kafka on a sunny day
Sad news! Richard Peel's free bizarre clipart has been taken off the web! I loved his drawings and all I could find was Mr. Smallsmall Squeezy, which is cute but also sort of … small. Oh well, Richard Peel, R.I.P.
Today in Grand Rapids it was warm and brilliant outside for November and I went out into the sun and took off my big overcoat with the buttons and my woolly-down scarf and rolled up my red sweater sleeves and watched humanity on their lunch break. When people aren't talking I love them dearly. I can understand why there are so many nudists in Norway and South Dakota because we in northern climes see the sun so rarely after October we need every pore in our body to soak in the rays, let our DNA remember what sunlight feels during those long, dark months. I have no problem with nudists … I just wish most of them weren't so hideous to look at.
So I went to the public library and found a book with a title like Know Your Body: 1954 with drawings of hairless men and women with no genitalia all smiling (I think they were Dutch) and I started thinking about all the parts of the body that make us up and how identical we all are with slight difference which we hold up as important while ignoring the vast similarities. We might have different skin hues but we all got spleens that look the same.
Then I found a book by Robert Crumb (who has stooped so low his comics appear in The New Yorker, has he no shame?) about the dead German neurotic Franz Kafka. It was well worth the read, unless you don't like looking at cartoons of Kafka in various stages of bizarre behavior and nudity. A passage that caught my eye read:
Letter writing … is an intercourse with ghosts, not only with the ghost of the receiver, but with one's own, which emerges between the lines of the letter being written … Written kisses never reach their destination, but are drunk en route by these ghosts (Crumb, 65)
And I thought, "that is how I feel with all these people I have been walking around with in this city today. I don't know them, never will but because we are all enjoying the same warm air I feel drawn to them …" but not them of course, but to the idea I have of them, their ghosts as Kafka would put it.
Which raises the question, to all my friends I write to, who I never have met but feel ecstatic and connected to, is it the person behind the letter I feel ecstatic about or their ghost?
Everybody I pass by has the burden
of potential I love potential, the potential
of potential, the hunger for all things
I can't have. For all the things I will
never know. Not in the Biblical sense.
Not like William Carlos Williams knew,
sad and pathetic confessing on his
deathbed to his legions of affairs. No.
I do not want to end in a pool of ridicule
but I love that Goethe never had sex
until he was 40 or that Kafka lay in bed,
night after night, writing "so alone, so
very alone" in his notebook with doodles.It gives me hope for the rest of us
since it all ends the same anyway:
dirty coloring, our flesh tones
mangled, our shrill accents fading.
Among all these office workers and
skateboarders and break dancers
and poets out on this warm day and
kids handing out fliers for fund
raisers for battered women's shelters
will any one of us pay attention to
another's bones? another's skull? our
skeletons under siege pumping out
blood? We ignore so much you ignore
my femoral, I know you do. My
femoral! and the thing which owns
all this sickening pap. Behind these
tones and hues and morass of
color is — what? fire? a spark? some
dull spirit that moans in its cage? Ilove it all. The fleshy-rot smell I find
everywhere. Our passions caught in
flesh, pathetic, diseased, but still
passions. And this, everything — every
misbegotten body, every flesh-born
fire, all passing by — bodies I will
never have, bodies I will never
know and again I say I do not
want what I cannot have is still a lie.
Work Cited
R. Crumb's Kafka; art by Robert Crumb; script by David Zane Mairowitz. New York: Ibooks: Distributed by Simon & Schuster (2004)