Bridge to Kafka's Language of Dream-Identity

Kafka, Separated from the Fire by a Mirror by Paul Mersmann der Jungere

"Please, consider me a dream." Kafka

How may we interpret this mysterious quote, passed down through interminable echoes? What, if any, interpretation needs be? Read one interpretation. They say it sums up his life. Can a life be summed up? In the spontaneous trigger of language into the folds of space and listening, when do we hear the contemplative grab of a lifetime thrown into a phrase? 

The peculiar relevance of the painting above by German artist Paul Mersmann der Jungere speaks eloquently to the theme of self-reflection and passion. Self-consciousness, or conscious identity may sometimes block our passage into the spiritual heart of self-annihilation, providing us only with a thin display at which to gawk, and finally, withdraw oneself from participation in life altogether. It may be more useful to identify with the less formal, and more marginal states of mind. Or, as Kafka said in another dream reference, "Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me." [source] 

If language is a bridge, we do not always cross it, but sometimes slip beneath, and after speaking in one direction, go our own way. 

__________

Memory fails to awaken dream into day. Here is bridge photography from the conscious state:

Entering the Blue Void by R.K. 

Electric Ice Reflection by R.K.

City Riverbank in Winter by R.K.

Ice Flow of Light by R.K. 

No One Lives Under The Bridge by R.K.

 ____________

Into infinity
            And the terminal plague of survival

Marching by
            Currents stepping like waves over the stone-headed martyrs

Staved off
            From one life inside
...

Painted fame twisting and writhing
            In the soundless urban deep
         
A rustic, inflamed few,
            Whose solemn grasp partakes in the early break
         
From an inevitable aftermath
            Draining the rage from our animal brain

excerpts from "Guise of the Beloved"

Dream, or Intoxication: Nietzsche and the Tradition of the Master Singers

The Ravens (For a poem of Nietzsche) by Margaret Hofheinz-Doring

"...dream and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. According to the idea of Lucretius, the marvellous divine shapes first stepped out before the mind of man in a dream.* It was in a dream that the great artist saw the delightful anatomy of superhuman existence, and the Greek poet, questioned about the secrets of poetic creativity, would have also recalled his dreams and given an explanation similar to the one Hans Sachs provides in Die Meistersinger.*

My friend, that is precisely the poet’s work—
To figure out his dreams, mark them down.
Believe me, the truest illusion of mankind
Is revealed to him in dreams:
All poetic art and poeticizing
Is nothing but interpreting true dreams.

The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the precondition of all plastic art, and also, in fact, as we shall see, an important part of poetry."

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy (e-text)

One night I had been tirelessly searching for this very stanza by Hans Sachs, however I'm unable to read German so my stalwart online efforts proved futile. After glossing over Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy" a few times within the body of other texts on mythology, psychology, dream and poetry, I have now found a predecessor to Nietzsche, Hans Sachs, embedded in his monumental philosophical work. This is one of my favourite tracts of literature, and yet I've still to read it in its entirety. I continue to draw from this work the kind of lucid understanding of our inner being as it has moved and developed since the first pages of history unto time immemorial. Such an exhibition of prime thought beckons one's mind, as a lure into the opaque night of isolation and longing, yet when nostalgia dissipates the true character of one alone breathes the kind of truth that is our universal whole, a cosmic constancy of holism, triumphant in its lasting mystery. 

_________

The air, invisibly opaque, opaque in its emptiness, invisible in its bodiless humor, I gaze through the sheathed firmament, a room, a body, jacketed in the empty dark. Forcing my eyes to move, I see a slight pitch in the cruel nothingness, a fleck of something in a bruised vacuum of light. Where am I? 

View of an Etruscan Tomb by Henri Labrouste

I am upraised, I am raised above ground, on a bunk, on an old bunk of childhood longing, bedside window staring, the endless bunk of isolated raised up childhood. On my head, a Viking helmet… It’s sheer weight, it’s ridiculous… My arms flail under a body weighed by the lowering ceiling, and a head crowned with a horned and vast slate of crudely nailed metal. 

Viking Saga: The path of the Vikings to the Greeks by Айвазовский И.К.

And as I look up, the ceiling, lowering, eyes me back with a staring mushroom, with an elongated stem, a fungal growth, upside-down, to stare at me with its sexual head of strange and auspicious gloom, a vivid flight of the hallucinating noesis, the natural misplaced in a mind-born hell of undone pain, to sleep and writhe, in a landless bed of the upright bunk, swollen helmeted head. 

Winter by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

And at once, I toss the disfiguring crown over the edge! It dings off the edge of a television perched on a dresser, and the reverberation is near-unending, an unnatural sound emits, and sends my unconscious flesh storming at the gate. 

_________

One proud, unseemly yet everlasting hoary wind

Escaping into the breathless fold of a storm-brought love

Escalating above the tumult of grounded trees

Lowered to rest in the silent play of her touch

With Mother Nature in lust at the American shoulder-sculpted God

President of inveterate honor

Failing to maintain true gaze

Into the outpouring blind Persian mystic call

Excerpt from "Untrained Timeless Tuning" [featured on Poydras Review]

Cavernous Dreaming, Forgotten

Lions painted in the Chauvet Cave by HTO

French Archaeologist

The first time I entered the Chauvet cave, I had a chance to get in during five days, and it was so powerful that every night I was dreaming of lions and every day it was the same shock for me, it was an emotional shock, I mean, I am a scientist, but a human too, and after five days I decided not to go back into the cave because I needed time just to relax and take time to...

Herzog

To absorb it?

French Archaeologist

To absorb it.

Herzog

And you dreamt not of paintings of lions but of real lions?

Herzog

Of both. Of both definitely.

Herzog

Were you afraid in your dreams?

French Archaeologist

No, I was not afraid. I was not afraid, it was more a feeling of powerful things and deep things, a way to understand things which is not a direct way.

From "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" by Werner Herzog