Fassbinder's 3rd reading.

I

“In the throes of an almost murderous puberty," around the age of fourteen or fifteen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Initially, the novel struck him as “boring”: the first third depicted the directionless chaos of Weimar without putting a claw in his mind, or making him want to continue reading. Fassbinder nearly gave up on Döblin several times, as admitted in a March 1980 essay titled “The Cities of Humanity and the Human Soul”.

But decades later, the adult could still recall the instant when that changed for the teen. It was “p.155 of the 410 page paperback edition” — the meeting of the two “heroes", Biberkopf and Reinhold, mesmerized him. There was no going back after that.

“Devouring, gobbling, gulping down”: these are the words Fassbinder used to describe the state of reading that stopped feeling like reading and began to waver towards something like experiencing “life, suffering, despair, and fear.”

Fassbinder read Berlin Alexanderplatz three times (at least) during his life.

This ‘take-three’ — this reading trinity — intrigues me. Obviously, it speaks to the value of multiple readings, or to the attenuation of interpretations. When he first read the novel, for example, Fassbinder was quite young and bound to his family. He later said that this first reading presented him with a principle that would animate his work, namely, an interpenetration, a mutually-informing dynamic between returning to “one’s own reality” and thinking “morally about being realistic.” The novel “helps you accept the reading as the real thing, as sacred" without climbing on a pedestal to moralize. The crown, itself, is both ordinary and sacred. Ordinariness was interesting and dangerous.

"Life-support," Fassbinder called the novel. Life-affirming to readabout how men ruin themselves because they lack courage to “recognize” their need for one another. In Weimar, the impracticality of the heroes’ feelings made fear the only livable response. This first reading helped Fassbinder admit his own “paralyzing” fear of “homosexual longings”; it prevented him from “becoming completely and utterly sick, dishonest, desperate.” In his own words, Berlin Alexanderplatz saved him.

Five years later, when Fassbinder read the book again, he discovered something different in it: a way of thinking about “what I really means”, a way to resist the temptations of “living life secondhand”. The second reading offered the shock of recognition in the realization that many things had had considered part of himself “were nothing more than the things described by Döblin.” The reader had subconsciously turned the novelist’s imaginings into the script of his own life.

II

I want to pause here and note the difference between the two readings: if the First provided a glimpse of a larger reality that implicates the writer and reader, and allows the reader to use as a tool for deciphering life, then the Second reading revealed the extent to which the books we read socialize our imaginations and exert influence on our actions by expanding our views of possibility. Fassbinder’s self-recognition is what comes with the Second reading, but the nature of this re-cognition is to cognize the First readings’ influence on a life.

III

After viewing Piel Jutzi’s film version of Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder felt dissatisfied. He vowed to use cinema to “document” his own “involvement with this very special piece of literature.”

It took a decade, a different epiphany, a way of seeing. Reviewing his own films, Fassbinder discovered that there were more “quotations from Döblin’s novel” in his films than he’d realized — and many of these quotations were unconscious, or unintended. This prompted Fassbinder to undertake a third reading.

The third reading had a purpose: to get a clear picture of “what was going on between me and Alfred Döblin’s novel.” With this third reading, Fassbinder recognized that “this novel, a work of art, had helped determine the course of my life.” The course, here, designates more than how life could be (which he found in the first reading), or the way in which he saw himself in relation to the heroes (which he gleaned from the second reading), but in the art that he had produced. The reading transformed the novel into something like a formative relationship, an intellectual and emotional entanglement that touched everything in his life.

IV

Am I reading too much into the significance of the number 3 here? Perhaps. Poets are prone to such things. Still, the pure reasoners (and their reasonings) might appreciate a quotation from the opening pages of Berlin Alexanderplatz, as written by Alfred Döblin and translated by Michael Hofmann:

V

Berlin Alexanderplatz ends with Franz being committed to an asylum after being arrested for the murder Reinhold committed. The asylum puts Franz through “a reverse process of catharsis,” a socialization that transforms Franz into a normal or well-functioning citizen of Weimar.

The well-functioning citizen is the one who considers it a duty (or even an “honor”) to become a functionary. Like Franz after his reverse catharsis, the well-functioning is tamed; he has accepted the system that exists and defines success in relation to how high he climbs in it. “He will probably become a nationalist,” Fassbinder said of Franz in the interview. There was no way to survive his encounter with Reinhold in the world that the “heroes” had been given.

VI

”Cinema finds its language in the close-up,” filmmaker and former-Surrealist Luis Buñuel said on April 1, 1927. For Buñuel, a close-up is “anything that results from the projection of a series of images that comment or explain an aspect of the total view, whether it be a landscape or a person.”

The art of cinema is established by the relationship between shots. A film is a series of shots. A shot is a series of images. In the usual novel, the story follows a narrative arc. Learning this arc is a staple of writing workshops, as well as conventional rubric for analyzing plot and tabulating the “success” of a novel. The film studio formula, like the narrative arc, focus on satisfying an audience. The happy ending is in the resolution. But independent films, indie publishers, and minor writers tend to focus on experimenting at the level of the line, or how we see, and reimagining how existence is narrated visually.

Fassbinder did not make films that would satisfy the studio formula. Sometimes he even purposefully flattened narrative arcs. He stretched silence just past the point of bearability. His films make me squirm, makes it impossible to avoid reckoning with the gaps in dialogues, or recognizing myself in the rupture between characters who are asking for something as simple and human as comfort. We are never quite the persons we imagine. We are often the insecure freaks we play in ordinary life.

Oddly, the word vicinity comes to mind: to be ‘in the vicinity’ of something is different from merely observing it. Being in the vicinity encourages us to implicate our own eyes in how we see, and what we see, and why. Vicinity-driven thinking acknowledges the traces of the books that we have read on our lived experience. “And even if my reason tried to talk me out of it, I knew that my imagination was right,” wrote Peter Handke in one of my notebooks.

A part of the cover image for NYRB’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, as painted be George Grosz, whose incredible art illustrates the sordid misery that was Weimar for many.

Paul Theroux on Ernest Hemingway

“Lord of the Ring” by Paul Theroux.

Written in 1971, collected in Sunrise with Seamonsters.

Ernest Hemingway imagined himself, as all his admirers now do, a heavy-weight, a literary hard puncher and even physically a formidable opponent. He valued the attributes that the American male (and the Karamojong warrior) value. His biographer shares the attitude and the metaphor: "He ... dealt, almost singlehanded, a permanent blow against the affected, the namby-pamby . ." He took enormous pleasure in flooring a muscular Negro with his bare fists, and delivering a manuscript he could say, "I'll defend the title again against all the good young new ones." He spoke of the discipline needed for writing as similar to that for successful boxing; he was proud of his good health, doing exercises, running, swimming and rising early while he was engaged on a book; and he saw his writing career in terms of the ring: "I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr Stendhal." He had the humility to add, "But nobody's going to get me in the ring with Mr Tolstoy .. " His line was that he could lick practically any man in the house.

He was a destroyer and so are many of his characters: even the gentle Santiago recalls a triumphant arm-wrestling match (with a muscular Negro); others of his characters are fighters, inclined towards pugilism. One sees the glamor: his destroyers come in pairs and all eyes are on them; it is one big man against another, and implies competition, ultimately a winner and a loser. We are to admire the winner (Heming-way, not Turgenev; Santiago, not the Negro). But the very reverent biographer concedes bullying: "Throughout the month of May, Ernest's way, not Turgenev; Santiago, not the Negro). But the very reverent biographer concedes bullying: "Throughout the month of May, Ernest's behaviour was often that of a bully." Professor Carlos Baker is referring to Hemingway ruining his friend's catch of a large marlin by firing a tommy-gun at some circling sharks which, maddened by the taste of their own spilt blood, devour most of the marlin. Later in that same month Hemingway beats up Joseph Knapp, a New York publisher. Both of these incidents, tidied up to make the gunner heroic and the fight with the rich intruder a justly-deserved victory, are retold in Islands in the Stream, with the envoi, black calypso singers immortalising the fist-fight Lord of the Ring with a song as in 1935, they "celebrated Ernest's victory with an extemporaneous song about the 'big slob' from Key West." The boxer recalls his famous matches, the novelist his novels; a boxer is bigger than any of his fights and though writing is hardly a competitive art, much less a sport, the novelist postured deliberately to be bigger than any of his novels. The question of "style"', a favourite boxing word, is fundamental to a discussion of Hemingway's work; not style as a literary value but style as a posture, emphasising the face, the voice, the stance.

Hemingway blamed the bad reviews of Across the River and into the Trees on his photograph that appeared on the dust jacket (*Makes me look like a cat-eating Zombie"); the voice is familiar (*You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris ..."); and the stance? Always the boxer's: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."

The reputation is all, and counts for more than the writing. Asked who is the most popular American writer in the Soviet Union, the Russian journalist says,'"Papa." The note of friendly intimacy is common: it is the man that matters. The American writer produces a good book and acquires a reputation. The reputation displaces the idea of literary quality: the idea of the author is much more important than the ideas in the work. Interesting, the number of academics who care so deeply about the man's adventures and leave the work unread, or see blasphemy in a low evaluation of it.

Hemingway claimed to dislike academics, but those who flattered him were welcomed at his haunts and in his house; he yarned them, feeding them lines, took them on his boat, and wrote them candid letters. In the letter refusing Carlos Baker permission to write a biography, Hemingway mentions ("with almost bewildering frankness") how he practised coitus interruptus with his second wife. (The fact appears in Professor Baker's recent biography, Ernest Hemingway - A Life Story.) 

Since the aggressive narcissism of commerce and the vanity of money are the driving forces of reputation-making, the progress of the reputation is best described in the language of the stock-exchange. A writer appears on the market; he has considerable long-term upside potential; he gets a divorce and hits a slump, his plane crashes in a jungle and this is a technical rally; he tumbles and bottoms out, he meets resistance at the buyer lever, then rallies again and inflates and firms up and meets a negative critical flow, and so forth. This does not have much to do with writing, but Hemingway's reputation grew without much reference to his work, and in the years since his death, aided by the urgent whisperings of fact-finders and anecdotalists, it has rallied and consolidated sideways.

Now a "new" novel has been found; it was written twenty years ago and apparently abandoned by the author. It is technically his last novel and its publication is a triumph for those obsessed with the man. The novel has no literary importance, but its personal candour is essential. This is of course the basest motive for reading; contemptuous of the art of fiction, the reader is interested in the book only in so far as it gives access to the author: "This is just a story but Ernest Hemingway is writing it . . ." The satisfactions are finding out how Hemingway drank and handled a boat, and spoke, and made love, and treated his friends.

These revelations are considered important, for once the reputation is made and the novel is a study rather than a pleasure (or a bore), the hero of the novel is its author. Fortunately for Hemingway his life began to be studied before he failed as a novelist, so it was never acceptable to say, "This novel is bad." The novels were aspects of the man, and the man's heroism was never questioned.

Islands in the Stream is divided into three parts. In 195 1 Hemingway said that parts 2 and 3 were "in shape to publish" , but he did not publish them. The novel (to use the publisher's term; it is really nothing of the kind) is set in the Caribbean and seems originally to have been intended as a study of the sea. Previous titles of the sections were The Sea When Young, The Sea when Absent, and The Sea in Being, retitled in the present edition as "Bimini", "Cuba" and "At Sea." The sections are loosely linked by the common subject of the sea and by the main character, Thomas Hudson, who is "in appearance, manner, and personal history . .. clearly based on Ernest himself (according to Professor Baker). There was a fourth section, and Thomas Hudson was not the hero of it. This was the story of an old man, Santiago, who caught a marlin and battled to save it; it was published (Hemingway had some reservations about its length) as The Old Man and the Sea. Professor Baker reports that Hemingway was very enthusiastic about the unpublished parts of the book he was calling The Island and the Stream, but rather than publish it he turned from it and wrote A Moveable Feast, his last book, parts of which are prefigured in the reminiscences of Thomas Hudson. Hudson, in his youth, also lived with his wife and small child over a sawmill in Paris in the 192s, and had a cat named F Puss and liked the bicycle races and drank in cafés with James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Here, perhaps, is the reason Hemingway never published Islands in the Stream. It was autobiography - this is clear from the duplicated recollections in A Moveable Feast - but he wanted it to read as fiction. He wrote it at an age when most novelists turn to autobiography, but rather than reveal the novel as that, he published the story of Santiago and spent the last three years of his life writing a straightforward reminiscence, to which he added ambiguously in the Preface, "If the reader prefers, this Lord of the Ring book may be regarded as fiction . .." It is hard to say whether he would have published the present novel, had he allowed himself to live a few years longer. This is crucial because a writer can only be held responsible for what he publishes himself and stands by; he can't be blamed for writing a bad book that he chose to leave in a bottom drawer.

Thomas Hudson is a painter. He has been divorced and he lives in different places in the Caribbean. He seems to have a separate personality for each place. In the first section of the book, on the island of Bimini, he is a reticent friend, a quiet drunk and a devoted father; he fishes with his three boys and does a little painting of the Winslow Homer variety. The second section is set largely in a bar in Havana; here Hudson is a bar-fly, drinking and betting, and talking at some length to an elderly prostitute; he does no painting. A sea chase occupies the whole of the third section; Hudson is a bullying, Bogartesque ship's captain pursuing Germans along the coast of Cuba. Three episodes, hardly stories, and except for Hudson, who alters but does not grow, the episodes bear no relation to one another. The three boys, Hudson's children, are all dead by the time the second section opens, possibly to give Hudson nothing to live for, though more likely because Hemingway couldn't think of any way of working them into the conversation with the elderly prostitute or the pursuit of the Germans. The artless novelist has his reasons for disposing of characters, usually no more complicated than the eldest boy's in Jude the Obscure, when he hanged himself and his siblings: "Done because we are too menny."

Hudson gets little satisfaction (but evidently lots of cash) from his painting. He is, for most of the book, an aggressive self-absorbed man for whom killing a big fish and disembowelling a German are ways of proving one's manhood. It is the philosophy of combat - perversely based on killing one's friend, for the noblest combat is destroying something beautiful, something one values. "In the worst parts, when I was tiredest, I couldn't tell which was him and which was me," says Dave, one of the sons, after the fish had been caught and killed.

Incapable of creation, these characters see beauty in destruction; considering themselves men in the proverbial sense of the word, their ambition must be to win: to kill the lion, to floor the Negro, to catch the fish, to have always the winning hand. Achievement is irrelevant here (Hudson's painting is all but dismissed as daubing) because achievement implies solitary creation. Winning is another matter: one wins by beating one's opponent. Thus, most strangely: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."

"All fights are bad."

"I know it. But what are you going to do about them?"

"You have to win them when they start."

Failure is losing, because losing is humiliation, unbecoming to a man:

"Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do."

That is Hudson at his lowest point, a loser. He recovers, but others are not so lucky, for the last loser deserves it, as the winner deserves his success. The loser's mortality proves more than the winner's physical superiority - it implies the winner's immortality. So much for the fist-fight between Roger and the wealthy yachtsman, which Roger wins, saying, "That guy was no good, Tom." And Thomas Hudson agrees: "You taught him something." The implication is that the yachtsman has been taught that he will never win a fist-fight with a man Hemingway conceives to be morally superior. In this case the man should know better: Roger is a writer and the sniveling yachtsman he defeats is a publisher.

Hemingway insists on the rightness of the philosophy. Consequently there is an interminable repetition of the words fine and good and true and wonderful and brave and necessary, all applied to bullying and mean-spirited and unworthy acts, "a wonderful chase,” "a fine shot,” "a beautiful kill". A sententious utterance, implying if not employing one of these words, closes each incident. After Dave hooks the swordfish and yanks on him for six hours (and twenty-five pages of the book), the motto is, "But there is a time boys have to do things if they are ever going to be men." An odd thing for a painter to say; but Thomas Hudson is no creator.

There is a great deal of killing in the book, practically all of it gratuitous, as when the swordfish is killed or Thomas Hudson shoots a land crab that appears on his path (". .. the crab disintegrated ... Poor old crab, he thought..”) or the Germans are shelled. Murder is necessary and it is a shame it makes one feel bad:

Then why don't you care about anything? he asked himself. Why don't you think of them as murderers and have the righteous feelings that you should have . .. Because we are all murderers, he told himself. We all are on both sides, if we are any good, and no good will come of any of it. But you have to do it. Sure, he said.

We all are on both sides: "I couldn't tell which was him and which was me," says Dave when the fish is dead; and "He was a pretty good guy," Willie says of the German he's blown to bits.

The philosophy demands the sentimentality of pity. And grief is self-pity. Here is Hudson revealing the death of his son to the mother of the boy, his ex-wife:

"That isn't it," she said. "Tell me, is he dead?"

“Sure.”

"Please hold me tight. I am ill now." He felt her shaking and he knelt by the chair and held her and felt her tremble. Then she said: "And poor you. Poor, poor you."

After a time she said: "I'm sorry for everything I ever did or said."

"Me, too."

"Poor you and poor me."

"Poor everybody," he said, and he did not add, "Poor Tom."

A very large number of suicides, by various means, are mentioned in the lovel as well, remarked upon with a kind of queer joy. Obeying the rerverse logic of destruction, the destroyer as hero, it is consistent that fter subduing or killing every powerful thing on earth, the man, to laintain the image of his invincibility, kills himself. The warrior runs pon his own sword. Self-slaughter is the only acceptable end for the estroying hero; any other death is humiliating defeat. Hudson does not commit suicide. At the end of the book, wounded by Germans for whom has developed an eager affection, he is full of self-love and self-loathing hich, combined, turn to pride and a satisfied self-pity. Motto: "You never understand anybody that loves you."

The Hemingway Stamp, that cauliflower earmark that characterises his worst fiction, is everywhere apparent. Hudson reflects on catnip: "There still should be some catnip in the shelf of drawers of the cat room if it hasn't gotten too dry and lost its force. It lost its force very quickly in the tropics and the catnip that you raised in the garden had no force at all." Hudson has a drink: “... strong with the real Gordon's gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow . .. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink."

The descriptions of food and wine are given lovingly, while lovemaking is reduced to utter vagueness: "He did something . .. She did something else ..."

The novel is offered as something of a departure for Hemingway, with "a rich and relaxed sense of humor." But nearly all the humor depends on seeing bullying or ridicule as comic: attempting to set a dock on fire, humiliating the yachtsman or taking the mickey out of a tourist or "a fine old whore," or teasing a sleepy-headed servant. In each case there is a victim who is weak or passive; he is made a figure of fun and one is meant to find him contemptible and so laughable. The humor has Thomas Hudson and his friends in stitches, and in many places Hudson says how much he is enjoying himself, but he is an embittered, heartless, unquestioning and deluded man. Physical superiority is what Hudson cares about but he is old and life is unbearable for him. The disappointment and the sour regret give the novel the tone of a suicide note. It is sad to think that Hemingway wrote it, and understandable that he left it in a bottom drawer.

Fassbinder's "Answers to Questions from Schoolchildren"

In 1979/80 a German school class sent out the following questionnaire. The first twenty six questions were asked of all the respondents; the last six questions, the so-called Personal Questionnaire, were formulated individually for each participant in the survey. What follows are Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s responses to these questions (the annotations are my own).

Do you find it difficult not to feel like an outsider in a group of people you don't know?

Depends on the group. In most of them, yes.

Do you consider it likely that there could be an evolutionary regression that would take us back to a very primitive stage of existence?

No.

Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrial beings?

Yes.

How do you picture your old age?

I don't expect to experience it.

What do you think of Christmas without a Christmas tree?

People who have been brought up so hypocritically that they need such symbols should just be left alone until we have a society where such things aren't necessary anymore.

How do you react to negative criticism?

Positively.

What party game do you like best?

The Truth Game. (1)

What do you think about the hostility toward children in the Federal Republic?

There is a larger problem, that of people who have been showered with too much fake love, and thereby help to preserve society in its present form.

Do you see the mentally ill as a burden to our society?

In our society there's no one who isn't mentally ill.

Do you find it difficult to show your feelings uninhibitedly to someone close to you?

No.

Under what conditions would you be prepared to make a great sacrifice?

For love.

In time of personal crisis, would you consult a psychiatrist or a psychologist?

Certainly.

What degree have you earned?

None.

Would you be willing to adopt a handicapped child?

No. (2)

Do you think other people like you?

I make it so hard for other people to like me that only a few are left.

Do you look forward to the future, or do you approach it with pessimism?

That's not an issue for me.

Who is your hero, and why?

Heinrich von Kleist, because he succeeded in finding someone who wanted to die with him.

Were you brought up in an authoritarian way? If so, do you regret it?

No.

When and why were you last embarrassed?

I'm always embarrassed when a person in uniform looks at me.

What does your self-confidence rest on?

On my skill.

What do you consider most important in a relationship between partners?

Constantly reexamining the values on which the partnership is based.

Do you see nuclear energy plants as a threat?

No.

Do you allow yourself to be influenced by other people's moods?

Depends on the moods.

What do you think is needed for a perfect Sunday morning?

Caviar, champagne, the Eighth Symphony of Mahler, "radio activity" by Kraftwerk, the Sunday Bild paper, a book so exciting you don't want it to end, a friend, a good friend, and the possibility of unplugging the phone.

In your experience, what trait or what kind of behavior has turned out to be particularly helpful in establishing contact with others?

I can't answer that like a normal person; for me it's my so-called prominence.

Are your television plays based on true happenings?

There aren't any true happenings. The true is the artificial.

Do you allow yourself to be influenced by others in your choice of a topic, or do you pick everything for yourself?

From the moment you make up your mind not to live on a desert island you no longer pick everything for yourself.

What party do you vote for in the Bundestag elections?

I don't vote anymore.

Do you believe in the things you show in your films?

Yes.

Do you like to play sports, and if yes, which ones?

Table tennis, swimming, faire l'amour.

How do you visualize your professional and private future?

There isn't any past, there isn't any present, so there isn't any future, either.

(1) There is a “Truth Game” in Fassbinder’s film, Chinese Roulette, though he could be referencing another Truth Game entirely.

(2) This is simply to acknowledge that some readers might have reacted in shock to this statement, a shock that, in many ways, both denies and privatizes the challenges of caring for persons who require continuous assistance and whose independence takes different forms than that of the abled. It is aberrant that people who are incapable of caring for disabled children are permitted to adopt them, just as it is aberrant to live in a country where disabled parents and children do not receive extensive subsidies and support from their government. And it is aberrant to believe that anyone should ever be forced to birth, raise, or adopt a child against their will and inclination.

On the 100th anniversary of Kafka's cosmos.

— This is an original detail.

“‘This is an original detail,’ he said, indicating what I saw to be an iron ladder descending into the gloom,” Elif Batuman writes in a wildly Kafkaesque short fiction titled “The Board Will Decide If I’m Qualified to Live in the Basement,” featured as Recommended Reading on Electric Literature today, and collected in a new anthology of Kafka-inspired prose, The Cage Went in Search of the Bird (Catapult). It goes without saying that I recommend it, despite my having said it.

Little Franz, mid-ruin.

— I should have been the little ruin dweller.

Against the chaos of his world, Franz Kafka poses a cosmology of fragments. I’m thinking of May 18-19 of 1910, the official "comet night," an event that reproached the patriarchs across time and space. For those 48 hours in May, the arrival of Halley's comet intersected with Kafka’s big bang, his big blame: the official reproaching of his parents for the failed education they gave him.

Both reproach and refutation have done him great harm, as Kafka sees it while staring at family photos. This great harm emerges ekphrastically, in relation to the poise of the "group pictures.” The son responds to the harm in fabulist way: he introduces them to each other in his imagination, which is to say, in a story.

An image from a photo: "The dress worn too beautifully floating over American boots."

The family members, these people who have harmed him, are unforgivable. "I should have been the little ruin dweller…" – This is Kafka’s refrain, and it appears here, in the rubble of that foundational bourgeois event known as the family portrait.

But how does a reproach address those "persons past," who are frozen in sepia ice by the photo and onerously present as in an endlessly-interpretable tableau? Who is the author of past mistakes in education?  

Of the persons past, Kafka writes: "They cannot remember! They stand there like tired dogs, because they use up all their strength to remain upright in one’s memory." The reproaches attach themselves to each image the way fondness attaches itself to a familiar binkie. "And now show me the reproach that in such a situation wouldn’t turn into a sigh," writes Kafka, drawing on the reproach’s capacity as a communicative mode, "is always on the verge of becoming a sigh…" 

Like the characters in the photo, the reproaches stand side by side, forming relationships with each other: "The large reproach to which nothing can happen, takes the small one by the hand." In the meantime: "We remain upright, because it relieves us."

— Present unhappiness consists of nothing but confusion.

Strangers glimpsed through a window make it easier for him to stop thinking about the reproaches. When looking out the window, Kafka quiets "the urge to reproach."

He looks out the window frequently when standing in a room with his father. He describes himself as standing by the window and looking out. The parents and family who have done him “harm out of love, makes their guilt even greater." For Kafka, love is almost more dangerous than hate, or more damaging.

Like other dispirited spiritual seekers, Kafka goes to visit Dr. Steiner and learn more about theosophy. He admits to Dr. Steiner that he fears theosophy because it might add confusion (his word) which would be a problem since his "present unhappiness consists of nothing but confusion.” There is no coexistence between what he feels and what he knows. It is untenable: his happiness in one realm ruins his ability to function in the other.

Kafka quotes from Goethe's diary; mentions that his "foreign nature" is suggestive of a "capacity for transformation". Goes to look at himself in the mirror and spies something transformative about his own eyes.

Unreliable: family, work, religion, bourgeois values.

Reliable: insomnia, restlessness, poison —"The wind blows through it. One sees only the emptiness, one searches in all corners, and does not find one self."

His sleeplessness is related to writing, and this is not true for all writers. At the risk of distinguishing between working habits and demands that work makes on the body, it is simply not the case that all writers suffer from severe, lifelong insomnia. Situational insomnia is miserable, but it differs vastly from the lifelong neurological condition of insomnia. No “sleep hygiene regime” cures or resolves it. Stop blowing smoke up my ass and sending me the bill.

Kafka crosses his arms like a vampire to sleep– or like a man in a coffin. He has suffered from insomnia since childhood. But it is easier to blame the unwritten. It is more satisfying to blow smoke up one’s own ass than to submit to having it blown there by others.

— Long insomnia description here.

— At the risk of being misunderstood.

"The great horror that everything in me is ready for a literary work," Kafka writes. And yet writing defines the condition of aliveness for him. To become alive is to write the book. Life is the thing that wants to be written.

Writing isn’t a substitute for life or an escape from life—it is simply, life. Kafka cannot know himself without writing – cannot even find a word for his condition.

The definition of "real despair": [see quote on p. 5].
An inability to stay inside himself which manifests as a sort of impertinence.
"At the risk of being misunderstood…": [see quote on p. 8].
The room is the prison and the space of revelation.
The desaturation of color dawns on the mind in a room that watches light move – "bounded in a curved line from the head of the bed."
Light gobbles up hues.
The dissolution of self in sidewalks.
"I’m restless and poisonous," Kafka says, referencing an earlier walk in which he "lost the strength for sadness."

—-Even in conditions that today seem unbearable.

"I have no time to write letters twice," Kafka confessed on November 27, 1912.

— No time to preserve a copy of his own words; no time for correspondence; no consideration of writing letters without a keeping a copy because correspondence, too, is a text for Kafka. Like Rilke, Kafka mines his correspondence for stories, metaphors, and figures. Like Rilke, Kafka is better as desiring his interlocutor on paper than encountering that desire as flesh, in real life.

—- Fear of waiting, a terror Kafka connects to his father’s use of a particular word in childhood. The word "ultimo,” and the dread that swarmed his mind when his father employed the ultimo: "the last, feared for so long, could never be purely overcome".

— New headache of a still unknown sort.

Kafka describes his diary as encounter with self in relation to time: "In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today, when the possibility of surveying our condition at that time does make us wiser, but we therefore must recognize all the more the undauntedness of our striving at that time, which in sheer ignorance nonetheless sustained itself."

He is ready to die because he cannot write the book.

He succumbs to time with dread, adding the famous description of having his finger on his eyebrow.

Constant, this sense of despair and being forsaken.

Headaches lengthen as books progress.

"New headache of a still unknown sort. Brief painful stabbing over my right eye."

—- Nothing, nothing.

Betrayed by the noise of neighbors.

Forsaken by everyone and their noises.

Distracted by the shadow of the oversaturated family photos: "Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even those who demand it) are like usurers, they are happy to risk the capital as long as they get the interest."

Econometrically-devastated. Emotionally over-laundered.

"I see the task and the way to it, I would only have to push through some thin obstacles and can't do it. —Playing with the thoughts of F."

He loves un-imagining himself in letters to Felice Bauer.

He will fold her into his fictions.

And: "She is again the center of it all."

— Pull quote on bachelor and marriage here.

— The ancient wrong that man has committed.

He returns to reproach in his letters to Milena.

And the poison continues: the pointed fingers, the ultimo, the ultimatum, the thing he does not want to become.

The judgment he leverages against his family.

Judgement is everything, he whispers.

He expresses a longing for sickness, which hides a longing to be tended, which he blames on his mother.

As for his failure to love his mother, he blames this on the German language.

—- And there is some venom in me, some poison I can’t articulate, connected to the terror of dying, of being erased, of not ‘surviving’ the aesthetic of late capitalism’s cuteness, of being consigned to eat the dust of my own dustbin; or finding the self defined by the pseudo sanctity of its therapy-industrial complex that takes middle-class American experience as norm and extrapolates all kinds of borders and inhumane boundaries that demand continuous police, that need incessant forms of policing (holy shit has anyone ever craved police as much as 21st century US)? I want to position love as a counterpoint, but it is easier to be generous when the world is built around preserving your ‘lifestyle’. Or: it is easier to be generous when the world is glossed by the generosity we bestow upon ourselves in continual self-esteem baths and self-affirmations. The literary world is certainly generous (yet suffocating), exciting (yet predictable and mechanistic), sensitive (yet obsessed by status, self-positioning and winning). One writes to spite it sometimes. One writes furiously, sneaking the no-no of adverbs in the pile of relentless things waiting to be written, hardly daring to wonder what will be read, if any of it gets published, if you will ever stop cringing when imagining being read. And there is that venom in it: no one will forgive you for saying the thing you have written. Maybe Kafka was blessed? Is it better to be read when dead? Milena, I am so dirty…

Rilke's "Letter to a Young Girl"

While in Muzot, on December 8, 1925, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of short prose poems titled “Four Sketches.” This "little notebook with four prose-pieces" was sent to Monique Briod on December 10. In one of the pieces, Rilke refers to a “billoquet”, a variation on the French word, bilboquet. The billoquet was a type of wooden toy, consisting of a cord with a ball on one end and a stick on the other. The goal of the game was to catch the ball on the spike-end of the stick.

Jeanne Bôle's L'Enfant au Bilboquet (around 1880)

For some reason, I kept thinking of the motion of tossing and catching a ball on a leash, and how this leashed ball makes the constraint of the game visible—-and how visible constraints appear in Rilke’s correspondence as the limits of what can be said and transacted in language.

His “Letter to a Young Girl” mesmerized me as a teen. Back then, it seemed so daring in its unboundedness. Now, it is beautiful precisely for the severity of its constraints. I share it here, this little world of consecrated words in epistolary form. This little ball on a leash of its own:

You know that I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion. All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood, for which reason I precede my work, through a pure and simple way of life that is free from irritants and stimulants, as with an introductory prelude, so that I cannot be deceived over the true spiritual joy that consists in a concord, happy and as if transfigured, with the whole of Nature.

A little time yet, and perhaps I shall no longer grasp all the conditions out of which these songs (the Duino Elegies), begun ago, arose. If you know some of these works someday you will understand me better; it is so difficult to say what one sometimes means. If I look into my conscience I see but one law, relentlessly commanding: to lock myself into myself and in one stretch to end this task that was dictated to me at the very center of my heart. I am obeying. For you know that being here I have wanted only that, and I have no right whatsoever to change the direction of my will before I have ended the act of my sacrifice and my obedience.

I have now done almost all the preparatory work, that is, I have redressed the uncomfortable delays of my correspondence. Think, I have written—I counted them this morning—115 letters, and not one was less than four pages, and many ran to eight, even twelve in close writing. (Naturally I do not count what has gone off to you. That is not writing, that is breathing through the pen.)

How many long hours of letters! There are so many people who expect of me—I hardly know what: help, advice—from me, who find myself so helpless before the most imperative urgencies of my life. And although I know they deceive themselves, are mistaken, still I feel tempted–and I don't believe it is vanity–-to tell them something out of my experiences, some of the fruits of loneliness. There are young women as well as young girls terribly deserted even in the bosom of their family. Young married women appalled at what has happened to them. And then all these young working people, mostly revolutionaries, who come out of literature and write drunken, malicious poetry. What shall I say about the state prisons without any orientation whatever, take refuge into them? How to raise their despairing hearts, how shape their formless will, which under the violence of events has taken on a borrowed, quite provisional character, and which they now carry in themselves like an alien strength, the use of which they scarcely know.

Malte's experiences oblige me from time to time to answer these writings from people I do not know. He, he would have done it, if ever a voice had reached him. Furthermore it is he who obliges me to continue this sacrifice, exhorts me to love with all my love's capacities all things to which I want to give form. That is the irresistible force the usufruct of which he left to me. Imagine to yourself a Malte who should have had a lover or even a friend in that Paris that was so terrible for him. Would he then ever have entered so deep into the confidence of things? For these things (he often told me in our few intimate conversations), whose essential life you want to reproduce, first ask you: Are you free? Are you ready to dedicate your whole love to me? To lie with me, as Saint Julian the hospitable lay with the leper, in that ultimate embrace that can never be fulfilled in an ordinary and fleeting love of one's neighbor, but has for its impetus love, the whole of love, all love to be found on earth? And if a thing like that sees (so Malte told me), if it sees you busy with even a single line of your own interest, it will close itself to you. It will perhaps bestow a rule upon you with a word, make you some slight sign of friendship, but it will forgo giving you its heart, entrusting you with its patient nature and its starlike steadfastness, which makes it so much resemble the constellations of the sky.

You must, in order that it shall speak to you, take a thing during a certain time as the only one that exists, as the only phenomenon which through your diligent and exclusive love finds itself set down in the center of the universe and which in this incomparable place on that day the angels serve. What you read here, my friend, is a chapter of those lectures I received from Malte, my only friend during so many years full of suffering and temptations, and I see that you mean the same, absolutely, when you speak of your drawings and paintings, which seem  valid only because of that infatuation with which brush or pencil carry out the embrace, the tender taking of possession.

Don't be frightened by the expression "fate", which I used in my last letter. I call fate all external events (illnesses, for example, included) which can inevitably step in to interrupt and annihilate a disposition of mind and training that is by nature solitary.

Cézanne must have understood this when during the last years of his life he removed himself from everything that, as he expressed it, might "hook him tight", and when, religious and given to traditions as he was, he yet gave up going to his mother's funeral in order not to lose a working day. That went through me like an arrow, when I learned it, but like a flaming arrow that, while it pierced my heart through, left it in a conflagration of clear sight. There are few artists in our day who grasp this stubbornness, this vehement obstinacy. But I believe that without it one remains always at the periphery of art, which is rich enough as it is to allow us pleasant discoveries, but at which, nevertheless, we halt only as a player at the green table who, while he now and again succeeds with a "coup", remains nonetheless at the mercy  of chance, which is nothing but the docile and dexterous ape of the law.

I have often had to take away Malte's writings from young people, forbidding them to read them. For this book, which seems to emerge in the proof that life is impossible, must so to speak be read against its current. If it contains bitter reproaches, these are absolutely not directed against life. On the contrary, they are the evidence that, for lack of strength, through distraction and inherited errors we lose almost completely the countless earthly riches that were intended for us.

Try, my dearest friend, to run through the overabundance of those pages in this spirit. This will not spare you tears, but will contribute to giving all your tears a meaning clearer and, so to speak, more transparent.

[Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969): 255-258.]

Edgar Boutanche, Bilboquet (2014).