Aerok Fiction Factory

There once was a country where beatings produced works of fiction.
The tools needed for producing such fictions were clubs, screaming, and bathtubs.
There were various methods of completing a work of fiction, like beating, hanging, and pushing someone’s face into water.
When a writer’s progress on their fiction slowed down, the screaming of friends, relatives, parents, and spouses were brought into the adjoining room, and this pushed the peak of the fiction’s climax higher.
The employees of the fiction factory only needed to repeat this one order: Confess! Confess! Confess!
The encouragements toward creating fictions did not stop until it was possible to say I didn’t do it or I did it.
Aerok Fiction Factory was a booming business.
After fiction writing was over, fiction writers were cast out
To some seashore or to some mountain valley in such secret
That not even the sewer rats knew what happened
Or they were thrown into solitary cells for decades
And the only way to reduce their sentence was by raising the level of shock in their fiction.
Fiction writer H came home from the fiction factory and their body was the color of ink
And they suffered aphasia for months.

After ages passed by, such fictions that no one would ever want to read again were completed as the writers crawled.

However, we come from those fiction factories.
We were born there.

Some time ago, right before one of those fiction factories could be renovated into an art museum,
I went down to its third basement floor
And there were fiction writers who had become ghosts, unable to leave the haunted hallways,
And their mumblings would not cease, their minds utterly lost in the writing of their fictions.

After ages passed by, when the daily recordkeeper of Aerok’s tortures was elected mayor,
Aerok’s order came down that now instead of beatings, carrots would be hung around everyone’s
neck.

Revolutionary’s New Job

It must be hard for a revolutionary to get a job after revolution.

Can being a revolutionary be a job.

Among ex-revolutionaries of Aerok (specifically literature majors), three job categories are most
noticeable.

The first being those who became national assemblypeople.
The second being those who became poets who write love poems.
The third being those who became tourists.

(Of course, there are also social activists, farmers, mental patients, publishers, professors, teachers, still-somehow-writers, real estate moguls, still-somehow-revolutionaries, and so on and so forth, many who have managed to get new careers, and many who are keeping true to the revolutionary struggle in their daily lives and jobs, and many who have passed away, but the ex-revolutionaries who are most noticeable to us now belong to the three aforementioned categories.)

And in those categories, there are those who work as all three, or just two, but rarely just one. Among them, the ones who write love poems write such poems with religious connotations, but they are never sensual or pornographic. They despise and call grotesque the pornographic poets and the young poets who howl about failures. From the perspective of n’t, this is because they still see poetry as a tool for the revolution of romantic enlightenment. The types who became tourists like to take photos as well, but they don’t go to Africa, Europe, or North America. They only go to places in Asia. The themes of their travels are about healing, reconciliation, and mutual understanding. The usual sentiment behind their lenses is nostalgia. They console themselves with landscapes they think are less civilized. To prove that revolutionaries are human beings after all, n’t thinks that these people should get a better, second job by starting pornographic scandals or going to camera-restricted areas in New York, London, and/or Tokyo and trying to put their lenses on folks there and getting their asses beaten. This isn’t something someone who enjoys the benefits of their revolution should say or think, but n’t hates how the ex-revolutionaries find a poor country and take photos of people there who are so beyond humble that they don’t even try to show any self-consciousness. Somehow the ex-revolutionaries must miss our country’s past.

Choice

(There is a building at the symbolic center of Aerok. What happened happened in a corner room
of this building.)

A meeting for the selection of a poetry award winner was being held there.
This was the third meeting, and we were to pick the winner that day.
There are many criteria that can be used to categorize the five judges.

Gender: 4 males, 1 female.
Genre: 3 poets, 1 critic.
Aerok-style criteria: 2 realists, 2 modernists, 1 ambiguous. (The criteria for these categories is automatically applied to anyone who is over the age of fifty, but not so for anyone below fifty, or sometimes it is not even considered.)
Worldview: Aesthetic Rationality, Traditional Lyricism, Everyday Editor, Womanhood, Modernism. (These are categories used by journalists.)
Job: 1 retired professor, 3 active professors, 1 editor at a publishing house.
Majors: 2 Aerok literature-related majors, 3 foreign-literature-related majors.
Hair: 4 black hairs, 1 white hair. (People of Aerok are born with black hair, so it does not work as a category for them. This is the same for eye colors. There are only various shades from brown to black. So we do not categorize human beings according to the colors of their eyes. In ancient texts, they said that women with darker eyes are more beautiful, but now women of Aerok sometimes wear colored eye lenses because they do not like their dark eyes.)
Political alignments: 1 man categorized as leftist, 1 man categorized as right-wing, 3 men and women who have never been categorized as either.
Marital status: all 5 are married. (Marital status is also unimportant. Ninety percent of everyone above age fifty in Aerok is married, no question.)
Incarceration status: 1 person who went to prison, 3 people who may or may not have gone to jail, 1 person who has never been to jail. (Prison experience is important. If he has been to prison, then it is proof that he is a practitioner of realist literature who lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s–80s. It tells us that he prefers the opposition party that is not in power, and that he is a leftist. The fact of his incarceration is an important barometer proving to us that his poetry is in transition from poems about resistance to poems about love, traveling, regression, glorification of motherhood, infatuation with Buddhism, et cetera.)
Shoes: 3 black, 2 brown.
Jacket: 1 checkered, 1 black, 1 gray, 1 brown.
Drink: 2 coffees, 2 green teas, 1 water.
Glasses: 3 wearing, 2 not wearing.
Reading glasses during the selection process: 5 wearing.
Residential locations in Seoul: 4 Gangbuk, 1 Gangnam.

(According to journalists, the books of poetry can be categorized by using the following criteria.)

Traditional Lyric
Rural
Resistance
Philosophy
Abstraction
Ambiguous (Not even the journalists have tried to categorize them.)
Travel
Popular
Living things + Natural Law + Veteran
Rhetoric

(The five judges had met twice in the previous month and had narrowed down the list of ten books to four. The remaining four books were as follows.)

Traditional Lyric
Rural
Philosophy
Resistance

(One of them had to be chosen that day as the winner.)

Opinions were shared.
n’t talked and wrote things down.

About “Traditional Lyric”
It has received too many awards recently.
It is not as good as it used to be.
It is copying the entertainment of scholar-gentlemen of the Chosun dynasty.
It is copying the attitudes of carefree lifestyles of literary men of the past.
It loves wandering and drinking and women without any interiority or social criticism or incisive commentary or wit.
It loves its blank spaces.
It writes like Du Fu.
It is kind of disappointing.

About “Rural”
It acts like a child.
It cannot be translated into a foreign language.
It is a beautiful painting of a landscape.
It is the childlike everyday life of an adult farmer.
How can someone with a job as a professor write these naive scenes of farm labors.
It is the epitome of purity.
It is purity that is camouflaged with barriers.

About “Philosophy”
What does this even say.
I have been reading poetry for decades. But I don’t know. If I don’t know, who can know?
Let’s say this is translated. Who will understand this.
Who were the preliminary judges. Their tastes are questionable.
It is good that there are parts we can say we don’t know.
It is philosophy of the everyday. It is philosophy of the quotidian. It is the omission of the mundane specificity.
It is perhaps the extrication of the external, the extraction of it.
It is a deep interrogation of time and being.
It is a link in the chain of the struggle to blow out the self.
It is similar to the work of Octavio Paz.
It is highly recommended.
Give an interpretation of this work if you can.
An interpretation is given using one of the poems as an example.
Isn’t that interpretation more like poetry than the work it purports to interpret.

About “Resistance”
Revolution was given up, and the poet went to stay at temples instead. Disappointing.
The work reflects on one’s own failures while also having the power to strike directly with a message.
Where is revolution and resistance, where are the reflections and remorse about that.
This isn’t prosaic, this is just prose.
It does not point toward the externality of life within the interiority of life, it only despairs about
the externality that always exists. That is why it is prose.
It came out from the actual prison and now struggles within the prison of time. Buddhism, dance,
meditating to be a bodhisattva — these are all escapisms. Why do all the failed revolutionaries of
Aerok go away to temples. They don’t just go to temples. They go to women, too.
Isn’t the path of such a life beautiful.
Doesn’t it feel like you just saw Marx fornicating with a servant girl after reading this.

5 laughs
42 silences

Discussion didn’t lead to any agreement, so we decided to vote by narrowing the list down to a final two.
We each wrote the names of two people on scraps of paper. So that we could keep a record of them.

2 votes for Traditional Lyric, 2 votes for Philosophy, 3 votes for Rural, 3 votes for Resistance.

We decided to discuss only “Rural” and “Resistance,” each of which got 3 votes, but it took a long time.
During this process, one of the judges gave up their vote, shouting, “I don’t like this kind of democracy!” and proclaimed that they wouldn’t participate in the next vote. They argued in favor of “Philosophy” until the end.

And so, “Resistance” received 3 votes in the final round and was selected as the winner. The poet, who was also an editor, who argued for “Rural” until the end, without saying goodbye, left.

Questions

I went to an international book fair.
Journalists from Aerok came, too.
One of them asked her a question.
What is your impression of attending this book fair?
n’t answered.
Yes, my impression. (Journalists love that word!) I feel like a poet who has come to a market to sell poems.
Can you tell us the list of your published books of poetry.
Please look it up on web portals.
The same journalist asked again.
What is your major work?
Not sure. Why don’t you look it up online?
Another journalist asked.
Which works of yours have been translated?
Please look it up on foreign web portals.
What is the response to your work in foreign countries?
Please look it up on foreign web portals.
What is your next work?
I haven’t finished writing it yet, so I can’t tell you.
An angered journalist left.

Next, a foreign moderator asked.
Is there censorship in Aerok?
(That again. Ugh, that’s so in the past.)
The oppression of military dictatorship has disappeared in Aerok. How do you write poetry without oppression?
If that is the case, then how do the poets of your country write poetry when they have never experienced military dictatorships?
Were they trying to show off how great their country is. Were they even showing contempt of Aerok.
Last question. If you can’t write anymore, then what would you do?
A fiction writer sitting next to n’t answered, visibly confused.
You can still read, though, can’t you? I will keep reading.
Respect soared in n’t’s heart for that writer with whom she had left Aerok.

Self-Appointed Measurement Standard of All Creation

The freshman asks.
I have no idea what this is saying. Teacher, how dare you tell us this work is a good work when it feels like utter nonsense that sounds like a ghost peeling and eating rice seeds. Do you actually understand what it is?
The freshman is angry.
Benjamin said, “Unrefined masses are caught in the insane anger toward the life of the mind.”
He also said in a sneer, “Those people line up and march into the department store like they are charging into concentrated gunfire.” He continued, “To read what is not written is the true reading.”
Such angry people lurk everywhere. They are the self-appointed measurement standards of all creation.
They do not try to feel, and they do not try to understand, but only front with their emotions.
They are particularly generous to difficult art or music, but they get angry at difficult literature.
Who can understand this work?
Perhaps that particular work did not wish to be understood. It could be that it only wanted for you to feel it. It could be that it only wanted you to look at it.
But perhaps the measurement standards think that language should only be focused on transference of information and creation of relationships. Perhaps that’s why they get angry if language is used to draw an image or explore the world of sounds. Perhaps they refuse to accept that language has aesthetic abilities. Perhaps they do not want to encounter an unfamiliar world drawn up by language.

Sizes of people who come to look at a work are all different.
Each brings with them an appropriately sized dish to hold whatever they can manage to perceive.
The shapes are all different, too.
One person brings with them a spoon.
Another brings with them a bathtub, and another brings with them an emptied ocean.
Another brings with them a roentgen.
People with smaller dishes tend to have more anger.
Isn’t this all a bunch of nonsense? I don’t get it?
They say it is violence when their spoon can’t scoop up the work.
But for the writer, those who come with spoons are the actual violence.
Poets can know the size of the people who come to meet their works.
From their questions, from their silences, and from their expressions.
Whether they feel, whether they find the meaning, or whether they are stuck in their ways.
Poets can measure the size of their dishes.
A poet carries the weight of their readers’ misunderstandings like a person without a home pushing all their belongings in a cart.

The size of the work is not decided by the size of the people who come to meet the work.
The work is a good work when its infinite abilities can expand and contract its own size in infinite measure.
The more deeply felt and expressed can end up weaker in its delivery.
The work that exactly fits the dish brought to measure it isn’t worth much.

The Roommate of n’t

Back when n’t was working for a publisher,
The government censored all the newspapers, books, magazines, and journals printed in her country.
When she brought manuscript copies to city hall,
Soldiers in uniforms, sitting at their desks as if they were working at a publishing house, censored the manuscripts of poets and writers.
They painted dark tar over unpublishable words and pages, then gave them back.
It was impossible to know why certain words were erased. Like how certain songs got banned in
Aerok for some reason, only the censors knew the reasons. Faster than the number of books that
were being published, countless varieties of reasons were being produced every day.
For example, common reasons for censoring any work were that the work was degenerate, that it made fun of soldiers, that it used certain words like freedom, and that it wasn’t allowed to cite this other work.
n’t didn’t cry until she returned from picking up the manuscripts that had gone through censors,
but she cried when she had to go and hand the authors their tarred books and tell them why.
When she went to see the economist R on his deathbed, who had hoped to see the last work of
his life in print, she had to declare the death of his book before the dying author. He wants to see
his book published before he dies, the economist’s wife told n’t on behalf of her husband.
The economist wept without saying anything on his deathbed.
Behind his thin, wrinkly glasses, his tears flowed down to his ears.
There were times when n’t had to manage publications of plays to coincide with the plays’ opening nights. There were times when she had to manage publications of novels.

There was a time when n’t was the news carrier for deaths of books.
In Aerok’s city hall there was a dark publisher, and they only kept dark coal tar in their office.

There were days when everyone who lived in Aerok was sinking into the quagmire of irrationality. There were days when people who lamented in the castles of sorrow spilled out into the streets like wind. There were days when days were only gray. There were days when the dream within a dream was put down under the light of censorship.

n’t was a colorless, scentless, nameless editor of lowest rank at her publisher. No one would have known if someone had slapped her face. She wept into her blankets, wandering why the days were always gray. She was an editor who was submitting the poems she wrote without anyone knowing.
A story once expressed can no longer be possessed by anyone.
The story lives on in the country of stories. The life of n’t is separate from the life of the story.
Within n’t there is a well-organized pile of stories and gestures from that time that haven’t yet soared out of her. Like dead volcanoes.
It looks like meeting an unfamiliar “I” on an unfamiliar street.
It looks like an “I” surprised at seeing “I” in the mirror.
Some shoes grow old faster than n’t.
Where are all the shoes that n’t dragged with her all her life.
Did they become the shoes that she wore when she went to dream.
Do the abandoned shoes return as the shoes one wears when you enter the factory of dreams.
Will this world also abandon n’t like a pair of shoes.
n’t trudges along like someone’s pair of shoes.
She trudges along, left foot, right foot, as if she is already something that someone wears when
they enter dreams.