Don’t be a papier-mâché Mephistopheles.

There really is nothing like cracking open a beer, putting on a jazz disk, and rereading lines of Conrad I underlined a few years back. The words shimmer in the air as I read them, then burst like bubbles. Here are a few that I found this evening.

“I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe…”

What a wonderfully yet horribly accurate way to describe so many.

“We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.”

What exactly does one say to “sum up,” let alone “take farther” such a thing, such a beast? One doesn’t. One contemplates from afar, like the Parthenon. One doesn’t touch. One dare not touch.

“You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies–which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world–what I want to forget.”

Forgetting the world sounds like death. From what I know of Blanchot’s ideas about literature, he believed inscription to be a sort of quest for death. As for Kafka, read In the penal colony. Inscription and death are inseparable.

Mortem quaerit auctor per scriptionem (inscription about death by inscription, in a dead language).

Sorry, I get carried away sometimes. Back to Conrad. Here we are back where we started: Writing is a lie.

“[Kurtz] was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me that I am trying to tell you a dream–making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams…”

In this quote Marlow is addressing the other men on the ship, but the text is also Conrad adressing the reader, taunting the reader, in a similar manner to Kafka’s when he had a policeman tell the first person narrator of one of his fragments “Give it up!”

Authors can attempt to spell out the weaknesses of their medium. The subject can make the medium itself its object. We can’t reach out over that abyss that looms beneath “you” and “I”, but the author can try to explicate the predicament.

Works cited.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1990.

Kafka to his reader: Give it up!

There seem to be structural elements of the first few paragraphs of The Metamorphosis which echo those from Give it up!. Any of these elements considered individually might appear to be coincidences, but the ensemble suggests Kafka could have created a purposeful correspondence between the two texts. Give it up! begins with the establishment of the time, place, and action of the main character: “It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station.” All three of these structural building blocks appear again in The Metamorphosis. Gregor usually wakes up early in order to make the train which will take him to work. We learn from the narration that he is a traveling salesman, which puts him neatly into the shoes of the hapless character in Give it up!, since traveling salesmen frequently find themselves in strange towns they are not familiar with. “This getting up so early makes anyone a complete idiot. Human beings have to have their sleep.”, Gregor muses to himself. Is he forced to wake up so early that sometimes he cannot remember the way back to the station..? “Other traveling salesmen live like harem women. For instance, when I go back to the hotel before lunch to write up the business I’ve done, these gentlemen are just having breakfast.” No one has to wake up as early as he does! Correspondingly, the streets in Give it up! are deserted. “…but for the time being I’d better get up, since my train leaves at five.” Gregor reflects, then, glancing up at his alarm clock, ““God Almighty!” he thought. It was six-thirty,…” The time of the alarm clock clashes with his internal clock, informing him that it is much later than he believed. This horrifying realization seems to be an echo of the character in Give it up! comparing the tower clock with his watch and realizing that a certain amount of time has been erased (a clash between the individual and society, but this theme is evident to anyone who has read Kafka).

I have only 2 things to say today.

Numero uno:

The other day I logged on to my blog to find a few anonymous posts complimenting it, to wit:

“Very pretty design! Keep up the good work. Thanks.”

“Super color scheme, I like it! Keep up the good work. Thanks for sharing this wonderful site with us.”

“Hmm I love the idea behind this website, very unique.”

How nice, I thought, someone enjoys my blog. I started imagining in my head who this person could be who left all these messages. Well, later on that day, as I was surfing the waves of the world wide web, I came across a message “someone” had left on another blog:

“Hmm I love the idea behind this website, very unique.”

Wait a second…that’s the same…what the bloody hell? Is some philanthropist skipping from blog to blog leaving the same nice little morcels of encouragement?

Even worse! I’m pretty sure it’s blogger.com, craftily sending out these messages in order to make lonely bloggers believe real people are reading their blogs, so they make more posts, and thereby help the blogger.com empire get more hits.

Does any real person who reads this know how to block these posts? I’ve been getting a lot of them; yesterday I got on and there were 43 emails in my inbox, and its annoying and a waste of time to go through and delete them all. I’d rather not prevent people from posting anonymously.

Numero Dos:

The first time I read about Nietzsche’s infinite recurrence, it struck me as an anomaly amidst the rest of his work which seems so anti-mystical. However, I think there may be more to infinite recurrence than some hair-brained idea about the nature of the cosmos.

Nietzsche posited that time is infinite, and that when we die, we will be condemned to live our life over and over again for eternity.

This conserves the idea that there is an afterlife without the debilitating Christian turning away from this life in order to aim oneself toward another. One can live for the future through the present, and live for the present for the future.

And it seems like the perfect justice! We will be punished or rewarded for our actions by those exact same actions!

I wonder if Nietzsche really believed in this idea, or whether it was a kind of bait to trick humans into living for the present without giving themselves up to nihilism, which is easy when one has managed to courageously swallow the truth: everything that one does is an ultimately futile attempt at doing something constructive.

0 or 1?

0:

It has been confirmed by professional futurologists that in the future (their specialty), life will have continued speeding up until life’s antithesis and aim will have approached the first moment of existance and the average American lifespan will have been reduced to between 4 and 6 seconds.
The first second is infance.
The second and third are childhood and adolescence, respectively.
One becomes self-conscious and realizes that “one has only seconds to live”.
Around the passing of the fourth, one is faced with a choice, which becomes one’s meaning.
Of course, this meaning is itself meaningless unless placed in the context from which it originates (in opposition with the choice decided against).
Nevertheless, one does choose a 0 or a 1, although one cannot choose whether one will choose.
Bad faith is not an option.
There is no such thing as a bad choice.
The last few seconds are spent marveling, then, kaput!
There is much too little time to wonder whether one’s existance is or is not the product of something else’s choice: whether one is or is not the incarnation of a 1, as opposed to a 0, and then to become convinced of the truth of one or the other.
Many spend their second second worrying about which choice they will make.
Even more amazingly, the world’s population is roughly 10 to 15 billion.
Billions of people, burning through their lives like Kerouac’s fabulous yellow roman candles.
But one shouldn’t forget, when reviewing these statistics, that numbers are meaningless unless placed in the imaginary context whence they emerged (infinity).
A 2 is meaningless ( = 0) without a 1 and all the infinitesimally small fractions that we imagine exist between them.
Be, choose, marvel, un-be!
No re-be!

1:

It has been confirmed by professional futurologists that in the future (their specialty), life will have continued speeding up until life’s antithesis and aim will have approached the first moment of existance and the average American lifespan will have been reduced to between 4 and 6 seconds.
The first second is infance.
The second and third are childhood and adolescence, respectively.
One becomes self-conscious and realizes that “one has only seconds to live”.
Around the passing of the fourth, one is faced with a choice, which becomes one’s meaning.
Of course, this meaning is itself meaningless unless placed in the context from which it originates (in opposition with the choice decided against).
Nevertheless, one does choose a Coke or a Pepsi, although one cannot choose whether one will choose.
Bad faith is not an option.
There is no such thing as a bad choice.
The last few seconds are spent marveling, then, kaput!
There is much too little time to wonder whether one’s existance is or is not the product of something else’s choice: whether one is or is not the incarnation of a Coke, as opposed to a Pepsi, and then to become convinced of the truth of one or the other.
Many spend their second second worrying about which choice they will make.
Even more amazingly, the world’s population is roughly 10 to 15 billion.
Billions of people, burning through their lives like Kerouac’s fabulous yellow roman candles.
But one shouldn’t forget, when reviewing these statistics, that choices are meaningless unless placed in the imaginary context whence they emerged (infinity).
A Coke is meaningless ( = 0) without a Pepsi.
Be, choose, marvel, un-be!
No re-be!

Insomnia

What if The Castle is about a man who is trying desperately to get some sleep?

Sleep can be elusive. I, for instance, need silence, or at least a humming or a monotone texture of sound with no abrupt noises in order to fall asleep. What is crucial, moreover, is that I not think about falling asleep. By thinking about falling asleep, I deny myself entry to the land of the oneiric.

Borges will help me here. In his Kafka and his precursors, he lays out what he believes is the Kafkaesque. He mentions works of literature where he has recognized the voice of Kafka, which (incidently) were written before the man Franz Kafka came into existance. He gives citations of texts where he has found the Kafkaesque.. Here is one of the citations.

“One [story] is from Léon Bloy’s Histoires désobligeantes and relates the case of some people who possess all manner of globes, atlases, railroad guides and trunks, but who die without ever having managed to leave their home town.”

These people plan out their future traveling and in-so-doing deny themselves the right to travel.

Now back to The Castle. First of all, K. spends a significant amount of time literally trying to get some sleep. In the very beginning of the story he has just arrived at the village inn, lies down in a pile of hay in the corner, and starts drifting off only to be immediately woken up by a peasant who demands to know his identity. Throughout the story, K.’s need for sleep becomes a hinderance for him in his quest for the castle! The ever-elusive castle could be seen as the ever-elusive dreamland itself!

There is one point in the story where K. manages to fall asleep in the inn, but he over-sleeps, and wakes up more exhausted than he was before he drifted off.

Towards the end of the story, at the one point when K. does not want to fall asleep, when he has encountered one of the ministers in his hotel room, of course, this being a Kafka story, you can guess what happens. He drifts off.

What could be the meaning of all this? We don’t want to win in reality, while losing in parable. Sleeping could be metaphorical for death, writing, truth, or an exploration of one’s inner self, which was what Kafka’s writing was.

Another idea is to see the entire novel as a dream (Kafka described his writing as a recording of his “inner dream-world”). In this case, even when K. has fallen asleep, he still seeks unsuccessfully for sleep in his dreams! Even while writing, Kafka was writing about trying to write!

We know from his diaries that Kafka suffered from insomnia. It was in fact at night when he wrote.

After reading over this post, it seems to be begging for editing, however I am much…too…tired…to…zzzzZZzzZZzZ