repetition II

early this summer, after deep interrogation revealed a rupture in my innermost being, i decided that i must go back to texas, to return to that shore on which i had shipwrecked years ago, so that i may find the dead among the wreckage, so that i may bury them, so that i may remember who that self was who decided to go on life’s voyage of discovery.

because i adhered to no schedule, i would simply go where the feeling took me. only by trusting my feelings, i reasoned, could i hope to truly discover them.

i stayed mostly to myself in the southern- and western-most parts of the state. i was alarmed again and again each time i sat two feet above the ground, flying through the world at nearly 100 miles an hour. i felt astonished at the desert, that all of this had outlived its purpose as the bottom of the ocean floor, had emerged from the depths to live life anew and be among the earth as the earth. i was mesmerized, moreover, at how grotesque nothing could be, at how visceral of an experience looking into the unreflective truth of the horizon proved, the recognition of one’s own flesh in the dust into which one day it will pass.

“WRONG WAY,” read the signs that adorned the highway. “TRUCK STOP,” “KITCHEN,” “LAST GAS FOR 60 MILES.” “COLD BEER,” “UNLESS,” “PRADA.” signs, the sheer madness of them. everywhere trying to impart meaning on shapelessness.

i decided one day immediately following the outbreak of the protests that it was time to head home. at a campsite along the path back, i happened upon an architect from shreveport.

“i’ve just been on the road for two weeks,” i told him. i told him about the artifact i discovered which eventually turned out to be pineapple tours’ ‘gold rush’. i told him about that young man who had come out here so many years ago to see what lay past the limits of the knowable, what he could forge himself into in the beyond, that young man whom i left behind so long ago now. i told him above all about the emptiness of the whole thing, about the signs which gave it form, the signs, the madness of signs.

“you mean to tell me,” he said, took a sip of his beer, smoked his cigarette, “you didn’t even see one rodeo?”

repetition I

“when i think about it, i must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects,” franz kafka reveals in a diary entry dated 19 july, 1910. if only he’d been born a little freer, in the country, perhaps on a mountain where he could be baked beneath the sun, then eventually his good qualities would have sprung up in him naturally, “with the might of weeds.”

he starts over. “when i think about it,” he begins. he unravels each detail with a heightened degree of scrutiny—he must press each “tightly together in [his] memory, otherwise one would drop out here and there—but since [he has] pressed them together so, the whole mass crumbles bit by bit anyhow.”

so he starts again. “often i think it over, and then i always have to say that my education has done me great harm in some ways.” longer, more granular this time, he unfurls his childhood, his upbringing, his school in the middle of the city, as though an endless scroll of paper which leads up and into the heightened crescendo of “the might of weeds.”

“often i think it over and give my thoughts free rein,” he starts again.

again. “often i think it over and give my thoughts free rein, without interfering, but i always come to the conclusion that my education has spoiled me more than i can understand.” the details have exploded by now into a story which fills several pages. “the reproaches lie around inside me like strange tools that i hardly have the courage to seize and lift any longer.” kafka doubts, he doubts himself, he doubts his abilities as a thinker, as a writer—and yet how can he, when he’s writing right now?

“i often think it over and give my thoughts free rein without interfering, but i always come to the same conclusion: that my education has spoiled me more than all the people i know and more than i can conceive.” kafka seems to have found the perfect expression for this thought, because it is never reformulated again.