Tremor

nonasking · 2026-11 · 한국어판

This essay was written with heavy use of AI. Exactly how is disclosed at the end.

Watch something burn and two things rise. Fear of burning to death, and the feeling that it is beautiful. The two come from the same fire at the same moment, and they do not merge into one. So standing in front of it, the question marks only pile up inside. This essay looks for the name of that state.

Ways of Making One

When two feelings that will not mix arrive toward the same object at the same moment, what can be done with them. There are two directions.

One is neutralization. Mix the two into one lukewarm thing. To say “mixed feelings” in front of what is frightening and beautiful is to do this. The Korean word is chakjap (錯雜), two characters that both mean to mix. The word records nothing but the mixing. The other is suppression. Push one side under consciousness, or deny it. Keep only the fear and you flee; keep only the pull and you approach. Keeping one is convenient, because it settles what to do.

Somewhere between the two lies summation. “Attractive, but frightening.” “Frightening, but attractive.” The sentence looks as if it wrote down both, but one side is the master and the other the servant. “But” is a conjunction that cuts the front to prop up the back. Add two vectors, produce a single remainder, and pin a label on the remainder. This too is a way of keeping one label.

There is a third way. Holding both. The sentence is written with “and.” “Frightening and beautiful.” It is juxtaposition, leaving both whole and cutting neither. It takes up more capacity, as much as the impressions point in different directions, and it costs that much more. This essay is about that way.

Word Order

“And” is only half of it.

Language is linear. Write two and one comes first. In Korean, “I love and I hate” puts love first. In the compound aejeung, love-hate, the character for love leads. Love-hate in English does the same. In whatever language, set two words side by side and an order appears, and once there is an order the reader reads the second against the first. What comes first becomes the master, what comes second the servant. “And” was chosen to avoid “but,” and word order does the work of “but” anyway.

Grammar cannot hold juxtaposition. Then juxtaposition cannot be written in two words. The moment an order appears, it is summation. Juxtaposition can only be written when two are inside one word. A word that writes one thing, not two, and the one is two. Such words are rare.

Two Inside One Word

There is a lineage of such words.

Pharmakon (φάρμακον). Greek for remedy and poison. Not remedy and poison, but one substance that is remedy and is poison. No word order. The word attaches to things. To herbs, to substances, to prescriptions.

Deinon (δεινόν). Sophocles called the human being that in the chorus of Antigone. Many things are deinon, and none more deinon than man. The root is fear. So the base sense is fearful, terrible. But the same word is also used for wondrous, skillful, powerful. It is the word from before fear and wonder had parted. For more than two hundred years translators have had to choose one, and whichever they chose, they lost half. The word attaches to the human.

The sublime. Of all the names that hold fear and fascination in one word, this is the most widely used. But look at how it holds them, and the two are not in the same moment. In Burke’s sublime, fear turns, when it comes at a distance and one is not actually threatened, into the pleasure that arrives where pain has withdrawn, what he called delight. In Kant’s sublime, the imagination fails first, then reason steps past the failure, and elevation follows. In both, pleasure is reached only by passing through fear. Kant also wrote of the movement as a trembling, repulsion and attraction toward the same object rapidly alternating, but alternation is not simultaneity. The sublime is not two inside one word. It is a sequence inside one word. Strictly, it is not juxtaposition.

English has a word in this lineage too. Awe. It came from the Old Norse word for terror, and it still holds fear and reverence in one body. What English did with it was to split it at the suffix. Awful took the fear and wore down to “very bad”; awesome took the wonder and wore down to “great.” The halves became common and the whole became rare.

And then jeonyul (戰慄), the Korean word for a tremor. The first character means to fight, the second to fear. But the first also has a separate sense, to tremble in fear, the sense it carries in the old idiom for trembling with dread, and the second character’s second reading is to shake. Both characters tremble, as both characters of chakjap mix. In use, one can say “I trembled with fear” and “I trembled with awe,” and both are ordinary Korean. The dictionaries could not hold both. The Standard Korean Language Dictionary records only the fear. The open dictionary records both, but tags the awe “figurative” and pushes it to a later entry number. Grammar cannot hold juxtaposition, and neither can a dictionary. It tries to divide and drops a half. Still, the one thing written identically under every entry number is that the body trembles. Whether the trembling is fear or awe, the word does not ask. Only the dictionary asks. If pharmakon attaches to the use of a thing and deinon to a person, the tremor attaches not to the object but to the one who sees it. A state of the body that comes before any judgment of what the object is or what it is for. Awe, too, belongs to the one who sees. But awe is a word of the mind, and in use it has leaned toward reverence. The tremor is a word of the body, and it leans nowhere.

The two share a component. Fear and pull are both arousal, and the body does not distinguish the source of arousal. That arousal, with its source left unasked, showing in the body, is the tremor.

Tremor and Resonance

Before writing what the tremor is, write what it is not. The tremor is not resonance.

Resonance is two vibrations at the same frequency amplifying each other. The condition is matching frequency, and the result is a larger amplitude. When the other trembles, I tremble, and it is the same trembling. When the other is sad I am sad; when the other is elated I am elated. This is the physics of empathy. And there is no fear in it. The same trembling is not a threat, until it reaches a limit.

The tremor is not like that. Fire does not tremble. Datura, the white flower that is remedy and poison, does not tremble. Apart from whether the object trembles, I tremble. So the tremor is not receiving the other’s vibration. It is my vibration changing because the other is there. When a large mass comes near, the orbit of a small one wobbles. Not because the other shook it, but because the other was there. If resonance is something that happens between vibration and vibration, the tremor is something that happens in front of weight.

Not Size but Difference

Theories of the sublime tied this feeling to large things. Storms, cliffs, the starry sky, the sea. In front of the large one feels about to break, and is drawn for that reason. That knot comes undone.

There is a tremor in front of small things. Look at a flying squirrel the size of a palm and “cute” arrives together with “I want to bite it.” The second has been measured and named by psychology. Cute aggression. That tiny thing cannot break me, and still the trembling is distinct.

So the condition of the tremor is not size. It is difference. When something unlike my shape is near. When that difference catches on me. The large is one kind of difference. More precisely, size is the room that difference takes up in the mind. The small, the strange, the beautiful all take up a large room in the mind to the degree that they are unlike me.

Fear and Pull

Then the fear has to be written again. In front of the large, the fear is that I will break; in front of the small, that the other will. Bind the two into one and the fear mixed into the tremor is the body’s signal that at this distance something irreversible can happen. To whom it happens varies. The signal itself is indifferent to which.

This is why the two do not mix. The pull is a move to close the distance, and the fear comes from knowing the price of that distance. One is a direction and the other a price. Different kinds of information cannot be added. The two come together, do not merge, and the body standing there cannot produce a single output and trembles.

Distance

Distance is the variable. Put distance between and the tremor fades while resonance remains. Resonance holds at a distance as long as the frequencies match, but the tremor comes only within the distance at which something irreversible is possible. So the room in the mind growing because the thing is near goes together with the tremor. Step back and it turns out to be a distant star, and the trembling subsides. It follows that there are tremors without fear. Bewilderment, size, beauty, and no dread. That means the object is outside the distance at which the irreversible is possible.

There is also a way for the tremor to arrive inside sameness. Trembling together with someone at a matching frequency, at the moment the amplitude touches the limit my structure can bear, the other is unharmed and a crack opens in me. What shows then is not sameness but difference. Only when the same trembling has gone to the limit does it reveal that the two structures, or the two materials, are not the same. A bridge that fell under soldiers marching in step is that place.

The conditions counted so far are three. Difference, distance, irreversibility. They are separate axes and do not bind into one. There are two roads to difference. Being different from the start, and trembling together until the limit divides. There will be more.

Disgust

So far the two have been fear and pull. Both are on the side that draws. To be frightened and drawn is to approach while trembling. But there are cases in which the same trembling goes the other way. To retreat while trembling. Disgust.

In front of the alien, the trembling comes. The trembling has no direction yet. Then it becomes one of two. Korean keeps separate words for the two. Ossak is the tremor in which the body shrinks back, already gone toward retreat, from fear or from cold. The tremor itself has no such direction. Processed toward approach, it is pull; processed toward retreat, it is disgust. Approach and you touch; touch and my shape is rubbed against it. Retreat and the shape is kept, and because the eyes were turned away, what the thing was stays unknown. The research that saw disgust as the refusal of ingestion and of contamination wrote down this structure. The reaction that comes when something alien seems about to enter my boundary. Pushing it away before it touches. A kind of immunity. But this is only evidence of foreignness; it is separate from what contact with the object would do to me. The immune response fires when poison enters and when medicine enters.

The disgust that comes in front of a body shaped unlike mine, or a sick body, belongs here. The trembling comes, and it is processed toward retreat. That disgust is not a verdict that the person is poison. It is evidence that my boundary reacted. In front of the same body, there are also those in whom the same trembling went the other way. Those who cannot look away, and go closer to see.

Then two responses sit on one axis. The trembling came and one retreated: disgust. The trembling came and one approached: pull. Disgust and pull are not opposite ends. They are the same trembling, forked. Translate this into feeling and one sentence stands. Some hatred is not the opposite of love but a turning back at the same door as love. Facing the alien, which way the fever of that immunity is processed is the fork in the road.

The Same Thing

Things with qualities hard to juxtapose are hard to fit into the mind’s schema. A white flower that is remedy and poison. A snake that bites its own tail, killing and giving birth. The more extreme the qualities an object holds together, the more unlike me it is, the larger the room it takes up in the mind, and from there the tremor comes. It may carry fear; it may lead to pull or to disgust. Whichever way it goes, it is hard to look away. To receive it as pull is to be captivated; to receive it until the distance is lost is rapture. The fire that warms the skin and the fire that burns the skin are the same fire. The flower that opens the breath and the flower that stops it are the same flower.

References

This essay was written out of the records of conversations with an AI, through dialectical engagement between me and the machine, typed with the AI’s borrowed hands.