the value of work.
what’s the most important work you do?
“Would you like to share lives together?”
When heard, romantic implications arise.
When “romance” is said, marriage montages play out, and naturally, we think “til death do us part,” but why do we disregard friendships and communities, natural floor plans to any relationship?
We forget the work we do everyday.
Talking to another person.
Good morning text.
wat r u doing?
how r u?
It is the unseen work.
Such basic questions evolve over time.
How do you feel about this?
What are you thinking about?
Can we talk?
Though it’s not my 9–5 or my passive income stream, conversation is always worth my time, especially with new people.
John Berger has ways of seeing.
New people that come into your life are practices in ways of hearing.
New people present a new palette in how you hear and how you speak, how you translate the ideas mulling inside your head, and how you joke.
When do they laugh? Where do they laugh?
This is work for yourself, a labor in love.
It doesn’t cost much but a heart to be in conversation.
But a lot of worth can come out of it.
In conversation, I’ve met people that have linked me to songs I now like, books I am reading now, and even job opportunities I never knew I’d find myself in.
When talking to someone, doors open.
When leaning in and listening, keys are found.
Attentiveness colors and clears the grayscale of mundanity.
Do you remember when you were sixteen?
When you could talk to friends for hours until it was 2 in the morning but you weren’t necessarily tired? You were filling in a hole in your heart you didn’t yet know needed to be filled?
Do you remember when you could talk about nothing for hours and hours, laugh long hours, laugh longingly because laughing meant living a life worth it enough to keep on laughing at dumb little things?
Small talk, even, comforts strangers, cashiers and tellers, you haven’t a clue what someone is going through until the mouth opens.
Until worlds spool out, spoon and spin parts and pieces of dialogues dwelling under our tongues, rehearsed and ready to be spoken when spoken to. So, we should speak.
See something, say something.
Ask about anything. Ask how they spend their days.
Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
Has anyone asked you about your day?
On a tree, a cicada sings next to a spider. Which is the hunter and which is the prey? Is the song a cry for help or simply a song? Is it a conversation? Can you call it a duet?
I live in South Korea, but I don’t speak Korean.
It’s terrible. I know a few words, here and there, to get through our days.
So, I think a lot about what I am not saying to people. I think about absence. I’ve been speaking absently.
Doosan Gallery, Seoul, “un-less,” a collective exhibition of varying mediums on the idea of what remains after which is gone.
Un, prefix, absence.
Less, suffix, insufficiency.
We see a family portrait in the form of sculpture. Haneyl Choi, My family. New language. No drawings. No plans. Built on bumpy grounds, it becomes clumsy. Abnormality is commonplace here, making it neither insufficient nor deficient, but offers a new possibility. Like first words, baby talk, primal screams to make sense of a terrifying world.
Cables and speakers, veins and pulses, by Hoonida Kim, ATTUNE reacts to the listener. As a listener moves closer to the work, a deafening screech expels from the speakers, but as they move farther away, the speakers go soft. The work itself is never stable. Much like conversation. Much like parties, where you have so much to say and nowhere to say it, no one to say it to.
Awkward pauses are okay.
A conversation moves much like waves do. Up and down, push and pull, sometimes rough, sometimes gentle, a nuisance at high noon or comforting at low tides. Sometimes still.
A year ago at a bar I no longer go to, a woman,
No, a girl, tells me
that she cannot find god. She told me from the beginning of her life she was damned to hell. In her words, she traced her steps, saw where she had gone wrong, to find a way to god. But she talked as if I was not there.
Sometimes people talk as if they are talking to a mirror. Sometimes people do this because they have nobody but themselves.
I told her, “Everything is going to be alright.”
She continued on about how lost she was, felt. She told me too that I was also damned to hell.
Little did she know that God was at her mouth.
If only she had put enough faith in building a community, surrounding herself in conversation, that she could form little prayers for herself.
On the far side of the wall, the Moojin Brothers created a short film Ground Zero in which clay dolls resembling bodies play in water until they are ultimately destroyed as if by natural disaster.
Why is it —
that when the bigger the disaster, the better we are at speaking with one another? Why are we able to talk about needs and feelings with so much ease?
Is it because comfort demands to be met?
Where was comfort before an earthquake or a flood?
Do we forget how comfortable we are unless spoken to?
I think of great speakers. Public speaking. Unafraid to ask questions, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Fran Lebowitz. Strong opinions. Wit. We forget wit. We don’t have wit because we’re too busy letting our endless feeds eat up our social habits. We let them do the talking for us.
But for me, this is such gratuitous work. Being able to talk, to hear people out.
If someone asks what I did for a living, I want so much to say, I talk. I talk because oral histories are ways in why I’m still here. I talk because extracting stories from passing souls allows light and lightness.
People are mirrors, windows, and doors meaning to let in that light and lightness, parts of a home, built off of hard work, good work.
God, damned or not, I’m trying to do good work.
