Dear good people, dear friends,
On a recent trip to Oxford, England, I visited the “Kafka: Making of an Icon” exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries about the Czech writer, Franz Kafka. Several things about the exhibition still reverberate. Kafka’s style and themes changed the shape of modern literature, expanding our understanding of the connection between one’s inner and external worlds. In his lifetime (1883–1924), he was an almost obscure writer; much of his work was published, against his dying wishes, posthumously. Like so many artists who touch on the unspoken and unsaid in a culture, Kafka was prescient in depicting our modern existential distress. Without Kafka, there would be no word for “the Kafkaesque.”
But this is not an essay on Kafka. I’m writing this to you because I’m having my own Gregor Samsa moment and wonder if you are, too. I’m trying to connect the dots between what I learned at the exhibition about Kafka’s themes and insights and our own troubled times.
I wake up every morning and the world appears to be steady and familiar, and yet this same world, the reality I’ve always known, is vanishing with increasing velocity. Whippoorwills, gone. Bats and Monarch butterflies, species of snakes,frogs, insects, disappearing. A fourteen-year-old kid saunters down a school corridor with an assault rifle, killing dozens. How can this be? How is it possible that lies are accepted as truths, and facts as lies?
Kafka’s novel,The Trial, is the story of a man’s excruciating entanglement with an absurd bureaucracy which he can neither understand nor escape. An innocent man trapped in an illogical nightmare and without allies could easily be a story set in 2024. Josef K is arrested but does not know why nor by whom. He is not told the nature of his crime, and disorientation and terror ensue.
In his masterpiece,The Metamorphosis, the protagonist Gregor Samsa, a salesman, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an ungeheuren ungeziefer, in German, Kafka’s first language: a “monstrous vermin” in most English translations. Kafka wrote the novel in 1912, long before the rise of Nazism, but he was prescient, here, too, in forecasting the disgust Hitler would later project onto Jews and other “undesirables.” And now another would-be authoritarian leader who shall not be named has reinvigorated the use of the hateful “vermin” label to target migrants in this country.
In fiction we use the term “the irreal” to describe works that depict realism interwoven with glimpses of the unreal. Think of episodes of The Twilight Zone in which a character believes himself to be in a familiar neighborhood among familiar people only to discover he is on another planet. It’s the displacement of the strange and terrifying into the ordinary that makes the hair on our neck stand up.
The irreal is all around us these days, manifesting in absurd conspiracy theories and fantastical delusions in the collective about the very nature of reality. (Some believe the Dems have created the recent devastating hurricanes.)
The challenge, I think, is to accept the “irreality” of our current reality, the frightening, vertiginous moments when the inexplicable butts up against the known world. To preserve our sanity, the trick is to linger in grounded moments that provide a jolt of aliveness and well-being. A slant of autumn light, the sound of waves, the smell of snow—the most mundane prompts can evoke what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being” when time seems to stop, and we feel the presence of the eternal.
In her essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” written in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War, Woolf contrasts moments of being with moments of non-being. The former are moments that are etched into our memory, moments when the ordinary world cracks open and a secret, hidden timeless world is revealed.
Woolf concludes: “It is a constant idea of mine, that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern, that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. . . we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
In a world of self-declared polarizing identities, could we have forgotten this aspect of our essence, its interconnectedness with all things, a part of a vast cosmic mystery?
Social media pundits like to quote an epigram of Bertolt Brecht from 1939. It’s usually translated as “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.” But must the singing only be about the dark times?
Writers, readers, friends, we need respite from the stressors in our lives. We need silence and space to replenish ourselves. To let the creative flow. I confess—there is a pine tree at our cabin I love. I talk to it and bring it offerings. Its roots grow deep; it transmutes water into air, light into growth. Here are a few lines from a poem I wrote about the tree presence:
Teach me to alchemize the bitter elements—swamp rot
into needles of green fire—
here amidst the lake’s iron scent, the abandoned nests,
let me learn your knowing ways—
If it’s true, as researchers tell us, that trees communicate, warning each other of danger through chemical signals, sharing nutrients through their roots, then other plants also probably converse, forming a protective community for survival. So, is it a romantic notion that we can learn from trees’ cooperative example?
Look around. Is there a tree, a rock, a lake or starry night calling to you?
On a last note, I’d like to share some happy news. Many of you know I’ve been interested in trauma and memory, subjects which inform a lot of my writing. Several of my PsychologyToday posts address these subjects. I’m delighted to announce that my interview with neuroscientist Daniela Schiller about memory and trauma for Psychology Today will be featured in the documentary See Memory, which will stream on PBS and air on public television stations beginning in May 2025 (check local listings). See Memory is an amazing and gorgeous documentary by the artist and filmmaker Viviane Silvera, made out of 30,000 hand-painted stills that accompany narration from interviews with leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists.
And soon, I will have a new website that will feature up-to-date articles, a page on writing prompts, updated events information, and more. I’m very excited to share this with you.
In parting, I wish you many engaging moments of being. And I’d love to hear your thoughts.You can reach me by replying to this email or at dale@dalemkushner.com.
As always, with care and gratitude for your presence in my life,
Dale
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Top image: My pine tree and me (Photo: Burt Kushner)
