Kafka first came to the town out of a desire to make himself real. As he approached, that day, the walls of the town made sense. A place to walk, a constant motion yet one static place. He approached with the love of the idea of the town so strong that he began to see the town receding from him, like an Oriental mirage. Out of panic and an instinctual self-presevation, Kafka began to imitate the inhabitants of the town. This initially took some practice. He started off merely parroting what he saw, figuring out how to represent them; once he was beaten by a citizen who took Kafka's mimesis for mockery. Soon, however, Kafka's behavior took on a synthesis of what he learned about the town. A way of carrying one's self; a measure of civic pride.
Kafka constantly fears discovery. Among the citizens of the town where he has taken up residence, he adopts a form of nondescript concealment. He walks with his head down. He does not speak too loudly for fear of drawing attention. He does not associate with elements that might, by reason of their style or by virtue of their ideas, attract attention. He keeps to himself and goes about his business.
Kafka has friends, in whose eyes he is a normal inhabitant of the town, as they are.. But Kafka, whose every breath is scented by the consciousness of his essential duplicity, feels a strange discomfort with their professions of friendship; he believes it is not him they talk about when they say they love. He wants to love them--nobody yearns for companionship more than Kafka--but the secret he carries prevents him from believing that they are real. There is no affection in Kafka. Kafka imagines he rides above his body; he imagines himself perched on a pole and platform device cantilevered above the head, peering down on all his behavior, and he takes careful note of all that occurs.
Kafka reads about exiles and envies them. Here are men and women, thinks Kafka, that can finally live in freedom. Wandering, free from the greedy root of place, they have choices that members of a society can not. Of course, exiles are not just drifters. The ideas that cast them from their place assume the status of a cause. They have lives shaped like paths; their choices are never bound by their society's conventions or customs. Because Kafka has never been an exile, he does not understand that exiles love their lost society, yearn for their original geography. Even in the bewildering multiplicities of their free lives, they wait for the day they may rejoin the structure of their home.
Kafka wishes that he had some secret errand in the service of which he could claim this double life. But as far as Kafka can see there is none. He simply lives in the town and is not who he seems to be. He does not choose to be an impostor. Chiefly, he fears what might happen if someone were to find out he is, in fact, only Kafka.
hypertext version copyright 1996, oedipal enterprises, (very) ltd.