KAFKA'S PHONE

‘In the duel between yourself and the world, act as second to the world.”

--  Franz Kafka

“Those writing great private journals in the last century (i.e. the 20th) did not do so to know who they were, but kept them to know what they were turning into, in which unforeseeable direction catastrophe was taking them.”

--  Enrique Vila-Matas

I’m walking with the Vietnamese nuns in the evening coolness, They are telling me about how much they miss Hanoi, I say I miss Hanoi too and they laugh - they know I’ve never been there. They are trying to practice their English in between birdsong clusters from their native tongue. And I can’t say much. I have to stay within their tiny vocabulary. I feel kind of alone, but surrounded by love. The story of my life.

And then, walking beside me, is Kafka, engrossed in his mobile phone, sending text messages to Felice in the old-new language.

I want to send you an impossible video: of the nuns’ sing-song voices and shining faces and Kafka’s otherworldly silence and hís shining mobile phone. A beautiful, raggedy yet carefully edited two minute video that just about stays within all those borders so respected by Bolano: the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics.

And I would like to send it to you through the post, inside a smartphone designed by Kafka. Just the phone itself, alone in a box, without any letter of convoluted explanation, without any “hi there” or “I hope you like it." Just the device, like a halo without an angel, a device all alone, alone like Kafka, like each of Kafka’s stories. I dream more and more of living in such an explanation-less world. Opinions, explanations, addresses, histories - they’re all on the verge of disappearing.

Describing Rembrandt's last self-portrait, Genet expresses the feeling that 'it seems to be saying "I shall be so intelligent that even the wild animals will recognise my goodness."' I'm imagining a world, post-Facebook, post-Apple-Amazon-Microsoft, in which our devices - and therefore ourselves - behave like Rembrandt and Vermeer and Kafka and Jane Austen. I will arrive there - you try too.