As If I Have Time to Read

This morning I was skimming (sorry, but it was the last article open in my Firefox tabs, and time is tight this Thanksgiving) A Writer Between Worlds. The title came through on a blog feed, it struck me as possibly intersecting with my own stuff. See, I am thinking of "Chasing Ashes" as Indiana being intersected in many ways. The essay is about Tawada Yôko, whom I had heard of, and in my skimming I found this:

One could thus argue that Tawada, acutely attuned to the fundamentally surreal nature of reality, is a direct descendant of the European fabulists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gogol can feel like a kindred spirit; so can Bruno Schulz, with his dreamlike receptivity to the hidden strangeness of ordinary domestic life. The most apt comparison, however, is undoubtedly Kafka, with his love of paradox and the absurd. Tawada’s characters can feel like contemporary updates of Kafka’s desperate seekers, thrown into a multicultural, multilingual world. But while Kafka’s characters wander various social spaces—government bureaucracy, the court system—Tawada’s get lost in the labyrinth of language, alternately beguiled and confused but never any closer to a way out.

And I am thinking how personal feels, this slippery selfhood. Not just Buddhist, or Japanese, but the elemental human. The world is a labyrinth. The external - society, government, school, chop it up as you like - and the internal - psychological, emotional, and, again, chop it up as you like - worlds we traverse without the benefit of a cotton string, approaching the Minotaur of our existence. As I see it, literature - all writing, not just fiction - is our attempt to toss out that ball of string to the rest of us, a sharing and a remediation of our experience meant to both memorialize our passing and to teach others our successes and our error. Now, I need to find time to get caught up on my reading. 

sch 11/24/22