Unravelling hallucinations,
Kafka never touches ground,
transcending the imagination;
Ariadne’s thread unwound,
he leads us to the minotaurs
within the spaces where our minds
take labyrinthine inner tours
pursuing demons no one finds.
In his desperate trials and trouble,
though he doesn’t know the laws
embalmed within a baffling bubble,
unaware of their First Cause,
he won’t trespass into treason,
pleading guilty for misdeeds
that have neither rhyme nor reason
he can understand, committed
to following the thread that leads
to monsters that can’t be outwitted.
Anita Desai in the NYR writes about Primo Levi:
In my writing for good or evil I’ve always strained to pass from darkness into the light, as a filtering pump might do, which sucks up turbid water and expels it decanted: possibly sterile. Kafka forgot his path in the opposite direction: he endlessly unravels the hallucinations that he draws from incredibly profound layers, and he never filters them. The reader feels them swarm with germs and spores: they are gravid with burning significance but he never receives any help in tearing through the veil or circumventing it to go and see what it conceals. Kafka never touches ground, he never condescends to giving you the end of Ariadne’s thread.
7/12/07
gershon hepner
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/kafka-2/
