A cage went in search of a bird: After Kafka - Group exhibition online

Excerpts from Daniel Frank's foreword to Kafka's Zürau aphorisms.

Kafka opens the sequence of Zürau aphorisms by drawing an analogy between a path and a rope:  

“The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It serves more like a tripwire than a tightrope.”

A path connects one place to another, but it also measures the distance that separates two places. A line at once joins two points and keeps them apart. This fusion between opposed meanings can also be found in the English work cleave, which means both to break and to join together. 

It is not only a matter of joining two opposed meanings but of finding the balance that holds those opposed meanings together. Kafka’s very formula is precise - “it seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope”. A tightrope requires balance, a tripwire causes one to lose balance. For Kafka, the tension required for balance also undermines the possibility of balance.

Here is Kafka musing again on centripetal and centrifugal forces:  

“As firmly as a hand holding a stone. Held, however so firmly, merely so that it can be flung a greater distance.”

And then, he concludes by suggesting a return:

“But there is a path even to that distance.” (21)

An aphorism is an acrobatic act that allows us to let go of what’s been caught - and the prospect of releasing is the point we need to reach. Or, in Kafka’s words:

“From a certain point there is no turning back.

That is the point that must be reached.” (5)

But Kafka himself turns back on that possibility to one of his most famous aphorisms: 

“Man found the Archimedean point, but he used 

It against himself; it seems that he was permitted

To find it only under that condition.”

One of Kafka’s aphorisms works as definition of a distinction: “The world is only ever a constructed world.” (54) He elaborates this statement a little later: The fact that the world is a constructed world takes away hope and gives us certainty.” (62) The word constructed suggests a sense of arbitrariness, that significance itself is constructed, and so it can also be deconstructed or destroyed. Aphorisms offer distinction that allow us to determine what we see or can’t see, between what is visible or invisible, divisible or indivisible. Without distinctions, we cannot see. But if we insist that our distinctions exist beyond the particular moment of what we’ve seen, we risk transforming them into the bars of a cage which imprison us. In the sequence of aphorisms called HE, Kafka writes: “The din of the world streams out and in through the bars. The prisoner was really free, he could simply have left the cage, the bars were yards apart, he was not even a prisoner.” In the Zűrau sequence, Kafka refines that extended metaphor to a single image: 

“A cage went in search of a bird.” (16)

(The Schocken Kafka Library)