Conclusions

The measure of a marksman does not lie in piercing the leather target, because the strength of the archer varies. This is the way of the ancients. - 3.16 The Analects

I find it hard to neatly close out my crash-course in Korea. The quiet of that Gyeongju suited me, though - its castle walls utterly gone, its pleasure boats sunken, and only a miles-wide parkland endless with wildflowers while only a grave marker here or there remained below dwarf, red maples. What’s there to write, though? It’s been hard to come away with much. I came as a tourist, and took away tourist snapshots.

I saw many good things, and will tell people about them over dinner or on a plane, but not try and make of them great writing. It might not be doable. The entire point of tourist sites is to create an experience that can be replicated, to insure visitors have and see more or less what millions of others had and saw and liked.

This is no criticism: I’m stoked that the world is revealing more of her lovely sides the easier, and the places were all well worth the visit. It was once the job of writers to weave stories of far-flung places that their readers could never see, but these were no substitutes for original experience, which at least in my own life is the teacher of all things. The days of writing adventures of distant places with the simple confidence that having been there counts as something has ended - down the paved road from the lost grotto are espressos and internet cafes, and the blogroll marches on. This makes writing such as thing much more difficult, but then again, it’s wandering lost on a busy street or arguing in a full train car that you’ll find experiences worth taking the time to commit to genuine prose. While the trajectory of men like me will always be towards the physically lost or isolated, there will be ever less lost space. Then, of course, there’s the question of what you find when you do chance upon them:

Aug. 28, 2008
A brickwall, shifting with age and repainted yellow over the gaps is overgrown with trees and bushes. It’s just like the wall that runs outside the window of my room in the southern district of Gyeongju, along the network of 19th century city homesteads that still cluster south of the burial grounds at Daereungwon Tomb Park. It could be someone’s house, there’s only a well-used 90’s model Hyundai and steel light-pole in this gravel lot, and the one gate I see, with the same red and blue taichi that’s printed on chop-stick wrappers and temple bells alike, is bolted and seems to lead to someplace else. The cabbie was pretty confident this was the seowon, but the only open door is just wide enough for my shoulders to pass through. Inside, a pair of dogs look up from their bowls at me, and I’m certain this is some farmer’s home I’ve taken a bus for an hour, then a cab for twenty more minutes, to reach.

This was, it would turn out, the servant’s quarters of the old seowon at Jade Mountain, the seat of higher Confucian learning, fittingly built on a foundation of natural bedrock. Instead of entering through the main gates, which face a river hidden from the dirt road by a stand of trees, I navigated the servant’s narrow back passages, skipped down ledges and crept behind the dormitory backs, the ways so tight I fell into an automatic stoop.

While the UNESCO sites were practically glossy with polish, at Oksan I found disrepair:

The yellow walls of the buildings are flaking and etched with Korean tags and English curses. The open courtyard has two dormitories on either side, a lecture hall to the North and a matching hall on stilts facing it to the South. To enter the seowon in its day would have been to find oneself emerging from the dark stairs under the raised hall into sudden light, the courtyard faced by people at all sides, after a path first through wilderness, then vague shadow beyond the gates and under the lecture hall. The passage from nature to culture, from darkness to the nucleus of the group; it’s dramatic in Confucian fashion, which is to say, unsubtle about putting you in you place.

I’d not expected anything except for empty buildings, but the disrepair shocked me. Crannies in the buildings’ bases were crammed with pieces of broken stonework and plaster, and newer garbage, too, like soda cans. Touching a red beam of the main gates left dusty stains on my hands, and the tanchong on the gables was waterlogged to threads. The twin halls had no doors, so the parts of the wood floors that the roofs didn’t cover were battered rough from rain, and dirty. Some cells of the dorms had modern padlocks on them, the same kind that my landlord in Gyeongju had handed me the night I checked in. On the inside rim of the gathering hall’s ceiling, placards of weathered wooden classics were still tacked. I was disappointed, and though the old seowon was far off in the mountains, and no one else was there with, the neglect was intrusive.

I’d brought the Analects on this trip in the hopes that when put together, the book and Korea, they would resonate like sounding stones, and I’d receive some curious, harmonic understanding. At Oksan, I didn’t want to really even read it, though, or particularly stay. Without the money that comes with UNESCO status, or the devotion of thousands of Buddhist laypeople, it was just a crummy old building.

The universal reaction, apart from the enigmatic Sunchaul, to my reading the Analects has been near-horror. As children, everyone in Asia has had the book’s dense sayings forced down their throats, to then be regurgitated on difficult tests where you must fill-in the missing word or complete the saying’s second half from memory. So, despite having authored the greatest unbroken tradition of any non-mystic in the entire world, and that even on subway cars in Asia you can see his long-dead hand at work, no one wants to look him in the eye.

I am certain other seowon somewhere are taken care of, and that there are tour buses and gift shops to match. I’m not saying filing past costume classrooms with conspicuously laid-out student desks would have taught me any more than what I saw at Oksan, but it would have felt better. It’s a grand illusion, the endurance of things against time that gives historic cities their sense of calm and depth; a well-paid grounds crew and five-yearly fresh foundations. That is the romance - continuity. So it seems that Oksan has taught me something about the Analects after-all: persisting in the dusty periphery might be the only true immortality around. As I writer, I’m not sure how I should feel about that.