Franz Kafka’s blue octavo notebook aphorisms were first published in 1953, in the posthumous collection Preparations for a Country Wedding, under the heading “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way.” That header, with its stair-stepping triplet of independent clauses—Sin! Suffering! Hope!--and its deft note of plea, was one of the innumerable publicity tweaks that Max Brod, zealous agent of Kafka’s literary estate, would perform on behalf of (or, some might say, in despite of) the spiritual reputation of his enigmatic friend.
It was Kafka who had culled the aphorisms initially from the pair of blue notebooks into which they had been handwritten. He transposed these, slightly editing some, onto consecutively numbered slips of paper he had arranged at his bedside.
Illness had set Kafka free. Tuberculosis had declared itself a month earlier when he first coughed up a little blood. Kafka would spend eight months, from September, 1917 to April, 1918, in Zurau, in the Bohemian countryside, at his sister Ottla’s house. In a letter from that time, Kafka compared himself to the "happy lover" who exclaims: "All the previous times were but illusions, only now do I truly love."
Of this letter, the scholar Roberto Calasso has written: “Illness was the final lover; which allowed him to close the old accounts.” Three days into his stay, Kafka scribbled: "You have the chance if ever there was one, to begin again. Don't waste it."
The sequence he produced was a first on many levels. It was, and would be, the only text in which Kafka directly confronted theological themes, and it marked the appearance, for him, of a new form.
#52 In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world’s coat.
#53 It is wrong to cheat, even if it is the world of its victory.
Calasso also wrote that, “Though Kafka made no surviving reference, either direct or indirect, to the existence of these aphorisms, one can't help but think that he meant to publish them in a form corresponding to the way he arranged them on those slips of paper." In Calasso’s edition of the now-fabled notebooks, the following aphorism, #109, concludes the aphorism sequence.
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you .
Interestingly, this aphorism was one of eight that did not appear in either original notebooks. They were added by Kafka at a later time--possibly in 1920-- and were demarcated from the aphorisms that preceded them by a quick stroke of the pen.
The Twilight Hour
Before anything else, “the world” of which Kafka writes in this aphorism is a present moment that he, as a creative artist, happens to be alive to and, with that present moment, alive, as well, to its present possibilities. I think, also, that “the world” of which Kafka writes in this aphorism is the ‘there-world’ into which he enters to write, as the yogis enter theirs to breathe. Do you know this story?
Kafka has just written the most threadbare sentence possible, ‘He looked out the window,’ and having written such a sentence wrote immediately upon its heels, ‘I know that it is already perfect.’ Now, isn’t that striking? That this nest of neuroses, this terribly insecure man, could write—could know!—‘it is already perfect.’ From where did this uncharacteristic confidence come? This sounded note of surety?
During his encounters with ‘the world,’ Kafka is no longer quite himself and his hand is being steadied. Just recently, a poet friend shared some Buddhist teachings, and one of the fables I think comes very close to what I am trying to express. The sun is always out there, he said, but we walk around with clouds above us, with their cloud shadows upon us. If we can slip out from beneath those clouds or if we can stretch up our arms and muck those clouds about a bit, the sun will shine upon us. The sacred world wants to shine upon us.
But where is it, this ‘out there’? Where is it, this sacred ‘there-world’ to which we would go? I like the word interstice. A gap or a break in something generally continuous. A paradox, like the snake that swallows its own tail until it has swallowed itself entirely. A double-joint in time, or a space that is only a bit of fabric that gives, and one can just slip on through it. The interstate.
As a young reader, I envied the invalids. And the invalids spoke of their invalid status as enviable. Gibran and Proust, come to mind. Both were bed-ridden. Being bed-ridden was their permit to dream. It was a special dispensation, really, an exemption against engagement with the tedious responsibilities of the here-world. Invalidism gave them the license, and the luxury, to go ‘there’. To go and seek the twilight hour.
Some invalids are life-long. Kafka probably romanticized himself so. Turned his affliction into a badge of honor. Proust once wrote that the neurotics have given us everything. They are the ones who have saved the world, created the world, made the world worthwhile. Invalidism eased Kafka of the burden of himself. Eased him of the chattering fears that told him, ‘You must do better!’ That told him, “It will always be beyond your abilities, whatever you choose.”
I have been thinking, too, of fairy tales. The idea of Alice and the rabbit hole and its connection with physics. I don’t know much about physics. I’m just another artist-groupie, but I am captivated by the idea of a wormhole. A hypothetical tunnel connecting disparate points in light-space, with the attendant, hypothetical, possibility of time travel. None of this is encouraged by hard science, but neither is it entirely refuted. Disputed, more-like. This idea of a shortcut between worlds, which, for me, translates as a shortcut into creative space, where inspiration is able to move with more agility and vision to engage with more dexterity.
The world down the rabbit hole. One moment you are in the here-world and the next you are in the there-world. But, how? That is the crazy part. How does one devise a way of getting there? Or at least how does one devise a way of not blocking oneself from getting there?
As a teenager I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first volume in C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia.” Before, I had read only horror genre literature. The Lewis book worked for me brilliantly on the level of pure horror, and then it went much further. As a teenager, I wasn’t aware of Narnia’s sacramental undercurrents. Or that Lewis was a ‘Christian Apologist’ (as he has been dubbed) and Aslan a sacrificial Christ figure. None of that holy apparatus was relevant to me then, but it is relevant to me now.
I return to the book both for scholarship and for Narnia. I like the idea of a closet, that eponymous ‘wardrobe’, through which the children can only sometimes gain access to Aslan, who is Narnia. I like how it shows that the wormhole experience cannot be forced. It loves to happen, perhaps, but its ways are inscrutable. One moment it is fur coats in a rickety wardrobe, but push a little harder, it becomes fir trees in a snowy forest, satyrs, fauns, and all possibilities.
I have a poem that describes something like this:
My hours are afraid of my days
mistrust placing their feet down
suspicious of finding a foothold
tick-tock they tip-toe self-consciously
My days are afraid of my years
never able to forget themselves
standing around as I try to sleep
shifting their weights, shuffling fears
In the interstices, it is timeless
unwound and happily unfound
there we slip through the sieve
between those immeasurable spaces.
That’s really where it all is. Between those immeasurable spaces. The crazy part is getting there.
