Invitation Letter & Video & Poster & Seminar write up

Video

https://vimeo.com/148828080

Jiwon Kim

Integrative seminar 1

Second draft

11/23/15

It was on Sunday morning in May 2013 when I heard the loud sound of a siren and many voices from outside my window. I put my pumpkin pie in the oven and went outside to check out what is happening. I found my neighbor Suzan in the crowd at the apartment next to mine. She told me that a dead body, half eaten by pigeons was founded in this apartment 4F, by his friend. I didn’t know him well but his actions were quite weird and strange. He only had shown at his balcony covered with the trash and the pigeons. By that scene, I just assumed that he must have a mental illness. I’d never seen him outside, except once. It was a warm and sunny day in July 2012. I went out for the grocery shopping and I saw him sitting down on the stairs in front of his apartment building, wearing a blue Bini hat and a military uniform. It was quite awkward outfit for the summer. I glanced a his name tag on his uniform but I’d never thought at that time that it would be his own uniform written in his real name. I remember he was staring at the blue sky for a long time. He was still sitting there when I got back from shopping. His eyes were empty and lost focus. I was quite afraid of him so I walked fast and passed him quickly. After I knew about his mysterious death, I couldn’t stop imagining who he was in real life. At first, I guessed him as a hidden criminal or an heir. I felt that he should have not lived a normal life as I does.  Now I want to confess something. I could not handle my curiosity so I sneaked in to his apartment at that night when his body was found. The door was open. When I entered his room, there was a weird smell and trash such as bottles, food and papers were all over the place. I couldn’t believe what I saw. How can human live in this room with this mess?Not only the trash but also the canvas, brushes and paints were spread out on the floor. However, strangely, there was no  a single finished drawing. In Paul Auster’s book ‘The Invention of Solitude’, he describes how the photographs were saved in his dad’s closet. Paul assumed that he would never care those pictures and his dad probably never even knew that pictures were sitting there in closet. I felt he would be considered those trash and painting tools which were on the floor same as how Paul’s dad was considered his pictures. Those art tools looked important; however, he didn’t care about them at all any more. t There was an big american flag hanging on the ceiling and badges from the Iraq war. Then I realized that he went and got back from the Iraq war. I was sure that he was suffering from the flashbacks from the war. I suddenly remembered my mom told me that my dad had similar symptoms. He didn’t go out and just stared at the sky for a long time as a dead guy after he went back from the Vietnam war. Suddenly one quote from Auster’s book popped up in my mind. During the time when he kept searching his dad’s life after his death, he mentioned that “the world was a distant place for him, I think, a place he was never truly able to enter, and out there in the distance, among all the shadow that flitted past him.” Everything made sense to me after I visited his apartment. His world and the real world was distant for him like Paul’s father. Therefore, he never truly able to enter  outside which must be shadow and darkness for him. Paul Auster also mentioned  to explain his father’s emotion in his book that “for a man who finds life tolerable only by staying  on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than this surface to others.” I think that’s why he lost his reality, locked himself in his small apartment room and stay on only the surface of himself and to tolerate his life and his old memories.

Bibliography

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. New York:Penguin Book,1982.