Like Kafka Was the Rage
1
Her own avant-garde, a slow dance, a parody of classical poses, a preview of things to come, an invention that was not quite perfected, a forerunner or harbinger, a new disease, the driver of a locomotive, the next step for me, my future, my fate, a form of shabbiness, literature, a stimulant, an aphrodisiac, my new paradise, her most secret part, a piston, Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine, the opposite of premature ejaculation, simultaneous translation, an invitation into that life, an uninteresting quarrel with the real, she went in for metaphors, like a work of art, like a split personality or two schools of thought, like a woman stepping out of a heavy garment, like a bird pecking at things on the ground and then arching its neck to swallow them, like a great black animal, a bear or a buffalo, like an illness, like a great smile in its sullen history, like a breach of contract or a criticism, like sand, like camping, a kind of exhibitionism, like a man running out of a burning building, like a woman dancing, as if composing a fugue, like one of those modern black jazz singers who works against the melody and ignores the natural line ends, like a collapsing of structures, like a building falling down, a sort of asking and answering of questions, like semantic despair, like a dog that you tie to the parking meter, like liberal politics, like two people walking through a gallery.
2
Like a luxury postwar romance, like exiles in our own country, our studio, as if it were a concentration camp, the way you go to a party, like a judge in criminal court, a blind date with culture, like testifying dueling scars, a brooding hen, the storm trooper of humanism.
3
A serial monogamist, like a policeman who doesn’t drink or sit down while on duty as a critic like a lecturer or a peripatetic philosopher, like someone helping to park a car, a seminar, like punching literature in the mouth, like the final orchestral cadences of a classical symphony, a kind of book as an El Greco portrait of a cardinal or pope, like Christ’s in a twelfth-century painted wooden crucifixion, like a priest of the Inquisition, like a man being persecuted as if he was trying on gloves, like an exquisite dog, a quattrocento Madonna like a flower.
4
The vacuum of my imagination, like hunchbacks living off the land or sailing around the world, the family I wanted as characters, like meeting old friends or lovers, like dolls or teddy bears or family portraits, like a surprising number of uncles as dreams that seem so unbearably actual, like someone buying a dog like Saint Jerome in his study bent over his books with the tamed lion of his conquered restlessness at his feet, like people reading the names on a war memorial, a place of last resort, a kind of moral flophouse.
5
The ghost of her younger self, like the guitars in cubist paintings, like a Japanese actress, as Chinese women used to deform their feet, like someone who really doesn’t want to buy a book browsing in a bookshop, like someone at a party, like someone in a dream the morning after the party.
6
I’ve never known anyone who used so many figures of speech, like living in a foreign city like a native, like when I used to read Surrealist poetry in French, like the women you see being abducted in romantic paintings, like bad rock music, more like a Chopin etude, a desultory or absentminded strumming as the velvet bleeding-heart medals, like a burglar, like a killer as a rocket, a poor piece of plumbing, a sleepcrawler.
7
Like having to take the subway, a counter invasion, like humidity or smoke, a German Marshall plan, as if we had been unconscious, like an immigrant who goes from a poor country to a rich one, a bad dream, like a shadow on my happiness, like static in my head, like the sound that billions of insects make in the tropics at night private treaties with ourselves, unconditional surrender from life or to it, the black market of personality, a whispering in my molecules, as remote as grinding your teeth in your sleep, the complaint of cheap apartments as if my brain had something stuck in its teeth, like Lorca’s “pain of kitchens” like someone lying in bed or a field of grass as if he heard a fly buzzing the sound of my converter, like the path they are supposed to take, like playing a game of tag or blindman’s bluff, like the Sunday Times, like a high jumper poised for his run, as if I had grabbed him by the lapels, like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood, a first draft, like flying, like the death instinct, a poetics, as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel.
8
Screams in their eyes, like the screams you hear in movies, a blue note like a factory whistle, like the girl in the Munch painting as if she was gargling a diphthong like an alarm clock, a riddle or conundrum.
9
Like church services, more or less a lie, the truth about life as students would go to India, as if he was whispering or hissing sexuality, promise or threat, like a man praising a woman’s beauty to her, a penalty you had to pay, like the German translators taking the puns out of Shakespeare, like a fate, angel of scholarship, a martyr, a medieval cantor or Gregorian monk praying in color like walking into a park like a theater searchlight on the world like fire, like a chiropractor cracking the bones at the base of your neck like a wild goose.
10
Yoga mime isometrics, like a person who is about to go abroad for the first time, like lovers in a sad futuristic novel, a place where all sorts of expectations and illusions come to die, a flight from art like one drowned person resuscitating the other, a foyer to madness like space, a little picnic of madness like an escaped balloon, like a tenement that had been partially demolished by a wrecking ball like orgasm, a shudder of hypotheses, like a man chasing his hat in a high wind having a permanent erection as if we were in a race, like interlocking initials dream like the people in medieval paintings, an investigation of loneliness safari, as if our love was a stove and she was letting all our gas run out.
11
Like people looking for love, like a character in one of those novels reviewers describe as shuttling back and forth in time by a young novelist who had been influenced by Kafka lyrics of a blues song splitting of the atom, as if I had butted against a glass door as a bird on a perch like the glare of truth caught in the high beams as if it was to be our last look, as if she were a blueprint meant to be sold by Floradora girls, as if he was diving like a dog, as if they’d burst the whole world upside down like a gymnast monstrous spider scuttling across the ground.
12
A fool’s errand the morning after the war as if a great bomb, an explosion of consciousness had gone off on American life, a great hangover, like a recurrent temptation to commit a crime like a painting by Magritte like a patient in a hospital recovering like a negative of a rainbow door swinging on its hinges in a draft turning a wheel like a pitcher shaking off a catcher’s sign like dying like an Irishman in a book, a failed lawyer or a defrocked priest like a witness on the stand who can’t remember.
13
Like a rooster crowing from a more advanced planet like an exclamation, as if he had talked his hair off, always Halloween on an intellectual bender, as if Brooklyn had been preserved in a refrigerator for my jungle, my Africa, as if he was taking notes to concentrate on walking like a shooting pain.
14
As if he couldn’t bear to look at it directly as vaudeville, as if blinded by reading like birds, a flight of chairs like a box seat as if they were mating on the wing like the Parisian apache dancers, a dancer who has one leg shorter than the other citizen only of literature, like postponing orgasm like a society with no failures like someone trying to force his way across a dance floor as if he was trying to imagine another culture as you sometimes hunger for a Mexican dinner that will burn your mouth, like those life preservers that expand when you pull the cord taking a dance lesson.
15
As if she was pulling it off or hiding behind it like a Little Orphan Annie who had been kidnapped by art, as if they had thrown up a picket fence to protect him like an inflatable toy that had been overinflated in a bad pub with the wrong people, like an Ibsen heroine perfect enjambment in a poem.
16
Like a parade like Dr. Caligari in the movie as if he had adopted the European walk of his favorite writer, like a dog shaking off drops of water as you love the poems and stories you can’t write like a corner fireplace whose images are too heavy, whose metaphors are too self conscious, whose language is strained, and whose technique is outmoded, like the grammar school bully who rips open your fly buttons.
17
Like the man who goes back to college after knocking about the world on a tramp steamer, as someone who had been robbed of his youth, a combination of Halloween and Christmas like visiting a medieval town in France, as if the human brain and the five senses hadn’t been split open as much as a superstition or a religious heresy like the sex jokes I was told like negligees they never took off, an ultimate or ultimatum like one of those complicated toys that comes disassembled like two bows bent all the way back with only one arrow between us like a gun modern art despairing of democracy like the radiator ornament on the hood of a car freedom more than a pleasure like a piece of aquatic criticism, a polemic against history as if we had no blanket to cover us running through American life as a speechless babble cathedral arching inside of us like a judgment, a diagram of thinking a drama in itself another form of virginity like the nearness of shame, the incarnation of meaning.
From Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard (Vintage Books, 1993)
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DOUG NUFER writes prose and poetry by using constraints and other procedures. He’s the author of over a dozen books, most recently Rotalever Revelator (Sagging Meniscus), a giant palindrome poetry collection in a flip-over format. He sells wine in Seattle.