Transformations: A Chorus

I woke up with the large-hand feeling. It begins with a tingling in the center of my palms and then I feel my hands swelling. The sensation as I wake is that I do not feel the bounds of my body and my hands are throbbing beside me like giant torsos. This usually means that I have something to write. Only this time, I didn’t know what it was. I lay there trying to note which thoughts shrunk the hands and which made them expand. My administrative mind—with its endless list of things to do—shrunk the hands. Other ideas, already played out for me in projects I have already begun or collapsed into concepts, also shrunk the hands. So now I am writing in my journal, wondering what unborn thought will further expand my hands.

I think Kafka began with a real feeling of transformation, and then attached it to the image of the roach before the roach took over to become the story. I talked about Kafka with the writer Stuart Dybek last night. We gave a reading and then went to a French bistro and talked about cooking, spear fishing, writing. At one point he asked how I chose my daughter Adèle’s name, which is a derivative of his mother’s name.

I said that her father, Richard, retrieved it when he traveled back to Europe and reconnected with his father’s family there. He was digging around in the attic with his newly acquainted fourth cousin, and he found the cookbook of their common ancestor—Adèle Fammerée. She was a Jewish woman living in Belgium in the late nineteenth century, and there were her recipes, in her hand. When he saw them, he felt like he recognized her, Richard said.

Then Stuart began telling a story about going back to Eastern Europe to teach. He hadn’t intended to look up his family there but had coincidentally run into his brother’s former fiancée, a French woman, just waiting for a train in Prague. They began walking down the street together, and they heard Klezmer music.

“And it was like a deep memory,” I interrupted.
“Why would you say that?” Stuart asked.

“Because that’s how Klezmer feels to me.”
“Yeah, it was like a deep memory,” he went on, and told me that as the music played, the French woman convinced him to travel back to Krakow, where his ancestors had lived, and where, she said, they would hear the best Klezmer music. They took the train there—Stuart, his wife and the woman—and found a small bistro where they ordered dinner. When the waiter heard his name, he got very excited. After they finished eating, he walked them to the local Jewish temple, to meet a Rabbi who had the same name. The Rabbi was imposing, and didn’t seem impressed that this cheerful American guy was also a Dybek.  

“In fact, he didn’t believe me,” Stuart laughed. “I was raised Catholic. Being Jewish was never a part of the story,” he added.

“My paternal grandmother’s family is from Hungary,” I said, “and my great grandfather came over alone at the end of the nineteenth century, when he was just a boy. His name was Evans, but I always wondered if his name was something else, if he was sent here to escape the pograms. Otherwise, I don’t know how to explain the affinity that I feel with that music, those traditions. Like a kind of recognition.”

That’s also how I’ve always described love, I realize, as a feeling of recognition. The first time I saw Richard, I shivered. I thought I saw our daughter’s profile in his profile somehow, although she was years from being conceived.

It made me think of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” “When we love,” Rilke wrote, “a sap older than memory rises in our arms. . .inside us we haven’t loved just some one in the future, but a fermenting tribe; not just one child, but fathers, cradled inside us like ruins of mountains, the dry riverbed of former mothers, yes, and all that soundless landscape under its clouded or clear destiny—girl, all this came before you.”

*

Stuart was teaching in Prague and he and his friend saw a poster for Eduard Goldstucker

giving a talk on Kafka. They thought it was a typo—surely it was some scholar on Goldstucker and Kafka? Goldstucker, Kafka’s great friend, had to be dead, right? But no, they got there, and he was the one speaking. He was in his nineties at this point, and he said that he could not die until there was a museum named for Kafka.  

“And in his talk, he said something that I never forgot,” Stuart said. “What you have to understand,” he said, “is that in the beginning of Kafka’s life, Judaism was a religion. But in his lifetime, he watched a religion become a race. He said, until you understand that, you will not know how to read Kafka’s stories.”

It was one of those insights so clarified that it makes all other literary criticism seem like a self-protective and decorative enterprise. Kafka watched something that was a living, sacred ritual and inheritance become “othered”—positioned over its practitioners as a fixed definition, priming them to be marginalized and then “exterminated.”

There are transformations brought on by inner need, and transformations brought on by outside forces, I remembered, and we are privileged to the extent that we can choose our own transformations.

*

“This can’t be the way the story goes,” a friend said to me when Richard first got sick with the incurable illness, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. A degenerative neurological disease, ALS relentlessly attacks the nerve cells that control voluntary muscles. People with ALS incrementally lose their strength, and the ability to move their arms, legs, and body, before finally losing the ability to breathe on their own. It is a slow-motion death, a terrible transformation in which the body becomes a confinement, an unyielding shell while the desires and mind go on living. It is a little like Gregor’s transformation in the “Metamorphosis.”

“This can’t be the way the story goes, this can’t be the way the story goes, this can’t be the way the story goes,” Richard must have said to himself as his body grew more and more paralyzed, as he tried every treatment, from medications to shiatsu massage to acupuncture to teeth pulling to breathing therapies. First, he could not walk as fast as he used to. Then he could not lift his foot. Then he could not lift his arms. Then his voice began to slur and disappear, all while his mind remained sharp, alert, intact.

The final entry in his journal, before it goes blank, entering the months in which he lost the ability to hold a pen and did nothing but try to survive, reads:

Seventeen days ago, I fell off my bicycle after an hour spinning in sun and soft wind. I had just arrived home and decided to inch my bike closer to the green garage door, when the slightest incline prompted the bicycle to the right. I fell beneath it, my right hip hitting the cement with the finality of a great bell’s last ring. The series was over and the silence surrounded me.

The “series” was over? What was the series? I wonder now. Those moments in time that had made up the forward motion of his life?

*

“The terror of art, the horror of life” said Kafka, discussing his Metamorphosis, “is that the dream reveals reality, which conception lags behind.”  The art that we see on the page tells us who we are, what we will have to endure or become.

“’What’s happened to me?” Gregor thinks in the story, realizing what has happened only after the terrible transformation has transpired. The mind needs time to catch up.  “It was no dream. His room, a regular human room, only a little on the small side, lay quiet between the four familiar walls.” The space he occupies has remained the same, but he has changed—involuntarily and irrevocably. Who he was has departed.

*

I have always intuitively believed in reincarnation—that’s where all these echoes of recognition come from, right?—but I can’t think of it as a literal, exact equation.  

“If I come back, I think it will be after I’ve already entered the great chorusing whole, after I’ve already been folded into oneness,” I said to my friend last night, “so if I return I think it will be as elements of me, reconfigured into new combinations. Maybe the way cells combine and split and recombine.”

“So maybe there’s a kind of alphabet of genes and human qualities, and that alphabet can be arranged into endlessly new novels?”

“Exactly, but since the alphabet is the same, there are always words, and sometimes whole scenes, that you recognize.”

*

Gregor’s incarceration in a beetle form forces everyone in his family to work the several jobs of the poor—the father as a messenger, the mother sewing the delicate lace of others’ underthings, the sister as a shopgirl with a newly naked neck—until they are forced to bring rude boarders into their very apartment. And yet, as the family is plunged into struggle, they also come alive somehow, focused around their urgent, private misfortune.

This too, I recognize. I wonder if I could have ever have fully known myself without those years of caring for Richard while he became increasingly ill. We hovered around the poverty line. I made calls to hospice and insurance, trying to hire in-home help with any resources I could find. I navigated Medicaid for him and potty training for our toddler daughter. I spoon-fed the man I loved and raged against the loss of him while I worked full-time and worried endlessly about paying the rent, raising our child, buying groceries. I came to understand something about myself, and my strength, in those awful years.

And while they were legitimately awful, I also would not trade them. We were living, we were learning, even while he was dying. We were communicating even through the months when he could no longer speak. His illness stripped him of everything he had been able to do, everything we thought he would go on to do. And yet there he was, there I was. This sense of presence and connection taught us to believe more fully and necessarily in the soul, in the ineffable, irrepeatable essence of who he was, who I was.

Maybe it was my sleep-deprived state or maybe it was my heightened alertness, but sometimes I felt like I almost recognized that story even while we were living it. Those shapes of love and hardship seemed patterned in us. They felt karmic or ancestral, somehow, like an intrinsic story of suffering and caregiving that we needed to externalize to finally release, or a process we needed to weather in order to find our equanimity. Sometimes I saw his illness, and that whole chapter, as a shell we would move out of into some greater radiance.

*

Even the reader feels some relief at the end of “The Metamorphosis,” and it is a little like the guilty relief a caregiver feels after a long and terrible illness. How was Gregor to go on in that awful, ill-fitting form, that shelled paralysis? Wasn’t it simply impossible?

Some of us who loved Richard comforted ourselves after his death with the fact that his suffering was over.  

“I’m just glad that he doesn’t have to wake up this morning into the terrible realization that he can’t move,” his sister said to me the day after he died. But at least he would know he was alive, I thought contradictorily.

At the end of the story, it is Gregor’s sister, Grete, who the family has pinned their hopes on. Her parents note that, in spite of all the hardships that turned her cheeks pale, she has blossomed into a good-looking, shapely girl. She will not become the violinist that Gregor had hoped she’d become, but they will be able to find her a “good husband.”  Her life, her dreams, have collapsed into conventionality. But she will go on in a way that is recognizable to the family, the culture.

I too experienced a collapse into conventionality after the heightened experience of Richard’s illness and death, his presence. I felt sometimes like I went from living in three dimensions to two, or five dimensions to three. Now I am living more conventionally, in a much more recognizable pattern. Now people are not so afraid to talk to me.

During those years of caregiving, I felt that Richard’s illness and death had torn a hole in the center of my life. Then I wondered if maybe I would step through that tear to enter my life more fully. But now I don’t know. My life may always feel like a half-life now, a carapace I too will one day shrug off.

*

Like any resonant text, Kafka’s “Metamorphoses” is interesting not only for the transformation it depicts in Gregor Samsa but for those it engenders in the reader. It is translated, quoted, imitated, and repurposed in every generation, recently and hilariously by Haruki Murakami in his story, “Samsa in Love,” in which the beetle Gregor turns into a human.  

Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tangle of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him? Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack), survive in the world? Why hadn’t he been turned into a fish? Or a sunflower? A fish or a sunflower made sense. More sense, anyway, than this human being,

“Why would the soul choose to become a bird? Or a boy?  Why did you come into a body?” Richard sang in one of his songs.

Richard’s former bandmate Carrie told me that she’s finally writing songs again, for the first time without him. “And sometimes when I’m composing, I just cry,” she said.

“I know,” I said, “I miss him too. But writing is cathartic. It’s like it externalizes some feeling that was inarticulate, or maybe just removes some pain or question that resided in my body and now can be released.”

“I don’t think it’s just that, she said. “I think it’s that I go around thinking I am myself and when the music comes through me, I realize I am not just me, I am something not-me, or something being imagined through me. I think I cry because I’m releasing some smaller idea of Self.”.

“Isn’t it time our loving freed us from the one we love and we, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself?” asked Rilke.

*

It is morning of another ordinary day I am lucky to have. My hands—both flesh and energy—have tried to tap out this stream of voices. They do not conclude a thing, but do come together for a time, into a loose combination and re-combination, into the body of a conversation.

I can recall the beloveds, ancestors, family, and friends who have given me the shape of my life. This container in which I am trying to come awake. I can recall the writer Murakami, recalling Gregor Samsa:

He picked up a metal pot and poured coffee into a white ceramic cup. The pungent fragrance recalled something to him. It did not come directly, however; it arrived in stages. It was a strange feeling, as if he were recollecting the present from the future. As if time had somehow been split in two, so that memory and experience revolved within a closed cycle, each following the other.

To sense the future in the past, to get glimmers of those deep and recent guides—this is one way of being present, I think. This is one way of staying alive.