The Natural World

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The Ceiling Fan

Now that we are beginning to get some chill in the air sometimes, I am reminded of how annoying our ceiling fan in the big room can be. Remember, we cannot shut it off. How retarded is that?!

** Writing Life, Reading Life

I am thinking that maybe a little chat session in the morning might open the floodgates of my writing resources - the creativity and memory. I’m debating whether it should be half an hour or a whole hour. With timed-out breaks, maybe reading a poem or two. Once you get in the flow of writing, you will often find that more will come out of you than you thought was there. Like you just have to prime the pump. Of course, sometimes you are simply bone dry, and you wonder why you bother at all, but then you remember that you do not have anything else, and there is stuff that you need to get out of yourself, to emotionally sort through.

To help give me something to ramble on about I keep a list of items of blurt-worthy events, which I now have beside on me. These are things that in the olden blogging day I would have typed up and posted right away, when I was younger and new to the blogging game and anxious to build up my post count, but that was ten years and thousands of posts ago. Now I just jot down a phrase or two in a memo pad to remind me of what I might like to jabber about now when I am in the mood to write, or when I feel like trying to put myself in the mood.

My reading life. I took up another Christian book, or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a Jewish book, “The Beginning of Desire”, an exegetical work on the stories in “Genesis”. Very Rabbinical or Talmudic. But I thought it would be interesting to get another, deeper look into these foundational stories of Western civilization. I quickly became disheartened by how random and fanciful the midrashic forays into the text can be. A part of my problem, I suppose, is that I am actually still looking for some magic, still hoping to believe that Christianity and heaven are true. I dropped the book in my disappointment. However, I then see other people talking about the Bible, including Andrew Sullivan on his blog, and it motivates me to rethink the situation. These are, after all, the key stories for our civilization, and as such, as a literary exercise, it is surely worth reading. So, not only am I going to read the book, but I am first going to read the Robert Alter book I got, his translation and commentary on the first five books of the Old Testament. After I finish the Genesis material, then I will take a break from Alter and resume reading “Beyond Desire”, and then I will go back to Alter. We will see what happens from there. It is only one slot in my reading life, which essentially means a few days of reading in a month, if that much - I have a number of slots. I think this is a worthy slot to have; Christianity does mean something to me. I just need to tamp down my expectations. I am not going to be saved. When I accept that, I can read more coolly.

The answer to the question above, whether this should be thirty minutes or an hour: it is thirty minutes. The timed-out breaks stretches things out. You might think I should be able to sit down for thirty minutes straight, but you would be surprised. I really am a jittery person. Besides, it is a minimum limit. When I have started a topic, I will want to finish it, and as is the case this morning, that can mean another ten minutes of writing.

I do not think I will do this every morning. Maybe every other morning, maybe a couple of times a week, we’ll see. I do want to get through my reading slots more briskly, and I don’t think my emotional needs require a daily sorting. Things can build up a little.

Kafka

There is a sizeable section in “The Trial” in which K. meets with a priest who is a functionary of the court system, and they have an extended chat on K’s trial. In this passage, Kafka also gives us one of literature’s great parables on the nature of law, about a common man who seeks entrance unto the law but is kept at bay by a gatekeeper. This is believed to come from Jewish legends, in which the law is the Jewish Law and the gatekeeper is a “guardian of the various forecourts leading to heaven.” It strongly suggest the nature of K’s trial, as being more of an examination of his soul, albeit in a comically sinister court system set in the everyday world.

This passage in the novel is worth reading and revisiting on its own (pages 149-160 in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback, 1979 edition). It is on par with Dostoevsky's “Grand Inquisitor” chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. The excerpt below does not go into the parable but provides some of the give and take between K. and the priest.

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“Do you know that things are going badly in your trial?” asked the priest.

“That seems to be the case,” said K., “I’ve done everything I can, but so far without success, though I haven’t completed my submission yet.”

“How do you imagine it will end?” asked the priest.

“I use to think that it would turn out all right,” said K., “now I sometimes even doubt that myself. I don’t know how it will end. Do you know?”

“No,” said the priest, “but I fear it will end badly. They think you are guilty…. At least for the moment they think your guilt is proven.”

“But I’m not guilty,” said K., “it’s a mistake. How can a person be guilty anyway. We’re all human, every single one of us.”

“That is correct,” said the priest, “but that’s the way guilty people talk.”

-- “The Trial” by Franz Kafka

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