Writings

Planaria

by Jeon Sang-guk, translated by C. La Shure

Sa walked in while I was organizing the lab equipment. “Hey, Mr. Planaria, you got a call from the graduate school you’re attending. Classes end tomorrow and the graduate students want you to come out to the school by six in the evening.”

Even entering graduate school might have come from my male desire to make more feathers to show off to her. Perhaps it was her protective instinct, but she was a great help. When a cloned human was born, his or her thoughts and actions would be the same as the original human. No. They wouldn’t be the same. Is science a value-neutral field of study? Why were moral judgments demanded of a scientist? What are the optimistic and pessimistic views of scientific technology? We discussed these hypothetical propositions of biological engineering using a sociological approach. She argued in earnest. Up to a point, she showed the courtesy to first listen to her opponent’s argument and then state her own position in a relatively indirect way. As time went on, though, she would overwhelm her opponent with an attitude of conviction. That was when the rash tenacity of an obstinate person appeared on her face. But I did not back down easily. Fortunately, our dispute did not turn into an emotional argument. That was because I was charmed by the sharp intuition and lucid judgment she showed moment by moment. The consequences humans would reap from the cloning of living things. What is the origin of the heterogamete, which is related to the separation between male and female? Snacking on fascinating stories of sex as discovered in nature and human society, we emptied about three bottles of soju liquor. At times we held each other’s gazes for a long while.

“You’re very pretty.”

“And you’re handsome, Sugam. It’s good to see you passionate about something.”

At such times I felt as if I were one with her. “Your soul is filling my body now.”

“No.” She threw cold water on my passion. “I don’t think so.” Our conversation turned to the existence of the soul.

Life is the soul. While I was an animist that believed all natural objects had a soul, she held to a view of the soul found in primitive religions, which said that the soul came from outside the flesh and controlled even the human will. Her position was in agreement with the Christian principle of creation, which said that, of all the organisms that had two pairs of chromosomes, only humans had souls. But within her theory of the soul was hidden an ulterior motive. When one had the will to control the soul inside, then for the first time one obtained freedom as a possessor of a soul. It was a challenge to God. She claimed that we must strive to be possessors of a soul that is not free of the flesh, but one that perishes along with the death of the body. In the end, it could be called a glorification of willful death.

In the early 1960s, James McConnell and his students conducted an interesting experiment with planaria. He fed trained planaria to untrained planaria to find out if the training would be transmitted. First, he shone light on a group of planaria in a bowl, and followed this with an electrical shock, at which the planaria curled up in an effort to lessen the pain of the shock. After this process of shining light and then administering an electrical shock was repeated a number of times, the planaria curled up immediately when they saw the light. It was the same as Pavlov’s conditioned response experiment, and the planaria trained in this way were then ground up and fed to other planaria. These other planaria, who had eaten the trained planaria, curled up as well when they saw the light. The training had been transmitted.

Can you gain someone else’s knowledge by eating their brains? I thought of a movie where insect-like aliens sucked people’s brains through their proboscises. Her vanishing aroused my creativity. If that is so.... Creativity is hearing a picture, understanding the speech of a cockroach, becoming an invisible person in order to steal something, restoring her to life, putting my flesh into her soul.

...I wanted to see her. I gathered the pieces of her that I had found around the house... her hairs and pubic hair, and a bit of dandruff I discovered atop the dresser. With a razor blade, I cut up a piece of one of the tapes with her voice on it. There was more. Twitter twitter, twitter scree.... that fellow that had appeared along with the bird’s song. Even a piece of that slug I found beneath the flowerpot and killed, the one that was watching the shoots of the orchid. I cut and cut these remnants of her until they could no longer be distinguished with the naked eye, and I made them into as fine a powder as I possibly could.

Scores of planaria, regenerating by asexual reproduction, were living in the water tank covered with black tape. They were all the same age. From the moment they were cut from the original planaria, the original planaria was born as a new organism along with the new planaria. There was no way their ages could be different. I did not come from you, and you did not come from me. There is no mother. There is no child. There is only “me.” Planaria “me,” planaria “me,” planaria “me”.... I didn’t feed these regenerated planaria “me”s for several days. If they don’t eat, they die. The strong planaria who survived starvation began to ravenously devour the remnants of her, stuck to thinly sliced pieces of liver.

Perhaps that is the way of things, but with her vanishing my social nature was restored. I grew closer to all those people from whom I had been distant, and I found peace. Her vanishing soothed the wounded hearts of all those related to me. My half brother, one year younger than me, came by to play checkers with me, and my stepmother, my father’s third woman, brought some food to my apartment. “I prayed aloud that that woman would be driven away.” I was tired of walking on eggshells around my colleagues about my entrance into graduate school. On the day I returned from asking for a leave of absence from graduate school, the principal presented me with the vacant position of chief of school affairs. Sa came by to suggest that I accompany him on his six-day, seven-night trip to China, leaving by boat from the eastern port of Sokcho.

Summer vacation was almost over. There remained only one last ceremony for sending her off. I was uncomfortable going there by myself. Even if only to prove that she no longer existed, I needed Sa, who had returned from his trip to China a few days before. Still regretful that I had not been able to accompany him on his trip to China, he came with me.

We parked the car at the entrance to the valley of Mt. Yeonyeop, and as we walked along he spoke. “Recalling memories is like the wind. A vanity of those left behind.”

“I feel like I’m going to die.”

“Well, you’ve killed someone, so of course you must be punished.”

“Do you think she’ll be there?”

“Look for another fairy. A widowed fairy with children.”

Perhaps due to the torrential rains the past year, the valley was not what it had once been. I found the broad, flat rock. After the rains had stopped the rock became home to a growth of stonecrop. The summer sunshine was brilliant, and shone like a rainbow through the stream of the small, shallow waterfall. Saxifrage flowers hung in the cracks of the cliff next to the waterfall.

I put the planaria from the school lab water tank into the stream. My ceremony of parting with her ended as cleanly as the summer sunshine. Sa sat astride the flat rock and dipped his feet in the water.

“This restaurant’s sushi is the best,” said Sa as he unwrapped a sushi roll.

There were no bird songs in the mountain on that summer day. I stared blankly at the saxifrage flowers that bloomed in the cracks of the cliff, looking like mosquitoes with their wings hanging down.