Unbearable Splendor

Sun Yung Shin

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781566894517
• eBook ISBN: 9781566894524
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Who is guest, and who is host? Adoption, Antigone, zombies, clones, and minotaurs—all building blocks, forming and reforming our ideas.

Poetry as essay, as a way of hovering over the uncanny, sci-fi orientalism, Antigone, cyborgs, Borges, disobedience.

Sun Yung Shin moves ideas around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be guest, to be host. How to be at home.

The Other Asterion, or, The Minotaur’s Sacrifice (A Story)

The English word disaster is a combination of dis (bad) and astron (star). Bad star. An event caused by an unfavorable alignment of the sky-bodies. A calamity.

But of all the games, I prefer the one about the other Asterion. I pretend that he comes to visit me and that I show him my house. With great obeisance I say to him “Now we shall return to the first intersection” or “Now we shall come out into another courtyard” or “I knew you would like the drain” or “Now you will see a pool that was filled with sand” or “You will soon see how the cellar branches out.” Sometimes I make a mistake and the two of us laugh heartily.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The House of Asterion”

“It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus,” said the officer to the explorer and surveyed with a certain air of admiration the apparatus which was after all quite familiar to him.

—Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”

Prologue: The Cosmos Births the Prisoner

An empty symphony of velocity. In the beginning of the world there was nothing. If you listened very closely, with your ear tilted toward the void, you could hear it breathing like a great silent bellows, and all you could hear was the sound of nothing expanding and nothing contracting. The invisible lungs of the universe. No color and nothing to see or taste with. Within the breath coiled something like a tensed muscle, something readying itself to spring. Patient as a trophied hunter or a benevolent mother.

After a nearly infinite number of years of this unhurried inhalation and exhalation, a scintilla of dust entered nothing.

Nothing swallowed this particle and a mote-sized convulsion, a miniscule choking, an imperceptible gagging on this speck, this impurity, this idea. Like a proto-Jonah it was engulfed but not digested, swam inside the vast nil, blinded by its darkness. Its inner absence. It became an untouchable inner navel within the black hole. That pinprick of mental noise deep within a quiet mind. A bit of grit inside the oyster of the protocosmos. The first queen of the first beehive, her perfect hormone-weather waking the drones and workers into sensibility.

Some might say that this was the origin of our conscience. What might grow into a moral reckoning. The itch of guilt or the deeper burn of shame. A pebble dropped into the deep end of the pool.

A tremendous force began bending the nothing within itself, a spring or a bow being drawn inward further and further, tighter and tighter to the point of breaking. When the bow was as thin as nothing itself, when the strap was as thin as sound, there was a great release. And from this violent freeing of energy hurtled a billion pieces of light with a thick protective halo of space around each of them.

Each dense portion of space unfurled and expanded like a lustrous flower opening toward the sun. Something opaque and endless thinned a nearly imperceptible amount. Somewhere else, a sheet of darkness began cracking, moving inward from its unseeable edges.

Eventually, through a series of violent clashes, Earth was born and glistened blue and green, and life began its cycles of formation, competition, adaptation, evolution, and extinction. There was and there shall be no escape from this great wheel, this inescapable machine. The land choked with lava, hot then hard. The evolution of the eye. Fearsome creatures from nightmares and dreams.

Unfathomable oceans of ice scraped their way across the surface of the planet, trapping and grinding everything to frozen dust and carving out vast scars and bowls.

Handprints on the walls of caves and spears sharpened. Primates walking upright. What we call hominids. Afarensis, africanus, habilis, erectus, and others. Axes. Necklaces and earrings.

Theft. Abandonment. The first murder.

Gods invented, feared, and prayed to. Sacrifices of all kinds. Animals roped and yoked. Virginity named and fetishized. Priestesses. The first kings and queens. Altars and the first permanent structures built. Architects and slaves. Grave goods buried with their illustrious owners for use in the unending afterworld. Copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold. Sword and shield. Horses and soldiers. Money and its malcontents. Seductions and infidelities.

The idea of crime. The invention of the criminal. Banishment and exiles. Other punishments to the mind and body.

Architects and inventors.

Churches and temples and altars.

Mazes and labyrinths.

The first prison.

Prisoners.

Part One: Asterion and a Peculiar Apparatus

I am a guard at an unusual prison. In fact, it is the only prison in the world, or the universe, for that matter. Actually, I will admit to you, reader, that this prison is indeed the universe itself. But it has many tricks and uncanny ways, and one of them is that it is a real prison on the real planet and houses real people, who, the moment they enter the prison under guard and their cells under lock and key, become something other than people. They become prisoners, they are defined by the structure that keeps them within it. Many metaphors may come to mind: a baby within its mother, a snail within its shell, a hand within its glove, a corpse within its coffin.

Like music captured and trapped in a parallel, one-dimensional world of black lateral ovals (some empty, some filled in) and vertical lines on lined paper, the prison comes alive when it is expressed through the actions of its prisoners. The prisoners, in this way, are like musicians in an orchestra. There are an infinite number of them, and there is an infinite combination of notes that can be played. Yes, these sounds are purely imaginary, but they are nevertheless an endless game of high elegance.

Our time is recursive and forking. Our time is a garden in which all realities are simultaneously possible. All paths are truly one path. From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence. This sentence is utterly, heartbreakingly unique. Never before and never again. Yet they, in ensemble, create One Sentence. It holds and houses us. Announces and defends us. Blesses and confesses us. Curses and condemns.

As I tend to them, the prisoners, I must pay attention to and interact with the physical structure; I don’t know if I am more like an instrument tuner or a minor conductor. An orchestra may not be the most fitting analogy, but it allows me to think of my vocation as somewhat elegant, rarefied, with the potential for beauty, if even the beauty has a hint of violence, like a piece from the romantic period that evokes emotions both sublime and savage.

At the orphanage where I spent my formative years, nearly everything a child might need was scarce, except for music. Of this there was no shortage. One of the nurses loved music and had a phonograph that was kept in the atrium. The music—all kinds—filled the dark rooms and hallways and even the attics and porches like water. The long dormitory in which I slept and kept my few possessions was, while a long way off from the atrium, able to receive the sound as if it was flowing right to me, enveloping me, entering me. After coming of age and leaving the orphanage, I continued to seek that same auditory experience—hearing as if underwater, or hearing as if music was life itself—but have yet to find it.

Now, in the prison, I have to do without real music. I am more like an ear, or a machine that records live music, as I am always present to listen to the prisoners and the sounds of the prison as it interacts with them. If only I could play every moment back infinitely and relive each moment, broken into segments of my own choosing. But it doesn’t work like that.

I tend to the prisoners. I say “I tend to them” because, it may surprise you to know, I am the only guard. In fact I am currently the only person at the prison aside from the prisoners. There is no warden, no physician, no librarian, no cook, no janitor, no shop teacher, no psychiatrist, no chaplain, no teachers, no lawyers, and no visitors—so far.

I confess that I harbor a longing for music and part of me keeps a small portion of hope alive, like a tiny flame in a glass jar, that someone or something will arrive with music. No one here can sing and no instruments are allowed. So I go on, waiting. If there is an end to my obligation here, my first step will be to find a record shop and I will search for the music through which I floated every night as a child.

Sometimes I dream that I almost hear it, that it is hovering somewhere nearby, but morning breaks the spell and my day begins, like in the vacuum of space, without sound. Sound cannot exist without something through which to move, and perhaps the air here is too thin, too evasive. If I close my eyes and put my hands out in front of me, I can feel the air eddy around me, swirling and silent.

Every nine years I have a special duty. It involves the receipt of a gift. Some call it a sacrifice. Surrender, give up, suffer to be lost. We can choose to look at this transaction in a variety of ways. Some say that these nine people, these nine young men, are guilty. They must be cleansed.

This duty is directly related to my favorite prisoner, or, really, my only prisoner. He is multiple prisoners, he is one prisoner. He has the ability of bilocation. He can be in two places at once. He can be in several places at once. He wears time like others wear clothing. Space folds and unfolds like an origami bird.

This year, the youths arrive, as usual, on time. They appear in the space outside of the prison, as if dropped there by the hand of a god.

I would say they arrived on the doorstep, but there are no doors. There are no windows. There are no bars, no locks, no keys. No stairs, no ceilings.

Asterion, on these occasions, waits in the center of the prison. His house. He is sometimes eager to show the youths around this impossible compound. He reads books on philosophy, books on various types of propositions, possible and impossible. Books of logic and the real and the unreal. The actual and the fictional.

Though he has the head of a bull, no flies worry Asterion about the face and ears. This is fortunate because unlike whole bulls, he has no long tail with which to swish away irritations. He has hands, beautifully formed, and a thickly muscled neck holding up his strong, velvet-furred head. The rest of his body is also nobly made, and white as marble or mother’s milk. He has no need of clothes. Or weapons.

I greet the youths at the entrance. One is crying silently, tears trickling down his smooth cheek. Others show fear on their faces. Still others have a distant look. One begins singing a folk song as I lead them through one of the many passages. Once a person reaches the inner section of the labyrinth, there is no return. The way back is impossible without guidance. None have escaped. Asterion has long ceased looking for an exit. Oh, the first many months there was so much anguish, always walking the halls and paths, keeping the flame of hope kindled. Each week he spent fewer hours wandering the identical passages. Rubbing his beautifully colored horns against the hard walls, even to the point of breaking them. At last he accepted his fate. He is the master of his house.

The nine youths are drawn inexorably toward the center. Though the labyrinth is flat, we are like water running downstream and there is no possible reversal. Gravity itself is drawing the nine to their shared destiny. In this, together, they have a fortune denied Asterion. Asterion, the only creature of his kind. His mother’s love could not save him, just as the youths’ mothers’ love cannot rescue them.

I have led this ritual so many times I have lost count. The youths, though surely individuals, have come to take on a cast of s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Valley, Uncanny
• The Hospitality of Strangers
• One Hundred Days in the Cave
• The Other Asterion, or, The Minotaur’s Sacrifice (A Story)
• Exactly Like You
• Harness
• Orphan: The Plural Form
• The Error of Blood Relation
• I Will Make an Example
• The Limit Case
• In the Other Future
• Like a Second Person inside Us
• Autoclonography
• Unalloyed
• Paradise
• Replication
• My Singularity
• Notes
• References
• Illustration Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Funder Acknowledgments
• About the Author