B.’s not feeling too full of himself today. We all have
those days when we can’t write, and while I can’t find the quote from Goethe he
seems to be referencing, he seems to be attributing permission to drop it for a
day now and then if the muse deigns not to visit. I find that while B. may be
saying that, he doesn’t really practice it: He writes anyway. He just writes about
how impossible it is to write. The Dream
Songs, full as they are of inadequacies and insecurity boldly asserted,
provide for that as well as anything in literature I can think of. Kafka was
paralyzed by doubt and lack of inspiration all the time, and he was good at
turning that into inspiration as well. That’s what The Metamorphosis is all about anyway, I think. You wake up feeling
lower than a cockroach? Been there. You get a pass today. Use it as a good
excuse to slink away—stay in bed, get drunk, wallow in anxiety, go indulge some
devastating vice that will really give some justification to how crappy you
feel. Instead, Kafka writes his great novella about waking up as a cockroach.
B. is following in Kafka’s footsteps here. In fact, he has more in common with
Kafka than I’ve ever realized. The details are different, but they both
chronicle the existential predicaments of the absurd 20th century in
their ways. Kafka’s the greater writer—I doubt there’s much argument over that—because
he so, so clearly gives form to the modern existential predicament. But B. is
close behind. I just have a bit more trouble swallowing that his personal
psychological landscape is representative of or symbolic of the broadest
cultural patterns in the West in the way that Kafka’s work is universally given
credit for. “A Hunger Artist” is a story that I really feel I understand. The
mechanized, merchandised world that has arisen around us has no interest in
unorthodoxy (art, almost by
definition, is unorthodox) unless the art affirms the orthodox or attains it by
generating wealth or the accolades of success. It maybe wasn’t always this way,
and to say that is more than empty nostalgia. Something about the mindless repetition
of mechanized industry and rise of mindless industrial political power has
devastated the individual and the artist and devalued the individual’s
idiosyncratic value. “The Penal Colony,” Kafka’s story about an elaborate
diabolical lesson-teaching torture/execution device, is about supposedly helping
the lost unorthodox individual—symbolized as a criminal—back into the fold of
orthodoxy. Of course the valuable light of understanding only comes on at the
moment of the criminal’s death, but that’s only a detail. The moment of
understanding that arrives through precisely orchestrated torture is worth it
for the lost individual, but more importantly, the orthodoxy of the state needs
that moment of the criminal’s understanding in death to validate itself. The
machine breaks down in the story, of course, and the final execution doesn’t
impart its transcendent lesson. It just tortures brutally and randomly, which
is the real point. The myth of the transcendent value in the order of
bureaucratic orthodox power is hogwash. It was all about control from the
beginning. “Report to an Academy” is about the ape individual leaving his
essential identity behind and joining the orthodoxy of the human—a comical,
doomed and twisted conception from the beginning. When we lose touch with our
symbolic inherent wild apeness, we arrive into the State filled with all these articulate,
self-congratulatory and sophisticated bureaucratic monsters.
I think it matters that Kafka wrote in German, as B. is
saying, a language which he had mastered, but was not his mother tongue. German’s
connection with the Fascist state—obviously through Hitler and the Nazis, but
as well through artists and philosophers like Wagner and Nietzsche—is foundational.
Even Goethe, a Romantic more than a century removed from the Nazis, shows some
of the seeds that might be seen to have twistedly blossomed into a
philosophical Übermensch and from there into an actual Hitler. Goethe wrote
I have come to the frightening
conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that
creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess
tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture
or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all
situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or
de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as
they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help
them become what they are capable of becoming.
Totally in Goethe’s defense, he’s not writing about power.
He’s addressing the primacy of the individual consciousness in interpreting its
environment. But this could get twisted, and apparently did once elements of
power were grafted onto it.
Berryman would never have admitted it or never have been
able to admit it, probably, but I often wonder if he wasn’t defining himself as
a kind of postmodern anti-Übermensch, struggling for primacy not through the
exertion of power through will, but through the exertion of feebleness through
will. It’s what lurks behind this DS 110: I can’t write, I’m all regret, swallowing
my own vomit and all that (an image partially borrowed from Kafka’s “The Penal
Colony”), I’ve disappointed everyone, including myself on this day when I’m too
broken and exhausted to even write,
the only thing I have left. Yadda yadda. But the poem arrives anyway, and there
is a slick sleight of hand at work to bring it about. I may feel like nothing
more than a loathsome roach this morning, but through all the nightmares, delirium
tremens, and waking pain, my thirty-year discipline and commitment—the
necessary traits of the Will to Power—haven’t wavered. Therefore, I will write the roach. He understands
that it’s the doing of it that matters. Even though I really suspect Goethe would
despise him, this still makes him Goethe’s disciple, who wrote: “Boldness has
genius, power and magic in it.” B. is bold in his feebleness, powerful in his
assertion of weakness, and there is an underhanded magic in his genius. It’s
incredibly twisted and bizarre, and I don’t even like it very much. In, fact,
we’re ready to move past it. There is something whole and wholesome to assert,
a life in tune with nature, the incontrovertible given and safety of our
existence. Goethe knew it: “Leap and the net will appear,” he wrote. But B.’s abstracted,
groundless Will to Power is still really something to watch.
Do you know if this was written while he was in the asylum?
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