I am in my 21st.day of water + 200 gram boiled chicken or fish diet. My blood pressure went down to normal: 120/80 and I have lost 15 kilos.
The pic illustrates Kafka’s 1922 story “The Hunger Artist.” Greatly admired in his youth, the artist is now aging and interest in his art is waning. As he grows despondent over this lack of interest he decides to break the forty day “rule” and just keep going. As he is about to die from starvation, the artist explains his real reason for being a hunger artist wasn’t to be the best hunger artist there was but rather, “Because I couldn’t find the food that I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else”. Unconvincing, I say.
Addenda: It ocurred to me, could I charge the public for watching me? I need an impresario.
7 comments:
Impressive. I think I'm gonna try that diet. Anyway, be careful when you stop the diet...
No, Peter, it is easy. The thought of fasting is scary, but the actual thing comes naturally. I definitely feel better, more energetic, the mind sharper. I am bothered by smells which I never noticed before.
Of course it is unconvincing - so is waking up transformed into an insect. Yet somehow Kafka is strangely compelling nevertheless. He has his finger on the pulse of the absurdity of modern life - we are surrounded by plenty but an intelligent man (Kafka himself) still cannot be made happy by that which entertains the oblivious bovine masses.
Kafka (like Anne Frank) is more haunting because he did not live to see the full horrors that his writing foreshadowed. He died of natural causes but the rest of his family perished at Auschwitz.
K
I never understood Kafka's stories. I read The Castle several times, could get the point. My fault.
Read The Penal Colony:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_the_Penal_Colony
I think it is a (disturbing) masterpiece - the absurd rituals of bureaucracy gone wild, the unthinking obedience of the those who are so caught up in the details of the ritual that they lose sight of all morality. The fact that without the rituals to sustain them, the lives of the executioners become worthless.
Read the Penal Colony and then read about Blokhin and tell me that Kafka was not strangely prescient about the totalitarian mind. Remember Kafka writes in a world where these horrors do not yet exist but he sees them coming with great clarity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Blokhin
K
There are very few human endeavors, basic biology excluded, in which the ceremonies and rituals do not, in the end, become the unconscious point of it all.
Anon.
This is the genius of Kafka - most people are possessed of the illusion that they have free will but Kafka knows that we have no more control over our actions and our fate than an insect.
By the way, the difference between the Russian and German approaches to mass murder are very telling. The Germans approached it as an industrial problem to be solved technologically. The Russians favored a more "hands on" approach.
K
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