outsider looking in I am acutely aware of being a foreigner in someone else’s language as I talk about a concept steeped in otherness as if I know anything about it.
Yet—if I put some thought into it—this otherness isn’t as foreign as it seems. Those feelings are not unfamiliar. The scale might be. But to claim it as unique to a single culture and not within grasp to those outside it—as it often is—is a disservice to the second greatest cross‐cultural bridge we have: solidarity. How do you reach a concept so wanting to be understood yet maintains there is no way you could ever understand it? It starts to look like an impossible problem. And I’m immediately suspicious of an impossible problem because I don’t believe it exists.
Does English contain the same raw trauma where a concept such as 한 would result? Possibly. Show me a language which doesn’t. But in exactly the same manor? …Not really. So I’m left with an attempt at the greatest cross‐cultural bridge we have after solidarity: relation. If 한 is representative of a complex set of thoughts and emotions spanning past, present and future, experienced by the individual both as a single entity as well as part of a collective then the corresponding English must sit on the other side and have a similar complexity and weight for it to properly relate.
Revenge seems like a good choice. But it’s too narrow in focus. Too procedural. Too active. The initial translation of grudge by comparison seems far too small a concept in of itself. Too simple and juvenile. What word within English has the power to unify with such sharp and heavy concepts so thoroughly entrenched they become part of an identity that’s both lamented and—perhaps inexplicably—quietly celebrated?
Just one bottle left…
Addiction? …Addiction.
That’s what I’d offer back from English to put on the other side of 한. But not the state of being an addict. I’m talking about what addiction does to people who aren’t addicts themselves. If you took those effects, scaled them up, applied them to a nation’s worth of people, and let the clock run, I think you’d end up with what could be considered 한.
Or as Mark Twain in the 24th century via Star Trek: The Next Generation puts it:
CLEMENS: Any place that doesn’t stock a good cigar doesn’t rank high in my book.
TROI: If you must have one, I’m sure we can replicate it for you.
CLEMENS: You think one of these imitations can take the place of a hand wrapped Havana?
TROI: I wouldn’t know.
CLEMENS: Well, that’s the problem I see here. All this technology it only serves to take away life’s simple pleasures. You don’t even let a man open the door for a lady.
TROI: I think what we’ve gained far outweighs anything that might have been lost.
CLEMENS: Oh? Well, I’m not so impressed with this future. Huge starships, and weapons that can no doubt destroy entire cities, and military conquest as a way of life?
TROI: Is that what you see here?
CLEMENS: Well, I know what you say, that this is a vessel of exploration and that your mission is to discover new worlds. That’s what the Spanish said. And the Dutch and the Portuguese. It’s what all conquerors say. I’m sure that’s what you told that blue-skinned fellow I just saw, before you brought him here to serve you.
TROI: He’s one of the thousands of species that we’ve encountered. We live in a peaceful Federation with most of them. The people you see are here by choice.
CLEMENS: So there are a privileged few who serve on these ships, living in luxury and wanting for nothing. But what about everyone else? What about the poor? You ignore them.
TROI: Poverty was eliminated on Earth a long time ago, and a lot of other things disappeared with it. Hopelessness, despair, cruelty.
CLEMENS: Young lady, I come from a time when men achieve power and wealth by standing on the backs of the poor, where prejudice and intolerance are commonplace and power is an end unto itself. And you’re telling me that isn’t how it is anymore?
TROI: That’s right.
CLEMENS: Well, maybe it’s worth giving up cigars for after all.