Unleash your imagination-the Kafka way!!

This is a session that is meant to open your eyes wide shut to possibilities (and impossibilities for that matter) of Life.

"What if" is a concept that was created to push our imaginations to dare to experience new encounters that are otherwise difficult in reality; while "Why Not" is a tool that gives us the guts to try things...

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For instance, what would you do if you woke up one morning and found you were someone else? Or something else?

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This is not small talk. Kafka, one of the biggest writers of our age, imagined it in his "Metamorphosis". Kafka starts the story simply with:

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One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

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Surprisingly, Gregor’s bizarre new state is not the central transformation in the novel. Instead, Kafka uses Gregor’s surreal change as a catalyst for an almost more shocking metamorphosis: that of Gregor’s family, as they move from helplessness and sympathetic fear to emancipation and hostile rejection. In fact, it is Gregor who remains largely unchanged. He struggles to maintain his daily routine during most of the story, until his body finally forces him to surrender and accept that he is no longer fully human.

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Furthermore, even when confronted with proof of his family’s scorn and rejection, Gregor refuses to see them as anything but justified in their disappointment and anger towards him.
It’s a telling detail that neither Gregor nor his family wonder why or how he’s turned into an insect. Once he’s unable to communicate, Gregor becomes a mere observer of the world around him. At the same time, this isolation evokes a series of startling revelations and actions from his parents and sister, triggered by their assumption that he can no longer understand what they say and their belief that he has lost all human traits.

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The reader comes to acknowledge from the first few paragraphs that Gregor has been almost the sole bread winner for his family for years; that their apartment, their everyday sustenance, and their few luxuries (His sister Greta's fancy dresses and violin lessons) come from Gregor’s hard labor as a traveling salesman. This explain’s Gregor’s distress at the prospect that he must “stay in bed being useless”. His first thought at discovering his new state was being concerned that he might be late for work, or take the whole day off!!

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Later on, Gregor overhears his family speaking about the fact that they have been saving money, however, they had decided to keep living off Gregor's earnings for as long as it was possible. Rather than being angry, Gregor feels relieved (in shocking idealism, that Kafka intends so as to show the paradox between the family's ethics and those of Gregor). He feels he has to “help them bear the inconvenience which he simply had to cause them in his present condition”; as they were, Gregor thinks, “suffering enough as it was”. All along, he believes he will be able to work again, that this is a temporary illness, and that life will eventually go back to normal.

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Gregor’s love and devotion towards his family remain unchanged throughout the story, the only constant left in his rapidly deteriorating life. As his physical needs and abilities shift from human to animal, it is his family who forces him to adapt to his new identity: they remove the furniture from his room, begin feeding him leftovers, and gradually help strip away everything that had identified him as a human being. It is no surprise, then, that they’re able to exclude Gregor from their lives, and ultimately cause his death.

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By the end of the story, Gregor’s parents and sister have themselves metamorphosed: they regain a youthful vigor as they begin to work, take trips to the countryside, and eventually sell the apartment they had shared with Gregor. Gregor’s change is superficial, since he resists adapting to his new physical identity. Kafka’s choice to portray Gregor as a “vermin” implies a useless and parasitic nature that clashes with his giving and reliable personality. On the other hand, Gregor’s “disappearance” forces his parents and sister out of their own parasitic existence, leading them to a much deeper transformation at the end.

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OH MY GOD!! DON'T YOU JUST LOVE KAFKA, with his depiction of the dark side of humans!!

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To continue what we were saying, one day, you wake up to realize that a particularly vital assumption about the world is wrong. Everyone who buys into it is wrong. Which is almost everyone in the world. Everything in the world that depends on it is wrong. Which is almost everything in the world. Now what?

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Examples make it easier for you to imagine: In Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise wakes up in the morning, on his way to his firm, he founds no one, nothing moving, utter solitude in this world. Scary thought? That is my worst nightmare, although I sometimes feel like I would love to try what it feels not to have humans around at all. In Vanilla Sky, this turns out to be a dream, or a nightmare would be a more specific depiction of it.

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Another very valid example is if they suddenly prove, with scientific convincing methods, that the earth was created randomly and that there is nothing like a God, religions, or anything with a divine nature. Now, this is just an example, so as not to offend anyone with faith in their hearts. But if this happens, what does that imply? Why do we live? Why do we die? Do we have to live or do we have to die??? Why do we endure pain and suffering waiting for a better tomorrow up there? Accidents are merely accidents? They are not destined or pre-destined?

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Waking up is an apt way to put it; rebooting your system slowly in the morning, thinking: (Who am I? What am I doing today? How did I get here? -Oh yeah..) This final Oh Yeah is what keeps us going, realizing once more the way of the world and our role in this life. But do we all say it and feel it??
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To be continued...

The "Truth" About Life

When I was little, I wanted to change the world.

How fast do years fly by. Things happen beyond your expectations so fast, with a tendency to go out of plan and before you know it, your priorities shift. From wanting to change the world to a mere, childish desire to fit in.

I have a very wide social circle, I do. They say no man is an island, well and no woman too :)

However, communicating with people around me is exactly what Samuel Beckett depicted in his masterpiece "Waiting for Godot", where people speak, (thinking to one another) when in fact they are going around in repetitive circles around their egos and themselves, not knowing for sure what they are aiming at.

While some interpreted Godot as an imaginary creature, others thought it was God- and the book was classified (or at least in my school) as Theatre of the Absurd. But I saw it as starking reality, like nothing before. I felt the resemblance from the first page, to life as a whole (and my life in particular). The utter randomness we live in, which we like to deny through God, customs, traditions and other masks that make it easier for us to imagine that there is more to life than the crap we live through everyday. We can't simply imagine that this crap is actually life. The Good and the Bad. Just as it is.

For instance, coping mechanisms with life include what people "invented" since the pharaohs to make their lives for a purpose, such as heaven, hell, socially accepted patterns (e.g. a virtuous married couple with two children and a small car- can vary a little from one society to the other).

Not accepting these givens might be what pushed Hollywood filmmakers to make movies such as Fight Club or Revolutionary Road (in which I AM Kate Winslett's character in every sense of the word). With the Revolutionary Road, I was one of the very few that cried her heart out in the end because Winslett's unborn child of convention and ordinariness killed her. I was scared for myself. I don't want to end up living a life that is good in other people's eyes. My eyes are what matter.

End result is I thought that Birds of a Feather Flock Together, so I started focusing on finding birds of my feather, so we can express ourselves freely together, to whom I can speak about my dream guy and not hear a word about how his social status, bank account, religion, car, continent, how we meet, nothing. Or if I want to drink some nice cup of coffee in Ramadan, I don't have to hear a word about the fact that fasting is a truth beyond doubts (I wonder how people even think there is anything like a truth beyond doubt in life at all. Did no body else but me hear of Descartes? Everything is rebuttable).

"Ordinary" people can push you to act differently from how you would have in a more liberal society. For instance, if I don't feel like I have to fast, I don't drink or eat outside my house in Ramadan, which is wrong and stupid, because it is hypocritical and because without coffee, I wouldn't have had a personality whatsoever. But my nationality does not allow me to drink coffee for a whole month because people around me don't want me to. I don't wish to delve in the area of what you are allowed to do or not in terms of religion, as this is an extremely thorny topic. However, I just want to emphasize that people should be allowed to act as per their discretion, and in the end they will have their reward/punishment accordingly (if they believe it).

People are the offspring of the environment they were born into, the country, the language, the culture, the religion, the timing in history, and so on- I was born (and still live in) in Egypt, a country that I love with every sense of the word, and I don't have to lie about it (or about anything else in life). But, sadly, it is also a country that can squeeze the blood off your face if you live in it long enough, unless you fit the profile of the "Birds of a Feather" that I talked about earlier (in which I don't fit).

I have spoken a lot and in circles, but I really thought this article is the best introduction of me. It is difficult to engage with people when your concept of God, love, right and wrong, career, ethics, (you name it) is plain unique, unconventional and naively idealistic.

(ps. I don't believe that everyone is unique, I think there are a lot of sheep out there!!!!!!!

In my part of the world, "unconventional" is a bad word that people don't prefer to use to describe themselves, their thoughts, ideologies, (although they are surprisingly more comfortable with words like pragmatic, practical, pro-West, conservative, career-driven, ...). I understand their yearning for acceptance, but it only proves my point.

Don't think that I am done. Not even close.

Rania- from my own personal free platform...