I Have It All Figured Out

Kafka and the Cosmos

“All phenomena in the cosmos and on the earth move in cycles, like the heavenly bodies, it is an eternal repetition; man alone, the concrete living organism, runs a direct course between life and death. For man there is no personal return. He only follows a declining path. So he breaks the cosmic order”

-Kafka from Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka

I can’t help but argue with this statement in my mind - that to presume that these celestial bodies are locked in eternal repetition seems to me a fanciful means of setting a stage for the divine comedy - to set man’s role wholly apart from the rest of reality - to determine that by some strict undeniable difference in the quality of being that is man’s, he is somehow the focus of the heavens’ turns. It’s an old argument. Janouch’s Kafka rebutts himself in all sorts of ways owing much of the dilemma to the numbing of the civilizeed mind: that we have become “anaesthetized by mere dehumanization.” That we are “simply glued to the shaky stool of vulgar common sense by the filth of fear.”

Don’t know where I was going with all that except to say that I’m attracted to Kafka’s certain way of speaking (or Janouch’s Kafka, as it were) and to his figures of illustration (the cosmos, repetition, a shaky stool) and too to trace what seems a profound course of thought back to the shared border of innocence and experience. It seems I have to be deliberate in my posture when sitting down to write songs to make sure I’m not leaning too far into either innocence or experience, and to remember to take my words seriously. It goes against what I’ve learned from cool people about being cool, but there it is. I’m not really built for cool.

Source: amazon.com