tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post1001574844206571078..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Franz Kafka: The Warden of the TombUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-32751711820881111482012-12-11T05:41:03.649-08:002012-12-11T05:41:03.649-08:00"‘But out! Everyone wants to get out.’ Appare..."‘But out! Everyone wants to get out.’ Apparently, even the dead can become dissatisfied, won’t stay put. Kafka takes another turn at liminal existence, where everything is in between, ever and always, and resolution unlikely. Great choice in those final two photos: what a grim, denatured world. That tomb-like 7-Eleven ostensibly in Taiwan could exist anywhere . . . which itself is another sort of nowhere-ness."<br /><br />This goes straight to the doubleness and hypnagogic strangeness of the piece, and exposes something of Kafka's unique method.<br /><br />The Prince is the owner of the Friedrichspark and its tomb, a sort of mysterious Nowhere. "For my family this tomb represents the frontier between the Human and the Other and it is on this frontier that I wish to post a guard..."<br /><br />You'd think the Prince would know what is going on in and about the property. Yet it seems to come as a surprise to him to learn that his warden, by now old and exhausted from the long ordeal, has been on duty all these years, guarding the family tomb. Furthermore, the warden reveals that he neither dreams nor sleeps but stays awake all night, involved in wrestling bouts with ghosts attempting to escape the tomb premises.<br /><br />Kafka was habituated to writing in a state of sleep deprivation.<br /><br />He wrote by night, as he said, "entirely in darkness, deep in my workshop". The sleep-deprived state seems to have worked as a kind of drug, enabling him to tap into otherwise inaccessible images and thoughts.<br /><br />A diary note appears to confirm this: "Again it was the power of my dreams, shining forth into wakefulness even before I fall asleep, which did not let me sleep... I feel shaken to the core of my being and can get out of myself whatever I desire. It is a matter of ... mysterious powers..."<br /><br />The warden guards a boundary between worlds, that of the living and that of the dead. A job that allows little rest for the weary.<br /><br />The Prince's chamberlain describes this nocturnal work as "a real guarding of unreal things beyond the human sphere".<br /><br />The further along we go these nights, the more it comes to seem that the unreal things are escaping from their carefully fenced-off nocturnal precincts and invading the daytime world, whose smug inhabitants almost seem not to have suspected that these ghostlike presences have been lurking there all along, biding their time, awaiting an opportunity to emerge...TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-38218829940310510222012-12-10T14:28:56.411-08:002012-12-10T14:28:56.411-08:00‘But out! Everyone wants to get out.’ Apparently, ...‘But out! Everyone wants to get out.’ Apparently, even the dead can become dissatisfied, won’t stay put. Kafka takes another turn at liminal existence, where everything is in between, ever and always, and resolution unlikely. Great choice in those final two photos: what a grim, denatured world. That tomb-like 7-Eleven ostensibly in Taiwan could exist anywhere . . . which itself is another sort of nowhere-ness.Hazenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13417573435195561519noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-3335426026738141742012-12-10T07:47:02.112-08:002012-12-10T07:47:02.112-08:00Tom,
"Then I can hear them rustling even in ...Tom,<br /><br />"Then I can hear them rustling even in the farthest hush at the end of the park. . . ." -- just over there perhaps.<br /><br /><br />12.10<br /><br />light coming into sky above still black<br />ridge, edge of moon next to pine branch<br />in foreground, wave sounding in channel<br /><br /> conditions which are so may<br /> be replaced, in which<br /><br /> field of motion corresponds<br /> to line, i.e., system<br /><br />silver of low sun reflected in channel,<br />sunlit green canyon of ridge across it<br />STEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.com