Acceptance

M -

I am really looking forward to the end of this year. Last year was not good, and at the end of it, there was a catastrophe I only saw as such when it was far too late to have done anything about it. Winter (among other things) will do that to a person.

If I were to take this event, in the final days of 2009, as an omen for what 2010 would bring, I would have plenty to point to in its favour. And such is the cyclical nature of my mind that I have been waiting for 2010 to end before starting “anew”.

The problem with this approach of starting anew with a new year is that it’s just a socially acceptable form of procrastination! Carpe Diem, you say? No, I would prefer to seize tomorrow, because there is always hope in tomorrow. And next year? Even better!

Then, when January 3rd rolls around, and the grand plans for the revolution have not come to pass, because I am tired and hung over, well...there’s always 2012!

I have learned a lot this year, about humility and pain (and my tolerance thereof), about how other people see me and about the kinds of things I expect from other people. I have also spent a lot of time wondering how those around me have managed to convalesce in the eternal shadow of a great castle, tended to by only the finest medical professionals, while I sit here in a cave with an Aspirin and some old gauze, which speaks to the fact that the most difficult thing I learned about myself recently is that I no longer have any hope.

“Wow, that’s really depressing!” you say (or not, maybe you have tuned out by now). You are quite right - it is depressing. However, isn’t hope a kind of misplaced nostalgia? Where we look at our lives, shake our heads, and wish for something better? Could no longer having hope also signify an embrace of the future and ones own ability to choose that future?

It is also moving away from a particularly pernicious form of fatalism toward something that resembles a sense of duty, to oneself, and to those one cares about, a sense that isn’t borne out of fear of failure or loss, but out of respect and compassion. But it's a big deal for me because I have always been an extremely hopeful person.

Given everything that has happened, and this will come as no surprise to you, M, of all people, but I have been thinking about Kafka, and in particular, Der Prozess. The standard Coles Notes version of the The Trial is that it’s about the existential emptiness of bureaucracy, or something like that (feel free to disagree!)

I think the title is ironic. The reality is that the process is irrelevant - it’s a ritual along the lines of a military parade in a banana republic - it’s meant to show something, just not the military.

Josef’s crucial error, which becomes increasingly apparent as the book progresses, is the hope that the bureaucratic process will save him, that there is a (this, any) process that will exonerate him. (Interesting fact - we don’t actually know which chapter is meant to follow which, so this progression is more of an editorial/reader affect than one of Kafka’s own design.)

Rather than being about the trial, The Trial is about judgement in a bureaucratic, managerial, capitalist society. It's all about the judgment - the judgment of an individual in a social space, a judgment one has very little control over, PR and marketing talk about personal branding aside...

We often focus naively on the fact that what bothered Kafka about bureaucracy was the mediocrity of his colleagues and the impersonal nature of it, because it’s what bothers us about it. But we are not Kafka! (I certainly am not, right? M?)

Looking at things this way, and taking some wonderfully loose and quite ungrounded biographical flights of fancy (this is a blog, after all!), his famous comment about there being hope, but not for us, is not merely a comment on the death of god (another piece of conventional wisdom), but a lamentation on the death of the aristocracy, the death of chance in human power relationships. Because everything we do now is mediated by "reason", where personal vendettas are settled gently, reasonably, by bureaucratic fiat.

By process.

Indeed, everyone I speak of tells me to have faith in the process of healing, that this is what will get your through everything. And I have spent the past while trying to work through a "process" when in fact what I had really been dealing with was the judgment in a trial that had already occurred.

I think what Kafka is getting at with this comment, and what I myself miss, is the idea that when one appealed to a lord or king, there was always the possibility of grace - the epiphanic resolution. There is no grace anymore, there is no hope.

This year, for me, has hung not on the hope for grace, but on the hope that reason might prevail - Impersonal personal reason. It hasn't.

And worse, I prefer resolution by grace. I am, truly, horrifyingly, a Romantic...

But that is no hope at all, is it? As we have seen, hope in the process, in people, is dangerous. The only hope worth having is the possibility of one’s own reinvention in the world, judgment be damned (this is also a Romantic solution, is it not?). And this isn’t to damn everyone else, but to acknowledge their proper place in one’s own desires.

Josef’s problem, and mine it seems, is that we let the judgments stop us from moving on (there are two words I hope never to hear again, and refuse to express in conversation any more!), we wait for the decision that never comes, but one that also stops us from making a decision ourselves. At the end of the day, this is our problem, not the judge's.

So you see, I spend a lot more time now working on being a Stoic, and less time on being like Josef. Because we all know what happens to Josef at the end...unless you read Der Prozess like Deleuze and Guattari, who suggest that the end of the book is really the beginning.

Actually, right now, putting the end of this trial back to the beginning seems like exactly the right idea to me.

But life is no book - not even Kafka could make that happen.