CATHARTIC DREAMS - FRANZ KAFKA IN GAZZA غزة

 

I know that none alive would ever believe me, and just because of it, I do relate. I met this summer Franz K. In Tukh. The small dirty town between Cairo and Alexandria, where in August and September, you can find delightful melons. (Yellow, girlish-round, and smooth, as moonlight). I met him in a dark, pour, private clinic, where he used to work, almost free of charge, upon completion of his daily job in a Cairo hospital. I did not even have time to glance at him before the surgery. I might miss forever the opportunity of that magic identification, had he not stepped, right into my eyes, at the very moment when I was emerging from my, anesthetic, sleep.

 

First, I did not wake for hours. Then I heard, with a certain end of my senses, a call, resembling panic. Mister, wake up! There was shaking me, his assistant, ever less gently, while, voicelessly, and persistently, with all my forces, I was refusing to come. As sinking, into the eddy, of the unconsciousness, while the same eddy, of the consciousness, was ejecting me back. To reality. (Ah, it was so indescribably easy, and painless, to be in nonentity!)

 

Then they called him to help. Finally, I had to open my eyes. In the midst of the reality, which has already, for millenniums, cathartically dreamt, but which never, until this very day, truly repented. To my luck, that is inseparable from the fate of this collection of dreams, first what I saw was since long known to me, his hair parting right through the middle of his head. I gawk at him, like at the ghost. He was as same as on the newspapers photos, to which, throughout his entire childhood, I begged my son to model his beautiful hair. He started speaking in (perfectly distorted) Arabic, which nowadays speak all Arabs (boasting, excessively, to be only who, well, just because of their language, properly understand the Holy Qur’ân. God forbid, never in my life I have heard greater lie!).

 

He would have almost deceived me, had I not felt, with my well-trained sense for the cathartic dreams, in his speech, a un/reality accent. Franz K. To support my finding, I turned upside-down, at once, by a look, his whole reference library. And, it confirmed me the same. Amongst the medical tomes, I have discovered some, for that place completely inappropriate, books on Administration. A masochistic nostalgia concluded I, of a former clerk, who, as he was disciplinary scrolling, every day, office documents, was learning what absurdity is. (To the comprehension, that the police and bureaucracy are inseparable ingredients of the life-elixir of every political lunacy, and almost no a power without turning to the schizophrenic, is sacrificed the work of Franz K. Likewise my living. What, perhaps, both, will find their cathartic healing in the crystal ball, into which I will peek, if God wish, at the end of this book). Therefore, who does not know Franz K. from his literature would hardly understand this incident with a bureaucratic poison amid a small clinic. But I, who consumed it from the first to the last letter, was now definitely sure, that I had before me a famous metamorphosis. (That previously used to reach its readers in its literary, metaphorical, form only.)

 

. . . and, in the bottom of the cadre, in a deep perspective, on a dusty road, as the Smaller bear, from the Sky Constellation, was moving a funeral procession, and entering a closed shutter, with a fragile, childish, body, as a white, swaying, headscarf, above, bereaved, heads.

 

You guessed! Even if there were not Anne's trust, I would not have missed, neither because of myself, to get occupied with the appearance of Franz K. in Gazza. Plus, in the midst of a catharsis. When I saw him sometimes earlier in Tukh, it was clear to me at once, that he lives for decades in a cathartic dream, as in his only home. In the catharsis, which, as being filled with the regret of a sincere writer, is not temporal, like with other people. Nor is it only personal. It is a very conscience of the humanity (on which rare examples, a bunch of scribble-maniacs has founded theirs - famous - mythology). In order to my own stays clean in this case; I have to relate how my sudden, post-anaesthetic decision to read out Franz's cathartic dream was delayed by an, reliable, information. Upon which I immediately flew to another side of the World, about what you came to know long before, from Dream the seventh, or Gazza, a forgotten land. Yet, as you would also understand this (apparent) case, and why it is important for Franz's and my relationship, I will tell you, briefly, what was it about. I will use, for it, a special chapter, in order to, neither mine, nor the enemies of this book would discover; that all these encounters are knotted in the ball of the same catharsis. The dream of which, like (Ariadne's) thread, introduce their dreamers into the very centre of the Palestinian labyrinth/o/s. Reality of whose horror unmasks all the world's history (including the one of literature) only as a wanton metaphor, that, instead of children (who now bleed), plays an, idle, game of hiding.