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© Michael Price Inc.
| Korean Elegies – Michael Price Dedicated to Keum Yong Song (maiden name) 1926-2006. The First Elegy The first word that came to mind was not love, but respect. I am an outsider here and you no longer belong. Neither dove, nor angel abide in the church. One tear discreetly shed is a greater tribute. Prayers from the cross mingled with laborious Mongolian chants do not vanquish cares of the flesh. We confine the glorious nature of life to death as an end in itself. You were already beyond the solace of shrouds. Who could defend themselves in death? You were beyond measure unperturbed by my concerns. And to respond through the organ and cello, your treasure released a spirit larger than life. In the music’s insistence lies the power to protect your privacy in this hour defined by ritual. Even the sin, eschewed by chanting priests clad in pious demeanour, belonged to the religious. Your giving was more than philanthropy, more than just a family dynasty. Giving defies limits of this world’s rules and pecking orders. Your giving defined a temporal world with no time for fools’ hollow etiquettes. You gave with gracious determination, not the sacrifice of martyrdom and pity. Now, curious, I walk with your image. For the first time, we stand outside translation, the refined realm of transition, treading the fine line of fate and coincidence where no dice are cast. In return, I offer the word sculpted by the air I am blessed to breathe. Epitaphs carved in stone conceal absurd longings of immortality. We weave yarns of light into the fabric of time and as meaning unravels, we align our spirit to receive blessing. Who could weave your epitaph? - “For the greater good”. The Second Elegy Shock waves from the resilience of bones flood through the darkness of this gaping hole where the mysteries of life, like the stones I treasure, are wantonly crushed. Our soul was unquestionable till this moment. Your spirit did not wait for this event, - no time for cremated exhibition. Who is forcing us to be penitent for loving life? You deserved more than this brutal display. Horrors of the abyss with a well-practiced structured containment caused my heart’s revolt with consternation ensnared by the web of religious rites with special effects and uncalled-for sights. Shock waves from the nakedness of your bones crush all hope of reconciliation with the perpetrators of ritual groans and their endless calls for your salvation. Religion lives through persuasion. The course of its history is a sorry tale of bigots and fanatics’ blooded force. Heaven and hell gave birth to nonsense. Stale cannons and texts thwart spiritual creation as our individual calling seeks enlightenment with grace. Yet the look of certitude on your face, a photograph placed before us, contained these renegade thoughts with balance maintained. Shock waves from the silence of bones call out to their reception. Which angel looking down would not be moved to flight carrying the message of wisdom beyond death’s doubt. Angels and prophets languish in the flames misunderstood for centuries. Their tears reflect our mood as the door to your remains opens a world enclosed by our deepest fears. Cast aside the myth of heaven and hell in all its primitive measure to free ourselves and partake of the endless well tasting the life the angels decree. Bathed in a transcendent colourful white we rise to the glory of inner light. The Third Elegy Grief, far greater than the two dimensions of sadness, swells like the ocean, its waves pound our beliefs, opening emotions confounded by death’s immensity. Graves live out their unrepentant history. Sometimes as the sea laps around the rocks lulling us with the false security that our senses shape the real world, it mocks us with a primeval outburst. In all modesty, we are forced to acquiesce, soaked in spray and misgivings in our fall from grace, although tears can never suppress an unavoidable loneliness. These cliff faces are etched with the sea’s signature reminding us time and again that forces of breathtaking magnitude became stiff and lifeless, shells of their expenditure. Life’s origin voiced as dual sources each one supplanting others’ needs, eroded thoughts as sediment, till their grief imploded. A family between tears of grieving and tears of laughter or consolation effervesce the tingling thrill of living like the waves breaking into white relief consoling the ocean’s desolation and our moments of brooding disbelief. The living slide between intangible memory and the quest for accessible possibility. Here, the volcano of Jeju island laments the silence in its ashes and past of violence as the burnt sky above shed its halo. And here on Jeju island your last wish is fulfilled. With the symbol of the fish, more than just astrological posture, but the pain of the concluding gesture, - your ashes committed to the sea. Looking into grey water, your whiteness spread so slowly, so ponderously. We dissipated into a blank stillness consumed by our personal resignation mixed with concerns of predestination. And the fish symbol of dual nature, swimming in opposite directions, brings the wisdom within love’s living fracture and life’s origins with watery wings. The Fourth Elegy How strange on each journey we undertake with expectant fortitude as we tread new ground, that each previous heart-break and past parting becomes our daily bread. Not even food for thought. But what award awaits each star burning its nuclear might to fill the night sky with meaning and light? Eternal darkness has its own reward. And what of the spent solar wind? - One day the pleasure of lovers finding their way, unconcerned their delight, but behind the façade is the time all are resigned. We live with the knowledge our turn will come when life’s passage and destiny are done. And who can imagine where you are now? Memory is imaginary and real, more than autobiographical. The word 'how' describes the puzzle. You turned the wheel of fortune’s endless games to suit your will with business as a means to an end. No thrill awaited you alone, more than duty bound. Does life really pass by without a sound? We witness new stars exploding to life in an endless display of gratitude gathering dust shed from universal strife to create worlds of silent magnitude. A cycle with neither meaning nor end awaiting lively interpretation becoming symbols of god-like reception giving life a purpose: all can transcend. What are we left with? How can I presume the word “nothingness” can grow and consume all hope? The air has a solid presence bringing life to each one with sympathy flooding us with momentary essence where life and death find no boundary. Spiritual beings, our common ground, as numerous as human souls abound each one an individual, beyond the limits expressed by myth, respond to the universe of eternal breath with each life elevated through each death. The Fifth Elegy What would the bamboo say of its own growth pursuing glory through endless struggle, knowing its rings swore an eternal oath bound by the duty of its own nature to hold in silence the monumental? Could the secret held forever fracture the sacred image of our learnt belief? When will it breathe out a sigh of relief - if only to whisper words we long to hear as the gentle breeze dispels each fear - and tell us of the earth's benevolence nurturing each forest's wild persistence? Would the bamboo’s words bring meaning and light back to the resplendent world we desire to that state of grace before the plight of prophets doused our spirit's unique fire? Bamboo does not worship, but simply grows from its self-contained strength (holding at bay thoughts beyond our station) as each dawn glows knowing no more and no less than each day. What did the bamboo desire as it lept from the forest floor to form a symbol of the artist's layered world as we slept like Endymion both pure and simple tantalizing the moonlight’s reception insisting on virtue in perfection? Through the practice of the painter’s brush, leaves sprout their own thoughts and hierarchies. Each stroke an uninterpreted ideal receives its moment of glory, forced to revoke the habit of rebirth. Yet unspoken prayers carry the burden of other-worldly cares. The lament of bamboo draws a long breath creating a language of mirrored certitude to counter imponderables bathed by death freeing life from a life of gratitude. An unapproachable meditation on being as transitory elation relinquishing the notion of life under review, with birth and death as steadfast as bamboo. The Sixth Elegy Ripples in the mountain rock, a secret held two hundred and sixty million years. What might this mean, you of the recently departed, a vision in your daughter’s dream? Layers of life without a quest, layers of rock into memory. Sediment’s washed hope as cycles of eroded life. Who can know who we are, let alone who we were? The secret is the shock wave’s aftermath, the imploding loneliness in an impersonal universe. Look out at all those stars and admit it! If we are a unique gem of nature alone in eternity, would we change our ways? Who would squander their preciousness? The fossils whisper an untellable tale, two hundred and sixty million years witness to time’s imaginary passage. Their bones found sanctuary in rock before belief in salvation or bliss. And you of the recently departed, what would you want us to hold dear and know from your new view with wisdom imparted looking out of death’s immense afterglow? But then our dreams may be mere chemistry with wizardry dictating memory! Mourning is more than chemical exchange even as words, too sweeping to consider, twist and realign our souls. Hearts derange under the pressure of death’s exposure. You of the recently departed, leave future generations to capitulate under the monstrous weight of time. We grieve like the waves locked in rock. Let earth relate the story of time immemorial with visions of elation and the funereal. Transcendent worlds free us from psychosis of fossilized life’s daily hypnosis. Who can open their eyes and not adore the rainbow’s dance within the waterfall. Ripples in mountain rock. How different our worlds are now, but even greater when you were here, you of the departed. Itinerant thinking, a global myth, traitor unto itself unable to stem the fear locked in the thunderous requiem. Clans found unity in a dynasty replaced by modern technology. Rocks are speechless. Values of east and west separate at the moment of conception beyond the philosophy we invest with no common ground for our perception. Yet to transcend the ordained with effort brings dearest joy and immense comfort. |
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