Page 72 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
wonderings. Heidegger’s un-concealment in the clearing of being, and other planes of immanence, or Shelley’s capaciousness of spirit 3⁄4 Plato’s sublime-sublime 3⁄4 are absent. There is only anxiety, divine absence, deus absconditus, and the stagnation of motion. Unable to see Parnassus,’ or Eden’s Streams, or Plato’s beauties,418 the heath is a mimesis of abandon and desolation, of Kafka’s own spiritual struggle.419 It reflects the infinite abysmal, and “the sensation of anxiety and shame whose centre cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty within things, impeding every step.”420 It mimics the anxiety and desolation rooted in original sin (10:14-16) and banishment from Eden. Josef K has “to reject the notion of any possible guilt,” and affirm to himself that “there was no guilt” (T25) to return to Eden’s immanence before The Fall.
It is as if no one, man or angel, could be pure or really acquitted (25:4-6; T9, 90, 156). Not even K as he took a bite of the apple of discord (T10). It is as if no one had morally survived any trials, neither the Israelites, nor Job, nor Josef K: no one could be innocent or righteous, not even the holy ones.421 It is as if everyone born of woman was abominable and corrupt — a maggot (Job), or a Kafkaesque-vermin drinking iniquity like water (15:15-16, 25:4-6) riddled with guilt (T212-13). It is as if Satan’s malefic whisper to Eliphaz when spread to Bildad (25:4-6),422 devoured Eden’s Beauty and splendour only to return beings to the primordial wasteland, and to the terror amidst two perishing trees.
If the elemental trees of good and evil and immortality are frail, so is man, and so are their concepts. In Jobel, man withers away. His branch is not green, it is dried up by the heat, cut-off, and his root withers beneath.423 In Kafkabel, man loses his ground, yet K’s island garden is lush (T228-29). The moral notions of good and evil as master-slave morality begin to decay, and with them, the bifurcations of antiquity wither away (Deleuze).424 Life and
418 Plato argues philosophers are superior to poets because they are the only ones capable of singing of the realm of Forms and of verities. Because poets dwell in the realm of appearances and opinion, they cannot belong to his ideal Republic, unless their art is subordinated to the Philosopher King’s ideals to promote the good, the just and the beautiful. Thus, only if poets sing to the true nature of gods and the soul’s immortality, its journey after death, they will be admitted in Plato’s utopia. All poetry and all poets and makers, thus, must aim, not at vice, but at the four classical virtues to exalt courage, wisdom, justice and temperance. Thus poets, who once were instruments of revelation and truth, mediators between gods and humans, are demoted to mediate between philosopher King and its subjects. Milton generally agrees with Plato. All of Milton’s works are didactic, they aimed at cultivating the good; however, Milton expounded a freer sense of liberty of expression, and of the press. Milton, in his Areopagitica, believes that “truth has more shapes than one,” and that humans are able to discern the true from the false, or virtue from vice, or right from wrong. He is more optimistic than Plato on human nature. However, this cheery optimism vanishes in King Charles I’s tyranny, and culminates in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and the creation of the most rebellious Satan in literary history (which, though not intended, it helped to launch the spirit of rebellion in European Romanticism). Milton was very clear on his position on Satan: where Christianity opens up the gates of heaven, Satan opens up the nine gated, fire surrounded Hell, Death, Sin and Eternal Damnation (Milton, Paradise Lost). Generally, Milton grounds true liberty on God’s logos, mercy and love, and on Platonic and Aristotelian ideals of reason, measure and proportion, and not on polytheistic theriomorphic and anthropomorphic deities (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Grecian) given to sin, debauch, revenge, oppression and rebellion (Atrahasis, Seth-Osiris, Titomachia, Typhomachia, etc). Milton links their corrupt behaviour to Dionysus and to Satan’s corrupt liberty. In the end, given the similarity of their political upheavals, Plato and Milton concluded that meritocracies are best (Plato: the Republic; Milton: On Church Government) and that virtue needs to be taught so as to end the tyranny of thought and of custom. Republic. Republic, 606e 105, 607b 5-6, and Book X. Plato. Plato Complete Works. Ed. By John M. Cooper, D.S. Hutchinson. Indiana, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997. Milton. See Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Comus, On the Birth of Christ Nativity.
Apollonian art manifests itself in the plastic arts in that it reveals the individual, beauty, the particular, the eternity of the phenomenon. It transforms a painful reality, via the imagination, into illusion and idealism in an attempt to make sense of the horrible character of things. In this sense, tragedy is a fusion of the Apollonian and Dionysian wills. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. By Douglas Smith. USA: Oxford University Press, 2000. Chapters 16, 17.
419 Brod, Max. Franz Kafka. A Biography. Trans. By G. Humphreys Roberts (Chapter I to VII) and by Richard Winston (Chapter VIII). New York, Schocken Books, 1937. 173
420 Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. See foreword by John Updike. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. ix 421 (Job 25:4-6, 3:17-18, 15:14).
422 Rumours and gossip progress and increment.
423 Peake, A.S. The Century Bible. Job. Ed. By Walter F. Adeney. Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904. 42
424 This refers to the antithesis of Deleuze’s rhizomorphous philosophy: the tree symbolizes dualism in its bifurcations. Generally, the rhizome, an anti- structure, changes in shape, accidental quality, and it rejects to form genealogical trees, dualities or deep roots or structures. Deleuze and Guattari adulate rhizomes in six principles. Rhizomes are chains of different codifications and of different biological, economic, political, or cultural systems. The first two principles, “connection” and “heterogeneity” express the proliferation of the rhizome in all dimensions of n-1, to its changes in shape, accidental quality, and to its rejection to form genealogical trees, dualities or deep structures. The third principle, “multiplicity,” is the absence of an object and a subject, one can only apprehend a rhizome through determination, quantity, and dimension. Symbolically, a rhizome is a simultaneous network. Rhizomorphous lines of discourse, poetry, and text are
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