The Writer in the Neutral by Gustav Janouch

 

In May 1921, I wrote a sonnet which was published by Ludwig Winder in the Sunday supplement of Bohemia.

Kafka said on this occasion: ‘You describe the poet as a great and wonderful man whose feet are on the ground, while his head disappears in the clouds. Of course, that is a perfectly ordinary image drawn within the intellectual framework of lower-middle-class convention. It is an illusion based on wish fulfillment, which has nothing in common with reality. In fact, the poet is always much smaller and weaker than the social average. Therefore he feels the burden of earthly existence much more intensely and strongly than other men. For him personally his song is only a scream. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. He is not a giant, but only a more or less brightly plumaged bird in the cage of his existence.’

“You too?’ I asked.

 

‘I am a quite impossible bird,’ says Franz Kafka. “I am a  jackdaw –a kavka. The coal merchant in the close of the Tein cathedral has one. Have you seen it?

‘Yes, it flies around outside his shop.’

 

“Yes my relative is better off than I am. It is true, of course, that his wings have been clipped. As for me, this was not in any case necessary, as my wings are atrophied. For this reason there are no heights or distances for me. I hop about bewildered among my fellow men. The regard me with deep suspicion. And indeed I am a dangerous bird, a thief, a jackdaw. But that is only an illusion. In fact, I lack all feeling for shiny objects. For that reason I do not even have glossy black plumage. I am gray, like ash. A jackdaw who longs to disappear between the stones. But this is only joking, so that you will not notice how badly things are going with me today.’

Supplement VI; The Neutral by Roland Barthes