3. Fragments: edge

As still as seeing eyes
from the smoke
y haze as the wind is
loud as the edge
is loud and as sharp
as long as I
walk along it.

Down to nothing in particular
from the midday sun
worth staring at
in shadows as in life
where I have the best
of things
or maybe just not the worst

Infinite sides to every story

Imagine you arrive at your destination late at night. Your destination, you thought, is a castle. But search as you might when you ’arrive’, you find no turrets, no towers, nothing that looks like a castle. No matter which path you take – and you take many, this way and that - you get neither closer nor further away. You begin to wonder and are disappointed by the thought that the ‘castle’ is just the loose collection of buildings you are in.

What would you do? How would you cope? What if the ‘castle’ is not a castle but your dreams and goals, and the journey to ‘arrive’, your assumption that the years are well spent, planning, doing and hopefully getting. You expect a beginning, middle and end, but it turns out: there is only a middle.

This is the disconcerting world Kafka creates in The Castle and his character K responds with an odd mix of emotions that do not obviously fit together. But that’s not the point. The point is that their meandering logic lead to an irrational defiance, a determination to see things through to the end, though he doesn’t even know what ‘things’ might refer to.

‘...they knew all about him at the Castle…they had weighed up the strengths and weaknesses and were ready to do battle with a smile. On the other hand… it showed that they underrated him... And if they thought they could keep him in a constant state of terror with this lofty acknowledgement… they were mistaken.’

It’s a hard book to read. The experience of reading it is like K’s fraught search. He finds nothing except that there are infinite sides to the story. Every character has a story to tell which sheds another, different light on the unfathomable situation.  He pulls off veil after veil from its opaque face, only to reveal a more and more complex picture, one that pushes meaningful understanding away into an explosion of details.

Some people get bogged down in elaborate interpretations. In the end though I don’t think it’s hard to unravel, it’s just hard to accept. Impossible in fact. The fragmentary world of The Castle where there is only a ‘middle’ is a lot more realistic than our insistence that things should make sense, that we should be able to understand and therefore have something to strive for, or hope for or search for. This means we prefer only to see one version of events out of an infinite sided circle and so, our grip on it is fragile - dangerously stretched by every other side that comes into view. We react to this threat with rage. We hold on.