The British poetry performer Andy Willoughby had a look at both Peter Sraghers’ considerations (see here: https://www.fitralit.ro/31-01-2025-peter-sragher-k-from-kafka/) about the visual art exhibiton Kafka Labyrinth by Alica Záhorská that was shown in Levice, Slovakia and also at the visual artists’ own thorough insights (see here: https://www.fitralit.ro/31-01-2025-alica-zahorska-kafkas-labyrinth-a-visual-art-exhibition/ ). Although the poet hasn’t’t seen the exhibition – as also Peter Sragher did not – he was so passionate about it, because we found out that he revered Kafka, too. Thus, he agreed to write about the cultural event after seeing many photos and the short video presentation. (Fitralit).
* * *
I am standing at the door with a sign marked K. It is in the castle of my mind. It has been there a long time since I was a teenager and first walked through it. I notice on my arms there are one or two scars where I clumsily removed the insect hairs growing there with a razor so no one would know. Reading Peter Sragher and Alica Záhorská on their encounters with Kafka and looking at the pictures and film of her exhibition Kafka’s Labyrinth in Levice, has me back there in an instant.
When I first encountered Josef K and Gregor Samsa I was in my late teens. Britain had been to war in the South Atlantic, unemployment on my council estate in North East England was rocketing as in the rest of the region, mines were closing or under threat of closure, shipbuilding was under threat, steel works cutting back, strikes loomed. The country was marked with a T for Thatcher. The bureaucracy of unemployment was growing and getting colder. I was aware of the rules and knew that signing on the dole was probably at the end of college if I didn’t become the first person in my family to go to University though it took me an extra year to bite that peach.
I found Kafka in my catholic St. Mary’s VI form college in my hometown of Middlesbrough. The Marist priests in charge didn’t censor the librarians. As well as K for Kafka where I found maps to my existential crisis, I was directed by Mr Sturgis to K for Kerouac and boom went the call of the road in my head. Reading “Metamorphosis” I saw the insect I had just been in adolescence, fingered a few acne scars, thought about the coldness of the world for those who were different. I knew a little about Kafka’s life then, but I was well read in Jewish history in Europe and saw the prescience in his work, too. I was reading Ginsberg too in an anthology given to me by my teacher Mrs Walker outside the syllabus. I see now that I wasn’t alone like K or Samsa, that I was lucky some staff in that Sixth Form (ie: Senior High) saw something in me. However, the times, class struggle, punk rock and its aftermath, meant that when I read “The Trial: the K door was as clear to me as the illusory open road of America that Dean and Sal were riding in search of their freedom dream.
The K door led to application forms, police who stopped you in the street asking where you were going as you walked from your estate to the one your girlfriend lived on, the fear of being arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time at the football match, at the mall, all the rules of school past, nuns, slippers and canes and headmasters shouting “ You boy! come here at once”, your fathers rules: “shine your shoes for Sunday mass!”. The hiding of at least half the words you found in books from your speech to avoid the insult of BIG WORDS and the possible boots of the bullies.
Once you’d been through the K door with Josef, and felt, no, recognized the unease, then terror of a labyrinth of power, rules and language with no apparent meaning except to serve the system itself you saw the K repeatedly, whenever someone tried to impose the rules on you, it heightened your beat dreams of escape, it fed your ability to rebel against authority, to laugh at the solemn, for better or worse it made you unable to play along and climb in the systems you moved through, it gave you an urge to mask this knowledge too lest they tell lies about you and have you arrested one morning.
You felt the K door might be locking behind you in hostile unemployment offices, on university applications and personnel forms, you see the giant letter printed on every page of your job applications, tax return, grant applications, your medical questionnaires, your yearly performance reviews and on the foreheads of teaching inspectors in your classroom. Now it’s lurking behind the screen as you order or post online and someone, somewhere – for an unexplained and possibly sinister future purpose – is collecting your data.
The importance of recognizing the tropes in Kafka’s work in life now seems to me pressing as it may be possible for us to resist mindless systems of authority or those encouraged by unseen potential dictators’ hands if they are made at least as visible to us as they were to poor lonesome Franz who wanted all his words to disappear too into flame. We need not believe, it seems, that we cannot communicate the self to the world to have an effect, and even if we cannot exit the rooms with doors marked K at least we can find something in recognizing them together. The exhibition of Alica’s in Levice sought to bring young people to Kafka like my St Mary’s College librarian teacher did just by displaying the book and directing me towards it, when so many words and images online seem to stop reading for long periods, and we need to find new ways to open the K door. This can only be a good thing as its better to see the K door rather than just be led through it like sheep by the invisible gatekeepers and then have it obscured by their interminable rules.
The giant letter K hanging above the young people and the link to Kafka means they will carry that as symbol of what it feels like to be on the overreaching, inhuman end of unthinking power, like us, the artist and poets, they will at some point recognize it again and the smile they make to themselves will help them with the fear, and hopefully encourage them to find the others who have seen it. Maybe they will put their head in the birdcage and feel what it is to be made different and restricted and feel more compassion for those who are most often made to feel this way. When they see the chaotic piles of paper that make it hard to move around, they will contemplate past and present systems that lost their meaning or became malignant as they covered humanity’s face and even think about future change where we do not accept things because that is how they are. Maybe they will become fascinated by the mind behind this, they will identify with feeling like they have become an insect overnight and seek out more knowledge of the writer’s life and works. Of course they may also just face the black room’s fear and emerge, knowing it is better to do this with friends than alone and that has its own value or walk it alone for a dare as a rite of passage and contemplate what if this, like Orwell’s boot in the human face, was forever – before emerging with a soul stamped with K but more ready and able to resist the erosion of freedom.
Walk through the dark,
though this is not the open road
trample on the papers like brambles below
they will hold on and try to hobble you
with titles and acronyms and subsections
that eat your individuality like leprosy.
They will spatter you with dots and
demand your signatures
so you cannot stand in solidarity
the typewriters cannot connect
but the computers you use connect to someone
or something collecting you as data
to make you a subject, an image
a new kind of cyber insect,
lost in megabytes and K-tok,
blocked and locked in false images of yourself
programmed by others unseen.
In this labyrinth your best hope is
to find the livestream named life itself.
Let Franz guide you despite his terror
with a book in your hand
to the out door
you must always recall
marked with a giant K.
Durham, February 2025
