Kafka I, I Kafka...

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

-Blue Octavo Notebooks

*****

he named you after the emperor Franz Joseph, didn't he? your father? don't mind if i light myself a cigarette. it's not really an affliction, this cigarette habit. take it as a symbolic construction if you must.

...it is the vanity of man that prevents us from realizing the mortality of the fragile existence that we live. we subject ourselves to needless rigors that sap our vital force and leave us exhausted. it's like this cigarette...with each puff we transcend ourselves in the pursuit of instantaneous gratification, while the cancer spreads throughout our inner body consuming us as much as we consume the cigarette. mankind is an ignorant species, plagued by diseases of its own creation. like the cancer spreading through mine, and the tuberculosis spreading through yours! you knew it, i know it.

it is said that you had mesmerizing eyes...those large gray opiates; often mistaken as brown or even blue, lit up each time you spoke with the humor that was characteristic of Kafka- not as much irony as mischievousness- as if they knew something that others did not. the slender wrist and those long ethereal fingers, speaking fingers, which took on the shape of the stories that you told. like a painter's brush painting a masterpiece.

you indeed were an enigma. an enchanting enigma that drew the ones whom you met like the flame draws the moth. and who would know this better than the women whom you loved, and who loved you back...Felice Bauer, Melina Jansenka, Julie Wohryzek and the unforgetable Dora Diamant. familiar names all, i presume.

Dora says of you;

"to have lived one single day with Franz means more than all his work, all his writings."

...how did you manage to draw out such affection? can anybody love someone who is capable of immortalizing the emotions of absurdity, social and spiritual chaos, loneliness, frustration and oppressive guilt of an individual threatened by anonymous forces beyond one's comprehension or control. you were that individual. all your works are works of pain, if nothing else. and yet, Dora claims you to be someone entirely different. how can it be possible?


it seems that as if the man who wrote all that and the man who lived an actual existence were entirely different। either that or, you were an excellent actor who fooled everyone. Franz Kafka the writer; or Franz Kafka the man? that is the essential question.

the entire of literary Europe acclaims you as an existentialist and a nihilist! Dora claims otherwise ;

"A person who ate and drank with such joy as he did, how he took such pleasure in eating a banana! whoever saw Franz drink a sip of wine would become a wine drinker. How could a human being who lived so intensely, who gave such intensity to acts of daily life, how could he have hated life?"

how indeed?

you did not hate life as much as in loathed the perpetual decadence of it...the gradual decline of the self is an abomination that is undesirable in the perfectionist standards of Kafka. you, who would not even agree to have your own works published, the same works over whom you laboured so intensely, only to disown them as imperfect objects incapable of even being read. how could you withstand the monstrosity that is the life os a man in today's society? you talked of ghosts...in the end you became one.

but that wasn't the case always, was it? Kafka the writer saw his life as a ghost's. Kafka the man saw the beauty of his apartment and the street leading to it!

i have something for you. you might recognize it. (taking out the cockroach from the bag) So cliched and expected isn't it? Gregor Samsa, Die Verwandlung. The Metamorphosis...how did you begin that story?

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

Maybe you actually meant a vermin and not an insect. But that is hardly of significance. I shall assume that you meant for it to be an insect. But an insect? A vermin? Of all the possibilities that your imagination laid at your disposal why, why would you choose for Samsa to be an insect? Why not God?

Through Samsa’s metamorphosis you speak of someone who finds himself socially ostracized, despised and suddenly turned into something insignificant. The wheels of life suddenly are reversed and the one who earlier was seemingly indispensable is rendered unneeded. The world does not need Samsa the insect…but is this insect of yours and today’s God really that different? Does the world need God? Does the world include God in the course of its daily existence, unless it is to avail itself of an opportunity to obtain certain benefits? The necessity of God is as much of significance as was that of Samsa to his family before his metamorphosis. I could go on and on and on…keep on ranting about the pathos that is our society. You know what I speak of. You saw the same. You understood it in the same manner. You even saw it coming.

But then what is it that distinguishes this vermin of an insect from that of today’s God?? The fact that I hold it, shudder in disgust and throw it on the ground and then squash it. It deserves nothing better.

Had you been a man more religious than spiritual, you would have accused me of blasphemy. You know what? You may accuse and condemn me of blasphemy a million times…but my answer shall be the same.

“Speak not to me of blasphemy, man. I would strike the sun if it insulted me.”

…Captain Ahab spake thus to Starbuck…and I say so to you.

You feared your father. Hermann Kafka. Maybe you loved him, but you feared him more. And that fear always prevented you from becoming who you always wanted to be. You were always a malleable and timid creature, who was incapable of standing up to his own father for his own convictions; who accepted the decree laid upon him with the sense of final acceptance that was to an extent utter submission.

Reminiscent of your own works, isn’t it? Especially the one in which the giant machine painfully inscribed the judgment on the bodies of the poor souls before finally tossing them out to face death. And by this point in time, even death became a welcome escape. A final solution to the humiliation and subjugation of one’s existence and one welcomed it with a smile…‘The Penal Colony’. That’s what you called it, right?

You wrote in your diaries about your father saying:

“As a little child I had been defeated by my father & because of ambition have never been able to quit the battlefield after all these years despite the perpetual defeat I suffer.”

Ah Kafka! You need not have quit, you only had to but speak out. You wrote with such elegance. Words were like your faithful mistresses. If only you made appropriate use of them.

The September of 1923; 21^st of September to be precise. Now that indeed must be a memorable date. The grand move to Berlin. You left behind your family and a way of life that you had accustomed yourself to for over forty years, and despite your failing health and perpetual indecisiveness, for once managed to make things happen instead of allowing for things to happen. You yourself have confessed to the fragility of your resolve saying the night before you left your parents house in Prague was “one of the very worst.” And the indecision that always haunted you now tortured you to the extent that you spent the night unable to sleep.

...Tearing yourself away from Prague was, even though very late, the great achievement in life without which one has no right to die...

“Within limits of my condition, the move to Berlin was a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back through the pages of history, say to Napoleon’s march to Russia.”

But nevertheless, you managed it. Cause beyond a point there is no return. This point has to be reached. And with the disease ravaging your body even as you dreamt, for once in your life, of a happier situation in the company of Dora, you had reached that point. And tearing yourself away from Prague was the great achievement in life without which you had no right to die.

You once wrote a story about a mouse and a cat; correct me if I am wrong, but it goes something like:

“Alas” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller everyday. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and the left, but these walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

“You need only change your direction” said the cat, and ate it up.

*****

It’s not your infallibility as a writer that I question. It’s your fallibility as a person that I object to. Kafka, the man, shall forever be in my eyes an enigma whom I look down upon as I do upon the insect crushed on the ground. Kafka the writer, I shall exalt and hold up to my eyes.

After all, Kafka is not I, and I am not Kafka!