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North of Kafka by Norb Blei

 

KAFKA IN PROGRESS:
Trains of Thought…

by

The Unreliable Narrator

Yes he had every intention of saying something, but may have back-logged everything in his FOR-GO/GIVE/LORN file, where it remains after months of inattention and may at this point be of less urgency or importance than the moment it arrived because…because?… Or he may have lost it entirely for whatever reason, or accidentally deleted it…or unintentionally filed it elsewhere because his mind remains a muddle these days, even more so than usual given the state of mind he cannot find himself in…too frequently lost in progress…reminiscent of that Eastern European train station once upon a time not long ago where he found himself somewhere in Poland on his way from Lodz to Wroclaw, where he felt abandoned in the dark, in the light, in the cold, in the emptiness of the station, a dislocated foreigner pacing in circles…up and down empty platforms, eyes following empty tracks into an abyss, a train to take him somewhere–the next leg of an inspired, ill-planned journey–from Wroclaw to?… To Prague, to find Kafka’s grave, but his words there and then, here and now like Kafka’s meaning everything and nothing…a foreigner bereft of language, of Polish or German …and even if he could voice a word, there was no one to bear witness…no one to approach in a station as empty as a midnight parking lot in America. Sprechen sie …nada… English, foreign on his own tongue…2:33 a.m.…nobody to express his alienation…no woman to touch gently on the arm, to lead or be led astray, to tell untranslatable tales of his travails…no derelict hunched in sleep along a wall, no cripple begging for attention, not single human being to express his confusion, fear, abandonment, the smallest flicker of desire to, if there were anything worth desiring other than words that meant something, said something, led somewhere. And so he stood, stone dead in place, eyes focused fiercely on cold steel rails waiting deliverance. Cold creeping from his toes in torn shoes…to quivering legs, empty stomach, hollow chest, fragile arms, numb fingers…listening to conversations in his head, stammering, falling (first) accidentally upon his old Catholic knee in genuflection, then both knees in supplication (the Poles would know the man in bended knees), recalling Latin, confession, contrition till the sound of an engine, screeching steel wheels…answered prayers…pushing himself up from the pavement, finding his footing, Gloria in excelsis Deo…breaking into a hobbled run toward car after slowly passing car…as the train shudders to a halt, comes to rest, exuding steam…thrumming…heaving …exiting a few wearisome passengers in the brevity and breath of something like silence, in and out…as he feels his body in desperate motion, the weight of everything he carried, boarding the first empty step, then heaving a heavy suitcase of books in front of him…stepping up, into, away from wherever he was, to wherever the train was destined to take him at a black hour of the day that was one long night. The compartment, blindingly bright. He settles into himself. The seat across from him bearing a sole woman passenger, her head leaning into the dark window glass…unaware of his presence, his broken breathing, his disarray. Opening one eye, looking Slavic to her, she mumbles something to him in Czech. He remembers the sound, says the word “Praha”? She nods yes, closes her eyes while he stretches his legs, falls into a fitful sleep and awakes later in daylight, someone shaking his arm, speaking what sounds like German…the woman gone, the train at a standstill. The conductor holding open the compartment door, helping with the heavy suitcase, leading him off the train to the platform…pointing to a sign on the station wall: KRAKOW.

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached,” whispers Kafka again—and again.

He rents a room, sleeps the remainder of the morning, recalls enough history of where he now finds himself to board a local bus to Auschwitz and walk alone beneath the metal sign above the entrance to the camp: Arbeit Macht Frei welcomes him as it welcomed those who came by train before him fifty years ago and left in ashes.

Yet another invisible station of the cross to bear that was never mentioned in his WWII Catholic childhood or ever appeared in the “living way of the cross” in the final pages of his little black book…his Latin-English Sunday missal.

Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipoténtem, factórem caeli et terrae, visibílium ómnium, et invisíbilium. [I believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.]

Visible piles of prayer shawls, windows of shoes, sacks of human hair, mounds of eye glasses…

End of line…of language…of never-ending story…

“Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate…but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins,” wrote Kafka, German-Czech-Jew, before his time, this time, our time…

“To be continued…” final words to learn at every beginning.

 

To be continued…

far from there and then. How did he get here anyway? This was not the beginning when these words began to fill the page five weeks ago? Eight weeks ago? Ten weeks ago? Endless revision, slow progression. The mood of any moment changing everything. This is not where he was headed. End it right here. Begin again. Dead ends. His intent, concern, destination, was to write of chance. Something he wrestles with still. That he’s still here after where he’d been two years ago, a year ago, last month, this week, yesterday, today, a moment ago. Chasing the ephemeral. Being dogged by it. Breakfast with a friend. The engrossing stories, everywhere in one small community–the living, the shattered, the dead—continuing to be. On the phone with an old love. In the pages of Graham Greene: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” Correspondence with a woman who can’t help but love one’s neighbor, given all that she is. Love to be given, to be returned—in abundance. To be continued…to pick up the unbearable crosses again…struggle–doubt, despair, delusion. dissolution, uncertainty. To consider the litany of loss, known or witnessed, in all its forms in just one year’s time: youth, middle age, old age, bad hearts, cancerous cells, broken limbs, fevered minds, addictions, accidental deaths, abandoned relationships, betrayals, self-inflicted wounds … Chance. That was the train of thought he had no choice to pursue but pursued him.

To be continued…yet in the end: Those who seek to make art often find themselves alone.

To be continued…so what was the original destination he set out to journey, back there then or here now in place? That lost train of thought? Moving forward…whatever the direction. So this is about that. About that and not about other things on his mind… Daily life? The ordinary day? Where is the language? The correct words? Sex, death, and melancholy. Were those the right words that came to him last night? An unsettling monologue? Sex, death, isolation and hostility?

Why did he pick this book FALLING from the shelf that night and open it to this…and feel, yes…to begin here:

“We all from time to time feel lucky, feel we are to be favored by chance, and most of us secretly, even shamefully, believe we can enhance our luck with totems, prayers, private rituals, and magical thinking. We want to protect ourselves from the vagaries of chance, the chilling randomness that dictates who is and who isn’t the victim of falling trees, flying bullets, drunk drivers, birth defects, tumors, viruses, lightning, that determines who does and who doesn’t receive the sandwich containing the spoiled bacon, the ticket on the plane that will hit wind sheer when landing in Denver, the fatally incorrect diagnosis from the overworked emergency-room resident. It is easy to dismiss luck as a delusion, a superstitious fantasy manufactured in some primitive layer of the human mind. But what separates magical thinking from positive thinking? Aren’t they both simply manifestations of our attitude? Isn’t a belief in luck simply a way of expressing our faith in our­selves?”

How did he find himself speechless one afternoon in Auschwitz amidst piles of shoes and eye glasses, boarding a train the next day which would plummet him to Prague in search of Kafka’s grave, as if any answers awaited him there?

To be continued…

February 16, 2012 · Norbert Blei · Tags: Norbert Blei, North of Kafka

 

 

WHERE AM I?

Distraught. Reaching for things in the dark. Grasping something. Feeling it in my hands. Naming it. Possessing it only for word’s sake.

This is not the next “North of Kafka” he intended to write, he tells himself. He is still working on that. Two more unfinished works to add to his oeuvre of incomplete, inconsequential, lost symphonies of the moment. Again life takes over, interrupting him, rearing its mysterious head, leading him to the abyss.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Of course.”
He is angry with himself. Angry with all that led him there. Again. He is looking for himself in an old notebook (one of the two unfinished Kafka symphonies in progress: old notebooks), but this is not the one, “Letters/Work,’95”, mostly listings of correspondence. Though the cover is a revelation of better days. Painting made him pure, whole. In love again. He pages through the names of correspondents in “95,” only to discover how many have left, gone over, into the abyss…that grey field of the cover painting, returning him there, where he began. Loss.

He can never find what he is looking for without finding something else. He opens another notebook, undated, finds a list of books. Books he has read? He might buy? And a few lines from Kafka: “What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved…that makes us feel we had been banished in the woods…” (looking out the window to his own woods)…”far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

He finds another quote? poem? (not his) hastily scribbled in pencil, unidentified, in yet another notebook:

 

Who am I [no question mark]

Why do we never see you anywhere, they say to him, why
do you bury yourself in that hole, they say, far away from your friends,
with no parties, no nights out, no fun, you ought to get out,
see people, clock in, show your face, at least give some signs
of life. Forget it, he says to them. I get up at five o’clock have a coffee
and by the time I have erased and written six or seven lines
the day’s already over and evening is falling to erase.

 

November 9, 2011 · Where Am I? · Tags: Franz Kafka, Norbert Blei, North of Kafka

 

Hatto Fischer says:

November 10, 2011 at 8:46 am

A beautiful reminscent of the question whether life inside oneself leaves any trail? If a frozen lake, the axe will not do. I think you know, however, the answer. It pertains to the question, how to respond to silence, the silence inside of you? More often than not it has been created by those who did not respond to your call for love of life. There is a saying by a good friend who works at the European Commission on the program ‘life long learning’. She tries to convert it into ‘life long love’. We ascertain a bit of happiness when we do not give up that special love while still trying to find the key for all those doors which silence has closed. Winter comes. With snow on the ground, there is a new silence to be discovered. Or when watching children growing up, parents watch often in silence, astonished about the fact that they not done nothing, but something, to bring this life on earth. All this continues when seen from atop of the hill and mapping the landscape around you. You do it with eyes remembering when love came suddenly swift like the birds of spring to surprise you. A beautiful piece this ‘North of Kafka’, especially since a second time around.

 **************

To recall, I received a first note from Norb that he had written something about Kafka in the following email letter:

On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:44:47 -0500, Norbert Blei<ngblei@gmail.com> wrote:

http://northofkafka.outlawpoetry.com/2011/08/11/the-notebooks/

to which I responded while remembering Kafka's letters to Felice.

 

On 8/12/2011 4:50 AM, Hatto Fischer wrote:

Norb, I tried to submit this on the blog but it was blocked.

An unusual assembly of quotes from Kafka transposed to and around Chicago, and thus from Europe to the USA. Thus I would like to start with the last quote with Kafka claiming a point of no return. In his life he constantly turned around, especially with regards to women who he was about to marry and then stopped short. That became his fate. A beautiful insight into his fear gives his letter to Felice when she spends her time in Frankfurt. Kafka writes to her that he could not exist amongst those businessmen; he only exists in-between the lines he writes.

Existence through writing is something akin with many other writers, you included, and thus there is this hamstrung syndrome, but what if in writing there comes a point of no return? Pavese knew about it. We have talked about that before.

I want to close with a reference to the literary criticism of Nathalie Sarraute. She compares Dostoevsky and Kafka insofar as she claims both would have written similarly if Kafka had lived in the age of Dostoevsky, that is during a time when good and evil where not torn apart as much as at the beginning of the 20th century. She adds that Kafka felt the time of technology and science had come with scientists willing to go much further in their experiments than what people were willing to follow or able to understand. Sarraute says Kafka followed in his imagination those scientists to seek a point where they would turn around and become once again understandable to people.

Today instead of scientists bankers go with their figures further than what people can understand, and there is no turning around despite heading for a financial crisis. In that sense the writer must find either a new imagination to follow those who dare to tread where no one else does or else succumb to the myth of a world having become less understandable in human terms than ever before.

In that sense Kafka has become a symbol for those who turn around and give up writing even though they should continue.

With greetings from a cafe on the Greek island of Spetses, take care and wonderful to see you at work.

hatto

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: North of Kafka 8.11.11

Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:56:52 -0500

From: Norbert Blei <ngblei@gmail.com>

To: Hatto Fischer

Hatto,

Thank you so much for this. All your penetrating insights. I always learn something new in your letters and comments.

That's so true about Kafka and his women.

When you read him (read him on his women...not to mention the letters etc from them) you wonder how he ever got the courage to even approach a woman, let alone develop any kind of a relationship.

He was certainly one of those writers who exists in between the lines. Then again, I suspect this is true of many writers.

Kafka himself (as I see him): the almost perfect metaphor for our age. "Kafkaesque" indeed.

Funny you should mention Nathalie Sarraute.

I have been looking at her books on my shelf all last winter, meaning to take them down...read her again..read what I have never read by her.

Now I will.

Thank you for reminding me.

I like that idea of a writer finding "a new imagination".

I think, in my own way, I've always quietly been trying to pursue that.

Ah, you break my heart sitting in those cafes on the Greek isles... I want to get well enough to do that again---before sailing off toward that great big blue sunny Greek island in the sky!

norb

 

Norb knew what was coming. He was battling with cancer like Sonja Skarstedt who had introduced me to him. When replying, I found a new name for him: Keeper of dreams

 

Spetses 17.8.2011

Dear Norbert,

your letter, or rather your dream makes me think that it might be a conceivable role of mine to keep those dreams alive. You should know that whenever you wish to come to Greece, you have a room waiting for you at our little apartment. Our daughter has moved out, so there is this spare room free. Anytime!

Also the way you refer to such a dream in terms of knowing the time is approaching that it is time to go to the eternal hunting grounds, as Indians would say, I imagine what makes Greece so special is this infinite happiness you feel in an instant when looking up, seeing a blue sky, with the sun painting everything from sea to coastline to olive grooves. Looking at the olive trees, their branches in the wind sway as if a school of fish flashing through the water near the surface. Again the sun illuminates their bodies. 

Since I am currently working again on my epic poem about Hölderlin's treatment of Empedocles, this dream of the South as expressed in his poem 'bread and wine' does pose the question why does this dream persist? Is it that we feel the inspiration due to minds being inspired by such a beautiful landscape in which every rock reminds of the economy of words while the colours whether white, red or blue are not tained but autark. They speak their own voice and do not need to mingle in order to get more colour.

Hölderlin saw in the South the life of people. There was always wine and bread available as much as dance. Back home, in the North, the markets close and everyone goes home. No one lingers, stays on, to enjoy a small talk.

Naturally in these days Greeks wonder why so many admire that ancient past while mocking them for their present economic woes? The financial crisis has its roots in a moral misunderstanding as to what pain cannot be removed even if you have a lot of money to spend. This pain was well
known to Seferis who said wherever he went Greece was with him like a pain that does not go away. 

A friend would say Greeks live nowadays too much in self denial of their reality. They are as proud as stubborn and only glad to be involved in symbols and images if they can gain a distance from them. For too long they suffered under occupation, hence they are weary about the future.
Ready to explode like a vulcan, they also can transform everything in a minute with a most beautiful smile.

Looking around in the cafe from where I write to you, it seems there is no crisis. And yet as an American friend advices, it is time to fasten the seat belt. But once I told that to Maria, who had just now on the 15th of August her namesday this advice, she replied that it is impossible to tighten it still more.

So I am glad to hear from you and that you will turn your next attention to Sarraute. I always enjoy all your work you do for poetry and for the voice of poets. It is amazing the depth and compassion of your poetic feelings.

Take care, good man, and remember the eternal sky of Greece is waiting for you to experience that touch of infinity.
ciao
hatto

 

 

 

 

 

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