For World Mental Health Day 2015 : Where, in me, is Kafka’s Josef K. ?

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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10 October, World Mental Health Day

A personal vision of trying to relate to the experience of breakdown / psychiatric challenge in the form of ongoing existential / spiritual self-examination

This is not [meant to be], on #WMHD2015, @THEAGENTAPSLEY talking about others as if about the self (or vice versa)*.

Rather, it is more in the nature of a confession, of trying to be honest and open about what breakdown, and admission under section (circa 21 April 1996), deep down meant and felt like, and still does, just now – when the feeling of how I act, and have acted, hypocritically can be keen, as here :

-> Then I don't *recall* Kafka's The Trial, how Josef K. simultaneously creates and tries to worm out of his own ill-doing, but see I'm K.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 10, 2015

I *am* K., but I easily luxuriate in the other K. - K.'s uncle sent him / me to Huld, the advocate, but we're more interested in Leni/ sex.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 10, 2015

If needed, here is a paragraph from Wikipedia®'s summary of the plot of The Trial**, by way of partial context for those Tweets :

K. is visited by his uncle, who was K.'s guardian. The uncle seems distressed by K.'s predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned that K. is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K. to a lawyer, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, who K.'s uncle suspects is the advocate's mistress. During the discussion it becomes clear how different this process is from regular legal proceedings: guilt is assumed, the bureaucracy running it is vast with many levels, and everything is secret, from the charge, to the rules of the court, to the authority behind the courts – even the identity of the judges at the higher levels. The attorney tells him that he can prepare a brief for K., but since the charge is unknown and the rules are unknown, it is difficult work. It also never may be read, but is still very important. The lawyer says that his most important task is to deal with powerful court officials behind the scenes. As they talk, the lawyer reveals that the Chief Clerk of the Court has been sitting hidden in the darkness of a corner. The Chief Clerk emerges to join the conversation, but K. is called away by Leni, who takes him to the next room, where she offers to help him and seduces him. They have a sexual encounter. Afterwards K. meets his uncle outside, who is angry, claiming that K.'s lack of respect has hurt K.'s case.


NB Looking back, in that way, to sectioning in 1996 (and again in January 1997), there is no intention to suggest that anyone else does feel, or ought to feel, twinges of conscience that are tied up with their experience of mental-health issues or services.

However, for me, conscience / awareness of feeling a fraud seem in the midst of what happened then, now, and everywhere in between.

If I see a spiritual or existential dimension in my own issues of mental health, it is for me to see – or, more likely, pretend to myself that I am aware of it, when largely I keep it well hidden (at least from myself) : it is all in relation to wanting to work out my paranoia, and why I can, so easily, find accusation in comments, words and texts (mainly from memory, though also in recollected things that people said or wrote, and what they meant / whether they really meant xyz)…


Coda :

And remembering may be, for some, to do with learning not to forget... ? :

Do we assume that short-term memory degenerates with age ? : If you left things at the post office at 19, you did learn to remind yourself.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 10, 2015

End-notes

* As one of Beckettt’s authorial voices says somewhere (in The Unnamable, or is it Company ?), When I say ‘I’, and – having addressed the question whatever / whoever ‘I’ is (and he digresses, as I do, in the fashion of Laurence Sterne’s principal narrator, Tristram Shandy) – he goes on to say just that : when saying ‘I’, he does not intend to talk about someone else (as if it were he).

(Molloy, too, certainly mentions that he may lapse into talking of himself as if of another.)

** Kafka wrote the (incomplete) novel in German, entitled Der Prozeß.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

From the #UCFF archive : The Lottery Ticket (submitted to @BBCRadio3 as a competition entry)

The Lottery Ticket :

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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11 May

The Lottery Ticket :

Six Numbers

[In homage to Stravinky’s Jeu de Cartes
(and, necessarily, Walter Mitty)]

To Svetlana

Alex frowned.

He had become captivated (again) by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, and now he just didn’t know how to go on… In particular, he found the story ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ perplexing, and his equilibrium upset. (This was, of course, before technology would render his musings virtually redundant, but at the impossibly high cost of re-creating another Borgesian fantasy, that of a library without end or catalogue, or even meaning.)

Despite the clear reference to another of this century’s great writers in the name of ‘the sacred latrine’, which – maybe? – threatened to undermine the whole edifice as artifice, was there ironic plausibility in the claim that ‘A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that that ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue burned out’? After all, hadn’t he heard that the same writer, in his A Universal History of Infamy, had plundered – or rather dismembered – the Encyclopaedia Britannica in search of tales of ‘Widow Ching, Lady Pirate’ and of ‘The Tichborne Claimant’?

That being so, why shouldn’t there be a grain of truth in a lottery in an ancient land decreeing ‘that a sapphire from Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates’, or giving rise to a world where it could be said that ‘Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave’?

He cursed Borges under his breath at the notion that, in the simple frustration that he just couldn’t know the answer, there lay the beauty of the text, and, in search of sleep, turned over once more.

13

* * * * *

Christy woke him – too early! – the following morning, with a shake. ‘Wassamatter?’, he raged incoherently. ‘Your mother is here’, came the stark answer that brought him unerringly into the wakefulness that he sought to avoid. Christy had a knack for doing that, and for being to hand as the (logically necessary) messenger-boy in the first place.

Alex threw on some clothes, and descended into the farmhouse kitchen. There, indeed, she was, brandishing a pale pink oblong of paper. ‘Now I’ll be rid of the lot of you!’, she shrieked; ‘And you all told me, over and over till I nearly was, that I was out of my mind!’. He had no idea what she was talking about, but there was no chance to find out, because she had metamorphosed into Science Officer Spock, complete with tricorder, blue top, and those ever so slightly kinky boots, and started flying around the room.

He jerked himself awake, regretting that the act of emergence meant that, the revels being, though thankfully, ended, he would have to face the day.

And who the hell was Christy?, he railed to himself. (Or was that, as he surmised as soon as he’d said it, an unbidden consequence of listening to Beckettt’s All That Fall…?)

8

* * * * *

Across the heath, he spotted a shape on the horizon. Not having the patience for it to materialize in a long shot, like Peter O’Toole on horseback, he busied himself with some papers: if, whether or not bearing scythe, it was for him, it would be there soon enough. But where were his notes from the other evening?!

When the knock came at the door, he descended. He half-expected Maria Andreevna – although she was no horsewoman – and accordingly started puzzling at why that term conjured up a satyr-type hybrid for him, whereas the word ‘horseman’ didn’t.

In fact, it was Dr Wassimiter, ever darkly cloaked against the wind. As usual, in the six or more hours that he was with Alex, he drank tea, kvaas and vodka to excess, and consumed copious pickled beetroot and herring, but, most importantly, he had brought the love-note that was so long awaited.

Alex waved him on his way, and fell to opening it.

19

* * * * *

Her carriage came crisply for him at ten, glistening with frost. At first, he was disappointed at the thought that it had been sent to him empty after all, but the pallor of her unveiled face gave her away, when she tried to sneak a further look.

Ably helped, amidst a cloud of powder, he climbed the steps that the footmen let down for him, but, losing his balance at the summit, almost fell into the furs on top of her! Scarcely a fit way to greet your queen when she condescends to call you to have your future read – a horoscope likely cast whilst the Englishman improvised a fantasia or two, and that other saucy fellow embellished further the record of his sexual conquests!

7

* * * * *

All at once, she was Leni to his Josef K., betraying the advocate with her passion, toppling and crushing the piles of paperwork over and over under her willing back.

Or Frieda, bringing the odour of the slops and swill into Klamm’s private rooms at the Herrenhof, into which K. and she had penetrated to avoid the tiresome attention of the assistants – and now found themselves alone, as never before since his arrival in the village, with the luxury to enjoy (rather than snatch at) sex.

He came close behind her, nuzzling the side of her neck and covering it with kisses, as he crossed his hands under and embraced her breasts.

Yes, to-night was the night!

29

* * * * *

As he drove her home the next morning, she caught him unawares, just after he had taken the gentle S-bend by the church.

‘What are you looking like that for, like you’ve won the lottery?’, she said, slyly.

46

31 January

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)