Writing as Mapping
We need places, whether real or imagined. We need them in order to map discourse and to leave a record. Writing and mapmaking are both attempts to make invisible trajectories visible. A map is drawn over someone’s footsteps, and writing retraces an inner journey, drawing that path again on the page.
This project explores the state before language is translated into space, the moment when words shift into a surface made of images, sensations, and feelings. Tilted Bodies: Screenplay as Atlas is an attempt to map narrative in this in-between zone. Here, the atlas is not a functional tool that marks territories and routes, but a cartography of affect. Layers of sensation and memory twist together, distort, and reflect one another, producing new forms of time.
The text of Han Kang’s Greek Lessons is the starting point for this exploration. Following its structure, I experiment with mapping it and then translating that map back into spatial form. In doing so, the project tries to reveal the network between language, affect, and space, and to uncover an invisible mental landscape that usually remains out of sight.
Greek Lessons
Is leaning something you do, or something that happens to you? The text I work with in Tilted Bodies: Screenplay as Atlas is Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, and it begins in exactly that in-between state. A woman who has lost her speech and a man who is losing his sight. Their story is an exploration of how loss, paradoxically, opens up new possibilities of sensation and relation.
The woman
At seventeen, the woman can no longer bear the act of speaking itself and loses her speech. By chance, she recovers it through a foreign language, French. Later, after her mother’s death, a divorce, and the loss of custody of her child, she becomes crushed again under the weight of language and, as an adult, loses speech once more. In order to reclaim it, she begins to study Greek, a language that is long dead, no longer used in everyday conversation.
“Let’s stop by the market and buy some tangerines.” She hears her mother’s voice. As a little girl, struggling to pull up the zipper of her coat on her own, she suddenly sees bright orange tangerines rise up before her eyes. She is startled by the fact that they are not real, and yet appear so sharply even though she is not truly seeing them. On top of that image, the letters she has only recently learned begin to overlap. Tree. Saying the word out loud, she laughs to herself. Tree. Tree.
For her, language was not oppressive from the beginning. From childhood she sensed language with her whole body. Words did not simply point to things; they summoned objects through sensation and reconstructed reality, a kind of apparition that wrapped around her entire body. That pure, almost ecstatic language began to wound her as she grew sharply aware of each word leaving her mouth. As an adult, it becomes frayed and exhausted by the endless tongues and pens of herself and others.
The man
As a middle school student, the man emigrated to Germany and found himself marked out by both discrimination and unwanted attention. For him, Greek became a path through which he can compete with German classmates and stand on equal ground. Because of a hereditary illness, he was gradually losing his sight. Before he goes completely blind, he returned to Korea and has been teaching Greek.
For him, Greek is also a lifeline that allows him to keep living even as his vision fades. His Greek classes are the way he stays connected to the world and confirms his own existence. The paradoxical vitality of this “dead” language lies there. In this space of language that has not yet been saturated with the violence and wounds of everyday life, both characters continue, in their own ways, living through. The Greek class is not simply a lesson in grammar and vocabulary, but a medium through which the protagonists endure loss and pain and keep going.
Between Languge and Perception
I cannot cover the entirety of Greek Lessons, but I hope to read selected passages as multi-layeres of language, sensation, affect, time, movement, and memory.
Language
Why Greek, then? In ancient Greek there is a third grammatical voice, the middle voice, which is neither active nor passive.
In Greek grammar, the middle voice describes an action that turns back on the subject. If you say “to love” in the middle voice, it means that loving something does not stay with the object alone, but comes back and changes you as well.
In linguistics, grammatical voice always presupposes two positions: someone who acts and someone who is acted upon. We ask, “Do you do, or are you done to?” The middle voice names a form in which the action turns back on the subject. Through the object, the subject ends up calling itself back into view.
If we follow this to the end, the middle voice becomes a question of the body. The body is at once the agent of action and the receiver of sensation. When I “hold” someone’s hand, it looks like a purely active gesture, but at the same time my own hand is wrapped in the other person’s warmth, texture, and tremor. A body encountered through sensation appears unusually clear and vivid.
“Before she lost speech, when she was still using language to write, she sometimes wished her words could be closer to something else:
a groan, a low scream, a stifled moan of pain, a growl;
the half-awake humming that soothes a child; a sudden spill of laughter;
the sound of lips meeting and then coming apart.”
She loves the nonverbal world more than concrete, discursive language. For her, the nonverbal is an inner extension of language into the body. It brushes up against the first vibrations of feeling, the realm of affect. Before it points to any meaning, it is already there as sensation.
Sensation
For her, to hold someone in her arms is a word deeper than a hundred spoken sentences.
“She sees again that Sunday afternoon in the summer when she was nine, crossing the road near their house with Baekgu, the dog she had raised for almost five years, walking ahead of her. A van speeding toward them struck him like lightning and fled. On the newly laid, blisteringly hot asphalt, the dog’s body below the waist was crushed flat like a sheet of paper. Only his front legs, chest, and head kept their three-dimensional shape as he foamed and groaned in pain. She rushed in without thinking and tried to pull his upper body into her arms. He sank his teeth with all his strength into her shoulder and chest. She could not even scream. She tried to clamp his mouth shut with both arms. The moment he bit her forearm once more, she fainted, and by the time the adults came running, they said Baekgu was already dead.”
The moment she sees him dying, she embraces him almost by reflex. Holding a dog who is already on the verge of death does not bring him back to life. Even as he, in pain, uses the last of his strength to bite her again and again, she cannot stop herself from wrapping him in her arms. To hold Baekgu’s body and feel his agony with her whole body, in a terror she can barely imagine, exposes the bond between the one who looks and the one who is looked at. To truly look at a dying Baekgu, to sense him, is to become one with his body. To sense the world in this way is not a matter of logical understanding or reasonable judgment. Her act of holding him is her way of taking his body seriously as sensation. It cannot be reduced to an intention to save him, or to pity, or to guilt. Her communication with him in that scene is nothing more and nothing less than sharing his pain. For her, this gesture of embracing is a way of wanting to understand someone completely, to the point of becoming one with them.
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of “flesh” in The Visible and the Invisible offers a way of thinking about subject and object through perception. When we perceive an object through touch, we are, in fact, feeling both the object and our own body at the same time. When my hand touches a cup, I first experience the cup’s qualities with my hand: its coldness, its smoothness, its hardness. At the same time, I feel those sensations as something that takes place somewhere in my own body. Through this localized field of touch, I am quietly composing a sense of “my body.” In that moment, touching the cup also becomes a way of touching myself. The one who touches is also the one who is touched. Through touch we do not only experience physical events related to objects; we also experience ourselves.
“When she was still able to speak, she sometimes chose to look steadily at the other person instead of talking. As though she believed that what she wanted to say could be translated completely into a gaze. She felt there was no more immediate or intuitive mode of contact than looking. It was almost the only way to touch without touching. Compared to that, language was contact that was dozens of times more physical. Moving lungs and throat and tongue and lips, shaking the air as the words flew toward the other person. The tongue drying, spit flying, lips cracking.”
For her, looking at someone instead of speaking worn-out words or sounds is another way of touching the other with her eyes. It is also an expression of her desire to face the world directly and know it clearly. Merleau-Ponty describes vision as a kind of “haptic visuality,” a way of seeing that is also tactile. When I look at an object, I am not only “seeing” the object; I am also faintly aware that I am visible to it, that I am seen from outside. I am not simply perceiving what surrounds me in one direction. I am also seeing the “me” who is reflected back through that surrounding world, and this returns to color the way I look at things again. Perception always contains this crossing: to perceive is always, at the same time, to be perceived. That crossing is the core of perception. Mesmer’s notion that the gaze could leave traces on the body and even heal it also treats the gaze as a kind of tactile eye. For her, the gaze functions not only as a system for understanding the other, but as a force through which she and the other can meet and become capable of healing.
For the man who is gradually losing his sight, to hold someone tightly is to face them fully and to understand them. He mourns the death of his friend Joachim Gründel by writing letters that will never reach him, and he regrets never having held him close.
“When you first embraced me, when I felt that gesture holding a desperate, uncountable desire, I think it struck me with almost chilling clarity: the human body is something sad. A human body, full of hollows and soft places and spots that are easy to wound. Forearms. Armpits. Chest. Flesh. A body born so that it can hold someone, so that it can want to hold someone.
Before that time passed, I should have held you, just once, so tightly that we almost broke each other. If you had not died, if I had gone back to Germany and met you again, would I have had to touch your face? Would I have had to read your forehead, your eyelids, the bridge of your nose, the wrinkles of your cheeks and jawline with my hands?”
For him, tracing another person’s outline with his fingertips is not just contact; it is described as an act of “reading” the other. This stands in contrast to her way of knowing others by touching them with her gaze. His way is closer to what we might call a “visual tactility,” where the hand sees.
“Pushing his fatigue back behind his face with difficulty, he speaks.
…
‘Shall I call a taxi for you now?’
With her right index finger, hesitating slightly, she writes on his palm.
No.
The thin, trembling strokes and dots draw themselves across both their skins at once, then vanish. There is no sound and nothing to see. There are no lips, no eyes. The trembling and warmth soon disappear. No trace is left.”
…
‘Shall I call a taxi for you now?’
With her right index finger, hesitating slightly, she writes on his palm.
No.
The thin, trembling strokes and dots draw themselves across both their skins at once, then vanish. There is no sound and nothing to see. There are no lips, no eyes. The trembling and warmth soon disappear. No trace is left.”
They sit in his room, and in the midst of their shared trembling, they speak by writing words onto each other’s palms. This language has no need of lips, of spoken sound, or of the eyes. This small and fragile bodily language leaves no mark behind. It does not cut anyone, and it does not linger as a scar. It is a language of recovery.
At the moment when gestures and movements of the body begin to speak beyond written characters or vocal sound, this scene offers us an alternate form of language.
EMOTION – EVENT - MEMORY
Emotion is always bound up with memory.
No matter how much time has passed, there is something she can never
know: why did Baekgu, lying flat against the scorching asphalt that day, bite
her? It was the last moment of his life. Why did he sink his teeth into her
flesh with all the strength he had left? Why, so foolishly, did she keep
holding him until the very end?
When she recalls Baekgu pressed against the asphalt, she brings back the tearing pain and the sound of his groans, and slowly chews over that moment until it hardens into what she calls “sorrow.” Emotion, then, is not simply the return of memory, but the re-sensing of memory, a state in which it has been re-narrated through language.
AFFECT – MOMENT – BODY
Affect, by contrast, belongs to a layer “before” language. It is the vibration, the impulse, the current running through the body before anything is given a name. Spinoza describes affect as a change in a being’s power that arises when it encounters another. It is not the label of a feeling, but the tilt that appears when two bodies meet. In that sense it moves not in some hidden interior, but along the surface between them.
In the scene where the woman writes on the man’s open palm, what runs between their joined hands has not yet settled into what we would call love. There is a tremor inside vulnerability, a tightening of breath, a pull toward the other. All of these small vibrations move between them only in the instant. This is why affect is bound up with temporality. Later, that moment may return as estrangement, as tenderness, or as recovery, but by then it has already crossed over into the realm of memory. Memory can summon it, but cannot fully define it, because affect truly exists only in the moment. At times, the affect of a given moment links up with sensations inscribed in the body and calls up older affects that have been stored as memory.
“She takes a deep breath. The sound of it is clearly audible. After
losing her speech, she sometimes feels that her breathing in and out resembles
words. Like a voice, it boldly brushes against the silence. At her mother’s
final moment she felt something similar. Each time her unconscious mother let
out a warm breath, the silence stepped back by one pace. When her mother
inhaled, an icy silence seemed to shriek and be sucked into her body.”
This scene shows the tension and fear that fill the silence before she manages to form a sentence in Greek class. It moves through her exhaled breath, the surrounding stillness, and the air around their bodies, then suddenly pulls her back into the memory of her mother’s last breaths, the cold silence, and the terror that made her shudder.
Tilted Bodies
On Borges’s gravestone there is an inscription that reads,
“There was a knife between us.”
That line brings out the sensation and tension that exists between two beings facing one another. The knife is not a simple symbol of separation. It is a boundary that almost touches yet does not, the thinnest surface through which they come to sense each other.
Is leaning the act of leaning, or of being leaned on? Greek Lessons tells of the lived lives of two wounded people who keep going by leaning on and being leaned on, stumbling forward together. They are joined at the most fragile, breakable points of their lives, at the core of their losses: the woman’s silence and the man’s darkness.
“Tilted Bodies” names the two bodies that exist in this unfinished state. For the characters in Greek Lessons, the body is not simply a site of lack. It is a place of care, where they move toward one another. As the man gradually loses his sight, he feels his way along the world with his fingertips. The woman, having lost language, comes to understand others through a silent gaze. Their bodies tilt and waver under the weight of loss, yet in that very instability they sense each other’s warmth and trembling and learn to care for one another.
In the end, Greek Lessons becomes a record of tender attention to the ordinary, vulnerable body. All of us live with pain, fragility, and limits. Yet within that incompleteness we lean and are leaned on, trying to find balance as beings of the middle voice. To lean on someone is not simple dependency. It is an act of mutual care that holds and gathers the other’s instability together with one’s own.
Screenplay as Atlas
This project centers on a single scene from Greek Lessons – the “palm-writing” scene – and explores how language is translated into space through emotion and sensation, mapped in four stages.
- I first rewrote the novel Greek Lessons as a screenplay. By making the characters’ lines and actions concrete, the events shift from abstract narrative into sensory scenes. In that process, the novel’s rhythm and mood become spatial movements, flows of gaze, and densities of emotion.
2. This terrain is made up of three radial layers: the Representational Layer, the Spatial Condensation Layer, and the Processual Layer. Each layer names a different point where language, emotion, sensation, time, memory, and the body meet and alter one another. They bleed into each other and together form a single topological landscape.
|
Layer |
Concept |
Temporality |
Sensation |
Space |
||
|
Representation Layer (Outer Layer) |
A layer where emotion is structured into language and stabilized as memory; events are encoded as signs and fixed as narrative. |
Past / event |
|
Wall, fixed surface |
||
|
Spatial Condensation Layer(Middle Layer) |
A transformative space where linguistic structures and emotional responses meet and generate new perception; the point at which emotion condenses into language and language seeps into sensation. |
Between the present and its re-enactment |
The middle layer where emotion takes on form, the moment when language becomes material and comes to the surface. |
Surface, fluid membrane |
||
|
Processual Layer (Inner Layer) |
A layer where pre-linguistic affective flows occur as bodily events; emotion appears as tremor and rhythm of the body. |
Present / moment |
Immediate, embodied vibration of sensation, affect as movement. |
Air (breath, pulse, body heat) |
Cartography of Affect
1. Meta Map of Mapping
It also works as a meta-map that shows how mapping operates, diagramming the very process through which language, sensation, emotion, affect, body, memory, and time are linked to one another and come to hold meaning.
2. Embodied Evidence Map
Grounded in visible incidents, this map registers how language becomes bodily trace.
3. Somatic Weave Map
This map braids gestures, sensations, and affect into an embodied relational pattern.
4. Affect Intensity Field
This map focuses on the flow and vibration of affect itself. It visualizes how feeling exists not as a fixed structure but as the persistence of sensation.
A Score for gesture, breathe, and pause
At this stage, the first axis sets side by side the “visible movements” and “invisible movements” in the palm-writing scene between the man and the woman. Bodily motions are drawn as solid lines. By contrast, what cannot be seen directly – the trembling of a hand, a gaze tracing the outline of a face, the rhythm of breath – appears as dotted trajectories that follow each figure’s gesture and tempo. In order: 1) the woman listening with all her strength, touching his words with her eyes, 2) the man staggering and carefully moving toward her, 3) the man bending his body toward her, 4) the man stretching out his left hand to her, 5) the man with fading sight reading her outline by following light and shadow, 6) the woman hesitating inside her memory of the dying dog that pierced their bodies as they clung to each other, 7) the woman supporting his hand with her left hand, 8) the word “No” written with a trembling right index finger, those faint vibrating strokes and dots grazing their skin, 9) the strokes and dots scattering and disappearing, 10) the two of them recovering inside traces with no sound or form, where vibration and warmth have gone. The drawing tries to map this scene where their senses and memories, movements and lines of sight intersect.
The second axis places side by side the physical time of the scenario and an affective time. Rather than the linear progress of narrative, it shows time as the staying, expansion, and repeated swell of feeling. What appears here is not the duration of events, but the density of the time in which emotion lingers.
The third axis uses points, their density, and the rise and fall of lines to show the intensity, fragmentation, and persistence of emotion. The concentration of points indicates how dense a feeling is. Short broken strokes suggest inner fissures and the breaking apart of emotion, while continuous lines mark its persistence. At the same time, the vertical, z-axis registers the strength of that emotion.
The final drawing is the plan of the man’s apartment, where the scene actually takes place. The scene begins with the man perched on the edge of his bed and the woman seated on a long wooden bench beneath the window. On this interior plan, the trajectories of feeling and the crossing of their gazes are translated into spatial structure. Here the flow of emotion does not stay only at the point where perception and feeling meet; it stretches into the man’s faltering steps, the vulnerability of his posture, the trembling, and the long breaths that carry the scene. Their conversation and the vibration of their bodies are set along a single, extended axis that reaches beyond the walls of the room into a wider world. As the memory of the dog dying between their arms folds into the present, the woman’s sensing shifts from an inward awareness to a current that is drawn in from outside the room. This scene becomes a map of how emotion seeps past physical boundaries and saturates the whole space .
Care
This map works as a structure in which emotion runs along the surface and leaves its trace. That surface is not a fixed boundary, but a shifting membrane where sensation seeps in, is erased, and inscribed again. The map does not reproduce a single, homogeneous world. Instead, it reveals a terrain in which, across layers of lack and residue, feeling and memory intersect and transform one another.
“Care,” at its root, means to keep watch. To care is to look closely, to sense, and to draw near. Tilted Bodies: Screenplay as Atlas traces scenes of recovery in that act of keeping watch, where body and language, emotion and memory meet again in a world marked by loss. There, tilted bodies write another kind of language through their gestures and sensations as they lean toward one another.