Write dialogue.
“Hey, did something happen today? Why does the mood feel like this?”
I meant to write whatever came to mind, but why did I end up writing a sentence that feels abrupt and bewildering even to me? They say that sometimes something from the unconscious world puts on the mask of randomness and gets caught in the net. If that is true, perhaps it is not entirely useless to think about what caused that sentence.
On the other hand, if the cause of that sentence is not in me, but purely in the force exerted inside the unconscious world, or, if force is not the right word, in its own internal dynamics, then whatever I guess may be wrong.
The mood is not good, so it feels as if something happened today. Why? In truth, the reason is unknowable. Unless someone tells me, I can never guess it. Otherwise I would not have asked the question. I would have asked whether it was because of this or that, not why.
What was my subconscious trying to tell me? Did it simply want to ask why I touched it, like a fish caught in a net and pulled up? If so, this falls into circular logic. The reason I pulled it up was that I wanted to hear a story. The story that was pulled up, in turn, tells me that what it ultimately wants from me is a story called the reason for something. Yes, let me be honest. I wanted to hear a story.
What happened? Yes, I wanted to hear your story. That is the whole reason. So stop asking questions now and tell me the story. What about the mood? Is the mood bad? Does it seem as if something happened? Why do you think so? Why does the mood look bad? Did you simply dislike the expression on my face, the one that was expecting a story from you?
I want to hear a story. Not a story I can commonly see and hear in life, and not something that has nothing to do with me, like an event happening at the far end of the universe. I want to hear the story that is happening inside me, so close and yet unknown to me. That is why I listen to dreams. But I know very well that relying on dreams will lead to nothing. So please speak. My unconscious, please trust me and speak.
Yes. I am wary of my unconscious. Like a blackout after drinking, I am negative toward the self I do not know. I want to stop the unconscious from bursting out in any way I can. But that only means I am wary of it coming outside me without my knowing. I truly want to know what shape it has when it is not doing something with my body in ordinary life, but exists purely as thought, as a state of reflection, as when I am lost in thought. And yet, once I come to know it, I do not know what I would do with that knowledge. I do not know what will come out. The world I do not know is this deep. No one knows whether what comes out will be what I call a religiously supreme state, a joyful state like the realization of all the principles of the world, or the emptiness of absolute nothingness. It may even differ from person to person. A situation may arrive that wraps around me completely like truth, yet differs from the truth of others, like the premise of an absolute religious war. What should I do then? Since not everyone can overhear such a story, should I simply insist that my words are the truth?
Yes. The great premise of everything is deceiving everyone.
The premise that such a state must exist.
Perhaps what we call the unconscious is only something like an illusion produced when the realm of instinct invades the realm of rational logic. Like when a dog presses a calculator and numbers appear on the screen, numbers the dog does not understand but that we can read, even though they have not the slightest connection to the dog.
Now, back to the starting point. I like stories like this. Stories in which one walks vigorously, keeps moving without rest on a round planet like the Earth, and finally returns to the same place. If I have walked this long only to come back to where I began, then surely this must be a place like the Little Prince’s planet, somewhere one can visit only in imagination.
Korean original: 키보드가 앞에 있으면