Kafkaesque Notebook


Kafkaesque Notebook

“One man then said: why do you resist?
If you followed the parables, then you
Would become a parable yourselves,
And thus free of your daily cares”
Another said: “I bet that is also a parable.”
The first said: “You have won.”
The second said: “But unfortunately
Only in parable.” The first said: “No,
In reality; in parable you have lost.”
—Franz Kafka, “A Message from the
Emperor,” The Great Wall of China

Parables are so much easier than letters—no stamps to lick, no sticking the letter in a mailbox, no inevitable waiting for a reply, no hoity-toity desire to see it published, no imaginary dead writer to read it or write it—like Jack Spicer writing to Lorca, a purely rhetorical device for whatever literary reasons, perhaps to frame some kind of narrative, serial or otherwise, setting the stage for disembodied discourse—but then isn’t that what parables sent perambulating into the aether are all about anyway, I said to myself.

Kafka had sent a message, directly from his death bed, all the way to me alone, his pathetic admirer, me a mere shadow taking refuge at this furthest distance from his dark Kafkaesque midnight sun, posting his message in my dream, not really caring if I wrote back to him, confronting me with the reality of his pessimistic parable, all the aether walls dissolving, all the great writers of the empire standing back hushed, while I dreamed Kafka’s paranoid message, thumbing its way down the vast fast-moving information highway, the speedy autobahn full of modern day VW Beatles and Cockroach Mercedes SUV's, driving fast out of Berlin.

Mystifying me, making its way tirelessly through the marvelously futile Blogosphere, forcing its way into the innermost inner sanctum of my crummy little bungalow, fighting its way into my caffeine-headache early morning consciousness, oozing its way into the palatial interior of my little love-shack dream ego, bursting through the innermost fluttering eyelids of my delta rhythm blues, delving deeper into the royal precincts of my cerebral capital city, piled high with ruins and dead fish from Hurricane Katrina, pushing further Kafka’s message moving deeper & deeper into my dead man’s dreams, waiting for the man who never comes, expecting the metamorphosis that never happens...

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