Vaseline Buddha (7 page)

to what people thought, and recalling the fact that Novalis, the writer, was an expert on mining, and Keats, the poet, was a licensed surgeon, wondered if there wasn't something I could do professionally besides writing, and having been constipated for several days and sitting on the toilet and applying great force to a certain part of my body, thought about the expression “with all your might,” or “with your heart and soul,” and thought that everything that was before my eyes at that moment was staying where they were with all their might, or with their heart and soul, and thought about things that could be seen endlessly moving (seas and clouds, for example), and things that seemed stationary but were moving (clouds and deserts, for example), and things that moved without being seen (deserts and excrement in the body, for example), and wondered what kinds of things in today's world would be considered uncivilized and barbarous to mankind in the distant future, and thought about how much despair or joy Newton must have felt while teaching math at Trinity College at Cambridge when none of his students showed up for his lecture, which happened from time to time because he taught in such an abstract way, and despaired at the fact that what I wanted to write more than anything, perhaps, was something without a beginning or an end, but that it was impossible, and above all, thought, somewhat irritably, about how irritating it was to think repeatedly about certain human concerns regarding human suffering, which would never come to an end, and thought about the artist who, suffering from Alzheimer's, tried to put herbicide in coffee, thinking it was whiskey (should I stop here?—this is the narrator speaking. I could stop, but I could go on as much as I want, and I do want to go
on—this is the author speaking, in a more playful way), and thought about the fact that I could think only in a way that was much too complicated, and wondered if I might go insane, if only for that reason, and wondered if being able to think in a way that was much too complicated was a talent, whether it would be better to discard it or nurture it, and wondered why I liked to say something nonsensical in a clever way so that it made sense, and thought about how the expression “retarded” is used to mean stupid, and thought about some figures of speech and about using figures of speech appropriately or inappropriately, and looking at a bruise on my body, wondered how I'd gotten it, and wondered why I sometimes had bruises on my body I didn't know about, and wondered why I felt affection for other animals, and thought that, among other reasons, it was because they couldn't speak, and thought that there was rapport that was possible only between those who couldn't communicate through words, and while reading a book on mathematics and trying to incompletely understand or completely misunderstand an equation that was beyond my understanding, wondered, as befits someone who doesn't know math very well, if the fact that Bertrand Russell, who was a mathematician, among other things, was one of the passengers who sat in the smoking section and survived the flight that crashed in Norway in 1948, while everyone who sat in the nonsmoking section died, could be a mathematical event, and thought about the breed of dog called Russell Terrier, developed by Reverend Jack Russell of England as a fox hunting dog, which was good at digging the ground and catching mice and liked to romp around, and thought about or tried not to think about a life of writing,
in which writing, which was clearly not a healing process, but seemed, though it wasn't clear if it was, to be a process of maintaining a symptom or the aggravation of a symptom, and wondered why I used certain words or phrases repeatedly in my writing, and why I felt pleasure in doing so, but didn't know why exactly, and so felt that it had something to do with making something burst like a bubble, and felt that repeated use of words or phrases resulted in something like bubbles in writing, and wondered if the pleasure I felt in watching these bubbles weren't like the pleasure I felt in quietly watching countless bubbles form in water, and wondered what to think of myself, who some time previously had decided not to write anymore, and yet was still writing, and thought above all about everyday life which was almost always seriously and severely tedious, and thought about the fact that my biggest problem was that I couldn't really get excited about anything, and thought about my chronic problems that mostly arose from bad habits, and thought that music, which had no part in my everyday life, could stay out of my everyday life, and recalled how I thought that we were all going past ourselves toward ourselves, as I parted ways with a cow I encountered on the road one day and gave apricots to, and, above all, thought about myself, who wasn't eternal, who thought about things that weren't eternal, and thought about things that I could make my own by imagining them instead of experiencing them firsthand, making them mine even more completely by doing so, and thought about the things I did even without any enthusiasm, and thinking about the life I've lived so far, and changing the expression to the path I've walked so far, thought about how smooth or
not smooth the path has been, and thinking about the things that made up my everyday life, thought about how they made up my everyday life, and above all, thinking that I was repeatedly using the expression above all in a nearly meaningless way in this story, thought that these thoughts I was having now could be included and further developed in what I was writing, and thought about endlessly going on with such sentences, and writing a novel by doing so, and above all, feeling tempted to make and commit intentional mistakes in my writing, and thought about whether or not it was possible to make intentional mistakes (are mistakes something that can't occur through intention, and can they be committed only unintentionally? Is an intentional mistake a contradiction that's logically invalid?), and thought about a contradictory story that's logically invalid, and thought that what's important is what kind of a story is placed in what kind of a context, and thought about the question of placing a story in a nonsensical context in my writing, and thought about confusing up my own memories and tangling up the stories, and thought that even if someone read what I wrote and found pleasure in it, the result was something I hadn't intended at all, and thought about thoughts that could be thought in different ways depending on how you thought about them could be thought to a greater extent the more you thought about them, or thought endlessly, and thought that you exist or don't exist to the extent that you think, and thought about things that make no difference at all whether or not you say they're such and such, and thought that there was nothing but language with which you could play around as you pleased, and in this way, I could make and add to an endless list of things I thought about.

Everyday life is often seen as something banal, but also found in everyday life, along with the banal, are the most astonishing, terrifying, and bizarre, and nothing that seems far from everyday life takes place apart from everyday life. And what's banal is not everyday life itself but certain things found in everyday life. In everyday life there are moments that captivate you, because the moment you step into life's most ambiguous, enigmatic territory called everyday life you feel a pleasant, unexpected surprise. And such surprises are everywhere, waiting for you at home, in an alley around your house, around the corner on a street, a forest path, or even in an unfamiliar place you travel.

Someone could, while taking a walk near his home, see a sign that says “National Boiler Association” on the first floor of a building in a residential area he doesn't normally visit and be touched by it in a strange way, although he would have ordinarily passed it by without second thought. He could also think that the place, which according to the sign, was headquarters to dealers who were probably responsible for household boilers nationwide, looked too small to be the office of National Boiler Association, but the place, home to an association of people whose job it was to make hot water flow from boilers in homes nationwide and let you take hot showers, and sleep in a warm room even in winter, could seem even more mysterious than a secret political or religious society, or he could look at the sign and think that the National Boiler Association could be a social gathering of people who did something that had nothing to do with boilers, or a ghost organization that was involved in something suspicious.

Or he could come across somewhere in the city he lived in an office called Teddy Bear Association, but seeing that it was locked, to his disappointment—the place could look shut down already, with only the sign remaining—he could stand before the office for a long time, and suddenly recall the touching documentary film by Andrzej Wajda, the Polish director, on teddy bears, and think that although he really hated being touched by touching things in general, he liked how the film touched him. And he could think that if he hadn't seen the film about teddy bears that had been with people or people who had been with teddy bears, which, if he remembered correctly, although he couldn't be sure because it had been long since he saw it, showed the process in which an artist in Canada established a teddy bear museum and collected teddy bears from around the world, and showed faded photographs with teddy bears standing side by side with people nearly everywhere in the world, in a living room, on a beach, on a battlefield, in a spaceship, sharing their joys and sorrows, and showed Hitler in the last scene, looking quite impressive, surrounded by teddy bears, he could have passed by the office called Teddy Bear Association with indifference.

He could also go on a walk around the house he lived in, and see a white mongrel with a tattooed unibrow standing in front of a shop and smile, thinking that the dog, which looked stupid to begin with, looked even stupider because of the tattoo, although there was no telling why its owner had given it the tattoo, and laugh for a change, looking at the dog, which looked like the most dejected dog in the world, thinking that the dog, of course, hadn't given itself the tattoo, so the owner must have given it the tattoo, perhaps while getting a tattoo himself so that he could always be sure that the dog was his, although there was no knowing what he was thinking. And having a sudden flash of thought at that moment, that, for instance, Baudelaire went around wearing lipstick, he could name the dog Baudelaire, and think that a tattooed eyebrow would have better suited Baudelaire the poet than Baudelaire the dog, and that if Baudelaire the poet had a tattooed eyebrow, he would have written a poem about it as well.

And he could take a walk on a hill somewhere, and find a swivel chair that someone had thrown away in the bushes for some reason, intact but for one missing wheel, and go there from time to time and sit on it, turning himself lightly, and think about the many things that had happened to him in his life, or think about his life in which nearly nothing, you could say, had happened, and pass many pleasant afternoon hours, and remember that once, while he was on an island in the Philippines and sitting in a metal chair on the beach—the chair looked as if it were in use by someone, not abandoned—he saw a fisherman setting out in the evening on his boat with a net, and saw the cross etched on his bare back, thanks to which he was able to wash away the memory of a bad dream he'd had the night before, in which his dead father appeared carrying in one hand his other hand, amputated from the wrist, like a fish, and saying that he had fished it out of some pond—as if he had caught a carp or something—made the strange demand that he decide which of the single hand he was holding in his hand he would have, at which moment he felt an urge to write something solely about a chair, and lie on the grass and feel the world unfolding beneath him, an enormous underground world in which his father, too, lay, and imagine being slowly sucked into the world.

And if there were some sunflowers on the hill that someone had planted, he could fall asleep for a little while under the sunflowers, having gone to see them on purpose in order to sleep under them when they were in blossom, and wake up and for a moment in a dazed state, and, not knowing where he was, recall how once he felt that my existence was unreal, so unreal that he felt as if his brain were in a drawer somewhere in his house, and the rest of his body in the wardrobe, or as if his entire body were hanging on the upper branches of a tall tree nearby, or he could see a yellow sunflower with a short stem right above his head and be overwhelmed with a certain kind of pure joy.

And days would continue, days on which he could see that the gloom that brought him pleasure at times, but not this time, was expanding its range within himself, and feel nearly overwhelmed because of the gloom, and feel so gloomy that he couldn't face myself, and couldn't look at his own face that looked so sullen that it embarrassed him, and thus could stand against the gloom as if making a stand against an oppressive and brutal system but to no avail, and so, instead of standing against the gloom, he could try harder to be gloomy, or think that he could meet someone and spend some time in a natural way in order to dispel the gloom, but then think that he couldn't stand to have my feelings of uneasiness beneath his façade of naturalness pass on in their entirety to the other person, and that he'd have a hard time putting up with the unpleasantness he inevitably felt when he was with people, and think that perhaps he had no friends at all but could be satisfied with the fact, and, one day, he could get up the courage to go out and go to a street crowed with people, and be startled by someone suddenly shouting in a loud voice behind him and flee from the spot, and with a Christian fundamentalist standing with a large cross saying naïve and nasty and foolish things that screech in his ears but don't touch his heart, vividly demonstrating how terrifying blind faith is, saying that you'll fall into hellfire if you don't receive Jesus, that you should repent before it's too late, he could feel awkward and uncomfortable even though the Christian wasn't yelling at him, and feel sufficiently rebuked even though he had no reason at all to be rebuked, and feel somewhat grateful to him, even, but because there was nothing he could do about it, he could punish him by glaring at him, and come home feeling repentant, at any rate, and deeply regret his first day out in a while and stay cooped up at home.