7.12.99

I have been reading back over the last year of this journal, in observation of the anniversary of my return from Korea. (I am now repeating time and place.) The shift in style is stark to me. I see a voice emerging immediately after my return and throughout last summer -- evolving still -- that is more true to my thoughts. Not that what came prior was not my voice, it was just distorted by outside interference. I've been missing Korea like I knew I would. I foresaw it long ago, when I still had a year there -- when I still struggled against the present. It was a difficult dissonance to balance, knowing that I would miss a thing that was undeniably the source of so much pain. The degree to which a body is rebuilt in the likeness of an enemy is a function of the level of disintegration suffered in opposition to it. I live in this culture now with that other one indelibly carved into my soul. The wound aches but itches too, and I cannot reach the spot to scratch it: I want to return. Joan and I went to see Joan Chen's new film Xiu Xiu: The Sent-down girl. So much pain in that story. Awakened that ache... those faces I see, have seen, have dared look into me with warmth. Intimacies irrevocable and the knowledge of them clawing from inside the skin trying to materialize alongside an American self. The ache. She told me that she knows it too: contentment spilling out of the smile of a man who sweeps in futility over a filthy porch, and who glances deep into the heart of a stranger without fear or judgment, but kinship. An injection of profundity that lingers for years like no other ephemeral meeting. Hundreds of moments like that one accumulate in imageless memory, the body of soul, that is called love.

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