The Unliving

[Vũng Tàu, 8/7/26]

In Kafka’s “The Judgement,” the self-satisfied protagonist, Georg, is writing to an émigré friend. Living alone in Russia, this man is also, in Georg’s eyes, a business failure, so is lost in every way, just “a big child” who can’t be helped.

Announcing his engagement, Georg softens the blow, “There will be time to tell you more about her later, for today let me just say that I am very happy and as between you and me the only difference in our relationship is that instead of a quite ordinary kind of friend you will now have in me a happy friend. Besides that, you will acquire in my fiancée, who sends her warm greetings and will soon write you herself, a genuine friend of the opposite sex, which is not without importance to a bachelor.” Georg is rubbing it in, of course, but this wicked humor is so Kafkaesque. Borges’ is similar.

Having a friend, genuine or not, of the opposite sex increases the pang of what’s missing. Even if she’s within reach, you can’t hold any part of her. You can’t feel her softness, or, if you’re a woman, his rigidness.

Two days ago, I wrote to Troy Skaggs, “Still groggy from my recent trip, so am inside too much. Talking to a pleasant young lady this afternoon cheered me up. Must check my creepy side.”

Troy answered, “Keep the creepy side in check but don’t abandon it entirely, comes in handy sometimes.”

Keeping your creepy side in check is just part of being civilized, sociable and, most importantly, out of jail. Already costumed, wigged, perfumed or even masked, it’s just what we do. To pretend your scandalous, felonious or hellbound instincts don’t exist is to lie to yourself.

Though we’re all careful to paint a rather flattering self-portrait, only shameless psychos crow nonstop. Weirder are those who believe them. I remember an older Trumper friend saying about some exposed public figure, “Shouldn’t his wife have known?” That shows his innocence. Often, your spouse is the last to know who you really are, for it takes constant self hypnotizing to endure and enjoy someone’s company, day by day, forever, or at least until one of you murder the other.

This buddy found out, years too late, his wife, now ex, had spent all their savings on street drugs, and it’s not even her fault. An ex waitress, she had been prescribed an addictive Jew concoction for her painful wrists.

Thinking about all this had me rereading Joyce’s “The Dead.” One of the most comic aspects of white nationalism is its worship of the worst whites possible, such as the crypto Jew Erika Kirk, or Pete Hegseth, Kid Rock, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham or all those talking heads on Fox News. Angry white pussies know nothing about the true glories of white civilization. When I was in high school, nearly all the white kids loved Howard Stern, back then just a local hero in the DC area.

Those who can no longer read can at least watch John Huston’s 1987 film version, but even that might be insufferably tedious. No one is pounding anyone’s head as he lies, bleeding, on the ground. No child butchering missile is being fired.

The scene is the annual Christmas party staged by three old maids, two sisters and their niece, in Dublin. Right at the beginning, we’re introduced to the theme of deception, when their housemaid responds, with surprising bitterness, to a genial question about her future wedding, “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” That describes just about everything, not just lads trying to penetrate some lassie’s bloomers.

The questioner is Gabriel. Though not technically the narrator, we see everything through Gabriel’s eyes. How he eyes the housemaid in the coatroom is suggestive enough, “She was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still paler.” Gabriel also notices, with delight, her low class pronunciation of his name.

Everyone is trying hard to be interesting or at least likable. Word by word and with each calibrated expression, they’re all performing. A Mr. Browne, for example, said something with “sidling mimicry,” then “assumed a very low Dublin accent,” to amuse or impress three young lovelies. To escape another tedious musical performance, four young men fled to the refreshment room, only to return “when the piano had stopped,” to applaud most loudly.

This civilizational strains got so bad, Gabriel just wanted to escape, “How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!” Gabriel must stay, though, to carve up the goose for everyone and to deliver an appreciative and literary speech, though not too bookish, for he’s talking to dummies, after all, “He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognize from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better.”

Though Gabriel considered his aunts, this party’s hostesses, as “two ignorant old women,” he dubbed them, along with their niece, “the Three Graces of the Dublin musical world.” Gabriel even managed to squeeze in a dig at a local radical. Though they had been “friends of many years’ standing,” she “had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit’s eyes,” at this very party. Social intercourse is a delicate minefield.

This story climaxes inside a hotel room afterwards, when Gabriel realizes he’s not his wife’s most mordant other. A badly sung song at the party has flayed her, so now she’s not just strange and distant, but nearly a ghost, like us all, the nominally living. Her grief for a young man long dead, though, is also a misunderstanding, for she’s never had to go through, with this “very delicate” boy with “big, dark eyes,” any “dull existence together,” lasting decades. Misreading his wife’s longing for another, Gabriel is aroused, but must check himself. The timing isn’t quite right. “To take her as she was would be brutal. No, he must see some ardour in her eyes first. He longed to be master of her strange mood.” An impossibility.

No one is as wisely neurotic about clunky, abrasive and, at best, squishy fits as Kafka. In his letters to Felice, Kafka goes on about why they shouldn’t be together. Even when agonizing, Kafka manages to be funny. That’s his Jewish genius.

On 1/1/14, Kafka warned her about losing her family and native city for “a husband who, more often than not (now at any rate more often than not) is melancholy and silent, and whose infrequent personal happiness lies solely in an occupation that, as an occupation, would inevitably continue to be alien to you. And these are things that possibly (I am not sure if I may mention this here) love alone could help one to surmount.”

His personal happiness lay solely in writing, not this woman he was supposedly courting!

Kafka the very next day, “You are not satisfied with me, you object to various things about me, want me to be other than I am. I should ‘live more in the real world,’ should ‘take things as I find them,’ etc. Don’t you realize that if in fact it is an inner necessity for you to want this, then you no longer want me, but are trying to get past me. Why try to change people, Felice? It is not right. One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else. Rather he is a whole, and if you pull one end, the other, whether you like it or not, begins to twitch.”

One in six American men has no friends, period, of any sex. (Gender is a continuum with an infinity of sexes, or at least genital formations. There’s no such thing as an absolute penis or vagina, just variations or permutations of both, plus whatever else you can think of. Yours may show clear indisputable traits of a coat hanger or galosh.) With cellphones liberating us all from the real world, craving any real body to twitch with, even a dead one, is an absurdity.

[Vũng Tàu, 8/8/26]

[Tuy Hòa, 7/31/26]

[Tuy Hòa, 8/1/26]

[Nanning, 7/10/26]