— Park Hyun-soo
To pass this way
even once,
you would have to be
at least this much.
Stamping hollows,
hollow after hollow,
into the dura mater —
a rhetoric
weighing tens of thousands of geun (a traditional unit of roughly 600 grams),
read or unread
90 million years later,
one page
of the Cretaceous
tossed onto the shore.
Isn't even the weighty
trace of it
obscure now?
They say the greatest footprints in the history of life on Earth remain here. It is the fossil site at Uhangri in Hwangsan-myeon, Haenam County, South Jeolla Province (Jeollanam-do) — known as the largest of its kind in the world. They say the giants that once roamed the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era gathered in one place. Just as Hollywood stars leave their footprints behind, dinosaurs, pterosaurs and web-footed birds stood before a single page of strata that is like the dura mater of the Earth. Step by step, the tracks each of them walked became type, became sentences. The weighty rhetoric that no wood-block or metal type invented by humankind could imitate was printed in living type. Not a single character quotes another's words or thoughts; it was written with the weight of its own existence. They say it points to a distant world beyond writing.
