The Places Bodies Can’t Reach

Earlier this year, I came across a 15-minute video from a YouTuber called Weekly Weird Kpop that introduced global Anglophone viewers to Cyber Singer Adam, South Korea’s first virtual pop star. Unveiled in 1997, Adam signaled the dawn of immaculately manufactured K-pop idols at a time when most people still believed in the inherent separation between “the real” and “the virtual.” In 1998, Adam released an album titled Genesis (what else?), but it was his novelty that put him all over South Korean TV and doomed him to be a one-hit wonder. Although I’m flooded with pity thinking of Adam now, at the time I found his desperation to come across as human rather creepy. Despite his peach-crayon skin, impossibly sharp nose, and perfectly V-shaped chin, Adam declared himself a real Korean boy looking for his human Eve. He insisted his special talent was ad-libbing on the guitar and that his favorite food was kimchi-jjigae (kimchi stew). The pixelated doth protest too much.   

The pity I feel is not for Adam himself but for my own naïve conviction that, because he was virtual, Adam couldn't be real. In the 1990s, no one I encountered in Seoul or even saw on television looked anything like Adam. But a generation later, scores of K-pop stars, cosmopolitans who can afford trendy touch-ups, and anyone using a beauty filter on Snapchat appear to carry his genes. Miraculously, Adam begat without ever becoming human. He simply had to make legible, and therefore realizable, a composite of what technocapitalism had determined humans should strive to become.

A year before Cyber Singer Adam came to conquer this world, the South Korean poet Yi Won published her debut collection, When They Ruled the Earth.[1] This work announced to Korean readers a posthumanist poetics in which personal computers, plastic bags, particulate-filled air, and shadows cast on asphalt are animated and, in turn, animate the lyric subject. When They Ruled the Earth makes up the first half of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), a new volume translated by E.J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello; the other half is The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, the eponymous collection published 11 years later. These two works bookend roughly a decade, 1996 to 2007, in which the world entered a new century and grappled with the imagined anxieties and unimaginable actualities that came with that transition. It was also the time when South Korea emerged as the most connected country in the world. In this context, as Koh and Cancio-Bello note, Yi Won’s writing “has been lauded for its paradigm shifts about the information age and digital civilization.” (One of Yi Won’s best-known poems—not included in the new volume but previously translated by Walter K. Lew—is “I Click Therefore I Am,” a title that succinctly expresses her ontological concerns.) Further, Koh and Cancio-Bello observe that Yi Won’s work positions South Korea “within complex systems around the globe,” thus vividly rendering “feedback loops that define our interconnectedness, our universality.” 

How technocapitalism alters what people are and what they create might feel like a well-worn trope, particularly after a pandemic year when many did little more than sit in front of screens, think about what sitting in front of screens means, and imagine what they could have done differently to avoid the whole situation. While reading The World’s Lightest Motorcycle this spring, I felt as if I’d encountered an oracular text that predicted with stunning precision where humans have ended up. For example, the volume opens with “PC,” a poem in which Yi Won plays with the ambiguous interchangeability between a “you” and a “me,” the personal voice and the personal computer that together comprise the modern lyric’s “speaker.” The poem begins, “Since ‘you’ are here, I send years’ worth of air back to you” and concludes, “The horizon / collapses into the dark monitor screen. I send ‘you’ a knot of air / from that horizon.” The poetic subject stands at the precipice of that simultaneously absorptive and reflective surface and experiences the disorienting sublime that turns into song (“a knot of air”). “Poetry should have both sharpness and sensitivity in the realm of foretelling,” Yi Won has observed. And “to foretell,” as any teller will attest, signifies both a premonition of what the future brings and a narrative that preempts and shapes that future.[2]

In their afterword, the translators cite three lines of “On the Street,” suggesting that technological interconnectedness can build toward activist solidarity: “People everywhere / walk with plugs suspended from their bodies / charged by the world’s rage.” It’s hard to read these lines and not call to mind scenes from recent Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter protests, and rallies in support of Palestine—movements on the street that extensively interface with movements online. The global mobilization and momentum possible thanks to smartphones and social media are undeniably impressive, but Yi Won’s poems offer another undeniable vision: humanity’s increased interconnectedness has produced greater isolation. “Foul air / clusters at the end of each plug,” Yi Won writes just before the lines quoted above. And in the spaces between the people “with plugs suspended from their bodies” are “pebbles clothed in”—or, an alternate translation, “stones hidden under”—“the air.” In other words, the space between people might be invisible, but it’s hard and palpable.

That both readings are possible, and that this pre-Y2K poem speaks so directly to contemporary ambivalence around digital culture, reflects the oracular quality of Yi Won’s writing. The simultaneous “sharpness” and “sensitivity” she calls for in poetry transforms “foretelling” into a kind of projected deconstruction: a time-bomb critique of received and repeated images set to go off at the very moment and place readers encounter the poem. Koh and Cancio-Bello note that Yi Won “sees the world through images rather than meaning.” As such, her work often probes how the “irony of the closest thing being the most unfamiliar seems to provide an unfamiliar and familiar image at the same time”—such as how the name Nike aligns the coveted sneakers of global capitalism with the ancient, winged goddess of victory, thereby shaping the possibilities for envisioning both.

In this sense, Yi Won turns the critique back onto herself, the poet whose imaging of the world readers are prompted to receive, repeat, or reject: “I’m interested in questions such as whether what I see is true or not, or whether what I see of myself is really me,” she states in the afterword. This is why the you and me in “PC” are necessarily placed inside quotation marks; these terms, the monoliths between which a lyric poem is constructed, are shown to be conditional, fluid, and virtual markers.

Let me now indulge in a moment of navel-gazing (unlike Adam, I have one). As I look at this string of words on my screen, can I claim to be their “speaker,” their “I” rather than the computer that literally gives them form? Or the software engineers who created the program that materializes and makes accessible “my” thoughts, including the useful thesaurus feature that regularly finds better words than “I” came up with? Or the long lineage of people who have shaped and expanded the language(s) “I” now employ? Or the reader who ultimately endows “my” words with meaning and value?

And couldn’t that “reader” be either “me” or “you?” My navel responds: “It’s OK, I get it, sometimes you just need to talk yourself into knowing you exist.” But it’s more than that, of course. As Marxists would say, people need to interrogate who owns the means of production. And as the PC might say, we must interrogate what exactly we define as “the means of production” in our increasingly digital lives.  

In “Self-Portrait,” which opens the second part of the translated volume, Yi Won writes, “I put my head up for auction online but got a notification that / when you click my head an hourglass appears, a loading error.” Eventually the poem’s speaker brings her head to a flea market, where

[…] somebody blows it up like
a balloon and my wrinkled head gradually smooths out and my
mouth chews on somebody else’s fingerprints and to my great
relief my mouth has yet to howl

Only at this moment, in the poem’s last stanza, is the head described as, and begins to function like, a living human head: it is round rather than shriveled and deflated; it has a mouth that can chew and potentially howl. Although the speaker initially owns the head, “somebody” else generates the form it finally takes; the speaker’s loss of agency, as well as her alienation from her head, is underscored by her final, passive observation: “to my great / relief my mouth has yet to howl.”

The absence of possessive pronouns in the original Korean compounds the speaker’s lack of agency. Speakers of Korean commonly refer to body parts without explicitly signaling to whom they belong; for example, I would say “Head hurts” rather than “My head hurts.” The implication is that I could be talking only about my own head. Maybe a bit wishfully, I have long regarded this convention as expressing a deep intimacy between oneself and one’s body. It’s a bit like calling a dog “Dog.” This doesn’t mean the dog is the Platonic ideal of a dog but is the singular, dearest dog to you. Although neither my or I is explicitly referenced at the beginning of the Korean-language version of “Self-Portrait,” readers can assume, as the translators do, that the poem’s speaker intends to say, “I put my head on display.” By the Korean poem’s end, however, the lack of the possessive pronoun feels significant and deliberate. Neither the head nor its mouth is anchored through language as mine. The head floats away from the speaker without anything (or any word, my) even being cut, retroactively calling into question whether the speaker has any claim to it at all.

Though the poem’s striking figurative language reflects Yi Won’s strategy of producing unsettling ambiguities around objects or concepts generally taken for granted (the “irony of the closest thing being the most unfamiliar”), it also dramatizes an intricate realignment of the structure of metaphor, a particular concern for the poet in the volume’s second half. Metaphor is conventionally regarded as being composed of a tenor (the object being described) and a vehicle (the language used to describe it). In “Self-Portrait,” one can easily make the case that in the last stanza, the speaker’s head is the tenor and the balloon is the vehicle, but when one commits to this normative metaphorical dynamic, questions surface. For instance, the “head” becomes a head only once the image of the balloon is introduced. Through this figurative language, the head becomes round and gains a mouth, features one generally assumes to be in place already; this means that before the comparison with a balloon, the head didn’t have these characteristics. What did it look like originally? It’s unclear, although the speaker indicates it was sellable and wrinkled in a way one wouldn’t normally associate with a human head. In fact, it’s a “loading error,” an “hourglass” that might indicate some form of processing, but it’s unlikely to produce any resolution to our query. 

Similarly, in “I Miss My Face,” one of my favorite poems in The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, Yi Won writes, “My face opens the mirror and goes inside. I follow but my face / locks up the mirror.” A few lines later, she adds, “My face becomes time on the wall.” The speaker’s face stands in for the clockface (already a metaphor), but why shouldn’t it, given how human faces so vividly show the passing of time? Then Yi Won describes the night seen in the mirror—and it’s hard to imagine anything more poetically metaphorical than combining the night with a mirror. But rather than this image (as vehicle) standing in for something else, such as melancholy in the speaker’s heart (a classic tenor), Yi Won turns the image into the creative agent: “The night inside the / mirror peels my face line by line. My bare flesh sprouts new leaves / and grows dark as if it’s about to bear blooms.”

This reconceptualization of the relationship between tenor and vehicle feels analogous to ongoing reevaluations of the relationship between “the real” and “the virtual” and the impossibility of compartmentalizing and maintaining a clear separation between these. But further, the agency and animism Yi Won extends to the nonhuman, such as the night (as well as the PC, baguette, or mirror), and how this shapes the poem’s speaking subject also calls to mind Jane Bennett’s notion of “vital materiality” from Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). Bennett argues for a deeper recognition and analysis of how nonhuman forces (“things”) participate in and even determine seemingly human-centered events. As she has explained in an interview, “My experiment is this: What would the world look and feel like, were the life/matter binary to fall into disuse, were it to be translated into differences in degree rather than kind?”

Yi Won’s poetry provides one possible answer to Bennett’s question. In The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, the dismantling of the real/virtual binary occurs precisely because of how the life/matter binary “falls into disuse” with Yi Won’s unsettling and inverted imagery. “The sky keeps spreading its blood beyond the / places that bodies can’t reach” she writes in “The Mirror Gnaws on My Face.” The screen seen above head—the sky—adopts the very thing—blood—that belongs uniquely to bodies, gives them life, makes them “real,” and expands it beyond their containment and comprehension. I see a sublime potentiality in reading Yi Won’s poetry as a bridge between vital materialism and virtual ontologies because the crucial question her work poses is not “How like ‘the real’ can ‘the virtual’ become?” but rather, “How does ‘the virtual’ set the terms for how people see and know ‘the real?’”

A poem can’t contain the whole world, and the poems I usually find most compelling are those that don’t try to dictate who or what I should be within it. But Yi Won and her translators show that a poem can be a space where readers might imagine that another world is possible; where correspondence and contradiction easily coexist, and no one insists otherwise; where one can play out dreams without turning them into dogma. That the familiar and the unfamiliar coexist in one image is the dream the poet can offer in the virtual realm of poetry. Again from “The Mirror Gnaws on My Face”: “I gnaw on a baguette in the mirror […] The mirror won’t darken. This time / it switches around. The baguette gnaws on my face. It’s a dream / I can’t interpret.” Something powerful, even magical, lies in that vision that bears blooms but refuses to yield to a single interpretation.

It’s worth noting that Koh and Cancio-Bello’s translation appears in a bilingual edition; the Korean and the English sit side by side on facing pages, as if mirror versions of each other. But through their transparent correspondence, readers can determine for themselves how the poems are not quite identical or interchangeable. As Yi Won has written, and Koh and Cancio-Bello have translated, “I gnaw on a baguette in the mirror… The baguette gnaws on my face.” These images are reflections of each other, in opposition to each other, and can both be truth without the baguette or I having to become any more or any less real, to take on the role of the literal versus the figurative, to claim a more authoritative position. The fact that one can see this both ways and that neither vision must overcome the other is what ensures, as Yi Won’s poem concludes, “Even if the darkness won’t brim to / the top, the earth’s time begins anew.” In the liminal moment that is both day and night, when the light is there but scattering, we see most vividly the possibilities we want to bring into the new era.

“The love that doesn’t exist in this world, I will dedicate it to you,” Adam promises in the chorus of his hit single, “No Love Like This.” Belted out by his anonymous human voice, it sounds deeply romantic, but the words, taken on their own, could also be a brutally honest offer. Let’s hope that soon Earth’s time will begin anew and that the poets have foretold a feedback loop of love that really exists.