Dawn Xiana Moon: Melodic folk pop infused with passion and honesty. From Chicago.

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Monday, June 20, 2005

Kafka and Art

I was first introduced to Kafka by Carmen, a flute-playing senior who usually shared a stand with me in band my freshman year of high school. She was reading The Metamorphosis for an English class, and over the next couple of days I read most or all of the story during breaks while our director would rehearse chunks of pieces we were playing with other instrument sections. That's all it took--I was hooked.

Some time later our forensics team (a loose term) watched the 1987 film of Steven Berkoff's stage adaptation. (Little did I realize then that the man playing Gregor Samsa is none other than Tim Roth, who is phenomenal especially in his physicality; he turns very convincingly into a dung beetle, moving in ways you wouldn't expect a man to be capable.) And then of course everyone reads Kafka in their own high school and college English lit. classes. If you're me, you read his work with relish on your own: I just finished The Trial last night.

It's something of a contrast in my personality that I have a tendency to laugh constantly, or, as one friend puts it, "Dawn's rest position is a smile," while most of art that I'm drawn to and create has a tendency toward darkness or melancholy. Not necessarily darkness without hope, as in Kafka's nilihism, but the exploration of emotions and situations, of struggle that may or may not end with victory or happiness. Perhaps this is because such work seems more honest, more real--"A Hunger Artist" in contrast to Tolstoy's late Christian parables ("The Three Hermits," for example, reads more like a sermon illustration than a short story), even though both contain elements of the fantastic or otherworldly that also tend to draw me into a story. Or perhaps it's because it's ridulously difficult to write something both substantive and thoroughly happy. Is it possible to have true happiness without first surviving trials, without suffering?

To close my ramblings, the conclusion of Andre Dubus's "A Father's Story," one of my favorites:
Why? Do you love them less?

I tell Him no, it is not that I love them less, but that I could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons' pain, could bear it with pride as they took the whip and nails. But You never had a daughter and, if You had, You could not have borne her passion.

So, He says, you love her more than you love Me.

I love her more than I love truth.

Then you love in weakness, He says.

As You love me, I say, and I go with an apple or carrot out to the barn.

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