Good time for Kafka

Kafka’s field day if he was still alive.

Strange times we live in. Stranger people we interact with evermore. Metamorphosis, the age-old concept immortalised in literature by Franz Kafka seems most relevant today.

The word ‘Kafkaesque’ has been overused to the point of abuse, as is often with literary trends. Today, however, concepts of surreal, imaginative, and the absurd coalesce together as if it’s daily business.

There comes a time when a person’s search for meaning becomes the driving force behind their lives. When individuality, place in society, and in work, defines a significant portion of their lives. So used do they become to their subjective realities that it becomes difficult to even look at anything else. The eyes a mere projection screen for the mind which is twisting reality with its own senses, biases, and prejudices.

Death, berserkers, and idiots everywhere. Every new day only brings out dread over the sheer numbers of death, from disease, famine, and war. The efforts to induce normalcy fail while some countries flourish with enhanced leadership. It’s a situation where some people die, others lament, and some rediscover themselves.

Goals and objectives fall apart in these times, never was one for much, I. The loss of hope for many brings out the connection humankind ascribes to the abstractions and the unknown.

The veneer of positivity espoused by philosophers has turned out to be a blatant lie. All the fancy graphs that bear no resemblance to reality, all studies of timelines which predicted humankind to reach its pinnacle, and all symbolisms of prosperity and positivity have withered away, a vain hope in the face of stark reality.

So why Kafka, you ask? No reason, I say. It’s merely indicative of the dreary and demanding deaths, while people on the side talk about wellbeing. It’s the descent of humankind into a chasm of despair while people outside celebrate their own demise. It’s the inevitable chess move where the opponent changes the whole board rather than a simple piece.

While calls for humanity linger, society goes ever polarised. Sense, humanity, and ethics stand as mute witnesses to a world increasingly gone mad. The silence not voluntary but one whose throat is choked from ingesting the bile of hatred from around the world.

All the while, the champions of the world casually move on, their lives undisturbed, their masts still steady, and their directions well set.

And in the midst of it, the most innocent casualty, human sanity. No sense prevails as the lines between humans become sharper, cutting through the haze of pretend harmony. Loud voices on all sides continue to subdue reason and sense, while the affluent cast aspersions on the underprivileged. The world goes on, so they say, built on the corpses of the unwanted, the crushed dreams of the weary, and the shattered dimensions of humanity.

These are parables, only they state no morals. These are ethics, only they serve an invisible abstraction. And these are future glories lost in the heap of the mundane. There are no lessons here which will help.

I used to imagine parables which could be relevant for Kafka’s conceptual application, when I realised that the whole world is already one. Cocooned in their homes with their abject fears manifested, fighting for their lives with hunger and for monarchs unrealised, and complicated procedures everywhere polarising every thought, this is Kafka’s dream novel manifested.