kafka. so bizarre, so bizarre

i realise that i'm late for posting on the blog. it's just that lately it's finally hit me that i'm in school and it's already the 8th week (or end of it). tempus fugit, and it ain't funny. it's not that we haven't done our readings, i believe, it's just that we're too tired to get online to blog. okay. enough dillydallying and on to my thoughts on the metamorphosis and the penal colony by kafka.

first, i'd like to do a little show and tell. what gregor samsa looks like inside my mind. the wonders of paint, and how cute he looks to me!

okay. back to the serious stuff. what shot through my mind as i read metamorphosis was firstly, despite how energetic and mobile gregor suddenly found himself (thus the numerous legs), he was psychologically restricted simply because of his family's perceptions/receptions of him, and because he couldn't articulate his thoughts. would it have been different if he could speak? then perhaps the sheet on the sofa could stay atop him and his mother and sister would come in and sit at a corner to talk to him, find out what his feelings were. but because he lost the power of speech, he lost his rights, his recognition as a 'human being', or a being with a human soul. he lost all vestiges of 'human-ness' in his family's eyes.

it just goes to show how limited our perceptions are, by our senses and by popular thought, by the mass media and so on and so forth. have you ever wondered how you've managed to acquire that irrational fear of bugs? (if you don't have any fear of that sort, then pardon me, it was a gross assumption on my part.) was it because you had a terrible, traumatic experience when you were young? like a bug bit you on the leg or something. or was it because you saw your mother/grandma/auntie/sister (erm not to be politically incorrect but i admit it's usually the female that does) scream every time at the sight of a hairy-multilegged thingy, and automatically your brain stores this information away, and you react the same way afterward when encountering another one of the miniscule, harmless - but oh, eek! creatures.

this fear is therefore irrational, of bugs of all sorts. i can sort of understand his family's initial reactions though, a BIG BIG bug is definitely something to get squeamish about. but surely after awhile, his appearance should be familiar to them, and therefore they ought not to react so violently every time? there was once i volunteered at the singapore zoological gardens, and they asked me if i was afraid of snakes. funnily enough, i didn't see any reason to be afraid of them, and so had to handle pythons for photography with visitors. see, despite shows on animal planet telling you about poisonous snakes, i personally hadn't encountered any vicious ones, so yeah, why hold a groundless prejudice against all snakes? likewise, i shake my head at the samsa family. they ought to know better, to be more objective. their reticence from gregor, their withdrawal of sympathy and social interaction was what inevitably caused his mental and emotional degeneration into eventual death.

and now for another commercial break from text: my pathetic attempt at reconstructing the 'apparatus' in the penal colony

it's a terrible attempt, i know. but heck, i never did do well at drawing.
nevertheless, you gotta admit, this form of torture, meaningless and mindless it may seem, is certainly an intriguing, well-thought out creative piece of machinery.

the officer was insistently annoying. pathetic, his lengthy diatribes of his departed commandant and his obvious clawings at a system that was unacceptable by modern standards. it was, as if, he was brainwashed, and his mind ('narrow, incapable of understanding') was the only weak one left that had no barrier of common sense to keep quiet and be one of the passive (yet hopeful of future uprising) adherents who ate above the commandant's grave. i felt that his death by impaling on the spike of the machine was not right, not fair. he should've been made to suffer like all the rest of his tortured victims, he should've been made to feel the 'message' on his body, the words 'be just' inscribed over and over again on flesh. (incidentally, this reminds me of some punishment in harry potter, anyone remember this?)

be just. these two words. i realised that there might be the possibility kafka didn't allow this last statement to be etched onto the officer simply because it wasn't a worthy message. was he ever just in administering this torturous death to others? the flippant way in which death was the penalty for a person who dozed at his post seems not just to me. the officer's death, quick and relatively less painful than his previous victims', was not just. the officer did not manage to achieve the realization (or did he?) that at the 6th hour, it isn't enlightenment that dawns in the victim's eyes, it is the active mind shutting down its defenses and giving way to a passive acceptance of death, it is the blanking out due to the ever-shrinking, obliterated world of the tortured due to the immense pain. the way in which the explorer could simply hop in and out of others' lives unscathed yet scarring them forever, was unjust. justice was never really manifest anywhere within the text. therefore the final message did not get written.