(no subject)

[proximoception]

Josef K.'s last actions:

But he didn’t do so; instead he twisted his still-free neck and looked above him. He could not rise entirely to the occasion, he could not relieve the authorities of all their work; the responsibility for this final failure lay with whoever had denied him the remnant of strength to do so. His gaze fell upon the top story of the building adjoining the quarry. Like a light flicking on, the casements of a window flew open, a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and height, leaned far out abruptly, and stretched both arms out even further.

Who was it? A friend? A good person? Someone who cared? Someone who wanted to help? Was it just one person? Was it everyone? Was there still help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? Of course there were. Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can’t withstand a person who wants to live. Where was the judge he’d never seen? Where was the high court he’d never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. (Mitchell version)

Those of Septimus:

Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the door. Holmes would say "In a funk, eh?" Holmes would get him. But no; not Holmes; not Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to foot, he considered Mrs. Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with "Bread" carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not him or Rezia’s (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun was hot. Only human beings — what did they want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. "I’ll give it you!" he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on Mrs. Filmer’s area railing.

Those of Clarissa, other than being:

It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.

Septimus' old man and Clarissa's old woman are their "natural death" future selves, but also that about their present selves that is able to keep that end in prospect, and that in doing so becomes one with that later self. Septimus' sees him, Clarissa's may or may not see her. Going down the stairs vs. putting the light out reflect their respective decisions to jump and not jump (thus die of old age, put off the moment of acceptance till then). The "little room" to which Clarissa has withdrawn is that of mental privacy. You have to have one to leave one, I guess. Clarissa's ability to reflect gives her more details about the older self reflected. "The sun was hot" meets "Fear no more the heat of the sun." Not because it goes down, but because you can make it do so. To not do it now is to do it then. That is the choice we get, but it is a choice. We can turn off the sun then or now.

But the hot sun, for Septimus, is about how life is good and he didn't want to die. Fear no more how good life is and fear no more how you don't want to die. They won't take away your choice of how to leave. Her night, the sky with "something of her own in it," is unexpectedly pale, not dusky. Ashes - the fear of the sun is one of fire, not of sunburn. Of what should be good in life proving too good, thus loseable, or too strong, thus removing us from choice. But it will burn out. Pallor - the reflection of withdrawn rays about the sky, perhaps aided by the moon. The leaden circles of time, echoing some fancies of Septimus that the rings of the clockbells might cut him, disperse at once with the acceptance of death's inevitability. It all becomes less serious, more fun. Thus not pitying Septimus, who doesn't pity himself - for him this is not tragedy. We speak against the courage of the suicide, but of course soldiers (hence Woolf making Septimus one) are supposed to value something more than their own life. Something outside the self, but why not also something inside? The later self who gets to go downstairs or turn the light out, say. Their freedom to do that alone.

Kafka's top floor may be the mind (our brain's on our own) or may be heaven. The messenger from the Great Wall story has arrived exactly too late, as he always has for everyone - just like the gate intended for each person is shut in their face at their death. That the failure is one of substance is made clear here, since blame lies not with Josef K. but with whoever left him without the needed strength for (mandated) suicide. The spreading of fingers in response to the reaching of arms can be seen as an answering stretch, or the catching of a throw, or a gesture if farewell, or a warding off of a threat or unwanted offer, or the revelation that hands are where our intentions fall apart (in doubt, in competing thus self-defeating choices of way) as much as they're the extremes of our reach. The fingers spread immediately after the possible meanings of the reacher are considered, as though counting them. Leaning stretching arms might seem to miss spread fingers because they push through the gaps between them, but of course the real problem is one of distance. The figure in the quarry can raise his all he likes, the one in the upper storey lean and stretch precariously, but they cannot touch.

Is he his own judge? Is the high court his own mind? Why not shoot his backup executioners with the offered gun? But of course that doesn't matter. If it's him that's doing it, there's something in himself that's turned against him. We die "like dogs" either because we cannot connect with the power within sufficiently to overcome the world without, or because we cannot connect with the power without sufficiently to conquer what's awry within. But of course there's no proof that we can't until we decidely haven't. All of time is trying, is a trial. "Investigations of a Dog" is Kafka's most underrated story, I think. There the failure of the dog to either be a dog or admit she is a person is the trouble, but there too the failure is not a failure: what she cannot do she cannot do. The expression "to die like a dog" emphasizes the manner, the lack of dignity or burial or help, but that's not quite what's meant here. We die like dogs because any death is like a dog's, is a reality we share with all other animals, despite our assumptions that we are or should or could be more or other. We also die like dogs because dogs do not die with the dignity that wild creatures do. They slink or whimper, are helpless and uncertain rather than fiercely resistant or opaquely still.

But of course he's exactly talking about help, the help that should have come or could have or might still or maybe almost did or maybe is hallucinated, is maybe just a mirror set a few seconds forward in time. Who might help? Everyone: are we something more only as a collective, and might this collective someday save us as individuals? A good person: would a purified ethic or total altruism do the trick? Someone who cared: one wonders if the German term used has a possible romantic connotation, given that that's absent form the list and that it itherwie seems nearly indistinguishable from "a friend" or "someone who wanted to help." That which would put us past doubt might be any of these, and whatever the message of the helper is it is orobably one where if we knew it ourselves we wouldn't need the messenger. It's as likely to be locked in our own mind as it is to be lost in the world somewhere looking for us. The person we might have been, for whom death cannot occur or if it does it is not the death of a dog or if it is it does not come as a surprise or if it does it is no shame, is somewhere inside us. But there's too much else inside us.

The Castle may be a village too, remember. In a sense this very village is the castle, or part of it, or a protectorate of it or. The life we should have lived we may be living.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

This is so good. The way the passages echo each other is devastating.