I speak like this because lately I have been eating a lot of freshly executed fish. I point at an eel, and minutes later it is thwoked on the head with a knife. With half its head hanging off and its body writhing in what must surely be a mixture of terror and pain, its head is imapaled on a spike, where the fish-monger proceeds to slice it open, gut it, and chop it into chunks for my culinary pleasure. The sea-life sometimes strikes back though. One day when in the sea with Joe, Luigi and Murphy, a crab pinched at Murphy's big toe."Aaah!" he screamed out. Turning around expecting to see a drowning girl with a speech impediment making her voice abnormally high-pitched, we were instead confronted with his shocked face, "a crab just bit me!" Immediately we were all scared, and for the next half an hour in the sea, we four grown Englishmen were panicing and hopping around like terrified children daring not to put our feet on the sea-bed, whilst metres away four Korean children were busy having too much fun to care about such problems. Murphy later claimed that the crab was "as big as a cup", but the tiny red dot on his toe proved otherwise.
Sometimes I think Seoul is like being in a huge human fish tank, a strange example of how far humans can go, whilst being observed by something much bigger or important than us. Whether that be giant fish or some God like entity, is for the reader to ponder. Seoul and its surrounding area is the second largest populous in the world and such heights cannot to reached without its strange side-effects. Despite being nothing but another bobbing head packed like humans in a steel tube, with nothing much to show for yourself but that incurable and infuriating sense of self-consciousness and a new set of mosquito bites, one still feels a part of something. The more packed in I am the less I am known, but the more defined I actually feel, as one who is fighting a losing battle between recognition and reduction to oblivion. Still we carry on to be recognised, because it is the effort that provides that important sense of fulfillment, not the target. And like a fish in that big blue, one way to be made felt is to be part of that school so large that it scares off the biggest shark.
In this case I am part of that big school, not the school I teach in, but the metaphorical group-of-fish one, however this is a human version of it. The external threat is still a giant fish however, which you could wish to use as a symbol of the threat of non-recognition, but I choose to regard it as an actual giant fish. And if you are still following me and have any idea what I am going on about, please let me know.
Photo by Luigi Marinelli
