dan's provocation + thoughts

Dream-City 

'This is not so much a provocation as an invitation to share imagery or cultural artefacts that have somehow drawn your attention during our on-going lockdown predicament. Whether alone or with friends or family - or still going out to work - experiences will have varied greatly, of course. For me, this time has seemed full of contradictions. Confinement to home and the local area has made me appreciate what is close at hand. Everything in my reduced world has become more vivid. Yet by this token, I feel things crowding in and I yearn to escape back to how things were, when there was a horizon I could dream of chasing. This sense of yearning is bittersweet as it relates to an experience confinement, both in terms of space and time, I have not had since childhood - endless school lessons, summer holidays, car journeys, etc. - so it is tinged with a warm feeling of familiarity for a state of being I had gladly forsaken. Of course, this is shaded by the grimness of this situation where Dystopian Sci-Fi has become fact. It all seems profoundly real and surreal at the same time. What a cliché! Would I say this if I had been physically or emotionally touched – or even bereaved – by the virus? 

Aside from considering writing personally about what is going on in your world (as I have tried above, which I had no plan for until now), my provocation/suggestion to the group is to think of two or three small cultural artefacts or objects that have somehow become more important to you through the lockdown situation. This can be an image, music, film or text, and – most importantly – be something arrived at intuitively, by which I mean anything that has jangled in your head or drawn your attention, which may or may not have an obvious link to your work or what is going on. Basically, something – a song, a picture, a story – that has sustained, lifted, haunted, or ear-wormed you through this time. I am offering my selection to start the ball rolling (please forgive my indulgence). After the Paul Klee painting above, Traum-Stadt (1921), my next artefact is a (very) short story by Franz Kafka: The Cares of a Family Man (Reproduced below). His more famous Metamorphosis is probably more pertinent to waking up to a new reality, but the less wellknown story wins out precisely because I can’t quite put my finger on why it is both so unsettling and strangely reassuring. 

The last movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is my third choice. The composer was imprisoned in Germany at the start of WW2, and restricted to composing with the musicians he found interred with him: a violinist, cellist, and clarinettist – with himself on piano. For me this short piece of music is a transcendent vision of hope and imagined escape. Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82AT62o838Y 

Please don’t be directed or put off by my references. I have shared with you three cultural artefacts that have drawn my attention recently, and I want to gently ask you to do the same if you’re open to this idea. The most important thing is to concentrate on your work, although my hope is that this provocation might help give your work context and relevance within the historic times we are living through.'

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The Cares of a Family Man by Franz Kafka

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.

He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him--he is so diminutive that you cannot help it--rather like a child. "Well, what's your name?" you ask him. "Odradek," he says. "And where do you live?" "No fixed abode," he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children's children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

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the music, The last movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time;

Listening to this piece of music did make me feel that it was representing a transcendent vision of hope and imagined escape. The fact that he was imprisoned, isolated from the real world, having to make do with the available musicians, sort of speaks to this pandemic right now. The overall tone felt melancholic, but searching for something at the end of the tunnel - I guess that is the ‘transcendent vision of hope. I can especially feel the ‘imagined escape’ nearer to the middle and end - as if he were really planning all these whimsical ways of escape. The constant returning to the piano keys feels like a heartbeat of reality weighing down the foundations of this thought process, whilst the violin felt like it was soaring, though not without cautiousness. I was surprised to hear how the violin built up higher, higher, and finally impossibly high (didn’t even know it could reach a note like that) and it felt like the light at the end of the tunnel, almost. and if his imagined escape worked this point would be where he touched the light outside. but does he actually want to reach that place?

The short story by Kafka, as dan describes it, is indeed ‘unsettling and strangely reassuring.’ It immediately built up this strange imagery of this mysterious creature that looked impossibly jangled yet purposefully so. In my mind for some reason it is a bit insect - like, but also a piece of machinery. The words it exchanges with ‘you’ provokes something deep from everyday dialogue. From what’s your name, to where do you live, to which it answers ‘no fixed abode’ followed by a laugh that ‘has no lungs behind it.’ The description of it sounding rather like the ‘rustling of fallen leaves’ seem bittersweet as it is hopeful - something alive and moving even when it has already fallen. And this seems to be a short conversation had multiple times - though not forthcoming. The last paragraph calls to very big questions about human nature and existence. ‘You’ wander if he could die and establishes that death does not apply to him, and the last sentence really says it all. “He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find most painful.” So the protagonist finds that this being, by outliving them, is the most hurtful thing he could do, suggesting a yearn for a life that is almost immortal. This makes me think of a quote and message in the ghibli film Tales from Earthsea where they say, a life without death is not life... and there are divided views about that. I’m not saying I understand the story, in fact, I’m terrified I misinterpreted the whole thing, but this is what I’m thinking about it so far. I see the title, ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ and this gives some more ambiguity (or perhaps clarity?) to the story - just like how a painting title would. All in all I really liked the contradictions found in this story as well.

I really enjoyed reading and learning about these cultural artefacts and made me think more about this 'dystopian sci-fi' side of the world we're living in now.