Summer is here.
Changbi Quarterly, Issue 188 — Summer 2020
The Summer 2020 issue of "Changbi" carries new literary works and criticism, along with wide-ranging discussions of the COVID-19 situation, a dialogue with former presidential chief of staff Im Jong-seok on the path to peace on the Korean peninsula, and contributions by Paik Nak-chung, professor emeritus of Seoul National University, among others
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Here's the table of contents for the summer issue. This edition is packed with pieces that capture our current era — the world rattled by COVID-19.
Even setting the keyword "COVID-19" aside, one entry in the table of contents stood out sharply. "On a Morning in Such Pathetic Times." Just the title of poet Baek Mu-san's collection alone was enough to send shivers down my spine.
On a Morning in Such Pathetic Times
Changbi Poetry Series, Volume 442. A collection by Baek Mu-san, one of the leading voices in Korean labor poetry. It is his tenth collection, the first in five years since "Salvaging the Ruins," winner of the Baek Seok Literary Prize. In this volume, the poet reflects on the value of a laboring life and on human dignity
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The summer issue of the Changbi quarterly includes an excerpt from the "author's note" of Baek Mu-san's new collection, "On a Morning in Such Pathetic Times." As the editor remarks, the poet's "author's note" held passages that were, for me, even more striking than the poems themselves. Here are some of them.
What I have come to feel while working is that time is not a physical motion but an idea. If you repeat the same labor and the same pattern, then even after living a month, you have really only lived a single day. From that angle, unlike physical time, a worker's life is squandered in a way that is very short and very meaningless. Labor time is the same time regardless of when or where, and the saying that we eat by selling our time is exactly right. Since time is life itself, and we feel we are living dead time, I came to long deeply for a different kind of time. Whenever I grow uncertain whether the present time we are grinding through is truly a genuine span of living, I tend to turn toward the past — though not on purpose. Because reality is so harsh, the past becomes the place that gives me room to breathe; and that is not merely nostalgia, but a process of experiencing a different kind of time from the present, a way of gaining a different sensibility. — From Changbi Quarterly, Summer 2020
Modern time is clock time — invented time. Rather than a human being living out their own time, they live by adapting to the clock's time, and that is labor time. Why should an hour of a winter night and an hour of a summer afternoon be the same? The seasons are different, the motions and the bodily activities are entirely different, and yet we call both of them the same "one hour." ...(omitted)... It is because, in terms of commodity output, an hour of a winter night and an hour of a summer afternoon are counted as the same. — From Changbi Quarterly, Summer 2020
