The bus left in a hurry, and then the next one came. A bus came up, and two or three people ran to catch the bus. There were quite a large number of people waiting at the bus stop. I was on my way back to the dorms after spending the weekend with my family. At that time, I was living at the dorms at the college I got into after retaking the college entrance exams. When I was eight and in Gyeongju with my family for summer vacation, I was standing in front of a gigantic gray rock.Īnd when I was twenty, I was standing at a bus station near Seoul National University of Education’s subway station. I couldn’t even see the stick pointing at the number four. I was five years old and standing in front of the eye chart with a yellow cloche hat on my head. I was brought into the world at seven months and was immediately put inside an incubator. When I was in the incubator, the ventilator supplied too much oxygen, damaging the blood vessels in my retina. My chin was sharp… A different place…My right eye is looking at a different place. I sat at my desk and with a magnifying glass peered into the picture on my junior high school student ID card. In the fish tank were two goldfish, one red and one pink. Playing on the radio was “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Globals Spotlights
The story complicates our notions of arrival while showing us another way of reading, and of seeing, the world.
#The soundwaves feeling myself full#
Written by Kim Soom and first published in full in Korean Literature Now, the story crafts a narrator who remains hypervisible even as the text’s fragmentary structure shreds apart the unity of meaning that we often ascribe to things around us. In fractals, the writing makes intuitive connections between the world and the language with which the narrator reads his way through it.
On the way to the sea, there are signposts: familiar sounds and their absence, remembered colors and the felt shapes of objects, and the narrator’s longing to see and to be seen. In Korean braille, the word for “sea” is constructed in four dots, resembling the ellipsis in the English language this story is infused with ellipses, offering a careful balance between sound and silence, the visual and the tactile. The narrative follows a nameless narrator who sets off alone one day to find his way to the sea. “The Man Who Touches Waves” is a short story that can be read as a sonic map drawn by a man who has gone blind. Claude Monet, Waves Breaking, 1881, oil on canvas.
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