Kafka and Hardy, Gurdjieff and Stein
The crowd looks respectful and bored.
Ten hours of conference. My paper
is last. I've honed my argument
silly enough to cut my throat.
Something about Thomas Hardy
meeting Franz Kafka somewhere
along the Italian border.
How the clash of aesthetics
sparked Walter Benjamin's doctoral
thesis on German tragedy.
The light in the conference room's raw
as the firelight at which Cro-Magnon
primates contemplate their cookery.
The speaker preceding me completes
her exposure of disjunctions
in Swift's Tale of a Tub. She drops
into her seat with a thud. No one
applauds, yet her observations
on Swift's use of the subjunctive
shone like garnets in dull gray schist.
A tough crowd. I rise and rattle
my papers. The half-drawn curtains
fail to wholly conceal the view
of Toronto, pink lamplight burning
on Lake Ontario. I begin
by depicting Hardy in tweeds
and Wellies, prepared for the worst
roads in Europe. And Kafka bent
over accounts that won't add up,
his final gesture of frustration
scrawling the final sentence
in the first draft of The Trial.
Hardy's ears prick up. The Alps gleam.
A tiny figure descends on skis:
Kafka? Not yet. It's Gurdjieff,
come to recruit the pair of them
into his favorite paradigm.
My audience stirs and groans. I read
more quickly, imposing Gertrude Stein
on the landscape, erasing
Gurdjieff and intriguing Hardy
while Kafka arrives with pasteboard
suitcase and shabby black topcoat.
The audience creeps out one by one,
the empty folding chairs stark
and indifferent. I tear my pages
into narrow strips and drop them
on the blue and green carpet and sigh
the standard institutional sigh
to which no one ever responds --
the ghosts of Kafka and Hardy
too cosmopolitan to notice,
Stein and Gurdjieff too enraptured
to acknowledge that they've died,
too convinced to notice the slight.
William Doreski
* * *
about the poem:
"This poem grew out of years of boredom sitting through academic
conferences, or presenting papers that numbed even me, their author.
Jon Woodson has written an interesting book on the influence of
Gurdjieff on the Harlem Renaissance writers. When he visited a
couple of years ago our freewheeling conversation, silly at times,
sparked this combining of elements. It depends on Jon's notion that
Gurdjieff appears not only as an influence but also as a secret or
disguised character in many of the Harlem Renaissance novels.
Beyond that, I can't explain it, other than it attempts to embody
the tension between the mystery of literature and the academic idea
that mysteries exist to be explained, which isn't a wholly misguided
notion -- merely one I've tired of."
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