Kafka and the Smell of Truth: Poetry at the Fringes of Thought

Where was Kafka getting it right?  Why do we enjoy his stories?  What about them can account for their intrigue and apparent importance?  

The world is like Reagan’s joke, wherein the optimist gleefully digs in the pile of manure, saying, “There’s gotta be a donkey in here somewhere!”  With Kafka, we find the manure and we have the premonition of finding a donkey, but what is the donkey?  Is it truth?  Is THAT why truth is valuable, namely, that it lies beneath all that is explicit?  That it is intractably hidden?  Perhaps, after all, the notion that truth is “god” has got it right, insofar that is, that this notion acknowledges the invisibility and irretrievability of truth.  Dig as you may, you never turn it up, yet it smells strong all the while.

 Truth is what lies behind that sneaking sense that one can and must escape from oneself in matters of perception and understanding.  That one can get at what lies out there in the god’s eye view…

 No, I’m getting this all wrong.

 Truth, rather, is a gas (Wittgenstein’s comments on mathematics.  Mienong cannot find his objects here, because they cannot be held by hands).  We make cracks in our encrusted what-it-is, in our everydayness, and we begin to smell something seeping up through the cracks.  This compells us to search for the source of this smell, but search as we may, we always come up with nothing.  But most people have their mouths too full of shit to search anyway, and they wonder why we philosophers attend so neurotically to what's underneath. 

 Kafka made cracks, and that was his genius.  Those cracks are the stuff of nightmares, they give us the guilt.  The guilt that we haven’t followed our noses, or perhaps it is this: that had we followed our noses, we would have in the end discovered our wrongdoing (now Dostoevsky). 

It just occurred to me: Humans are copies, archives, of a primative form.  Even their thoughts are reproductions insofar as batteries of mechananisms have produced them, their variance being mere pathetic attempts at variation.  We are like products on shelves—bags of candy—with a “net weight” but not an “exact count or volume,” since “contents may settle during shipping” and besides, the machines do not bother to count each M&M because that wouldn’t be profitable.

 So we are these “net weights,” these approximations, these mass produced goods fit for consumption by time and nature.  Individuals are good for nothing, but are designed to be piled in with all the others (the chief concern of our design being to approximate our mass-produced neighbors on the shelf). 

 In other words, in a naturally evolved world, there is no “me.”  There is not even an “us.”  There are instead reproductions with strategically implanted variations.  But we make the grand, miserable, pathetic mistake of assuming that those variations constitute unique personal identities.  But personal identity is a sham, because the source of our personal identity is a manufacturing facility with machinery having a built-in randomizer. 

 We are only ourselves because it was strategically necessary in the marketplace of survival.  Hume was right:  Personal identity is an illusion.  But he was wrong in defending this perspective by appealing to the disconnectedness of perceptions.  He should, rather, have noticed the common source of our perceptions (the mass production behind the stuff we call the ‘self’) and realized that, in fact, we are all—thoughts and dreams and all—variations on a theme for the purpose of not losing everything when the next pressure to survival comes to town.

 We are bundles of programming with net weights (go to a finer level of measurement, and even that comes out with variation, betraying the mutancy of what the bag contains).

 So, back to Kafka.  Kafka made cracks. That was his genius.

 

So, Kafka’s Cracks

A cockroach

Iron

Descends upon the tempered glass

the crackling lawn

the us

Whose expectations clamor for common recognition

 

And nothing breaks, but

cracks are formed like spiders legs

cold and icy and prying apart

Arctic backgrounds yet unnoticed

Before us

Behind us

invisible.

 

Gas ascends

Putrid rising

I recognize it and fear

My own wanton lust for its

Source in the dark abyss

Beneath the ice.

 

So tempted are we by Kafka

That we want and plead and grope

With a crazy horny desire

To slip ourselves between the cracks

And drown within the darkness

Below

Where truth’s fragrant beams

Are all at once quaffed

And appealingly undiscovered.

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Art is terrifying insofar as it happily reduces any anxiety that we my have about living life as we ought.

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Kafka’s art invites us to receive everything as a potentially other, since beneath everything, is something so other to us, that its smell alarms and, in the end, murders us (The Trial).  Kafka bothers us because he hints at the idea that, in the end, truth is a killer instead of a life-giver.  That smell emanating from the cracks is poisonous, but—AND THIS IS WHY WE PHILOSOPHERS IMBIBE THE FRAGRANCE IN SPITE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF ITS NOXIOUS ESSENCE—the smell is a laughing gas.  It makes us laugh at everyone who has failed to smell the gas coming from the cracks.  They die without knowing why, whereas we miserable ones die from deeply breathing in the noxious odours of truth.  We mean to breath it.  Social gas masks look unattractive to us compared to the glamour of the powdered nose.  The padded cell with it’s freedoms (more cracks than the psych-techs can see…notice the icy floor).

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Kafka wanted us to feel guilty about something, but what?  Disaprobation from family (The Metamorphosis), litigation by a mysterious elite (The Trial).

Here is where the guilt comes from, really, I think, if we read between the lines.  This, namely, the…

loneliness

of your own “right-here-right-now-in-this-place-with-this-shape-and-color-and-texture-and-plasticity-and-sameness-to-all-that-like-myself-are-subject-to-death-without-being-noticed.”

That didn’t capture what I wanted to express.

GUILT.

There is something important about that way of seeing things (things experienced as one who feels guilty).

Dostoevsky needs to give up gOD here in favor of mass-productive-equivalence.

That’s god without meaning and purpose and worthiness.

Not god but garbage that still works when plugged in.

 It makes us uncomfortable, does it not (I revel here!)?

To juxtapose the words GOD and

                                    GARBAGE

                                                ?

 Why?

 Because both smell funny, which is why both are so intriguing and sweet and subject to that “what’s-beneath-this-object”ness that, in my view, helps bring forth truth’s gases.

The unreality of a number is the crack that gives way to a gas which smells like infinity.

I’m not trying to sound deep here.  I’m trying to give voice to a metaphor that I feel, but cannot express properly.  I am trying, hoping, longing, wishing, assuming, giving-my-best-shot-at poking at “the divine.” 

God is never found, never known, never touched.  God is not a being, not a person, not a savior.  God kills us by sneaking into our awareness.  God is the black whole beneath us, drawing us into the dark depths of giving-up.  God is the prophecy of Sagan about the expansion of the sun—no!—God is the hunch had by one about to die—no!—god is…

...The personification of the fear and guilt that happens when cracks are opened up in our everydayness.