We’re all going to the castle: part 1

Even when he was alive, he wasn’t the easiest person to get on with. He was demanding. He was finicky (oh God, how he was finicky). He was profoundly weird. And by profoundly weird I mean he didn’t fit: didn’t fit the world or worldliness. No one got his jokes. And if ever there was a man who could make a serious joke, ‘twas he.

He was what you might call, with all the respect in the world, “different.”

Since his death, people have been more willing to spend time thinking about his ideas and the things he wrote. I’m not angry with them; some people are easier to deal with when they are not so alive.

And how can I be angry with them? After all, Kafka was quite dead when we met.

Franz Kafka died at 40. It was 1924. I’m not talking about him now because it’s near his birthday, his death-day, the anniversary of a significant publication or anything like that.

No, this is just because he’s always helped me make sense of things and I need to make sense of things.

I think most of us need to make sense of things and maybe we don’t know how.

This country can be baffling. So can the rest of the world, but I wish to stick to that which I am most familiar.

I can’t be a Kafka scholar because I don’t speak German and the gatekeepers of Kafka studies got no time for me. So bear in mind that anything you read here does not come from a stamped and peer-reviewed source (unless I say otherwise). But, like my friend, I’m not waiting for someone to give me permission to think.

Was that, in fact, his greatest public service? The clarity and precision of his work could only come from someone whose mind could not be manipulated by state or general society. The independence of his thinking may have left him intellectually a bit lonely in his time, but it allowed him to write the stories and journals that can keep us company now.

Kafka worked as a lawyer with an insurance company. He kept proposing to women, but couldn’t bring himself to get married. He had the worst relationship with his father, but could get along with Ma Kafka. His bedroom was practically a corridor and he had little privacy. Nothing in his life could have prepared the world for what he would write.

And what he wrote about was alienation and the arbitrariness of the powers that be. He understood loneliness and what it feels like not to belong, and, in not belonging, to be shunned. And quite depressingly (yet simultaneously reassuringly) he knew that when people find power – or power finds them – there is a sort of reverse alchemy that turns good to beastly and meaning to confusion.

The Trial, The Metamorphosis, Amerika, the Letter to His Father – these are the works that get cited to show how he understood that so much of what we live through is not to be understood. No one ever told us we were meant to get it. There is a big picture somewhere and if you don’t feel like you can see it, it’s ok. Maybe all we can do is make sense of a little niche that means the most to us.

People often tell me they can’t with Kafka. He’s too difficult, too abstruse.

Then they admit they’ve never read anything by him.

The Castle is the one I think everyone should read. It is The Ultimate Guide to Living in TT. (I live here, I won’t speak for anywhere else.)

This is a story about someone who is trying to do a job but can get no answers about who to talk to, when he might talk to them, where they are, what is expected of him. Some minion of officialdom keeps telling him to wait. So he waits.

When people tell me they don’t understand his writing, I point to government offices (and not only the ones that deal with driver’s licences or passports). I refer them to speeches or outbursts or general utterances by political leaders. I gesture to banks and other such places of befuddlement.

Like many Kafka characters, when we are ill-served by those who are supposed to be helping, helpful, or at the very least not-a-hindrance, we seldom complain. Because we didn’t expect anything else. Or anything better.

We should expect better. We should have better. I need better.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.