My first blog post I ended with some questions that I wanted
to ponder after completing my first MFA semester. Now that I have completed 33
credits of my MFA in Creative Writing degree, I have even more questions. How do
I be attentive to my world? How do I learn to witness myself? The more I write
and study, the more my questions turn to myself, my origins, my world. This is
where it all comes from after all. I find it difficult to express emotion, but I
recently drafted a poem that was intended to be a love poem for my husband. It
also turned into a love poem for poetry. I couldn’t have done this without
allowing my emotion to pour through it. Emotion is where we find that universal
connection with others.
Kafka wrote in a letter to Oskar Pollak, dated January 27,
1904:
„…ein Buch
muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich.“
“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Kafka
was referring to reading books here, but I would apply it to writing as well.
If a story or poem does not move me, will it move my readers? Probably not.
I do not wish to navel gaze, and this developing perspective is not solipsistic. However, given my context, my need for peace and no conflict, thus my people-pleasing tendencies (I am an Enneagram 9), I find it is time to focus on myself for good rather than ill. I am finding my particulars to understand our universals.
Speaking of Kafka, I am beginning a paper on Franz Kafka and
Erazim Kohák. My abstract is the following:
Boundaries, Crunching Bones: Kohák and Kafka Roaming the Borders of Human and Animal
Relationships”
At a time when
demarcation prevails, when science seeks to winnow apart smaller and smaller
particles to better understand each components’ function, or when a human has
the positive right to shoot another human for crossing an invisible property
line only made apparent on a map, the boundaries we rely on to define
ourselves, the boundaries we seek to place between self and another, become
ever more apparent and often detrimental. The history of how humans have
progressively differentiated themselves from animals, from the Middle Ages to
now, indicates our increased need to define ourselves against animals, against
nature, rather than see ourselves as a part of it. Erazim Kohák says in The Green Halo
that we insist now on total separation, that “humans are descended from above,
in the sequence God-angels-humans, all other life rises from below, in the
sequence matter-plants-animals” (p. 19). Franz Kafka confronts the anxiety we
encounter when animals come a little too close to humans, or rather, when
humans become a little too animal, in several of his works of fiction. In this
paper, I will examine Kafka’s animal-human hybrids, such as the dog narrator in
“Investigations of a Dog” and Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, in
relation to Kohák’s ecological ethics, where he perceives all of nature,
humans, plants, animals, god, as belonging together. Kafka’s narrator dog says,
“The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be
conquered only by a united crunching of all the teeth of all the dogs”
(“Investigations” p. 291). It is with a
sense of belonging together, of no longer defining ourselves apophatically
against animals, but instead with them that we will find right relationship
with animals and nature, with the Earth, and with ourselves.