I Really Like Kafka (An Involuntary Celibate's Best Friend)



“This mode of address is becoming tiresome,” he says to Milena Jesenska, who he endlessly yet self-destructively courted, referring to the letters with which they, yes, exhaustively corresponded. In his genius, he called her husband “the calmest person” in a paragraph full of eerie compliments. Franz is fun in his numerous writing, but ladies, can you actually imagine dating him? Kafka lived online before the internet: a one-sided spasm of impulsive, desperate communication towards abstract entities wrapped in a pretty face. His aphorisms would have been the world’s greatest tweets; his diary entries ponderous blog posts with that nightmarish 0 comments. It is not until we are all 404 Not Found that his truest prophecy awaits, but until then, good times.
“Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts,” again, in a weary letter to Milena — and in 2013, on this blessed day, these ghosts are you, dear reader. I write for a selected few in mind, fleshy ambassadors of whatever devastations irl-experience(s) have incurred, intercepted kindly by this readership. Though, we are complicit in our mutual faith in these words. We dare to understand one another. Intellectual intimacy is underrated, so come overrrr my darlings. He ends that letter to Milena with “the ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish,” a masochistically selfless gesture towards the timelessness of words. As if he were writing for us all along. Please, I do not compare myself to Kafka. He had a much better set of hair.
I’ll spare you the details of my involuntary celibacy, only to say that I don’t understand what the/ my problem is. I’ve been told countless times in the last decade or so that I need to “get out more” by friends owing my demise simply to paltry statistical numbers, their implication being that the more people I meet, the greater my chances are to use the word “consummate” in a future ball-drained account of it. I’ll occasionally go to a party (usually work related), brave the wet tips barely seen in the dim lighting, and realize I want my bed more than sex, the manic high-pitched squeal of some blonde women in a short skirt and caked mascara almost cracking my Samsa-esque exoskeleton. Oh my god, she says. Oh my lord, I think. This is when a man with arms thicker than my legs comes in. Kafka compared faith to a guillotine, calling it both heavy and light. I guess my faith in the game, and its players, is on the light side.

“A cage went in search of a bird.”

My favorite of his aphorisms, as the imprisoner needs some fulcrum of meaning, the imprisoned, to define itself. Dominance was invented by the weak, and the slow months that roll by, invented by the week. I imagine my heart — not that blind dumb funny-beating organ, but the brittle vacancy around and within it — wrapped around an afternoon with you, a walk through concrete London jungles marked with the inked spatter of late afternoon tree shadows, leaves gently threatened by a gaining breeze, before getting dinner for my younger siblings, then maybe my tongue-in-your-face. But of course, there is the power of a text, them fingers of yours finding letters one-by-one, in your greatest assertion, as mine had found the warmest parts of you. “Intercourse with human beings seduces one to self-contemplation.” Kafka can’t shut up can he?

The truth is, I use Kafka similarly to the women to which he hauntingly wrote: whenever the dire need calls for it. He is my non-homoerotic timeless muse. The idea that he suffered emotional torment diminishes mine, the projection that he was never loved. Like Jesus, he is a pastiche of words inside a book. I am the empty cage that hosts some swollen notion of him, my friend. My copy of The Basic Kafka (1979, Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster) was procured one foggy day for £3.79 at a used book store. I handed him four pound coins and neglected the change. When the cashier looks at you with pity, you know you’re onto something good. “I am more strange than a stranger” goes my Franz, in a letter to a father explaining why he didn’t want his morose disposition to preclude his daughter’s potential happiness, that she deserved more. Even in break-up letters, he cut himself.
This mode of address is becoming tiresome. All I have are these words, strands of sentences flimsier than arms. I have addressed “you” simply as a formal second-person pronoun, shielded by the auspices of rhetoric, speared by the hyphen required to type non-fiction. The problem with ghosts is they look so real. The opaque face hides that transparent feeling of something wrong, barely dense enough to contain itself in the gathering wind. Love may be the devil’s laughter in disguise, or simply, in the skies.

16 comments:

  1. 'a cage went in search of a bird' is one of my favorites too

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  2. What a relief--to know that men like you still exist.

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  3. Generally, I commend you Idris for publishing this piece. It is experimental and difficult to read, but this does not reduce its value. I personally enjoy the aesthetic challenge posed by such verbose prose.

    Specifically, you seem to be knowingly arrogant, and while this quality does not necessarily detract from the pieces affect, it does increase the readers attenuation to qualities that she might otherwise not pay attention to, and therefore the writing need to be justified in my mind by a certain virtuosity. To my mind, this piece largely fails in this endeavor.

    However, I will say that the self-effacing nature of your intimate disclosures--writing, as you say, directly to the reader, as if in a letter--is somewhat redeeming. I love this line: I imagine my heart — not that blind dumb funny-beating organ, but the brittle vacancy around and within it — wrapped around an afternoon with you, a walk up concrete London jungles marked with the inked spatter of late afternoon tree shadows, leaves gently threatened by a gaining breeze, before getting dinner for my younger siblings, then maybe my tongue-in-your-face.

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  4. This is definitely one of your more intellectual posts I've seen on here. Which probably means no one will read it.

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  5. Go Idris Go! Although if you're not getting any sex from writing then don't do it. Kafka was one step ahead: he didn't know what to do with all of the attention from the opposite sex, and he didn't know what to do with himself. I would date you but you're just a blog post, and I'm a statistician, so I know a thing or two about odds. Result: Kafka's work was always too artsy for me, too intellectual, but it is true that Dying was his undisputed masterpiece.

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    1. do you mean that idris should stop writing b/c he's not getting laid? i feel that in the time between this comment and when the article was posted jimmy chen has received at least 5 unsolicited offers for casual, no-holds-barred sex as the piece, i feel, gave everyone a 'mind boner'

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  6. Please keep writing, forever.

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  7. I'm not sure your reading of the Metamorphosis is totally on point. There is a lot more humour in Kafka's writing than might appear at first glance; view it as an absurdist tale rather than a depressive existentialist exercise. Gregor's transformation into an "insect" isn't for the purpose of constructing a protective shell but serves as a metaphor for how society treats social "outliers" (for lack of a better term). The German word which Kafka used, Ungeziefer, which is typically translated as "insect," has a meaning in German closer to "vermin" or "unclean animal." Thus, the implication is much more than insect or bug, which suggests a simple dehumanization; it suggests a certain danger to other humans, a possibility of infection.
    What Kafka was getting at in the Metamorphosis was the absurdity of individuals, each with their own complex and chaotic inner lives, turning themselves inside out with worry and stress over trying to live up to social expectation of behaviour. Gregor, rather, chooses to "drop out," to accept than his being is socially unacceptable. So, yeah, I'm basically saying Kafka was a hippie and would have totally have done LSD if it had been around at the time.

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    1. thanks K., but i didn't mention the metamorphosis, only invoked it by "Samsa-esque exoskeleton," merely used lyrically/visually i suppose

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    2. So you did mention it, then.

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  8. after i read this i caught myself viewing it as a work of art rather than an article. i don't think i've felt that way about one of your posts before.

    this was a well-crafted piece idris, please post more.

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  9. "my heart — not that blind dumb funny-beating organ, but the brittle vacancy around and within it"...the most poetically accurate and resounding sequence of words I've read thus far on a blog post. this was beautiful, and the overall tone paid great homage to Kafka. Post more pieces like this!

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  10. Awesome and poetic. Each thread could go multiple ways, yet you always weave it back together so smoothly; possibly an Idris-style could be recognized by the internet literary community; college papers could be written; or comments w/ semicolons use improperly could be written.
    My subjective view of one Kafka's quote, you used, “Intercourse with human beings seduces one to self-contemplation.” I realize the "intercourse" used does not mean actual sex, but talking/having friendships/acquantances with people, which of course causes people to self-reflect, as with lovers also where actual intercourse takes place. While "intercourse" leads to self-reflection the bulding of attachments, lovers, companions, actually can diminish a person's ability to self-reflect. Could a person self-reflect during a honey moon? On the saturday spent getting breakfast, groceries, lamb for dinner, too much cabernet, movie, sex and a hangover in the morning. Certain moments could be found to sit with a book, sit with pen, type, yet your lover would want your time. Your thoughts. And then what of children? Where would one's time for self-reflection be then? So while "Intercourse" leads/"seduces" us to self-reflect--the building of said attachments conflicts with the desire to be alone/queit and self-reflective. But w/o attachments what could be said of this world. Standard contradicting nature of life and the false idea that balance can be achieved, though it should be strived for.

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  11. I need to read this again. It resounds deeply, so it is important. Precisely how its significance will function, time will divulge.
    Thank you for this, Idris.
    I'll come back.

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  12. I won't and cannot ever stop being thrilled about the "timelessness of words" and the fact that pieces like this and those of Kafka, can live on forever and touch lives as they're discovered.

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