A Day with Kafka

Kafka is petulant. I am not surprised. What else should I have expected? Didn’t I know that he would never like to spend a day with a stranger and that too someone as aloof as me? Neither he nor I wanted anyone’s company merely because we would never be comfortable with any other person. We are not comfortable with ourselves in the first place. Kafka would describe himself as “a cage in search of a bird.” I am the empty cage, in fact. Not he. He has earned his admittance to the Paradise. I am like the man from the countryside in his novel, The Trial, who spent years seeking admittance and finally died in vain. Was he at the wrong gate? No, he is assured by the gatekeeper who keeps accepting the bribes given by the seeker. Years pass. The seeker grows old. He has stopped asking questions. He only mutters to himself. He grows childish. His eyes grow dim. Or is the world growing darker? He realises he is dying. He has a last question to ask the gate-keeper. Was he at the right door at all? How is it that no one else ever came to seek admittance at this door? The doorkeeper tells him, “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

Was it ever opened for him to shut it now?

Kafka doesn’t answer. His protagonists were all in wrong places – places where they didn’t belong – or they were trying to enter wrong places. All wrong places. Is there a right place?

Kafka looks at me with unconcealed contempt. Isn’t the answer obvious? That is the meaning of that look. We are all in wrong places most of the time. Because there is no right place. You are condemned to be in the wrong place. But you strive to be in the right place which doesn’t exist. There is the Court of Justice to which you appeal fervently though you have never seen the Court. You have never been given access to the Judge. But you are sure that they exist. Their officers are the ones who arrested you one fine morning saying, “We are not authorised to tell you” why you are under arrest. The priest will tell you that “Your guilt is supposed, for the present, at least, to have been proved.”

No one but you can know what your guilt is. And you say you don’t know it. Ignorance is no virtue, my friend. Ignorance is not innocence.

And so, one day, they come – the officers. One of them holds you by your neck and the other thrusts a knife into your heart and turns it there twice. Your eyes dim. The world is utterly dark now. The darkness engulfs you. “Like a dog!” You hear yourself muttering. To yourself. It is as if you mean the shame of it to outlive you.

Kafka is still petulant. I apologise. Why the hell did you do this? Demand a day with me? I apologise again. Like a dog.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Blog Hop