More reflections on 2017: persistence, terror and Das Schloss

Persistence

Twelve months ago I was approaching Christmas and the end of a liberating period of long service leave. It was a period of leave that rejuvenated my writing and my living. It returned a sense of adventure and courage to my cultural life. I found a way through this blog to weave together my personal experiences, my observations of the greater world, the visitations of mine terrible angels, and the life of my mind.

But Christmas came with a terror for what the new year of work would bring. The Castle had, some years before, cast me adrift, stolen my life jacket, and turned its back on me. The lordly castellans had hoped I would drown, and now, as I clambered back to the ship, they spurned and insulted me as a cur, not worthy of any enduring position of honour in the Castle.

Still, I lived and still I wrote. I was assigned to pump water from the listing ship, and at night I wrote here. Here dignity, compassion and the life of the mind endured. Here I could leave behind the humiliations of the day. Here I scratched into the panelling of the cursed ship something of beauty, if not every day, then at least most weeks.

Here, I raised my lyre to sing infinite praise.

Terror

The acts of terror and mass violence across the world, including in my home city, this year have cast a long shadow. In my home city, Melbourne in the south-eastern corner of Australia, so distant from the war zones of the world, we have witnessed a string of incidents: the Bourke Street vehicular attack, an incident on a plane in which a man with mental illness claimed he had a bomb, the luring of police to a hostage trap by an ex-prisoner associated with terror plots.

And, of course, across the world a never-ending chorus of the damned has reported terrors in London, Los Angeles, Manilla, New York, Paris,  Stockholm, and Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, Germany, India, Iraq, Israel, Russia, Somalia, Syria, and Turkey. I have read of feral cities and failing states, and been shocked by the espousal of violence by claimants of social justice like Antifa.

This year I had to confront personally the meaning of terror  since it became part of my job. What could my minor provincial government do to prevent and respond to acts of violence, such as the Bourke Street car attack of January 2017? I learned about the motives of mass killers, lone actor terrorists, and group terrorists. I studied grievance-fueled violence and its relationship to extremism and mental health. I met and discussed responses with an Expert Panel on Terrorism and Violent Extremism, composed of a former Police Commissioner and a former Supreme Court judge. I contemplated whether religion provides a salve of peace to counter violent extremism or an ark of the covenant that stores in the culture grievance, hatred and a willingness to die and to kill as a martyr.

I remember the moment of September 11, 2001. I was watching of all things the West Wing, when some news broke that a plane had flown into one of the twin towers. My partner and I watched uneasily the news coverage, and saw live to air the second plane fly into the second tower. There have been many incidents since in the new era of pessimism and fear ushered in by that attack. But it has not truly been until this year that I have truly recognised the gravity and depth of the threat posed by the monster of sacred violence that sleeps in all of our hearts.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Das Schloss

“K. constantly expected the road to turn in the direction of the castle at last, surely it would, and it was only because he expected it that he kept going” Franz Kafka, The Castle (Das Schloss)

Eighteen months ago I was prepared to give away my long search for the gates of the Castle. I had sought a return to the ivory tower of my youth, where I could study history, and leave behind the court and practical affairs. But the keepers of this tower spurned me too. So on the last day of my work before my long service leave I disconnected my work phone, copied onto a flash drive the few documents that would remind me of my most important personal achievements in the bureaucracy, and packed up the few personal belongings on the desk that I would never return to again. I walked out the door about 3 pm, and, on the eve of an election for a national government, went to watch a live-to-air radio show in my local shopping centre where they talked about political affairs and the looming verdict.

I was not sure I would ever come back, but I had no plans to find another career. A year earlier, I had been in a deep depression, close to suicide. I had fled my work in humiliation and fear. Now I was walking into a deeper and truer life, but a life without security or status or power unless I chose to return. I threw myself into poetry, history, and the meaning of a simpler life. But nothing about my dependence for a living on the organisation that seemed to despise me changed.

In January this year I did choose to return to life as a bureaucrat, and I renewed my search for admission to Das Schloss. Every month I have written to some minor lord of the Castle, and pleaded to be considered worthy and admitted to the orders that busy themselves with the business of the court, there in the mists, beyond my vision, at the end of the twisting road. Twenty times, at least, they have said no, and not once, as I have walked this long twisting road, have I caught a glimpse of the true Castle I have searched so long for.

Now at the end of a year in which I have tried to live in truth, to write my own thoughts as authentically as I can and to act in the world in a way that approaches my values, I still stand as an outcast beyond the reaches of Das Schloss.

Which way do I walk next year? To the Castle and back, or do I turn my back on this great civil dream, and wander alone like a grey wolf into the Great Dark Forest?

go for only thus will you be admitted into the company of cold skulls

to the company of your forefathers: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without bounds and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

Zbigniew Herbert, The Envoy of Mr Cogito

Image source Sam News