A Staging for a Spot of Light
What do we do with Kafka? We’re seized by the enchantment of his writing and drawn into the vertigo of anguish. He speaks something of our own — conscious or unconscious, what does it matter? The fear of life and the fear of death are one and the same. Fear. And where can one hide? You try to escape — but from where, and to where? The road up and the road down is one and the same.
Art — and life — suspended in temptations of flight, yet always returning to the center; only there can it hold, only there does it cling in hope of salvation. Otherwise, what meaning would salvation have, and to what end? Falling into the void seems an easy flight, melancholy seductive, the nothingness of darkness a lure. Escape teeters on the edge of the abyss, even though the sun shines on all things, though the stars mark luminous paths through the dim night, though life is a gift, and the dark avenues of paradise stand wide open. A single speck spot of light is enough to open a road toward it.
I had gathered some old timbers from a ruin nearby, weathered and wounded by time and the elements. I tended to them, mended them, and they made up a rectangular staging— a tenebrous well, discreetly adorned — how could one deny beauty? And there, the deeper you go, the longer it stretches, a tiny flicker gleaming ahead, a point of light.
The path is weathered, dark, with colored scraps of cloth as scattered joys, stray little roses as fleeting pleasures, incomprehensible dark traces as loneliness, inscrutable transformations of self or other — it makes no difference. And even if you try to distinguish them, in the end, they are all one. And here we still are, carrying with us our incurable cure — hope.