The Architect's Brother

Some of the phenomenally dream-like art of Robert ParkHarrison.

The Incoherence of the Sentence in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”

The Incoherence of the Sentence in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”

“Forgive me if my explanations seem rather incoherent” (Kafka 144). Such is the officer’s response, in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” when he discovers that the explorer sent to witness the execution does not yet understand the method by which the sentence is executed on the condemned prisoners. The officer claims that by having the sentence inscribed into their bodies, the prisoners have an enlightening moment in which they fully comprehend their crime, but this claim is continually undermined by the theme of inexpressibility that runs throughout the story. Though the method of execution seems inhumane to the explorer, the circuitous explanation of the device of torture, the practice of not informing prisoners of the terms of their guilt, and several miscommunications that beset the characters suggest that the officer’s plea for clemency in his use of the apparatus is incoherent, and the meaning of the sentence will inevitably remain unrevealed.

While the officer becomes shocked that the method of execution had not previously been explained to the explorer, he is at first pleased, and wants nothing more than to give his own description of the apparatus. However, he is unable to do this in a manner that the explorer fully understands. When the officer notices the explorer’s first interest in the machine and “stop[s] explaining in order to leave a space… for quiet observation” (143), it is the first hint that he wants the explorer to give his own judgment of the execution. Yet the officer does not let the explorer utter a full sentence before butting in with a technical description of the apparatus’s parts, which still leaves out the main detail of how the device actually works. The officer later shows the explorer the old Commandant’s plans for the apparatus, but the explorer only sees “a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other” (148), and cannot understand the sentence. Though the officer points out each letter of his own verdict, “BE JUST” (161), the explorer still cannot see the sentence in the confusion of lines. Like the validity of using the apparatus, the elaborate script of its sentences is only clear to the officer, and does nothing to convince the explorer of the machine’s rightness.

Similarly, the prisoner does not understand the machine or even the charges against him, which further displeases the explorer. When asked about the penal colony’s judicial process, the officer explains that the prisoner does not know his sentence, does not know that this or any sentence has been passed on him, and has not been given a chance to defend himself. The only evidence of the man’s guilt is the word of his captain, and the officer suggests that if he had interrogated the prisoner, “things would have got into a confused tangle” (146). While this already seems a barbaric lack of judicial clarification, the incoherence of the sentence for the prisoner is exacerbated by the condemned man’s inability to understand the officer’s French language. Through the story, the prisoner tries to follow the officer’s explanations, but even when he is placed under the Harrow, the part of the apparatus that does the inscribing, it is not indicated that he has any comprehension of what is going to happen to him. It is shortly after this incoherent parody of justice that the explorer is first tempted “to denounce this execution or actually try to stop it” (151).

Despite the officer’s gradually more insistent pleas for help, it is this desire to intervene that stays with the explorer. But when he finally passes his own sentence on the apparatus of execution, he does not directly explain to the officer that he disapproves of the procedure because it is inhumane. Due to this miscommunication, the officer is led to believe that the apparatus has been negatively judged because the explorer “did not find the procedure convincing” (160). Consequently, he decides to condemn both himself and the machine. While earlier describing the moment of enlightenment that comes to the prisoners, the officer suggests that this “might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself” (150). When the machine is finally put into motion however, it does not produce a sentence on the officer’s back, but merely stabs him to death, and the explorer notes that there is no such moment of understanding on the man’s face.

Through these instances of inexpressibility in “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka is suggesting that it may be impossible to pass a sentence, whether on a person or a cultural practice, and have that sentence by understood.

Works Cited
Kafka, Franz. “In the Penal Colony.” The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Pgs 140-167

On Transcendence

I have been thinking much lately about what has been a lifelong desire to transcend or escape from what has otherwise felt like a mundane and often painful reality. I have desired true miracles, magical occurences, other realities, even yesterday I was looking at some buildings on campus and thought that if I walked past them I might find myself in another set of places that do not exist except in my dreams. I have longed for this since I was a child, and my twin and I used to walk up and down the beach creating an imaginary mansion between us that we would inhabit whenever life was just too little to hold our attentions. I have always sought the irreal, and all my arts, rebellions, highs (of which there have been many), have just been a part of this desire. And yet I still don't know why. Was there some buried crises or trauma from my childhood thjat forced me to want to escape reality? Was there instead no such crises? Was this just a product of my overactive imagination, precocious reading, social ostracization, and somewhat spiritual upbringing? Am I really just a "recovering Catholic," in that I've sought for all manner of spiritual and liminal experiences because God never showed himself to exist?

I have been equally fascinated with magic from a young age, and have been involved over the years with all manner of ritual and religious behaviors. And though many irreal and seemingly miraculous things have happened in my life, whether by my own actions or not, never has anything occured that has completely surpassed my expectations of what is possible. Even my "meeting with God" in '03 can be attributed to the liminal or shamanic state induced by the San Pedro I had consumed, and thus reduced to chemicals in the brain and the powers of imagination. The clouds did not open up while I was walking down the street and angels step out to greet me. It was only ever the sunset, and the only angel I've met is, despite her immense powers, only all too human. I never woke up from a horrendous nightmare to find myself metamorphosized into an enormous insect. It has instead only been a feeling, a metaphor. I think of my younger brother, supposedly kidbnapped by aliens. Did this really happen? Is it only psychological? Is there any difference between the two if reality is indeed some holographic simulation, as scientists currently theorize? Was I abducted too, and have I just repressed it and continually sought out proof, justification? Instead am I merely jealous that it was not me? I used to take the garbage out, and look up at the orange sky in delirious fear that this time they were actually coming to get me. I did not long for it. And the time I was in Oregon and looked up to see that one point of light doing loops in the sky unlike a star, plane, or satelite before speeding off. I was almost relieved, accepted it, perhaps because it was so far away, so inconsequential to verge on the meaningless and thus not a threat to my reality. And I was also stoned.

Show me a sign! I want to cry out, distraught that this glaring lack of a true miracle or magic really does disprove God, the transcendent, forgetting perhaps the miraculous complexity and improbability of the ultimately real, which has yet to reveal anything more than that. It is these thoughts which occasionally lead me to the question of intentionally going mad, in order to see the spirits that we feel must lurk on the other side of the real, forever taunting us with thir elusive presences. It is the lure of the voices, the visions, the unrectifiable break from the Real. And of course, even that insanity is reducible to a state of mind, as is all perception.

Perhaps we can never quite let ourselves experience, or even just see, that which is beyond our conception of the possible. Perhaps there are miracels walking amongst us all the time, and it is just easier, safer to function, to stick to our patterned realities and not let any of that in. We wouldn't know what we were looking at anyway, and would walk right past, the way I couldn't see those peculiar rose-like mushrooms growing in the forest until a friend had pointed them out to me. And then I saw them everywhere. I want to learn, like Rilke's character Malte, to look, and to look again. I think of all the gods, the faeries, Eliade's hierophanies that filled past ages, and I suspect that these were seen because they were then not beyond what was possible, what was expected. We now just have other things that are possible, that are expected, in which the irreal holds very little socio-cultural value. I could only roughly begin to ask why that is.

For all the looking I've done, for all I've tried to extend my perceptions and conceptions of what is possible, for all the incredible things I've actually seen (and if you'd have only seen what I've seen with these eyes), I am still waiting for something that is yet a hundred percent outside of my expectations. I am still waiting for reality to break open, for the time when I will walk over that hill and find myself in that other place that I can only vaguely go to in my dreams.

Open Faith in the Digital Age

Seventy-five million years ago, Xenu, the wicked ruler of the Galactic Federation, drugged billions of his (remarkably earth-like 1950's era) people and shipped them on a spacecraft to earth, where they were stacked around volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs. The tormented spirits of these aliens remain on earth, coalescing around people and causing them grave spiritual harm that must be exorcised with expensive spiritual technologies.

Such is the story revealed to advanced level members of the Church of Scientology, leading many to decry the religion as simply bad, mail-order science fiction for the rich and famous. As creation myths go, the story of Xenu is no more absurd, and just as reflexive of its socio-cultural milieu, as the creation mythologies of the majority of the world's religions (keeping in mind that instead of tribal priests, its founder was a 20th Century sci-fi author). What strikes me, however, is the exorbitant fees paid by members of the Church of Scientology to have this doctrine revealed to them, or to even join the cult in the first place. But even this isn't new. The Vedic religion of ancient India, one of the world's oldest ritual cults that laid the foundation for Hinduism, was primarily written by the priest-poet caste for payment by the warrior-king caste. The religion reflected the monied desires and glories with little interest in or from the commoners, whose own gods got no sacrifices and were often picked as the demonic enemies of the gods of the ruling class.

Thankfully we live in a much more advanced age, in which religious freedom both allows anyone to practice whatever kind of faith they choose, and the rest of us to practice our own faiths (while simultaneously suffering the other guy with some level of curiosity and/or amusement). At least that's the theory anyways. Questions of the insidious involvement of the Christian right in U.S. governmental policy aside, the Church of Scientology has created somewhat of a stir over the years with their vehement refusal to let anyone else see, use, or much less critique their material. Recently, an indoctrination video starring the renowned Scientologist Tom Cruise was leaked onto the internet, and then swiftly suppressed by the religion, with the threat of lawsuits if it was not taken down. Which of course backfired, and led a group of hackers, named Anonymous, to declare an open war on the CoS.

I first became aware of this interesting religious battle several days ago, when Anonymous released a mass of secret Scientology documents, which were posted on a site that has now (for some odd reason) been unfortunately deleted. It seems that much of the reasons behind this war deal with the aforementioned accusations of suppression of information, assertions that the church has killed several people over the years, and that the Anonymous hackers may be a gang of teenage kids out for laughs. While a handful dead do not rival the wake of countless bodies many religions have left behind, and while I generally practice a respectful tolerance for any belief that does not threaten a person or people who have not willingly joined that cult, something that significantly sets the Church of Scientology apart is that their faith is not free. I don't believe there is a single other set of religious texts that is not open to the public, at all, which in this age of information freedom (whether you like it or not) seems to be an attitude of almost medieval occultism. Of course so is assailing someone else's faith just because you think it would be a fun thing to do. Even all the old occult manuscripts are online, somewhere.

Though judging from the sheer incomprehensibility of the deleted, leaked documents (as mildly attested to by this guide of Scientologist terminology), it doesn't seem certain that having their religious texts open to the public would make the Church of Scientology any more endearing to the public eye.

Dreams on the Cave Walls

There's a great essay over on the Dream Studies Portal about the prehistory of lucid dreaming. It seems that many of the kinds of designs found on the walls of paleolithic caves, from spirals and grids to monsters and sex organs, are the kinds of images that are said (by Eliade) to occur in connection with shamanic trance states, but they also occur to the modern, and perhaps prehistoric, dreaming mind, suggesting that our earliest ancestors may have been practitioners of dream-work. Having fallen to sleep to hypnogogic visions of radiant grids dancing in my head, I can identify with the suggestion that this kind of imagery is perhaps somehow hard-wired into our nervous systems. However, I am also sure that many of these kinds of images have appeared in my dreams, whether or not I have been lucid or in any shamanic trance kind of states, and perhaps there is something endemic about the geometrical and fantastic to our experience of reality itself.

The other alternative seems to suggest that we are really just disembodied brains floating in space. All things being equal, science suggests that reality is very, very unlikely to create a universe as complex, organized, and well, as pleasantly skinned as our own. Chances are that we exist in a much more chaotic manner, sans bodies, and more frequently than not, that monstrosity in your nightmares is more real than you are!

The biggest challenge is that is just as highly improbable that time only moves in one direction, and sooner or later someone will find out that it doesn't. Personally I already think that this is the case, for how else could we explain ancient artifacts that defy our concepts of history, such as ancient carvings of dinosaurs, prehistoric metal spheres, and batteries from the dawn of time? I suspect that time is just a subjective paradox, the deeper we look into the past (or the future for all you sci-fi fans), the more we are likely to find ourselves and our desires reflected in that distant eon. I'm almost surprised someone hasn't found a prehistoric car yet.

Review: Eliade's "The Forbidden Forest"

Last summer, watching me struggle through the symbolisms of my dreams, Sophie recommended that I look into the work of Mircea Eliade, who she had heard of in reference to a class on narrative she was taking. I immediately picked up a copy of "The Sacred and the Profane," which while presenting some interesting theories struck me as being somewhat meandering in tone and content. In the fall, during my Myth Symbol and Ritual class, I had a greater chance to look into Eliade's writing, and began to appreciate the depth of his scholarship and research into the field of comparative mythology and symbolism. However, as my teacher pointed out, while Eliade is known in America primarily for his work as the "founder" of the study of the history of religions, in Europe he is perhaps better known for his novels. In fact, some of his critics argue that Eliade's academic work is marred by a rather literary mindset, in which he seeks to present his material like a labyrinthine narrative more befitting of the magical realism of Marquez or Borges, and that his theories on mythology, and in particular the idea of the eternal return and the terror of history, were highly shaped by Eliade's youth in Romania between the World Wars. All this somewhat delighted me, and I was quite pleased to find in the school library a copy of Eliade's fictional masterpiece, "The Forbidden Forest."

Set in Romania and other parts of Europe in the years leading up to and through the second World War, this is the story of Stefan Vizeru, a man who desperately seeks to escape from the clutches of time, as his county and life are destroyed around him. Eliade presents this through startling psychological portraits of characters who all desperately attempt to live in their own personal mythologies, while furthering his own specific theories of hierophanies, the eternal return, etc. The Romanian title of the novel roughly translates as "The Night of Saint John," and the tale opens with Stefan meeting a young woman Ileana, named after a princess in Romanian folklore, who he searches for throughout the next twelve years until he meets her again on that same night in the same forbidden forest. Stefan is obsessed with finding experiences that are more real than real, such as a car that he believes the girl arrived in, or the mysterious woman Zissu whose name is mentioned while he is listening through a wall. Again and again, Stefan returns to the same characters and places, so that the whole novel, and all the historic events that take place in it, feel that they are really a dream lived between the two meetings in the forest. While many modern (or post-modern) novels try to make use of mythology, they often end up using stale tropes, whereas Eliade's exhaustive work on the subject is instead woven masterfully into his character's lives, so that they end up living out their own versions of the classic myths. Similarly, Eliade seems aware that he can only fully depict someone trying to escape from time by accurately depicting them in a historical setting, and the places where that "real world" seems to stop functioning and another time breaks through. On the whole, this novel bespeaks of a masterful grasp of symbols, storytelling, and a desire to break through the real world into a time that may indeed seem more real to those who seek to live it.

We are the heroes of our own dreams

A recent article at Psychology Today suggests that dreams may serve the function of training us for how to deal with threats. Citing the vast number of nightmarish and negative dreams over fantasies and problem solving, researchers believe that dreams may be a practice-place for understanding how to respond to real-world difficulties, even to the point of suggesting that all those nightmares of zombies and aliens are really misappropriated imagery that fills the old evolutionary role of running from the saber-tooth tigers.

Robert Stickgold however, holds that dreaming is much more complex than rehearsal. He points, for example, to the ability of sleep to allow us to integrate and consolidate knowledge, or to come up with novel and artistic solutions. During sleep, our brains are making sense of the world, discovering new associations among existing memories, looking for patterns, formulating rules. "That's how we create meaning," says Stickgold. "Our brain puts things together."

Personally I agree that dreams can help us deal with threats, and help integrate our knowledge about the world, but even still there is some element of the fantastic, the joking and playful, the absurd, that dreams can always present to us, even in our most "realistic" dreams, that suggests to me something above and beyond a mere flight response. Perhaps dreams allow us not only to integrate our knowledge of the world, but articulate a deeper sense of personal relationship to this world, and everything that may or may not happen in it.



Last night I watched Paprika for the third time, which, in the opinion of someone who admittedly has been paying attention to the depiction of dreams in media since about third grade when I discovered Little Nemo in Slumberland, is a rather stunning depiction of the sheer insanity, intricate symbolism, and metaphysical speculation that I have always associated with dreaming. In the chaotic parade of all things under the sun, the use of Jungian archetypes fighting against Freudian repressions, imagistic leitmotifs that accompany each character, or the final idea that perhaps all our dreams are connected, this movie, based off the book by Yasutaka Tsutsui (that was apparently based off the authors own dreams and I desperately wish was in an English translation), certainly does not depict dreams as being a mere "threat-evasion" or problem solving technique, but a true reveling ground of the psyche and all that is possible in the human imagination.

Happy Zeitgeist

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity..."
-Yates, from The Second Coming

It's kind of incredible to see how far world civilization has progressed, and yet how mundane modern celebrations have become. In ancient Mesopotamia, the new year was not just celebrated, but had to be ritually brought about by returning the city-state to a point of chaos; mass orgies, feasting, the dethroning of the king, and then the world is re-created by two teams acting out the mythological slaying of Tiamat by Marduk. While I am still not quite convinced that modern America isn't Babylon (our worship of towers and law, and our war-like and demonizing social rhetoric), our new years celebrations only seem to return to chaos on a surface level: screaming in the streets, drinking and fireworks and singing. While these actions certainly don't re-create the cosmos in any paradigmatic image, they do suggest that the spirit of the times is one of a general and undirected anarchy.

I, on the other hand, had a quiet evening with Sophie. We finished setting up and cleaning our new house, had a lovely dinner, watched a silly movie and played scrabble, watched the fireworks from our window view of downtown, reminisced about how positive last year was and how we planned on reaffirming our practices for 2008, called our families and friends, and curled up in bed, where I dreamt of attending a conference held in all the languages of the world.