Poet's words

Part 1

Parentheses Love Hole | Introducing My Girlfriend | Mary in the Black and White Room | The White Room | The Alone Person | Nirvana | Not Facing Each Other | Pseudo-Rhythm | Biting | When Going Zero | Due Date | Second Language | That's Our Mission

Part 2

Read Love and Extinction interchangeably | The Music of Bones | What Kind of Heart Did a Dinosaur Have | The Geological Era | The Practice of a Creepy Smile | The Love of a Witch and a Robot | A One-Room Dance | The Constellation of Hybrids | The Dance of Extinction | The Aquarium | The Lair of Eternity | The Crow's Paradox

Part 3

Tachycardia | Dad's missing spot | Identical sadness, twin sadness | I want to give birth to my child alone | We can't stop | Because that box might be empty | Youth list | Principle of Sufficient Reason | Night stage | Judges' comments on a trot competition program | Zumba version | Group counseling | You came to the bamboo forest | The fact that the bomb is not defective

Part 4

The Empty Room | Thought Experiment on Collision | The Problem of Evil | The Ontology of Holes

commentary
Sentences from a 'philosophically cleansed' soul · Jo Yeon-jeong

“Even if the universe expands and all points move away,
There is a moment when you approach.”
Hybrid constellations and tilted planets
Faith that defies proof and flies to Earth

Even if it is not valid
Even if you can't prove it
There are some passages that make you believe
As a list of premises and conclusions,
There is an inexplicable blurring

[… … ]

A planet with an extinct inner self
There is a great loneliness that makes it impossible

The conversation we had yesterday
The greeting you gave me with your gestures, the question I answered with silence, the gaze that understood the silence, and the unique rhythm of your words
Can you imagine a planet where all of this is a lie?
―The “Thought Experiment on Collision” section

The original form of the meteorite before it came “at the moment we made love” and “brought a new extinction to the Earth” (“Read Love and Extinction Again”) was a meteoroid floating in the vast universe.
A strange and beautiful mass, a collection of pieces of stars that “glitter in vain” (“Constellation of the Mongrel”), “me who loves you who only loves useless things/and you who loves the half-me who keeps limping/mixed together” and pieces from a planet that “was hit and crushed/with a tilted orbit” and “rotates in a terrible and grotesque cycle/to an irregular beat” (“Pseudo-Rhythm”).

The reason why meteors floating across space plunge into the atmosphere of a distant Earth is probably because they believe in the existence of something that can only be “created” when “our bodies meet/when bodies made solely of matter collide/and collide together.”
In order to dare to “go against the proof” by taking on an era that seeks to prove that a world without inner self and meaning can exist, the planet with its out-of-sync rhythm and the constellation of half-humans and half-beasts willingly becomes a meteor and collides with the Earth, creating “that which makes us not a mass of particles/Beyond the waves that flow from our lips” (“Thought Experiment on Collisions”).
The collision of this meteorite, which flies toward Earth with a firm belief, is largely intentional, so its trajectory will not be a parabola of a fall “from the sky” but “like a dance” (“Dance of Extinction”).


“So, I believe there is a hole in the soul too.”
A hole in existence that nothing can fill
The hand of life that senses its reality carefully

Some might argue that the soul hole cannot be touched or seen, and therefore does not exist.
But look at the things the hole sucks in greedily.
The gravity of the hole that commands us to fill in the empty space.
The mass of empty space.
The heaviness that is longed for.

Can't you feel these things?
―Excerpt from “The Ontology of Holes”

The “unknown substance” that “fills the universe” must pass through when it arrives on Earth, and that is the human “hole.”
This hole is “a stubborn void/that cannot be filled/by love, justice, struggle, or revolution/that can only be described as a complement/defined by the non-existent,” so even the matter of the universe can only “pass through” and “pass through” it, not fill it.


“It is natural for humans to do their best to hide holes” (“Ontology of Holes”), but the poet confesses from the very first work of the poetry collection that he “has a hole in his head” (“The Hole Loved by Parentheses”).
Perhaps because “humans kill all creatures that are not cute” (“Dancing in a One-Room Apartment”), his hole has a “cute” appearance that “might meow if it gets a little bigger,” and it grows “bigger and bigger” (“The Hole Parentheses Love”) by eating “thoughts that cannot be parenthesized.”
As literary critic Jo Yeon-jeong, who wrote the commentary for the poetry collection, points out, for the poet, the hole, that is, the “hunger of the soul and the lack of existence,” is such a “natural and obvious existence” that it is “always a clearly perceptible entity.”


The poet goes beyond simply exposing the hole and actively 'nurtures' it.
Even though he “commands to fill it up/while it’s pulsing,” he “kneads this difficult ‘companion hole’ here and there with warm hands like he’s handling donut dough” (“The Ontology of Holes”).
Even though I know that “if anything is too puffed up,” it will “get a hole in it again” (“The Problem of Evil”), I want to “feel alive” for a moment, smelling “the fleeting sweet smell of rising flour.”
Yoo Seon-hye focuses on feeling “the innate lack of all living things” (“The Ontology of Holes”) with a still hand, and her “hobby is being alive, and her specialty is being quiet” (“Introducing My Girlfriend”).


Poet's words

But I am the kind of person who insists on using it

Without logic
Dreaming of a future with only leaps
A person who writes down all the ruined dreams

How can I live without throwing this up?

October 2024
Yoo Seon-hye