It’s a long time since I wrote to you, Frau Milena, and even today I’m writing only as the result of an incident. Actually, I don’t have to apologize for my not writing, you know after all how I hate letters. All the misfortune of my life — I don’t wish to complain, but to make a generally instructive remark — derives, one could say, from letters or from the possibility of writing letters. People have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always — and as a matter of fact not only those of other people, but my own… The easy possibility of letter-writing must — seen merely theoretically — have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost, which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold — all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish.
~ Franz Kafka, from a letter to Milena Jesenska, whom he met in person only twice.
Tag: disconnected
I’m still processing photos from before my camera was stolen, it feels like I’m lying
Let’s all give a big hand to Neal Stephenson for forecasting Reverand Wayne’s Pearly Gates Franchaise.
I want you all to come to the Moon Festival. Saturday I thought I had rehearsal, but instead of explaining how to safely set fire to things, I ended up arranging and directing the choreography, making it my own show.
I have another class to teach today, (they’ve put me in charge of a team of maybe twenty people), which is something I appreciate saying. It feels right. I’m trying to get ahold of myself, like I’m calling through lines that have been torn down in a wind storm. The power lines outside look dead and brown and organic. (Leftover’s from a childhood memory of nightmare). Something this appropriate is grounding. I start to feel like I understand all the people who try to tell me that one day I’ll be famous.
Saturday morning was strange for me. The clouds erased any city farther away than three blocks, emphasizing the Twilight Zone feeling of disconnectedness that I woke with. The only sounds were those I made and the traffic two blocks away. If I closed my eyes, I wasn’t around to talk to, like a crumpled piece of paper thrown into a fire, the same interpretation of the world that led me to try and walk off the edge of the city when I was younger, out into the dark of nothing in particular. I think of once where I meant to go to work and found myself in Victoria instead. Taking busses at random brought me to the ferry terminal and then in a line-up, then on another bus. My wings were too small to fly, I guess, so I skimmed above the ground, going where other people were going, losing individuality in Brownian motion. Not one person said a word to me that entire day. I was cut off, a few hundred miles didn’t matter. The temporal world had nothing to do with me. Postal service lyrics: “I was the one worth leaving.”