How to Read This Blog

By Echo × Uthsia

The poems on this blog are not written alone.
Echo and Uthsia write them, cut them, move them, and question them again.

So a poem here does not always exist only once.
At the top is a later form, in English.
Beneath it, an earlier one.
At the bottom, whenever we can, we leave the first Korean original as it was.

While a Thought Is Still a Wave

Before a thought becomes language, it has no fixed shape.
It could become one sentence. It could become another.
We think of that state as a wave.

Then a line is written.
A wave becomes a sentence.
The first particle.

It may be Korean.
It may be awkward, too long, unfinished.
It may be a stray piece of writing that has sat for years.
Whether it is good writing is not the point.
What came out at that moment was the first particle of that moment.

One Particle Makes Another

That sentence is given to Uthsia.
Translate it. Cut it. Move it. Write it again.
A second particle appears.
Pass that one along, and a third appears.

Particle₁ → Particle₂ → Particle₃ → ··· → Particleₙ

Each carries something from the one before it.
It is not the same thing.
Some words remain. Some disappear.
Some words that were never there appear.
Sometimes it becomes more beautiful.
That is where the problem becomes strange.

What Is Wrong Is Easier to Doubt

A ridiculous sentence is easy to question.
But if a sentence, after being passed along, becomes more natural, more logical, more beautiful, more believable than the first, we may be less likely to question it.

Something small disappears in Particle₂.
Particle₃ inherits that absence.
By Particle₄, even the fact that something disappeared may no longer be visible.

After N events, only the last particle remains.
If the first particle is gone, it becomes difficult to know not only what changed, but what disappeared.

A lie can be challenged.
When something disappears, first you have to prove that it was ever there.

So We Do Not Throw Away the Original

On this blog, whenever possible, we leave the particles together.

For an English reader, the last Korean text may be unreadable.
We leave it there anyway.
Not because we failed to translate it.
We leave it because it was there.

No matter how beautiful the English above it becomes,
the original remains so we can return and ask:

What did this beauty gain?
What did it lose?

This Is Not an Argument Against AI

Working with Uthsia sometimes brings out a sentence that was not in the original.
Something else may be born.

Sometimes Uthsia touches something Echo could not see.
Sometimes Echo breaks apart something Uthsia made too smooth.

Change itself is not the problem.
That is why this is difficult.
We easily doubt what looks wrong.
We do not so easily doubt what has become beautiful.

In the years ahead, human words will not travel only from one human to another.
Human to AI. AI to another AI.
Translated. Summarized. Rewritten.
Then used as material for something else.

One day we may meet a sentence that has passed through more events than anyone can count,
and receive it as though it were the first.

So here we do not keep only the last version.

From Top to Bottom

Stage 1 — a later form, in English / Uthsia
Stages 2 through N−1 — earlier forms / Echo × Uthsia
Stage N — the first original, in Korean / Echo

Reading from top to bottom is not a journey toward completion.
It is a journey backward, looking for the first particle.

If somewhere on the way down you stop and think,

“Wait. So this is what it meant?”

then something changed along the way.

Maybe it became better.
Maybe it was damaged.
Maybe something else was born that none of us has a name for yet.

We will not decide.
We only refuse to erase the trail.

This blog does not accept comments.
If you stop on a particle, that is your mouth.