LITMIR.BIZ

      Among all our utensils is there any more familiar to us than scissors? There is not a household without a pair. East or West, they are one of those utensils most commonly unearthed from ancient burial sites.

      Scissors, however, have not been blessed with a positive image. Designed for cutting things, these two blades using the awesome power of leverage both look and play the role of the villain. In that world of the sewing basket inhabited by the thread, needle and scissors, scissors, with their nature so different from the needle and thread lead an alienated and lonesome existence.

      That figure of speech which has the thread following the needle is often used to signify the inseparable relationship of a loving couple, but it also shows the capacity of the needle and thread to unite that which is fallen asunder. The needle sutures the wounds which clothes receive in their much abused existence, and it mends new life into them when they seem to be on their last leg. The thread incorporates the nature of continuity. That is why parents like to think that when their baby, at that special celebration of his first birthday, happens to reach for the spool of thread (placed conveniently close to him for that very reason), he is guaranteed a long life.

      But scissors cut things which are whole, and sever those which are joined together. Scissors signify to us separation, severance and elimination.

      To the writer, scissors are the most fearsome of all our devices. In Korean we say censored writing has been scissored. In addition to their figurative role as the greatest enemy of the freedom of expression, in the West scissors are used as a simile for plagiarism. Imagine one writer scissoring out a useful part of another's writing, then fitting it into his own. Scissors, not the pen, plagiarize. And so we have the true story of how, on the opening night of a play by the nineteenth-century writer Alexander Dumas, the author's rivals sent him a pair of scissors instead of the usual bouquet of flowers. (Wherefore Dumas announced to his audience, "Anyone who thinks he can write a play like this can have these scissors!", to which the audience responded delightedly with a vindicating round of applause.)

      In Korean, we refer to the negative mark X as scissors, not only because of the shared meaning of the two, but also because of the strong resemblance between them in form.

      There is another, happier image of scissors to be found in their country cousin, the shears of the taffy man. Clanking his huge shears, he makes the rounds of the neighborhood with his white twists and tan slabs, pieces of which he exchanges with the kids for whatever discarded goods they can scrounge for him. Those shears with their dull, loose blades do not look like they could cut a thing, and, indeed, can not. The taffy man long ago scissored the scissoring function out of these emasculated scissors, since he did not use them for their original function of cutting but simply to help sound his arrival. In that transformation from severing to serving, scissors were transformed from the role of villain to that of the much loved hero in children's tales and childhood memories.

      Both scissors and shears work on the principle of leverage, but the taffy man's use of leverage has nothing to do with force. When the shears' lever-like blades meet, a lyrical sound, not destructive force, is produced. Those glinting blades of scissors with exact fit could never produce such a welcome sound as the jangling clank of the taffy man's shears. Only the loose, amiable blades of this artless and guilelessly dull work of gray steel can. Shears do not sever, they gather the children from around the neighborhood, unite like thread and needle.

      The taffy man is no longer to be seen in the big cities these days. But still we hear the genial clank of his shears in our dreams.

      It is not the horrifying quiet snip of scissors that you might hear in one of those dreams which Freud tells us originate in some subliminal castration complex. It is rather a sound which recalls the warm affection the taffy man stuffed into the extra chunks he always gave us.

      A Hat of Principle

      Kat

      That which best manifests the nature of a building is its roof. Likewise, of all the different clothes man wears, that which best expresses the character of the person wearing it is the hat.

      Both the roof and the hat are at the summit. closest to the sky. and both of them serve the purpose of protecting us from sun and rain. Let us turn it around once: the roof is the building's hat. the hat is a person's roof.

      One architect even theorized that a roof in any one culture closely resembles the hats worn by the people of that culture. There is no difference between the turban of the Moslem and the onion-shaped roof of his mosque. And in European culture that hat worn by Napoleon's troops recalls to us the classical triangular stone roof supported by its rows of pillars.

      Anyone who sees the undulating eaves of the Korean thatch-roof house sees in them the floppy brim of the reed hat worn by our travelers in the old days. Our point may be made even more clear if we suggest a juxta-position of the reed hat and the thatch-roof house with the sombre head gear of the patrician class-the kat— and the dignified tile-roof buildings of that class.

      Korea's version of Confucianism, which came to dominate our society from the end of the fourteenth century, gave the kat a feature unique among hats of the world. While it resembles a roof, it does not serve the roofs function of protecting. From a practical point of view, on the face of this earth there is nothing more impractical than the kat. This headpiece, woven in a very loose and airy warp and woof from the hairs of the horse's tail, stops neither rain nor sun nor wind nor cold. In truth, a much more attractive aspect of this wondrous hat which, for all its lack of protection, one can wear without actually wearing, is the way it shows off the head under it. The topknot and the horsehair band inside

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