KAFKA AND FELICE BAUER

(the first poem is an imaginary letter from Kafka to Felice, and also to someone like myself)

Letter from Kafka

Dear Fräulein K, I can’t believe you ask,

Does God love us? You must joke.

We are the suicidal thoughts of God.

I always have a headache ready,

can easily arrange insomnia.

Do I complain too much?

My motto: If we cannot use arms,

let us embrace with complaints.

If only I could be not the nobody I am,

but the nobody I’m paid to be.

For a minute in my mind I leaned

to peony petals rimmed with rain,

when my superior, that good sober man,

asked if we carried insurance for convicts —

I wanted to slap him with both hands.

You see what an impossible

person I am. What strength it takes

to read this letter.

How you must hate me.

But I am unworthy of hate.

My father meanwhile grows

and grows, one colossal leg

already in America,

he’s sprawling across the continents.

We have nothing in common, but then

what do I have in common with myself?

Today a neighbor coughed twice;

I know tomorrow

he’ll cough even more.

I must move away from home:

the sight of my parents’ nightshirts

makes me sick to the stomach.

I think of marriage

even more often than of death.

But isn’t marriage too high a price

for the crystal-and-snow bride?

If only I could spend my life

in a cellar with nothing but paper 
and pen, and a ribbon of light

seeping in at the edge of the door – 

But I won’t torment you by mail;

I’ll save it up until we meet.

If writing is prayer, who am I praying to?

not the one who hangs

around our neck our daily stone.

Perhaps we shouldn’t meet.

I resent having to talk

when I could be writing you a letter.

You ask: What is art?

Dear Fräulein: there is no art.

There is only the delight of failure.

Kindest Regards, K

    ~ Oriana 

**

From the Lost Letters of Felice Bauer

to Kafka

Felice Bauer was Kafka’s fiancée by correspondence.

She kept all of his letters; he kept none of hers.

Dear Franz: On my birthday I dreamed I walked

around a cemetery, looking for my grave.

Each man’s tomb was marked with a dresser,

filled till-death-do-us-part with white shirts.

Lifetimes of shirts! Some with pleats, Franz,

with stiff collars. Birches like leafless brides

wept at the gate. How easy for you to say,

I do not really exist. Yet you claim

a right to your despair. What about

my despair? Who were the ghosts

ironed and folded into those shirts?

When we met, you mistook me

for a servant. In our one picture together,

you smile above my head,

the smile of a man who knows

he’s handsome. You don’t fool me, Franz.

Even the shadow under your chin

lies in its place, demanding Ordnung –

though when I ask what time it is,

you sigh, Eternity, or, Too late.

You write: I am not interested in literature.

I am literature. And I am what literature

is about. Nobody, meaning everyone.

Thank you for your two thousand

letters about your nerves, bad stomach,

sponge baths and Swiss exercises.

Dear Franz, you will always be

my son. Forever yours, Felice

    ~ Oriana

**

From Kafka’s letters to Felice:

11 November 1911 (Excerpt)
 
Fräulein Felice!
 
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:

Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday—for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?...

**

20 November 1912

Dearest, what have I done that makes you torment me so?  No letter again today, neither by the first mail nor the second.

You do make me suffer! While one written word from you could make me happy! You’ve had enough of me; there is no other explanation, it’s not surprising after all; what is incomprehensible, though, is that you don’t write and tell me so.

If I am to go on living at all, I cannot go on vainly waiting for news of you, as I have done these last few interminable days. But I no longer have any hope of hearing from you.

I  shall have to repeat specifically the farewell you bid me in silence.

I should like to throw myself bodily on this letter, so that it cannot be mailed, but it must be mailed.

I shall expect no further letters.

Franz

**

Hyacinth:

Kafka was a fascinating man, a romantic it seems. He has the same intensity in his gaze that Rilke has. I especially liked the "lifetime of shirts." Women used to spend hours ironing. Put me in mind of Eliot's "I measured out my life with coffee spoons," measuring life with the little things. And "birches like leafless brides" – an odd way to say that. "Writing is deeper than death, (we don't know that) just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from the grave, I couldn't be dragged from my desk at night" -- ah but we are victims of this world.  

Oriana:

Yes, I’m sure that Kafka and Rilke had about the same level of intensity. Someone said that what ultimately matters in literature is emotional intensity (I agree, though I think many times it also has to do with the finding and use of "magical metaphor"). Intensity, complexity, and drive – these are supposed to be the three main traits of gifted people. I wonder if the genetic component prevails over the environmental one, or if the intensity has to do largely with “sufficient trauma” (both these extraordinary men experienced a lot of suffering; think of Rilke as a young boy in a military academy, of all places! His father wanted to “toughen him up.”)

We are all victims of the world and the biology of aging, but the great achievers have given the rest of us so much joy over the centuries. And to be even a small light is already something.

Kafka with friends in Vienna's amusement park

READING KAFKA IN WARSAW

Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, which happens to be also the city where Rilke was born (in 1875). Thus, one the greatest prose writers and one of the greatest poets of the modern era shared a common mother city. Kafka happens to be one of my favorite masters -- I especially love "The Metamorphosis" and "The Hunger Artist." But I also admire "The Penal Colony." I was introduced to it in an unforgettable way.

READING KAFKA IN WARSAW

                        in honor of Andrzej Paszkiewicz, a great teacher

On the last class day of my last year of high school, our literature and philosophy teacher pulled out a worn paperback from the abyss of his cracked, ancient leather briefcase, and read aloud to us “The Penal Colony.”  Kafka’s books were forbidden at the time. For some years after the war they could be bought in bookstores, and then suddenly disappeared. The government realized that Kafka was not a friend of the regime . . .  

And our marvelous teacher read to us, unruly smart-ass teens, Warsaw’s “hereditary intelligencja” – because he realized that unless we knew some Kafka, our education in literature was going to be a travesty. Kafka was not only one of the greatest modern masters; he was also the most prophetic writer of the 20^th century. Here was a story about a place amazingly like a concentration camp, an orderly place like Auschwitz, where sadistic brutality masquerades as supreme justice, as Law and Order, even Hygiene. We listened without stirring. No passing notes, or suppressed giggles. The silence was startling.

I remember how solemn (but without any theatricality) the reading was. He made no comment afterwards, just slowly put the book back into his worn briefcase. We sat in stunned silence until the bell rang. Our last literature class.

Our teacher could have chosen a different story, but he chose "The Penal Colony," maybe to show us that a writer could indeed be a prophet and a deep psychologist who showed us that the seeds of the horror that our parents survived (mine nearly didn’t) lay in the psyche. That this wasn’t anything specifically Nazi. 

Later I encountered Nietzsche’s phrase, “the Hangman’s metaphysics,” implying that a hangman feels compelled to give lectures on morality. And I remembered my teacher's courage in reading to us Kafka's visionary example of this. 

         ~ Oriana
**


Kafka has also been something of a muse for me, like Penelope. The motto over his desk was Warten -- wait.  Writing takes tremendous patience. 

Here are some less-known quotations from Kafka:

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.

I have powerfully assumed the negativity of my times.

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood.  When you stand in front of me an look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?  And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?  For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.

Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment: in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.

Writing is a deeper sleep than death…. Just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from its grave, I can’t be dragged from my desk at night. ( letter to Felice Bauer, June 26, 1913)

So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards. (“The Advocates”)

“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.” (The Trial)

Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. (The Trial)

When it became clear in my being that writing was the most productive direction for me to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection and above all music.
–January 3, 1912


Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
–February 25, 1912


What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.
–January 8, 1914


What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require the expenditure of so much strength.
–March 9, 1914


The life of society moves in a circle. Only those burdened with a common affliction understand each other.
–June 12, 1914

Through a heaven of vice a hell of virtue is reached. 
–January 9, 1920.

My life is a hesitation before birth.
–January 24, 1922

We were expelled from Paradise, but Paradise was not destroyed. In a sense our expulsion from Paradise was a stroke of luck, for had we not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.


Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point must be reached.

Theoretically there is a perfect possibility of happiness: believing in the indestructible element in oneself and not striving towards it.

**
Oriana:
I am particularly struck by Questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.  One could argue to the contrary: the answer might come out of the blue twenty years later. Nevertheless, my recent experience confirms that the right question can be answered in an instant, and that instant can change your life. 


Soon after Deborah Digges' suicide, I was stunned by those lines in one of her poems (probably "The Broom") -- I quote from memory:


When was the last time I was happy?
When did the light hold me and I didn't struggle?


*


-- but "happy" was too extreme a word, too remote -- I couldn't connect with it. One of the characteristics of my chronic depression was inability to remember any happy moments, much less a whole extended period of being happy. It was only when I asked, "When was the last time I wasn't depressed?" that the answer came instantly. Thus, asking the right question changed my life. (I need to add that at long last I was motivated not to be depressed. I always knew how to pull myself out of depression, but had no motivation to make the slightest effort toward healing. I had to see that I was getting older, and life was passing me by while I stewed in bitterness, like Dante's "the sullen" who chant their repetitious hymn while sunk in mud.)