스카이콩콩

"There are no limits to the sympathetic imagination." --공감적 상상력에 한계란 없다.

쿳시 J.M. Coetzee 의 The Lives of Animals에 나오는 주인공 엘리자베스 코스텔로Elizabeth Costello의 주장이다. 나의 주석을 덧붙이자면, 고통을 느끼는 존재인 한 공감의 한계는 없다.

                                   ............................<http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/blueguitar.html>.....................

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade 
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board 
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings...

IV

So that's life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?

The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,

And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way 
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;

The sun no longer shares our works 
And the earth is alive with creeping men,

Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand 

Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night,
The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air--

I know my lazy, leaden twang 
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar

Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.

X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell
And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills
Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones-behold
The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished care.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

"Here am I, my adversary, that
Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery
At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end,
The touch that topples men and rock."



XV

Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard
Of destructions", a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?



XXIII

A few final solutions, like a duet
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice
Of ether, the other smelling of drink,

The voice of ether prevailing, the swell
Of the undertaker's song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice
In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath scene and final,
The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.



XXX

From this I shall evolve a man.
This is his essence: the old fantoche

Hanging his shawl upon the wind,
Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries.
At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb,
One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing
From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire,
Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps...
The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their droll affair.
The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.


XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know 
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.


XXXIII

That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread 
Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

군산대 강의에서 외국인 학생들과 <<웰컴 투 동막골>>을 시간 관계상 삼분지 이쯤 함께 봤다. 영화에 그려진 시골 공동체에서 인상적인 것 하나는 노인의 존재다. 촌장의 노모. 초가집에 다 함께 산다. 미국 갔다오니 군산 뿐만 아니라 여기 저기에 노인 요양원이 새로 많이 생긴 것을 알게 되었다. 그 뿐이랴. 이미 그 전부터 장례식을 전담하는 병원이나 장례식장 전용 건물들이 늘어나는 것을 조금 불편한 마음으로 봐왔다. 나는 어중간한 세대로 옛 시골에서 어떻게 어른들을 모시고 어떻게 장례를 치르는지를 어렸을적 보고 자란 세대다. 마당에 흰 장막을 친 시골집 장례식장은 이게 초상집인지 잔치집인지 구분이 안 갈 정도였다. 내 부모의 늙음을, 엄마 피부의 검버섯같은 것을, 곁에서 지켜 보노라니 어떻게 모실까, 지금의 내 처지와 함께 여러 생각이 든다. 난 가능하면 그런데로 보내드리지 말아야지 다짐한다. 물론 그런 이들의 사정이 있을테고 난 절대 그들 모두를 분별없이 싸잡아 비난하는 것은 아니다. 집 근처 조그만 밭--임자 없는 땅이라서--에서 아버지는 채소 같은 것을 심으시고 엄마는 우리들 장가 보내면, 아님 막내 장가라도 들면, 시골로 가서 살까 지나가는 말로 말씀하신다. 나는 좋다고 얘기한다. 쿳시의 소설 Disgrace에서 주인공은 안락사되는 개들과 마지막을 함께 하는 의식을 치룬다. 죽음에 대한 예의랄까. 마땅히 인간에겐 더 말해 무엇하랴. 한편 이런 장면이 떠오른다. 법정스님의 다큐멘터리에서 본 건데, 어떤 이에게 했다는 말로, 중으로서 가장 멋진 죽음은 때를 알고 아무도 모르는 숲 속 깊이 들어가 자리에 누워 낙엽을 끌어모아 덮고 죽는, 풍장 같은 것. 헤세의 <<지와 사랑>>에 나오는 골드문트의 죽음도 그 비슷한 것이었다. 골드문트가 부럽지는 않았다. 스스로 고독을 완성하는.. 나는 잘 모르겠다. 내가 다시 시골로 돌아갈 수 있을까-그런 잡생각을 해본다.

김수영의 산문집을 보면 그는 이 시를 쓰고 대단히 흡족해 했다.

내가 읽어도 어떤 단단함과 절제된 간결함 그리고 폭포라는 객관적 상관물에 대응하는 시인의 결기를 느끼게 한다.

이상하게도 이 시가 내 머리 속에 꽤 한 동안 계속 상기되었다.

나중에 쓴 "풀"과 맞닿아 있다는 내 주관적 판단이다.

폭포     김수영

폭포는 곧은 절벽을 무서운 기색도 없이 떨어진다.

규정할 수 없는 물결이

무엇을 향하여 떨어진다는 의미도 없이

계절과 주야를 가리지 않고

고매한 정신처럼 쉴사이없이 떨어진다.

금잔화도 인가도 보이지 않는 밤이 되면

폭포는 곧은 소리를 내며 떨어진다.

곧은 소리는 곧은 소리이다.

곧은 소리는 곧은

소리를 부른다.

번개와 같이 떨어지는 물방울은

취할 순간조차 마음에 주지 않고

나타와 안정을 뒤집어 놓은 듯이

높이도 폭도 없이

떨어진다.

순창 강천산에서