The background:What comes into my head is the story of the Korean poet Ko Un. So I tell the women how he had tried to commit suicide four times, once by pouring poison into one of his ears. He survived but destroyed his eardrum. The other eardrum had been damaged when he was a political prisoner and was tortured. During the Korean War he was forced to carry dead bodies on his back. Then he became a monk for ten years.
The women have stopped arguing and are listening to my story about the poet. I stop speaking.
Agata asks, Then what?
Well, later he became an alcoholic, which saved his life when again he wanted to kill himself, this time with a large stone and a rope in the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Jeju Island.
Where is that? asks Autje, but she is shushed by her mother.
It doesn't matter, says Mejal.
Well, says, Salome, it matters, but let August finish his story first.
Agata nods at me to continue.
On the boat, I say, they sold alcoholic drinks. Ko Un thought: Why not have one before dying? He had one drink, then a second and a third ... he got drunk and fell asleep. When he woke up, he was at the pier. He had missed his opportunity to kill himself, and the others were waiting for him because they had heard that the legendary monk and poet Ko Un was coming to their island. They hoped he would stay there. So he did. And he was very happy there for some years.
After a pause, Mejal asks if I'm finished and I tell her that I am.
The women do not speak but shuffle on their pails, clearing their throats. I mutter that Agata had asked me if I had an opinion on the debate over leaving versus fleeing. I had meant only to articulate my feelings about the meaning of meaning: How it is possible to leave something or someone in one frame of mind and arrive elsewhere, in another entirely unexpected frame of mind.
With only a few days left in the year I made a new purchase (rather than finish a book I've marked as "in progress" on Goodreads - ha!) and started Women Talking by Miriam Toews. Apparently I'm a glutton for punishment as this is NOT an easy read, though I'll probably finish before New Year's due to the length.
The story:
It's a fictionalized account of real events: A number of women in a Mennonite community in South America were raped repeatedly over several years. The perpetrators were dosing them with animal tranquilizers to cover their tracks. For several years they would awaken with bruises and bleeding and were simply told that they had been molested by demons or some such.
The story is an account of a group of women from the community meeting to decide on their course of action: Stay and "forgive" the transgressors, stay and fight them, or leave the community. The telling is complicated in the (fictional) account because the narrator is a man who had previously been expelled from the community but was seeking to return because he didn't feel that he fit in in the outside world.
My interpretation:
Oh hell no, it doesn't come that easy. I only just read it a few minutes ago.
But I can definitely appreciate that our self-destructive patterns can often lead to unexpectedly positive outcomes, also that the future result of a given course of action is difficult to predict.
