Kafka-esque Interview
Interviewer: How did you become a Cockroach writer?
Kafka: Well, after awhile it became clear to me that the most productive direction for my being a writer was to be a Cockroach. Everything pointed toward Metamorphosis. Everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those usual human abilities which were directed toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. I atrophied and devolved—or rather metamorphosed in all these directions toward being a Cockroach. My development is now complete and, so far as I am concerned, there’s nothing left to sacrifice.
Interviewer: In other words, you practice Cockroach Literature. “Cock Lit,” as you call it?
Kafka: That’s correct. I don’t think of writing as a type of philosophical reflection; instead it constitutes a “way to scuttle across the kitchen linoleum floor late at night”—it’s a practical insectoid orientation. It’s possible that writing might lead to the one goal that matters: “to become a dead Cockroach and finally to answer to the Great Bug Exterminator” himself. In other words, by becoming a Cockroach writer I would become thoroughly displeasing and disgusting to all, and, to be sure (here comes the scuttling kicker and even more surprising winged flight in the darkness) so disgusting, that, without sacrificing a single drop of love, I would become finally, the sole sinner who could not only be squished underfoot, but also could parade the meanness that dwells in me, in us, openly, before all eyes. And of course, all monkey-brained human beings are such sick voyeurs—they love to be shocked and insulted by their own ugliness, death and cockroach lit.
Interviewer: Is that the Insect talking?
Kafka: Look around. Human “law” consists of monkey-brain preferences, desires and moral ideals—what they want to do and not do. We insects don’t think about wanting and doing. No, no, Nanette. Not that. The “court” of human beings is simply a monkey-brain mishmash of perceptions, discriminations and judgments contributing to one’s monkey-brained POV—whether before the highest court or down in the gutter with monkeys and baboons. The so-called “court of Man” is really just a baboon troupe. A vaudeville show—full of pink & purple bare-assed mandrill manikins.
Interviewer: Do Cockroaches have a sense of Good and Evil?
Kafka: I can’t speak for other Cockroaches—but I personally don’t believe in good and evil. When I first became a Cockroach, I was still thinking like a man. Then gradually, my senses metamorphosed away from monkey-brained sensations like acute eyesight and being a biped who could run up and down stairs and catch the subway to work. Over time all that faded and I achieved an original state of innocence—having nothing to do with self-reflecting monkey-brain thought. I forgot all about Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist and Novalis—instead I assumed the clearest “adversarial” position possible. It’s only on the far side of monkey-brain knowledge—that the real difference begins.
Interviewer: What do you mean difference?
Kafka: The differences that matter—the “real differences”—have to do with monkey-brain concepts, conceptual work producing more monkey concepts, pervasive and deficiently conceptual things like monkey knowledge of good and evil, the production and acquisition of such monkey-brain knowledge, the accumulation and archiving of such monkey-knowledge—along with the perverted so-called evolutionary assembling of images, simulacra and logical monkey phantasms that have haunted the tortured monkey-brains of mankind since the somewhat recent puny Pleistocene. Insect consciousness, on the other hand, goes back much further than the last Ice Age and other glaciation encrustations that drove the poor monkeys deep into the earth to doodle away their time down in the dark stinky caves of Lascaux.
Interviewer: You mean the lovely Lascaux cave paintings?
Kafka: Poor monkey artistic pretensions. They’re the only species that think they can corrupt or participate in alleged intercourse with the natural or metaphysical or spiritual world. Metaphysical to monkeys means “meat”aphysical—as if dancing dogs could conjure up magical worlds by their ridiculous, indecent, revolting nakedness, mating in heat and invoking some kind of positive-seeming aura in the world. As if “dogdom” or “monkeydom” and prolonged fasting and singing (“angel-doggery” or “angel-monkeyshines”) could give human beings an excessive sensitivity to time and space, a certain over-blown magnificence which only seems like a different reality brought over into this world completely beyond their senses. The truth of the matter is simple—monkey-brains is No Exit.
Interviewer: The quest for transcendence is a monkey-brained delusion?
Kafka: Think like a Cockroach. Monkey-brain feints toward transcendence produce an aura of abysmal rhetoric—and negation through a series of conceptually articulated monkey-brain states of affairs—like falling down a stairs. Being a Cockroach is a matter of lowered expectations and a more ancient minor literature. The movement is toward deconstruction, demythification and disarticulation of typical unreflecting monkey-brained thought. At least that’s what happened to me—during my recent Metamorphosis.
Interviewer: What is monkey-brained thought?
Kafka: Monkey moments have their own monkey logic that’s manifested and then swiftly disappears. Monkey moments are communal like a baboon troupe travelogue. There’s an aura of fabulous and even archaic allusion to some idealized community that’s transcendent. But long ago ants, termites and cockroaches achieved that evolutionary transcendence of One Mind. A bee hive, a termite colony, an infestation of cockroaches, excuse me, a cockroach colony—these are the only successful communal Minds at work that have survived on this crummy planet.
Interviewer: Monkey-brains is simply momentary?
Kafka: The only way the Monkey moment achieves transcendence and a heightening of the whole of monkey existence into a Oneness—is when it metamorphoses into a single Negative. Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden. The monkey-moment goes Whoosh!!! and Bingo!!!—and I suppose some sort of monkey-transcendence is achieved. On a somewhat smaller scale a single monkey-moment Mind perhaps gets achieved—like when everybody on the Titanic all together had one sudden gasp of death when the ice-cold water seized and paralyzed their lungs—as they slowly sank down deep into the cold North Atlantic Ocean that fateful night after hitting an iceberg. All the way down to the bottom.
Interviewer: What a hateful thing to say.
Kafka: Hateful? Look at what I’ve had to endure—suddenly without warning or premeditation being metamorphosed into a lousy stinking Cockroach? What a hateful thing to happen to an innocent law-abiding hardworking Wal-Mart salesperson!!! And then to get stuck and held captive in my own bedroom—hatefully denigrated by my father, mother and sister. Even the lousy cleaning woman calling me a “stinking old cockroach.” Have they no shame—these people I supported for years, paying the bills, paying the mortgage, paying the insurance, paying the price of a poor unmarried son enslaved to a bunch of tacky parasites and ungrateful leeches?
Interviewer: But you were a Cockroach?
Kafka: Cockroach, Smockroach!!! Was I nothing more than a monstrous brute—reduced to nothing more than a loathsome insectoid existence of Being-Hated? Was that what my existence had become overnight? “Being-hated-to-death”? Quarreling with everybody and being punished for my unexplainable unexpected despicable existence? Could I help it that I had a couple of nervous twitching antennae? Some ugly little insectoid feet to run away from them with—to hide under a couch or bed in my locked bedroom? My ordinary Wal-Mart salesman life brought to a suddenly negated screeching halt—no unemployment benefits for a crummy Cockroach? My whole existence thrown down into an abysmal pit of suffering with oblivion hanging forever over my head?. Death by somebody’s ugly stomping boot—or the wicked cleaning woman’s vicious mean broom? Did they bring in a doctor or even the village schoolmaster to come see me—and come up with a decent diagnosis or helpful prognostication for my well-being? Was it my fault that suddenly—out of the blue—I became a disgusting loathsome hated Cockroach?
Interviewer: How can you speak—and still be a Cockroach?
Kafka: It’s easy. All insects are telepathic. Bees, bugs, silverfish, nightcrawlers, termites, fleas, bedbugs, mosquitoes. We’re all telepathic. Haven’t you ever seen a gnatswarm in motion—dancing in the summer sunlight like a happy Calder mobile? The same with all bugs—does that bug you?
Interviewer: Sorry, I just was wondering.
Kafka: I’m constantly in contact with all my cockroach brothers and sisters—living and breeding there behind the wainscoting and fading wallpaper. The more things rot and stink—the more lively we become. You should hear the lovely serenades each night behind your humming little refrigerators—you think crickets and frogs make heavenly music? Forget Beethoven and Mahler—we’ve been serenading the stars since the Paleozoic Era and long before that. Wise up, chump. Time to Evo—not Devo!!!
Interviewer: What’s it like being a Cockroach?
Cockroach: I can barely really have a thought anymore—because I simultaneously forget what it was I was on the verge of thinking (a process Nietzsche discusses in his Untimely Meditations). And so whenever I begin expressing myself—I don’t conceptualize it until afterwards. Thus I can only think by failing to think—and then afterwards it makes sense. Does that sound counter-intuitive?
Interviewer: Huh?
Cockroach: To be an insect is to be a machine of expression. Capable of disorganizing monkey thought, disorganizing the forms and content of monkey-brains. So that it frees up an intense material of expressive energy—separated from monkey expression. Insect expression breaks forms, encourages ruptures and new chirpings. When monkey-brain thought is happening, one must reconstruct the content that will necessarily be part of the continuity in the order of things. To rupture, to think out of the box—monkey-brains must fail first. Then insectoid thought comes into being. I’m halfway there—being a Cockroach writer.
Interviewer: How did you become a Cockroach writer?
Kafka: Well, after awhile it became clear to me that the most productive direction for my being a writer was to be a Cockroach. Everything pointed toward Metamorphosis. Everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those usual human abilities which were directed toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. I atrophied and devolved—or rather metamorphosed in all these directions toward being a Cockroach. My development is now complete and, so far as I am concerned, there’s nothing left to sacrifice.
Interviewer: In other words, you practice Cockroach Literature. “Cock Lit,” as you call it?
Kafka: That’s correct. I don’t think of writing as a type of philosophical reflection; instead it constitutes a “way to scuttle across the kitchen linoleum floor late at night”—it’s a practical insectoid orientation. It’s possible that writing might lead to the one goal that matters: “to become a dead Cockroach and finally to answer to the Great Bug Exterminator” himself. In other words, by becoming a Cockroach writer I would become thoroughly displeasing and disgusting to all, and, to be sure (here comes the scuttling kicker and even more surprising winged flight in the darkness) so disgusting, that, without sacrificing a single drop of love, I would become finally, the sole sinner who could not only be squished underfoot, but also could parade the meanness that dwells in me, in us, openly, before all eyes. And of course, all monkey-brained human beings are such sick voyeurs—they love to be shocked and insulted by their own ugliness, death and cockroach lit.
Interviewer: Is that the Insect talking?
Kafka: Look around. Human “law” consists of monkey-brain preferences, desires and moral ideals—what they want to do and not do. We insects don’t think about wanting and doing. No, no, Nanette. Not that. The “court” of human beings is simply a monkey-brain mishmash of perceptions, discriminations and judgments contributing to one’s monkey-brained POV—whether before the highest court or down in the gutter with monkeys and baboons. The so-called “court of Man” is really just a baboon troupe. A vaudeville show—full of pink & purple bare-assed mandrill manikins.
Interviewer: Do Cockroaches have a sense of Good and Evil?
Kafka: I can’t speak for other Cockroaches—but I personally don’t believe in good and evil. When I first became a Cockroach, I was still thinking like a man. Then gradually, my senses metamorphosed away from monkey-brained sensations like acute eyesight and being a biped who could run up and down stairs and catch the subway to work. Over time all that faded and I achieved an original state of innocence—having nothing to do with self-reflecting monkey-brain thought. I forgot all about Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist and Novalis—instead I assumed the clearest “adversarial” position possible. It’s only on the far side of monkey-brain knowledge—that the real difference begins.
Interviewer: What do you mean difference?
Kafka: The differences that matter—the “real differences”—have to do with monkey-brain concepts, conceptual work producing more monkey concepts, pervasive and deficiently conceptual things like monkey knowledge of good and evil, the production and acquisition of such monkey-brain knowledge, the accumulation and archiving of such monkey-knowledge—along with the perverted so-called evolutionary assembling of images, simulacra and logical monkey phantasms that have haunted the tortured monkey-brains of mankind since the somewhat recent puny Pleistocene. Insect consciousness, on the other hand, goes back much further than the last Ice Age and other glaciation encrustations that drove the poor monkeys deep into the earth to doodle away their time down in the dark stinky caves of Lascaux.
Interviewer: You mean the lovely Lascaux cave paintings?
Kafka: Poor monkey artistic pretensions. They’re the only species that think they can corrupt or participate in alleged intercourse with the natural or metaphysical or spiritual world. Metaphysical to monkeys means “meat”aphysical—as if dancing dogs could conjure up magical worlds by their ridiculous, indecent, revolting nakedness, mating in heat and invoking some kind of positive-seeming aura in the world. As if “dogdom” or “monkeydom” and prolonged fasting and singing (“angel-doggery” or “angel-monkeyshines”) could give human beings an excessive sensitivity to time and space, a certain over-blown magnificence which only seems like a different reality brought over into this world completely beyond their senses. The truth of the matter is simple—monkey-brains is No Exit.
Interviewer: The quest for transcendence is a monkey-brained delusion?
Kafka: Think like a Cockroach. Monkey-brain feints toward transcendence produce an aura of abysmal rhetoric—and negation through a series of conceptually articulated monkey-brain states of affairs—like falling down a stairs. Being a Cockroach is a matter of lowered expectations and a more ancient minor literature. The movement is toward deconstruction, demythification and disarticulation of typical unreflecting monkey-brained thought. At least that’s what happened to me—during my recent Metamorphosis.
Interviewer: What is monkey-brained thought?
Kafka: Monkey moments have their own monkey logic that’s manifested and then swiftly disappears. Monkey moments are communal like a baboon troupe travelogue. There’s an aura of fabulous and even archaic allusion to some idealized community that’s transcendent. But long ago ants, termites and cockroaches achieved that evolutionary transcendence of One Mind. A bee hive, a termite colony, an infestation of cockroaches, excuse me, a cockroach colony—these are the only successful communal Minds at work that have survived on this crummy planet.
Interviewer: Monkey-brains is simply momentary?
Kafka: The only way the Monkey moment achieves transcendence and a heightening of the whole of monkey existence into a Oneness—is when it metamorphoses into a single Negative. Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden. The monkey-moment goes Whoosh!!! and Bingo!!!—and I suppose some sort of monkey-transcendence is achieved. On a somewhat smaller scale a single monkey-moment Mind perhaps gets achieved—like when everybody on the Titanic all together had one sudden gasp of death when the ice-cold water seized and paralyzed their lungs—as they slowly sank down deep into the cold North Atlantic Ocean that fateful night after hitting an iceberg. All the way down to the bottom.
Interviewer: What a hateful thing to say.
Kafka: Hateful? Look at what I’ve had to endure—suddenly without warning or premeditation being metamorphosed into a lousy stinking Cockroach? What a hateful thing to happen to an innocent law-abiding hardworking Wal-Mart salesperson!!! And then to get stuck and held captive in my own bedroom—hatefully denigrated by my father, mother and sister. Even the lousy cleaning woman calling me a “stinking old cockroach.” Have they no shame—these people I supported for years, paying the bills, paying the mortgage, paying the insurance, paying the price of a poor unmarried son enslaved to a bunch of tacky parasites and ungrateful leeches?
Interviewer: But you were a Cockroach?
Kafka: Cockroach, Smockroach!!! Was I nothing more than a monstrous brute—reduced to nothing more than a loathsome insectoid existence of Being-Hated? Was that what my existence had become overnight? “Being-hated-to-death”? Quarreling with everybody and being punished for my unexplainable unexpected despicable existence? Could I help it that I had a couple of nervous twitching antennae? Some ugly little insectoid feet to run away from them with—to hide under a couch or bed in my locked bedroom? My ordinary Wal-Mart salesman life brought to a suddenly negated screeching halt—no unemployment benefits for a crummy Cockroach? My whole existence thrown down into an abysmal pit of suffering with oblivion hanging forever over my head?. Death by somebody’s ugly stomping boot—or the wicked cleaning woman’s vicious mean broom? Did they bring in a doctor or even the village schoolmaster to come see me—and come up with a decent diagnosis or helpful prognostication for my well-being? Was it my fault that suddenly—out of the blue—I became a disgusting loathsome hated Cockroach?
Interviewer: How can you speak—and still be a Cockroach?
Kafka: It’s easy. All insects are telepathic. Bees, bugs, silverfish, nightcrawlers, termites, fleas, bedbugs, mosquitoes. We’re all telepathic. Haven’t you ever seen a gnatswarm in motion—dancing in the summer sunlight like a happy Calder mobile? The same with all bugs—does that bug you?
Interviewer: Sorry, I just was wondering.
Kafka: I’m constantly in contact with all my cockroach brothers and sisters—living and breeding there behind the wainscoting and fading wallpaper. The more things rot and stink—the more lively we become. You should hear the lovely serenades each night behind your humming little refrigerators—you think crickets and frogs make heavenly music? Forget Beethoven and Mahler—we’ve been serenading the stars since the Paleozoic Era and long before that. Wise up, chump. Time to Evo—not Devo!!!
Interviewer: What’s it like being a Cockroach?
Cockroach: I can barely really have a thought anymore—because I simultaneously forget what it was I was on the verge of thinking (a process Nietzsche discusses in his Untimely Meditations). And so whenever I begin expressing myself—I don’t conceptualize it until afterwards. Thus I can only think by failing to think—and then afterwards it makes sense. Does that sound counter-intuitive?
Interviewer: Huh?
Cockroach: To be an insect is to be a machine of expression. Capable of disorganizing monkey thought, disorganizing the forms and content of monkey-brains. So that it frees up an intense material of expressive energy—separated from monkey expression. Insect expression breaks forms, encourages ruptures and new chirpings. When monkey-brain thought is happening, one must reconstruct the content that will necessarily be part of the continuity in the order of things. To rupture, to think out of the box—monkey-brains must fail first. Then insectoid thought comes into being. I’m halfway there—being a Cockroach writer.
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