Ingwon

Corpse

That itchy spot in your heart acting up again, right behind your left aorta. Or when you remember a bold moment from a few days ago and you squeeze your eyes shut, because you don’t know what to do with the memory. The heavy water in your belly from eating eight oranges after dinner. The clenching of your navel as you wonder where independence from your parents begins. The gritting of your teeth to feel your jawline. When you realize how little you appreciate that warm flash of contentedness down your neck as you drift off to sleep. The bruised elbow when you fell in the gym today. The direction the tiny hairs on your arm bend. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that your body has things to tell you after a long day. Listen to its tired sighs, observe its wonderful minutiae, and in doing so, know yourself.

The Christmas Truce of 1914

This year on my way home for Christmas, I read a story at the airport waiting for my flight that struck a particular chord.

Christmas morning, 1914 in Ypres, Belgium. A young French private squats on his haunches, his helmet barely poking out over the top of the trench as he stares cross-eyed at this weed growing a few inches from his face. The howling wind dries his eyes and carries the weary scents of the German soldiers huddled in muddy trenches a mere sixty yards away. They must be miserable too, he muses. The war reducing mankind to mere earthworms, crawling and burrowing in the mud. The French private thinks back to his dear mother and sister waiting in his hometown of Montrichard. Thinks of the candlelight decorations they have up around this time of the year, and the faint voices of the children’s choir coming from the town church. The lights and sounds here on the Western Front are different: sudden flashes of artillery, dying screams and foreign curses that carry the unmistakable urgency of hate. As the French private stares at the single scraggly, pathetic plant sprouting from the hard winter soil, he sees himself: young, awkward, clinging to life, hopelessly overmatched in the event of a sudden barrage of snowfall or artillery raining down from the sky.

On Christmas Day all along the Western Front, the weary infantrymen have similar thoughts. They miss home. They have seen their comrades cut to pieces by molten scraps of metal out in No-Man’s Land. It is Christmas. In a sudden, strange act, the French private tosses his rifle on the ground and crawls over the top of the trench. He slowly stands, stepping over the weed, and begins walking across a field strewn with bodies and scorched tree stumps toward the German side. He winces as he walks, half-expecting the sharp crack of a rifle that will be the last thing he hears. There is only silence. As he nears the halfway point, he sees movement along the German trenches; a soldier is climbing out. The two meet, unarmed, and in silence exchange cigarettes. There is a stirring, as slowly more men emerge from both sides, some carrying trinkets they have received in their care packages. A soccer ball is tossed onto the ground. Sporadically along the Western Front, British, French and German soldiers meet on the battlefield, exchanging candy, playing soccer, singing Christmas carols. Most are in defiance of their commanding officers’ orders.

For one day, on Christmas 1914, the sounds of singing and laughter rang across the battlefields of Western Europe. Soon, the Great War resumed, and it wouldn’t be until four years later that it finally ended. Nine million military combatants killed, and millions more hearts broken. Yet in the midst of one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, on Christmas day, because of the brave spontaneity of a few weary soldiers, there was chronicled in the annals of mankind the brief triumph of peace and love over violence and hatred. I like to imagine that for that unassuming French private who first dared leave his trench, fate awarded him a long life after the war. Perhaps he went back home to Montrichard, married his childhood sweetheart, and had lots of grandchildren. And the raggedy plant he stepped over that day, perhaps now a hundred-year-old tree with a secret.

Autumn

Slowly, one by one, the red leaves peel off

One by one, the tree acknowledges the lean autumn wind

Leaves that float and shudder like sparks from a bonfire

November is our last dance.

Huddle around dying flames, lap up the precious drops of sunset;

the torpid freeze approaches.

Soon even the embers will be gone, and all that’s left of auburn flames

Are ashy skeleton branches.

So go now, before it’s too late:

Hold an empty hand

Knit a blanket for a shivering heart,

Project a brilliant light when there’s none to spare.

Be the warmth that is suddenly missing from your life.

We must love one another or freeze to death.

A Winter’s Wait

It was a sunny winter day, and I was walking through Killian Court back to my room when I met the stern gaze of a squirrel. His back was ramrod straight and his eyes furrowed. “Hi there!” I called out. The air was crisp and clean, the snow crunched like cereal beneath my feet, and I had just aced my econ test.

“Hrmmph,” he grunted.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“My wife kicked me out of the nest last night.” His tail flicked up. “The old hag said I grumbled too much. I had to sleep on some damp dirt huddled next to a steam pipe!”

“That’s too bad,” I said. I recalled with a little guilt the wonderful sleep I had last night on my tempurpedic pillow.

“That’s not all. She said I twitched too much in my sleep. I’m a squirrel, for God’s sake! And after all the crap I’ve put up with all these years. The feathers, the damn sunrise chirps, and the droppings. You’d think a pretty robin from an upstanding family would have learned to clean up after herself, but noo…”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” I sat down on the snow next to him. An elderly group of Chinese tourists walked past us, pointing and taking pictures.

“When does she fly south?” I asked.

His tail drooped. He turned towards me, and I could see a strange sadness in his eyes. “She left this morning. Left a note on the ledge saying she was sorry, that when she comes back in the spring a winter’s worth of soaking up the Mexican sun will do her good. Do us good.”

“Oh.” We sat there in silence for a while, watching the boats in the distance on the Charles river. The sails glided slowly past, while the motorboats flew by, unzipping the water with their large trailing wakes.

“Maybe it’s for the best. Every year. Maybe some time apart helps us reset our relationship. Beatrice and I.” He said.

“It’s worked this far,” I agreed.

The squirrel got up, slowly shook his head, and made his way towards a tree, leaving behind tiny pawprints in the snow. I watched him go.

The odd squirrel and robin couple were fairly often the subject of gossip among the animal residents of Killian Court, strange as they were. The other squirrels still talked about that fateful spring day ten years ago when the two had suddenly eloped, immediately estranging themselves from their shocked and outraged families. Every year it had gone like this. The squirrel and robin would simmer and quarrel in the fall, as the days grew shorter and the leaves thinned out. She would eventually have enough and fly off in a fury down to Cancun, where her sisters lived. Somehow, she had always flown back in the spring, and the two would reconcile.

Poor guy, I thought. His family had never talked to him since his marriage, and a particularly nasty snowstorm two years ago killed off all of his relatives. He was alone here in the winter. He had no one to share the nest with, no one to await the return of spring, and of Beatrice.

I stood up to leave. As I walked back down the infinite corridor towards my dorm, I wondered how much the the squirrel must dread the possibility that this would be the year old Beatrice did not fly back, that she decided to remain in Mexico with her sisters.

Did the squirrel ever think back to that fateful spring day ten years ago, and rue the day he fell in love with a pretty robin?

Ardour

You meet folks who remember when this country still had a winter, and one year led into another unhindered. Come the first snow, men would leave the fields for fallow, to chop firewood in the forest. Then not more than a day would go by before you’d hear that one of them had seen her.

She wasn’t somebody any of them knew, at least not personally, by way of an affair or a mutual acquaintance. But long before, they’d made up a name to use when talking to one another, as men will, about a girl. They called her Ardour.

The story was ever the same. Resting alone in a clearing, burning a small flame for warmth, a peasant would sense at first just a breath within the dead trees’ shadows. Then he’d see the sky-gray of two eyes, watching. That was what she was always doing, the girl they called Ardour, and, calling out to her, they’d each compete to draw her closer than any of the others had done. Yet there was a certain distance that she’d always keep.

It was not, evidently, a matter of modesty: Over her bare skin she wore at most a coat of snow, often only a gloss of frost. Nor could she seriously be considered a flirt: Unlike young women in town who hid their flaws by making potential suitors notice only each other’s faults, Ardour had no perceptible imperfection. From behind their fire, they’d call to her, and it was as if she simply wasn’t sure how to respond.

Could she have known their ulterior motives? Each year echoed the one before. As she woke into the first snow, she recalled not what had happened the previous winter, but remembered only an urge that had yet gone unfulfilled.

It had begun as something she’d seen, who knew when, deep in the woods where she’d lived all eternity: A girl like her-breasts as steep as snow peaks beneath a blizzard of hair-came hand-in-hand with a man into an open meadow, where they embraced, and, it seemed, drew into a single skin. Then there were his words, her tears. A rupture, a quiver. They cradled, as if each were the other’s wound.

Had Ardour known the word, perhaps she’d have called it love. As likely, had she known hate, that term would have occurred to her as she watched the couple wrangle. She hadn’t had language to guide her. So she’d clutched her own numb flesh, and dreamed what it would be to-

To feel? To desire? How? Who can be lonely, even, if never not alone? After that, each year, under cover of winter, she hovered on the verge of humanity. And men urged her over the threshold.

They beseeched her all season long until at last she came too close to fire. As the frost thawed from her, she melted with it, into clear water. Then the cold brace of winter would follow her, flowing downriver through closed forest into the unknown. Beneath the snow would emerge a new spring. Work would begin again, the cycle of sowing and reaping that consumed everybody most of the year. There was so much to be done, to bring bread to the table. The only able peasant permitted by the king to remain idle was the man who had tempted Ardour from her forest cover. That was the reward for ending winter.

Every year men worked harder to lure Ardour to her fate. They sang to her, played the fiddle or the flute. If once they’d been attracted to her, after a while you no longer them at the tavern talking lustily about her blizzard of hair, those breasts as steep as snow peaks. Each man thought only of himself.

Yet, the more trouble they took, the less their efforts worked to draw her near. The king watched as his subjects flattered and bribed Ardour, tended to her more unctuously than to his majesty. The winter, previously only a period of rest, was more trying than a season of sowing, and what did it reap? For all but the man who ushered Ardour’s departure, another nine months of labor.

The wintertime clamor became almost intolerable, each man playing whatever instrument he knew, dancing, tendering bread, mead, gold. Ardour could scarcely choose which way to look, let alone who to let tempt her. One year she was drawn to the peasant who had the loudest horn, which she mistook-simple soul-for the force of his desire. Another winter, she went for the one who danced most gracefully, which she misunderstood-foolish girl-as a measure of his sensitivity. And then came the season that she fell for the man with the greatest goods, which she misinterpreted-dumb broad-as a token of his generosity.

After that, she entirely forgot what she’d wished once to find amongst men. She came back with winter, her annual ritual, and stormed around in search of bigger, better-what? No longer was she shy. She smothered fires, buried farmers under her coats of snow. The people called her cruel-no more dumb fool simple soul-and wondered how she’d come to resemble them.

Winter that year stretched into April, May, June, July. By August they were burning the days of their calendars for warmth. The king ordained that whoever brought about her fall would never work again. But the men who’d once fought so hard to woo her now just begged her to be gone. Horns and flutes abandoned, their voices became one: Curse Ardour! Go away! Leave! Scram!

September, October, November. Winter led into winter. The king’s hunters laid traps to catch her. They shot to kill, sunk their munitions into snow. December, January, February, March. Months lost their meanings, years their numbering. Word were moot. Time was marked only by the aching advance of starvation. Folk looked forward to dying.

At last the king had only his son to send from his castle for firewood to warm his gruel. The boy had been quite young when that interminable winter began, and had heard of Ardour only as a monster, insatiable in her appetite for human life. He knew well to fear her, a beast as immense as his country, her body encompassing mountains and valleys, a woman said to freeze men with her breath. His father didn’t have to tell him to take care.

He wore boots of cowhide lined in fur, laced up to his thighs, triple-tied. His hat and gloves had been crafted from the same, fit to him so tight that there wasn’t even space for a shiver. The coat, though, was a nobler matter: It had been willed to the king by his father, to whom it had been given by his father’s father-a tradition, in short, that went back to a generation before there was gold to leaf the family tree. What the coat was made of, though, people no longer knew: the skin of an extinct animal-a dragon, perhaps-or even the earth’s own crust? That day, the king laid it on his son.

With ax and saw, the boy made his way into the woods. And it might have been the first time in sixteen years that he was alone, were there not, he wondered, another set of eyes fixed on his own. They were, at a glance, an overcast gray, but cleared, as he stared, to two open pupils. They belonged to a girl such as he’d never seen before. The snow covered her small body completely, her hair wrapped in the fierce weather that ravaged every inch of bare flesh.

He was not, in truth, especially brave. But had he been moved to rescue the girl from winter, to bring her to shelter, presumably he would have met the same fate as if he had thought to drive the weather away by attacking her. Instead, he approached with no motive other than to come closer.

Colder, colder, and colder. He reached out to her. The coat of snow was soft as fur. He brushed it off, and as it fell, her bare hands met his shoulders, to lift away his own shell.

It is said that the last sensation felt by a body freezing is an all-encompassing heat. As the girl drew nearer-frost melting form her breasts and hips, the stretch of her neck, the pale of her belly-he also let go deeper layers of clothing. Ardour then, folk say, led him away.

Winter withdrew into spring, fell fast on summer. The king went in quest of his son. But all he found, in a clearing, was that greatcoat the boy had worn. It wasn’t bloodied by the bite of any beast. There weren’t even bones to bury. Life went on.

That year, winter didn’t come. None of the peasants met Ardour. They worked clear through December, barely even seeing one another, so relentlessly did the land produce. Prosperous, who had time to rest? Another year passed, two and three more, four. The weather never dropped off enough for the fields to sleep a season beneath a blanket of snow. And so it went that the workers never more were idle.

Till and sow and reap and till and sow and reap and till. Only rarely was the rhythm broken for an hour by the sounding of a distant storm. The king, shut up in his castle, believed that it was the gods above weeping with him over the loss of his son. But the peasants knew that the tantrum came from the forest floor: the noise of Ardour struggling with her lover, the boy who had fallen for her and who made her feel furiously-could it be true?-human.

-Jonathon Keats

Go Sailing at Night

Go sailing at night! Lean back against the edge of the boat and tilt your head back, until you see the shores upside down. The buildings of Boston hang down like glowing stalactites from the mossy ceiling of the Esplanade, and you almost feel the quiet waves of the Charles grazing against your dangling hair. The world and the sky are no longer slow, infinite expanses to you. Upside down, you are no longer an ant on the ground, looking up and seeing no end to your daily toils. You are now flying along the Charles, skimming the ceiling of the world, a great heavy expanse of river water that inexplicably doesn’t fall. From high up on your perch, the blinking lights of planes move lazily beneath you, and you feel so light. There’s a peculiar way the Boston skyline looks at night, when it’s upside down. The varying heights of the buildings, with their tiny lights against the purple sky make it look as if someone took a brush, dipped it into a paint can of speckled lights, and starting painting from the top down and never finished. I guess as more years pass and the buildings get taller… if one day when I’m old I were to take a boat again out to the middle of the Charles at night and stare upside down at the skyline, would I see a paint job completed, the sky covered with lights that seem to extend down forever? Go sailing at night. When else will you be able to dream such things, graze your hair against the silent river, and stare into the glassy depths of such a calm, beautiful city?

Time is the hero and the villain

The destroyer and the builder

The father of hope and the mother of despair

Giving us years and taking away the seconds

Lending us the moments and letting the minutes

Run out like the sand in a tiny hour glass

Destroying us with what we cannot see

As we spend the precious substance as if

Tomorrow will never come

Finally we will all say, just one more

One more hour to love

One more moment to see

To hear those explosions in the sky

- Unknown

Halloween Ruminations

As the 20th Halloween of my life approaches, I realize how little a part of my life neighborhoods and trick-or-treating have become. Growing up in Houston, I lived and breathed neighborhoods - leafy, quiet mazes of suburbia. To a small kid who rode his bike too fast along sidewalks, the old stoic oak trees felt like loyal guardians that caressed the ceilings of the neighborhood with their vast foliage and the maternal curves of their trunks. And the quirky personality of each of the homes and occupants on Oakdale Drive gave the impression of a cartoonish ecosystem - a subdued, humming cacophony of blue and red city council campaign signs sticking out of lawns like birthday candles, scattered skateboards and toys poking out from under garage doors, and the incessant drone of lawnmowers and leaf-blowers.

A move to Korea, then boarding school, then college, and ten years removed from my childhood neighborhood, I have to strain to recall the once-ubiquitous sight of old Mrs. Bailey walking her tiny dachshund in measured paces, the machine-gun rapid chatter of the families of Mexican immigrants grooming the lawns, and the distant dribbling of a basketball on a slanted driveway down the street. It was within this suburban jungle that I went trick-or-treating with my brother. How distant it all seems from the lingerie-themed frat parties that now characterize my Hallow’s eves! I realize now though that Halloween as a child took on a special significance. Part of it had to do with my mother, who insisted on making the costumes for my brother and me every year right until we moved to Korea. She had a strange obsession with round objects or characters. This made for some hilarious and classic Halloween photos in retrospect, but also led to some very nasty temper tantrums by a scrawny Asian kid who wanted nothing more than to be Batman that year, but ended up as a fat pumpkin, complete with stem hat. It was on more than one occasion that I walked out the doors to begin my candy-collecting journey in tears, holding a candy bag in one hand and my little brother’s hand in the other.

Ignoring the sound of my father chuckling from inside and my mother’s final call to be safe, my brother and I, two fat pumpkins, grey mice, Barneys even - one slightly shorter than the other - would set out towards the porches lit by ghastly decorations, framed by giant oak trees that looked just a bit more menacing that night. Scampering from house to house like bandits, the two of us grabbed fistfuls of candy with a desperation known only to children - the understanding that our haul would have to last us the rest of the year. And after hitting up both sides of Oakdale Drive and then scurrying down Avenue B to dust off the accommodating residents of Pine Street, my brother and I would return to our room and begin our tradition of dumping our loot on the floor and trading pieces with each other. The stakes were high, and none of us wanted those damn tootsie rolls. My father knew eventually to wait nearby in the study, ready at a moment’s notice to come pull us apart and arbitrate our disputes. To be honest, I usually took advantage of my brother, employing all kinds of reverse psychology (“these Reese’s limited editions are so good, I’d really hate to part with them!”), and when that wasn’t enough, just reaching over and simply grabbing his mystery Airheads.

At some point in my life, I grew out of such childish whimsy, the way I no longer fit into fat pumpkin costumes. My brother and I are both in college now, and our conversations are just that - conversations; we no longer scrabble over pieces of Halloween candy or commiserate over our damned misfortune of having a Martha Stewart wannabe of a mother. The last time I saw a suburban neighborhood was in the opening montage of “Up”. Sometimes on a clear night, I’ll go on top of Kresge roof to revisit old memories. At that height, staring up at the moon, the buildings and  manmade lights that identify my surroundings as MIT, in the present, fall away from my periphery, and for brief moments I can picture myself again roaming beneath that same moon peeking through the leaves of the oak trees on Halloween.

It’s quite stark to realize that the past is an illusion; it pulls out from underneath us, slowly, like a rug. A decade is enough to reduce memories to fantasies; strange, as I sit in my single dorm room, how I once lived in a house, in a leafy neighborhood. As a college student, I am now in a period of transition; my old family structure has faded away. My parents are greying, and once I eventually start my own family, it won’t be utterly ludicrous to regard them as “grandparents.” How soon the future flies towards us like the wings of a bat, unknown and sudden. And I suppose I’ll return to the Halloween I once knew as a child, in a different iteration, waiting in a corridor to pull two fat greedy pumpkins off of each other. And that’s truly a spooky, frightening thought.

Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle

CONSIDER THE HUMMINGBIRD for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas Voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have racecar hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It IS a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words “I have something to tell you,” a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.