Letter from Seoul -1
In two months, I will go to India to walk the streets of Old Delhi, Varanasi and Kolkata - with a side trip to Kathmandu. Me and a camera – for no other reason than it’s what makes me feel alive.
Long ago I stopped dwelling on the meaning of life, especially as the funeral notices of family members and select friends started to crowd the inside pocket of my suit jacket. Many of these loved ones died in the conviction that a Jewish zombie from Nazareth would return to this mortal coil and take them heavenward in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti.
The dead Kennedys of my Irish clan are a collection of bones in cheap coffins, buried in Catholic cemeteries from St. Louis-to-Chapulhuacan in the old Aztec Empire of Mexico. I have not heard from any of the dearly departed about the Nova Express and the big payoff for a life of deferred gratification, marketed as the Heavenly Reward. No one has called collect. No one has Googled my cell phone number, or turned to both Chinese and North Korean hackers to locate me.
During my misspent youth, I enjoyed some primo Red Lebanese hashish many times, but those highs could never match the hallucinatory story of the Christian Resurrection.
My goal in life is to get through the farce of the human condition with as much dignity as possible, and gain meaningful insights about people from Athens-to-Yangon.
This marks my fourth trip to India since 2017.
My wife, a life-long resident of Seoul, hates the thought of India. Her idea of international travel favors the clean and affluent capitals of Western Europe, New York City in America and Sydney down under.
What used to be referred to as Indo-China, that sweeping arc from Tokyo-to-Kolkata, is off-limits (with the exception of Seoul – of course, and Bali, which is wonderfully unique). Forget Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.
My wife came of age in the aftermath of the Korean War, a civil war between the North and the South. I understand her fondness for cultures that reflect prosperity, especially from her tales of destruction and deprivations, when Seoul was nearly wiped off the map, and basic commodities like bananas were unavailable in stores until the early 1970s.
My point of origin in the United States was dramatically different in the early 1950s, and so I knew middle class peace and prosperity during the Eisenhower era.
Yet by age 14 and growing up along the Mississippi River at St. Louis, I knew I was no different than Huck Finn and “reckoned I had to light out for the Territory” before the system civilized me, because I couldn’t stand the idea of working on Maggie’s farm.
India is a visual feast that calls my name.
Despite my wife’s aversion for the country, it is her character – a thoroughly Korean trait, she assures me, to be my companion on all these adventures.
Her motives are to:
a) make sure I eat well (she packs a small kitchen supply of food in her suitcase); and
b) to keep me out of the clutches of wayward women ready to offer men forbidden fruit from dubious shadows.
In other words, my wife loves me. She also wants to protect me from myself – once a full-time role in my prime, when the Road to Perdition beckoned more than once.
Now the heyday in the blood is tame, and I might be halfway respectable. What would Huck Finn say?
In that bygone era of grade school, when a collection of students was together in the same room with the same teacher for an academic year, my sixth-grade teacher bought us all a smart looking paperback copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. If he had handed me a bag of gold, it would not have been as valuable as that 50-cent thesaurus. It changed my life.
For high school graduation, my mother presented me with a portable manual typewriter and a hardbound copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. I’ve had a half-century relationship with that edition – longer than my connection with any one person, and it has accompanied me from St. Louis-to-Seoul, and all points in between. That edition from 1970 remains an integral part of my book collection.
Allegedly, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), an immensely talented wit and writer, could imbibe liberal quantities of alcoholic refreshments throughout the day, hold forth with ease and intellectual dexterity on literary, political and religious issues at both formal lectures and lively parties - then sit before a keyboard at 1 a.m. and produce a stunning essay for Vanity Fair that marked him as the rightful heir to Gore Vidal in his prime.
I’m still waiting for lightning to strike, to know what I want to be when I grow up, to be enraptured by a muse who will inspire me as much as June Mansfield (1902-1979) shaped the life of Henry Miller (1891-1980), her husband, who went unaccompanied to Paris in 1930 and during this down-and-out period wrote countless letters to his wife and friends in New York City that became the material for the scandalous Tropic of Cancer – banned as obscene for 30-years, edited by his mistress and benefactor, Anais Nin (1903-1977). Perhaps the best we can do is to be an interesting collection of contradictions.
Call me Kennedy. Ahab had his whale. William Burroughs (1914-1997) had his heroin. Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) had his Patagonia. As for me, I have a camera and a passport.
The play’s the thing.
Michael Kennedy
