The question of what to read before bed has always bothered me. Out of all the reading I do in a day, it is the least fruitful — I cannot take notes in bed, I lose the subtle elucidation of a theme, I can hardly keep track of names, and inevitably there are wide gaps in my recollection of any plot — and so reading in bed is no more than the final gateway in a long procession of gateways that lead, at last, to rest. Consequently, if I do not read before bed I almost always find it impossible to sleep. My mind refuses to rest alone, and needs a companion in the form of an author’s words to accompany it to the shore where it can drift off.
Shorter works, I have found, are best suited to this purpose, preferably stories or essays which I can finish in the span of a night or two. Earlier this year I read the jazz manga Blue Giant and the samurai manga Vagabond, though in both cases I found that reading Japanese before bed prevented deep sleep. Retreating to my native English, I read George Steiner’s Errata for a third time, jumping from essay to essay according to interest instead of reading front-to-back. Following that, I decided to knock myself out by re-reading the final chapter of Ulysses.
I was with Ulysses for two weeks. On a night in early September, when at last I read Molly Bloom’s final and world-founding “yes,” I found myself just halfway sedated. It was late, and I could not form a real thought, but there remained in my head something like the slow-blazing loop of a solar flare, a boogey-anxiety or the residue of joy(ce) which I knew would keep me up for hours more. So I rose from my futon and went to pick something new from the shelf of books I had brought with me to Japan. Without much consideration (it couldn’t have happened any other way), I took my copy of Kafka’s Complete Stories and, laying down for what I hoped to be the final time that night, began reading from the section titled The Shorter Stories.
These, as it turned out, sent me to that other, quieter shore more quickly than Joyce had. If I gave a reason as to why, it was probably Kafka’s sense of detail that was my tranquilizer. Rendering a Kafka scene within one’s imagination is like copying an M. C. Escher from a detailed list of instructions; one tends to get lost in the architecture. Take, for example, this description from “Wedding Preparations in the Country”:
“Behind her sat a gentleman with a traveling cap on his head, reading a large newspaper. The girl opposite him, who was probably a relative of his, urged him — at the same time inclining her head towards her right shoulder — to open the window, because it was so very hot. He said, without looking up, he would do it in a moment, only he must first finish reading an article in the newspaper, and he showed her which article he meant.”
This paragraph is pure description; it bears no clear relationship to the protagonist or his goal. The narrative gaze moves in a loop from the gentleman, to the girl, to the window, and then back to the man. The request to open the window is placed and then deferred before the newspaper article returns to the fore, though the reader is not told why. The details given — the man’s hat, the conjecture about the relationship between the man and the girl, the fact that it was “so very hot” — do not coalesce in any metaphor. Kafka’s vision tends to spiral in this way, to survey with wide detail but without coherence, before drilling rhythmically, into the strange heart of a scene.
A few paragraphs after the one quoted above, the gentleman in the traveling cap finally opens the window. The narration continues: “Raban [the protagonist] thought he was waking up and that was why his cheeks were so refreshed, or someone was opening the door and drawing him into the room, or he was in some way mistaken about things, and, breathing deeply, he quickly fell asleep.” Though the window is opened and sense is fulfilled in one very minor stream of the story, the protagonist loses his sense of place as well as his consciousness. Various lucidities assembled in non sequitur: this is Kafka’s design philosophy. Amongst other merits, it tires the brain.
I continued to read from “The Shorter Stories” for several weeks. Oftentimes I found myself halfway down a page before I realized none of what I had read made any sense, and that this wasn’t the result of a stylistic effect but in fact owed to my stream of consciousness running thin. Sleep almost always came on quick and thorough, and once asleep I rarely woke again in the night. In the morning I found myself with a fresh mind, feeling well-rested, lighter. It was immediately clear that I had Kafka to thank. I could think of nothing else responsible for this sudden improvement in my sleep. And yet a moment of hesitation came before I opened the book each night. When would I have a nightmare?
I am blessed with a more-or-less relaxed subconscious, and so usually enjoy a timeless blank between getting into bed and getting out of it. Stress or an “undigested bit of beef” can lead to bad dreams, though not often what I would class as nightmares, and apart from this my sleep is neither ecstatic nor horrific.
As one might predict, reading Kafka changed this.
At first I noticed nothing. Recognition of the change was as slow and foggy as the change itself. I was not “dreaming” in the narrative, pictorial sense. There was still no nocturnal plot for me to survive. But if my mind was clearer when I awoke this was because it had, as I slept, performed some subtle maneuver, had dug into a density which had taken the form of a sentence or perhaps only a single word. It was as though, even with the book laid away and my eyes shut, my mind had continued to follow Kafka’s whirlpool-pattern into a distilled and kinetic waterlight that reflected out to the boundaries of my dreamworld. The nocturnal experience sewed by these Kafka stories was not a dream, but a glimpse into the setworks of one. It was hollow and bare, independent of life. Including, it seemed, my own.
Here was a mental region of which I had never been cognizant. And it remained, night after night, frustratingly blurred, a recollection of a reflection discovered after the fact, a memory of a non-shape blocked by the barrier between sleep and waking. To call it a sensation would be to give it more content than it had. For all its novelty, this dream-stage persisted in emptiness. But whereas I had started reading with a fear of nightmares, I came to anticipate the time when something would finally appear to populate the non-Euclidean Kafkaland inside me. And should that dream turn out too frightening, then I’d only have to shelve the Stories and read Lucky Jim for the umpteenth time.
I do no remember the exact story I read on the night when the dream, long fertilized, finally bloomed. It was probably one in the range from “The Bucket Rider” to “Eleven Sons.”
In the dream, an old friend had come to visit me. His girlfriend was with him, as was an older man who bore a vague resemblance to our high school English teacher, though he had grown a Freud beard and wore glasses and a labcoat. There was nothing in the setting of the dream which indicated that the four of us were in Japan — the three characters and myself (I always dream from a half-omniscient point of view, sensorily expansive but emotionally, psychologically embodied) stood in spotlit streets that vanished in the half-distance. There was something strange about my friend’s behavior. He was confrontational, paranoid, adverse to reason such that our conversations lacked any real content. This depressed his girlfriend and distressed me a great deal. Soon the Freudian English teacher took me aside and told me that this raving was due to a lamentable psychological break on the part of my friend, a sad case with little hope. But the man’s ambiguous relationship to my friend stoked doubts in me. Whether he was a teacher, a doctor, or a stranger I could not know, and each relationship would naturally impact what I thought about his supposed diagnosis.
Kafka before bed is the only psychosomatic therapy that can cure one of the disease, endemic to his work, of interpretation. I do not mean to say that, when reading Kafka, everything is a misinterpretation, because some works by critics have been well-reasoned. Even I have the theory I expounded above, about a geography of spirals along which his scenes move. But Kafka’s writing was, as he said, “a form of prayer”; and prayer is best heard without a commentary beneath it, even if it is the prayer of a foreigner spoken in a strange tongue and generated out of a strange tradition. “There are two lives,” as William Jamese wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.” Because there is no such thing as untruth in prayer (what would it even mean to deceive in prayer?) there is no need for interpretation, for the unmasking of a hidden sense. Sense in prayer is not found by traveling down, as in psychology; it is found by traveling up. To understand another’s prayer one must abandon natural language and go up to meet them.
The next scene took place indoors, in something like an all-black version of a standard room of a Japanese business hotel. It lacked a window. My friend and I spoke to each other over the bed, he with his back to the abbreviated hallway and mine to where the window would have been. My friend was as unhinged as before. He gestured madly, punched the air with his right fist and patted the bed with his left. I sank to the realization that there was something deeply wrong with him. But as I continued to listen, I noticed a change in the room; it was as though a white outline had spread over the edges of the walls and furniture, and this change in the environment also took place within me, so that the pitch-black rambling of my friend gained its own bright silhouette, and I realized — though all too late — that his madness was in fact a kind of warning that had collapsed beneath its own urgency.
With cinematic suddenness, my point of view cut to the foot of the bed. On it appeared an electric-blue horse which lay over the sheets with its legs uncomfortably spread in front of and behind it, its large, ink-blue eyes pointed towards the door of the hotel room. It was motionless with fear. Over and around it crept a form that swam in sharp currents of yellow and white. My eyes struggled to understand the logic of this second being, but along my spine there came a dread like a cloth being drawn across an embroidery frame. It looked something like a portrait of Apollo done by Monet yet behaved in ways less-than-human. Within the immediacy of my vision the streaming, glowing figure, beautiful to look at yet nauseating to watch, was in every bewildering ray of its being unnameable.
The figure was larger than the horse, with a chest as broad as a truck and thighs like lighthouses, and yet it squirmed over the poor animal with serpentine fluidity. It pressed its elbows with sadistic pride into the horse’s smooth skin, then flipped over to wrap its legs in a chokehold around the creature’s neck. It wrestled with the horse, or performed something like a wrestling routine — the horse was immobile and innocent, even passive. Across the light demon’s face a smile carved itself like initials in the bark of a tree. And all at once the speed at which it twisted itself over the horse began to accelerate, as did the cruelty and wretchedness of its shape.
It began to eat the electric-blue horse.
To read Kafka without logic or rigor; to read Kafka without comparison or dialectic; to read Kafka without sense or hesitation.
Unlike Balzac, Austen, or Joyce, Kafka is not a writer of the natural world. The pain experienced in his writing — so often there is emotional suffering, physical injury — is not, as it would be with these authors, pain recounted; it is pain enacted. Likewise with his giddiness, comedy, and absurdity. Though I have always been a defender of Kafka as a primarily comedic author, to me it is now pain which seems to be the primary note in his works. It is what my spiraling conscious attends to when I read him (as I have continued to do since the night of my dream). And it is what I have come to identify in the wideness of his eyes in that most famous photograph. They are not, come to think of it, not dissimilar to the eyes of the electric-blue horse.
What a trip! Have you thought about adapting this as a story or the beginning of a book? The further you went on, the more it felt like prose itself wanted to shift into a higher (more spiritual?) register. I think you mentioned that you had previously been working on a novel set back in the states, but perhaps this might be a way in to writing about your experience in Japan.