Réflexion || Letter to the Father (1919)
"A son’s poignant letter to his father."
The impossibility of knowing where to begin has seized me. Few words hold enough weight & I am inclined to write in French so that the colour of the language shades the ineptitude of everything I will scramble to say in English. Reading a letter that was not intended for others has left me feeling hollowed out like a dead trunk, waiting for the axe.
“I am not going to say, of course, that I have become what I am only as a result of your influence.”
Typically, I have rounded sentiments that I grasp & mould into sentences; analogies of what covets my mind following my reading experience. However, as it stands, I wish to remain silent. Kafka’s letter to his father was not mine to read & yet it was written as though I partook in sharing intimate experiences with a man I will never know, a man who died a few short years after collecting his courage to write to a tyrant known commonly as his father.
My statement is not meant in jest or naive ignorance. It is baffling to me that Kafka would have written such a letter to a man who would never understand him. I sit in my lowly apartment in the centre of a city filled with thousands of people perturbed by the existence of a man I can never reach out to with comfort.
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What was the purpose of reading this letter? Perhaps, the purpose was the same as the one the author sought to achieve in the written format. I cannot say for certain what our reasons are, or what rationalities we rely on to phlegm through cavities jaundiced with malaise. Rather, this entire experience has left me distressed & rather despairing. What is there to say that has not already been sung, written, crafted into strokes, canvas woven over sturdy & raucous matter unfit for human experience?
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It feels uncouth to sit & write a review about a personal letter, one that a child wrote to their parent in the hopes of repairing their relationship. Therefore, this will not be a critique of the likes of which I have written for fiction that boasts of ghouls, goblins, birds in rib cages, giant cats, pirate ships sailing the Great Lakes, or portraits that tether a man’s mortality. Instead, I will speak to the author as though he were around to read what I have written.
My sentiments of unease derive from a place of cognizant awareness that the subject matter in this letter is deeply personal & the author has no more say in what was written than he did in my experience with the material. It is silly & slimy to read the letter of someone else. Yet, I have done so before; therefore, perhaps I am more slimy than the drowning whales’ underbelly.
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Few authors have found themselves immersed in the experience of writing motifs that turn out to be the flame’s sensual tease. On an evening when I needed a laugh or, perhaps it was an evening like every other, a friend—one whom you will have noted in other reviews—sent me a link to James Joyce’s pornographically erotic love letters—we both laughed.
I felt at once teased by the material & sullen at the reality that these tiny pieces of Joyce’s life were no more sanctus than the alleged personification of clips of bread spread like ash from the altar. What would Joyce have thought of me sitting, once again, in my apartment reading his crisp letters denoting violently vivid sexual acts?
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Certainly, one learns a great deal about another person through their letters. One day, when I have died & all that is left of me is all that I have written, I might find that the words I used reflect acutely to the one reader who will understand me when, in life, I had no gumption to be clear about my person.
To regard the written word with such veiled delight may lead one to feel comforted. Correspondence allows us to shimmy off sections of ourselves to become memorialized. Should words be held in such high regard?
What Kafka writes in his letter speaks to a life that is widely misunderstood. Following my completion of his exhausted efforts to gain access to the heart of his parent, I was void of enthusiasm. There I sat salivating at the jowls as I palleted the morsels of this stranger’s experiences, selfishly shedding the tide that soared in me.
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This feeling of anguish persisted as I wondered why I had chosen to read the letter. What brought me here? The community of readers in my immediate viscidity have not peered into the eclipse & have rather remained shaded by lemon trees & orchards of citrusy squirts, the likes of which they will never purge themselves of.
Had I been a spiritualist, a religious monger, or even one who believes in an all-powerful, I may be inclined to accept that a serpent came down to me in a dream & left me to ravage the private recollections of a child grown into a man whose heart could no more handle his weaknesses than could his father the truth of his son’s parentage.
Yet, I do believe that this was the time for me to see through the hallucination of my vantage point in the Canadian tundra which this city offers me; for me to walk all the way through a hundred pages & more, to arrive at the tombstone of a stranger & thank him for what he has said; thank him for his words for, his words have set me free.
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The magnitude of what Kafka has written will be lost on most. In fact, I read several reviews where the critic had no grasp of the material & recited lesions as though the scalpel had been harmed. This titteringly inept conclusion wrought me with thunder. I write to you now with a firmer grasp on their inability to understand that, what stares them in the eyes is no iris but a mountain moulded into a genocidal man. These are analogies, of course, & I profoundly doubt they will chisel the split-toothed cavern of those who read the letter with the derision of a person unaccustomed to abuse.
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Kafka does not name the behaviour of his father as one that should be escaped. In many sentences, readers note that Hermann was a man worth knowing; a grandiose being whose own childhood burdened his heart of stone into a Makalu that made the very sight of him beauty to behold.
The complicated nature of a person who is clinically incapable of disabusing themselves from romanticized notions of individualistic gore & parties chorused for pity, reads clearly to me, in the passages where Kafka reflects on his inability to be strong; his loathsome manner of being feeble; his tired & trite self-doubt. Rather, though Hermann was a real person & though he is as unknown to me as he was to his children, the reflections & scenarios that Kafka embodies within his words allowed me to see my apprentice’s reflection, something I look for only in the dark.
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The masterful approach that Kafka undertook to perform his greatest feat succeeded in part thanks to his natural talent. Readers will note the ease & poise of the prose that Kafka employs throughout the pages, riddling the letter with metaphors, analogies, gentle stanzas, & rhymes whose intention is to calmly welcome the letter’s recipient to the truth; that Franz Kafka was harmed by his father & his upbringing but no more holds his father to contempt that he might himself.
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Pausing intermittently throughout the reading of this letter may grant readers the opportunity to humble themselves. The author has not lifted his pen with the desire to devour his home or his memories. Rather, Kafka has written to heal. Will the reader forgive him for the coy manner in which he rebounds from space to space, place upon place, soaring & roaming the catechism? In the end, it is neither the reader’s responsibility nor should they feel at liberty to place judgment on Kafka.
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Given the nature of this letter, & the very intimate voyeurism that plagues the pen, one must keep in mind the goal of the letter. Perhaps a learned & experienced reader will decode each of the syllables & their plaintiff to the correspondent. My sullen & romantic regard of the author is no more earnest than were his parting words; shaking of the truth of each, we neither come together nor convene apart; the letter, its correspondent, & intended recipient remain estranged.
Though the tenderness I feel upon reading Kafka’s personal penmanship is not rosy like the Bleeding Heart, nor is it ravaged like the aching lover, my poem for Kafka is in what has been left unsaid.
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I have written time & again about the nature of fear & its twisted grip when present in a person’s life. The tantalizing raved lunacy of licentious seduction rivals the spectrum that tilts to flower-fanged horror; leaving the sordid fingers roaming for softness where always there has been stubble.
Unlike Kafka, the lethargy that bellows inside my ribs keeps me quiet. I have pondered & floundered at the nature of my own Polaris, wandering further into the cooled scorching blades of grass that shielded my unprompted saviour for forty days & led to the death of many who plowed fields where their burned bodies lay forever as slaves.
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Ultimately, I have nothing of value to write. None of the words I know will come close to rippling the tide before it transforms into a monsoon. My ability to narrate torment into severed limbs, platted for consumption, rests easily in the belly of the beast.
Rather, my parasomnia slithers over the masticated marks along my skin reminding me of the body I live in; the detached phantasm whose green eyes linger over the wounds hidden behind flesh & bone, nestled keenly under river beds & skittish Vertebrata, looming over my head at night.
There is no use in eviscerating the riddle. The letter was written & shredded; read when it wasn’t sent, & shared without permission, while the writer sought only for reprieve in deciphering experiences of the adult world mounted on the walls of the bedroom of their childhood self.
C. 💌