Interpreting Franz Kafka's _An Imperial Message_

[Glenn Scheper]

> A dog toy?

Well, I suppose so.

The Heart track _Dog & Butterfly_ compares a young girl
whose world is crashing down around her--melancholia--
who "Rolls back down to the warm soft ground / Laughing,
she don't know why" (a favorite Nietzsche idiom) to the
old man's advice, how the dog and butterfly both love
to fly up in the air--Obvious upturned monadic erotic
symbols painting a gender contrast.

But I think generally poets and prophets shy away from
the obvious dog comparision because of the Revelation
line "dogs shall not enter therein," which I've read
explained as signifying male temple prostitutes.

Yet, I do recall Nietzsche's dog yapping at the portal
when he counselled the shephard to bite the head off
the snake found bitten into his mouth. But that could
also be like Baudelaire's bitch awaiting her remnants
of the _Carrion_ that is he himself, the autofellator.

But about Kafka's _An Imperial Message_ and it's greater
containing text, _The Great Wall of China_, both here...
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/imperialmessage.htm
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/greatwallofchina.htm

First for any newcomers, I only hang around lit-crit
for whatever evidence I can gather to demonstrate an
autoerotic trigger for such metanoia and melancholia
as affects poets and prophets, and as happened to me.
Kafka is such a fellow: clear to me, an autofellator.

First, his _Metamorphosis_ was so like the day of my
acute psychosis, then wasted years of mental illness.

Second, his works are amply filled with all the right
words -- standard ancient metaphors and novel coinage,
well-tuned isomorphisms to the domain of autofellatio.

On the ineffability of the carnal Word, his _Josephine,
The Singer_ asks "Is it really singing?" It's true that
there are songs, but no one remembers how to sing them.
If fact, rereading that, his is no less laudable effort
of intergender subjectivity than _Cristabel_, or all of
Dickinson's self-versus-bird (autofellator) references.

Again, in _The Burrow_, ~ "if he finds the opening [i.e.,
mouth] I will maul him, devour, cast his bones out, etc."

And in the conversation with A, B, and C, he ~ "swallows
amiably all that is said by C". Also therein to tense the
eyes, a patent standard play on eye/opthalmos/hole/mouth,
is to pucker the lips. I should check out his muscles...
No, not such prominent lip elevators as I would expect:
http://faculty.rmwc.edu/tmichalik/kafkapix.htm

Anyway, whatever historical accuracies, his great wall
expounds the spiritual realities of the solitary mage,
the abject man, who as Paul says, has "tasted that God
is good" and has fallen away, or rather for apostasy:
stands apart, who cannot be renewed unto repentance
--which is all exoteric religion offers: no rebirth.

To say the wall is to base a tower plays on a notion
(Nag Hammadi?) we are living stones built up a tower.
The comparision of real Peking vs. an eternal emperor
is like the exoteric church vs. a distant, hidden God.
At length, why the wall is built in segments recovers
an experience of developing the solitary gnostic mage.

My first thought was the emperor and the pathetic man
are one and the same, although apparently separated in
space from a casual reading, they are both one with the
messenger whose impeded flight reflects the paradox of
the metamorphosis--the marriage, birth, and death all
at once, from impossibility of being one's own father.

Of course, Kafka's heritage--Jewish, differs from mine.

On the day of my psychosis, I awoke from the dream life
asking about Jesus while already knowing that I am him,
the direct gnosis of the entire universe worshipping me
being parallel to this portion:

> And in front of the entire crowd of those witnessing his
> death--all the obstructing walls have been broken down,
> and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a
> circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs

I, a gentile, could be such a monad who begets himself.
But Kafka, whose body was marred by circumcision before
his rebirth, could not beget such a marred body. So too
Jesus of Nazareth could not go off a content monad like
Enoch, but was entangled in all prior generations since
Moses implemented circumcision, and in prior generations
until Abraham by the subtle entanglement of patriarchal
autofellatio overloading ordinary relationships, until
Himself, Angel of the Lord, declared fertility to Sarah.

Whereas Abram, having a son, felt to slay him, I having
no son, but a father, rose to discuss with my father how
I must kill him, quite as Sophocles has Oedipus' role, or
Hamlet's ghost-self-father armed against Claudius, his
father now called uncle, apparent usurper of the throne
and the implied wife/queen of Hamlet, a father-of-self.

My second thought was that the emperor is not the same
bodily self, but God, that particular celebrated Jesus
of Nazareth. But it is no real difference. I confessed
His name, being baptized into the Uncommon Ejaculation,
Holy Spirit, and obtained Him when I bit into Our body.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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