[b]Franz Kafka
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.[/b]
This is particularly applicable to moral, political and religious values. Something is true if we believe it is true. And if we believe it is true passionaitely enough we can wreak havoc on the lives of others.
Even though it is not really true at all.
[b]Bianco Luno
How do we fit my small attitude into an ego this size?
I am not remembered to the community; where would they find room for me?
The quantity of becoming it would take, the dissolution of my precious being…
I was driven forth from the land, so to speak, fifteen years ago, when I began in earnest these letters-turned-journals.
To document my exile for the odd person in some future generation.
The mystery of participation, of what is called “good” (no matter James’ comment).
No matter that I’ve succeeded in the person of my person in being judged kind, considerate, steadfast…
Deliver me from this “good” that permeates all things.
What crime could do this?[/b]
This is how to rationalize something as obscure and inconsequential as these observations: accummulating them for “the odd person in some future generation”.
We accummulate them for ourselves now because, really, what is the alternative?
[b]Franz Kafka
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.[/b]
This might be said of paradigm shifts originating from any number of human endeavors.
[b]Bianco Luno
Arguing with Mill about the ineradicable penchant we seem to have for the ideal, especially in the face of utility, James conjures a world where the mass enjoys an undisturbed bliss paid for by the uninterrupted torture of one solitary individual.
How repugnant, he permits himself to say.
But now picture this: a moral state of affairs where just a sampling enjoys a modicum of bliss, while the rest…
This is not so repugnant I gather from looking about.
This is not a Marxist sarcasm, but a sound literal evaluation, pressured by the only measure of repugnance available, free of lip-servitude.
Is lamentation insincere then?
It may serve some biological function, I guess: the way irony, on occasion, does.
(It keeps me, for instance, from acts of physical violence.)
Just now, I am not moved to claim more for it.[/b]
This is the world many refuse to look at: “…a moral state of affairs where just a sampling enjoys a modicum of bliss, while the rest…”
The world we actually live in. The world of Walmart and commodity fetish.
Instead, they rationalize it: it’s their own fault: overpopulation, refusing to embrace our way of life, the color of their skin, ethnic blunders, choosing the wrong God etc.
But being moved to violence reinforces all the more the relationship some [like me] are shackled to—the one between outrage and fear.
[b]Franz Kafka
My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.[/b]
That’s one way to look at at. Fortunately, there are other ways too.
[b]Bianco Luno
Maybe a million people died yesterday on the other side of the earth on islands in great typhoons and in the horn of Africa of not enough pity.
Acts of God?
Certainly, He was complicit.
(And if He doesn’t exist, I accuse Him of that.)
But the important thing is the difference that makes to you?[/b]
The important thing [for some] is whether or not it ought to make a difference to anyone at all. In fact, it can be argued that we invented God in order to insist it must.
Living with her—and perhaps with anyone—would have a certain element of hell about it.
Hell is, after all, other people. And being alone is bliss. Right up to that point [and it’s coming] we begin to fall apart at the seams.
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Fernando Pessoa
And we will never run out of idiot savants who insist they [and they alone] can separate them.
This actually reminds me of the problem creative people have once they are known to the public. The incredible pressure to repeat and create ‘according to their identity’ as judged by critics or fans. (or their own self-pressure) That we are always stopping flow, trying to get control of what ‘worked’ and even people who hate the very ugly way capitalism can suck resources - nature, talented people, workers - dry, do the same things to their kids, ‘artists’ they love, and even themselves.
I tend to agree with Kafka here. My quibble would be that many things can act as drugs and its likely that Kafka partook in some of these ‘drugs’. Some drugs even prevent socialness. Probably most do.
Regarding “controlled substances”, I tend more towards the perspective of Tom the priest from Drugstore Cowboy:
“Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that someone can use drugs to escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots.”
But there are a lot of different ways to encompass a “terrible fate”. Still, it infuriates me I don’t have access to the dope that would ameliorate mine.
[b]Bianco Luno
Freeze-dried passion, the icy intimacy of nightmare.
A clinical voice, but with the syntax, emboldening familiarity, found in diaries.
An accomplishment, an act with tortuous though forgiven consequences under a white moon.
I will be forgiven in time, more or less.
What difference does that make to you?
By what grace will you dismiss me?
My ugliness, the terror that attracts (not pursues) me I cannot give names to as you will assuredly give me.
You will conflate the logician and poet in me to save yourself, to spare yourself yourself.
I am, over and over again, a sharp instrument in your heart.[/b]
A logician who fancies himself a poet more or less than a poet who fancies himself a logician. Too close to call? Not really. What I read are the gaps between words and worlds from a mind that knows enough about relationships in which there are no gaps at all. We agonize more over what we come to conclude we cannot know: the things that matter most to us.
Okay, the things that matter most to me.
[b]Vaclav Havel
Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity…[/b]
From my vantage point now, this sentiment appears more noble, stirring and inspirational “up there” than “down here”. Down here the absurd comforts me more from the opposite direction: the great equalizer.
[b]Franz Kafka
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.[/b]
Well, if he didn’t reach it back then, he has certainly reached it now.
I think it is pretty rare anyone manages to escapte a horrible fate with drugs. But I agree there is something off in the way narcotics are scapegoated and demonized. It’s a distraction from noticing the real pernicious drugs at work. Though none of this helps Kafka, Kafkas out there now, the Kafka in us. Yes, people try to use drugs as social short cuts and really, through this, likely avoid actually dealing with their real situations. But his ‘real’ situation’ was probably the contruct of non-pharmaceutical drugs and not something he could ‘cheat’.
[/quote]
yeah.
[b]Bianco Luno
Now everything has become ingrown that early on was admitted—and the rest apparently sealed off—to this self-infected hypochondriac.
He was a cheerful boy once, as can still be observed between fatigues and headaches and digestive upsets.
But now, caught up with stealing the pleasure others may take in accusing and cataloging him, he even recoils instinctively with them from his own image.
His ‘I’, already become ‘you’, is straining toward ‘he’.
He (while we may still speak of him as such) feels he might be able to breathe more easily were he to speak in the fourth person, possibly a place in the grammar of a language spoken only by the all-the-way dead.[/b]
Can “I” become a slippery slope to a psycho-somatic hell? Or can it [possibly] be the antedote instead? Obviously: Yes.
[b]Fernando Pessoa
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.[/b]
Well, after music of course.
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
True. But we all know that some ports are more excruciatingly painful than others.
[b]Bianco Luno
To repeat: What is the difference that makes to you?[/b]
To repeat: It is a difference that lies between “we die so life means nothing” and “we die so life means everything”.
It is no accident that I dress like Mr. Rogers; could I ape his soul?
Well, that’s all he is now. And it’s not an accident some say.
Not the co-existence of evil and good that is so appalling as that there is no breach between them, all the while a very forward justice masquerades as the bandage for this hypochondriac’s wound.
Words co-exist all the time “in here”. We need but insist they do. And then argue back and forth about things like “logic” and “poetry”. “Out there” however any number of breaches exist as well. Indeed, they can, among other things, get you banned.
In here, for example.
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
Franz Kafka
This is a subjunctive point of view. I can’t even imagine it as a philosophy of life. Not in the manner in which most construe that expression.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
Franz Kafka
As, it might be said, is the man of letters forced into a state of action far removed from the world of words.
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
Franz Kafka
Worse perhaps is wanting things advertised you cannot afford. For some, the bare necessities of life itself.
[b]Bianco Luno
When you left, saying we had been “off” all day and unable to take my silence about all that wasn’t mundane, that class of things you so despise and which functions for me, when anything does, to stave off a hopeless, utterly lightless, pall…[/b]
I think I know someone who eschews the mundane. She lives in a world of words…a world far, far, far removed from all things quotidian. A thanatophobic who is creeping ever closer and closer to the final solution.
We shared her in common. Unless of course we didn’t.
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Samuel Beckett
How many arguments have a beginning, a middle and an end? But then don’t really say much at all about the beginning, the middle and the end of the lives we live? But no matter. They’re still well-built.