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Funny how we resist and struggle so much with change, when it’s the only thing we can really count on. Guess it’s the unknown factor that is the “spicy” ingredient that adds fire to the fear of change.

The Trial is worth a reread. And, if you read it years ago, better translations have appeared since then. A brilliant work of art, all the moreso when we remember Kafka didn’t even finish it. Probably would have tightened it up a bit, expanded on a few things here and there. He was obsessed about writing the perfect work. A curse and a gift. It kept him on the move, searching, reinventing, rewriting, refining . . . but made it difficult for him to actually finish things. I’m sure he worried a lot about that, too.

I’ve hit a bit of a writer’s block today. I can write about trivial things. Could add something quick and breezy to my blog if I chose to. But I don’t want to. I want it to be deathless prose!!

:>)

Want to do a little bit on Henri Michaux, one of my favorite poets. He was a great painter and aphorist as well. A true genius. Want my writing to live up to the subject at hand, which may be the biggest problem of all for me now. When the subject deserves great care, time, patience, thoughtfulness . . . the obstacles increase.

Oh, well. Must push through that gateway of sorts. Perhaps after a good night sleep, a new sunrise, and a bagel?

Take care, Tim . . .

All of us pick certain stopping points, certain signs, symbols, names, places, things, ideas. Certain gateways we feel comfortable stopping in front of . . . We don’t go through them. We won’t.

To evolve, we probably need to reduce the number of those gateways, go through more of them, more often. Have fewer sacred cows and comfort zones. Question more stuff. Seek rest in different ways. Perhaps between gateways, on our way through the next one and the next one.

There’s a great parable within Kafka’s novel The Trial, called Before the Law. Really encapsulates the above. Though the petitioner can never really rest. His anxiety levels are probably off the charts. Sometimes going through the gateway is actually restful, indirectly, at least. Ironic.

I wonder about that. I worry about that, too. Worry that worrying too much causes my own stagnant reserves to fight their way to the surface and take over.

It would be great to evolve as a person, while simultaneously helping the nation, or the world evolve as well.

Of course, that sounds a bit pretentious. But, of, what the hey!!

Reading a really good book now, by Humphrey Carpenter: Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Good history of the period. In one section, the author talks about a study done in 1921 by a group of social scientists. Harold Stearns was the editor. A tough critique about America putting most of its energy and focus on building wealth, and not enough on building hearts and minds via the arts, etc. An entire generation must have felt something similar, because it took off for Europe to find heart and soul. Gertrude Stein remarked a few years later than American was the oldest nation on earth, and was downright geriatric in its ways, because it had basically gotten there first. First to urbanize and industrialize to the degree it did.

Anyway, to make a long story short: I’d like to make at least a small contribution toward an artistic evolution, even revolution . . . on a personal as well as national scale. Cart before the horse, perhaps. Then, again, the cart sure has evolved.