Page 70 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
dulcet lyre and flute mourn, K’s tonalities murder a tone (T155).408 For where had the dulcet and mellifluous music gone?409
The murdered tones bear the cross of silence and death: K’s heart is slain with the cross (T231). In K’s murder, one hears the condemnation of Job. He is driven away as utterly as a dream of the night.410 God fences him, sets darkness in his path (19:8-11; T224), strips his honour (19:8-11; T231), breaks him (19:8-11; T231), tears his hope (19:8-11; T212, 214), and treats him as an enemy (19:8-11; T231). Terrors are turned loose upon him, driving off his honourable estate like a wind and his secure position passing away like a cloud (13:9, 30:14-15; T135). If Job cries, “Behold, I cry “Violence!,”... I call out but there is no justice” (19:7; 13:3), K cries the Court aims at arresting the innocent, at introducing senseless proceedings, and an extensive organization replete with corrupt guards, inane inspectors, judges and hangmen (T51-52). If Job cries, “days of affliction have taken hold of me” (30:16-17), K laments his persecution (T75, 87, 125, 200-04). Just as the Judge or Yahweh turns cruel towards me, with all his might, He hates me (13:3; 30:21) and intimidates me (T54); He tosses me in the raging storm (30:21; T73-4, 78).
Job’s terror nauseates and criss-crosses K’s murder. He gropes in the dark without light, and He makes him stagger like a drunkard (12:14-25). God hands him over to the evildoer and through the hands of the wicked (the insensitive supporting actors) He wrings him out (T226-28). He was at ease (16:12; T4-5), and God smashed him (16:12; T231); He seized him by the neck and crushed him (16:12; T231); He set him up as his target (16:12; T6). At night, He stabs his bones within him and his veins know no rest (30:17; T229-31); because of His violence his garment is disfigured (30:18; T229-31); He holds him tight like the collar of his tunic (30:18; T231); God’s hand upon him is heavier than his groaning (23:2; T231). He has hurled him into the mire, and he has become dust and ashes (30:18;T231); he is destroyed by darkness, before his face is all-encompassing gloom (14:17; T230). There 3⁄4 a memory returns: the persecution and death of Christ in the cross, portrayed in the altarpiece, the sepulchre of Lupins, a Christ un-raised and unjustified and his exile from the world.
The duplication of heath landscapes is the bleak obverse of Romanticism’s joyful natural supernaturalism.411 Sombre 3⁄4 the humble, the beautiful and the sublime wither away and only desolation, an irremediable remoteness, a far- away-ness between things and beings, God and the self, the self and the soul and others remain amidst the futility of a Sisyphean conquest. Perhaps there, we might hear wistfully Heraclitus words, “you will not be able to discover the
408 In Nazism, Celan argues, music too is murdered. It becomes a Tangoul Mortii (Tango of Death); the dance of death that Jews had to endure at concentration camps. At the Janowska camp in Lamberg, a SS lieutenant ordered Jewish fiddlers to play a tango whose new lyrics, “Death Tango,” were used during Jewish persecution: marches, tortures, grave diggings, and executions. Before shutting down the camp, the SS shot the entire orchestra of fiddlers. Paul Celan. Poet, Survivor, Jew. London: New Haven, 1995. 28-30. See also Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose. “Deathfugue.” Trans. By John Felstiner. USA: Norton, 2001. 31
409 To Schopenhauer, beautiful art and not reason’s jostle, reveals the eternal forms in varying degrees, passing successively from architecture, to sculpture, to painting, to lyric, to tragic poetry, to music. Music, particularly, is almost a prophetic revelation of the Will because it is beyond every spatial representation. It emblemizes the burning expression of sentiment just as it is: pure, real. Music is then, the pure abstraction of suffering and joy, and consequently, the liberation of the Will’s sufferings given music’s serene vision and dominion. Music, always a-priori, is the loftiest expression of universal language: it is pure symmetry, geometry and number. Terribly, music is murdered in Kafkabel; it cannot flourish, it cannot sing, it cannot liberate the will from suffering. Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. Two Volumes. Vol. I. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. USA: Dover Publications, 1969. 261-64
410 Peake, A.S. The Century Bible. Job. Ed. By Walter F. Adeney. Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904. 43
411 This word was coined by M. H. Abrams, one of the foremost literary critics of English Romanticism of the 20th Century. Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism. Tradition and Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton, 1973. 5
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