Sauro Motel

THE GATE

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a French philosopher and social activist. In terms of her philosophy, “The Gate” is both a poem and a central metaphor. Her poem, “The Gate,” describes Man’s journey to God, which culminates in Man’s ultimate inability to pass into heaven. According to Weil, it is Man’s true purpose in life to stand before The Gate, and direct his gaze beyond, toward God. However, no matter how hard he tries to penetrate The Gate, Man is doomed to fail.

Man’s faith and his acceptance of unjustified suffering as conditions for salvation have brought him to the base of The Gate – it is now up to God to cover the final distance.

The Suffering of Children

For Weil, suffering and affliction are the ultimate means to Man’s salvation. As she stated: “Any attempt to deny our misery and construct a happy life is based on lies and delusions. Our only purpose in this life is to learn to love God, not in spite of the prevailing affliction, but even because of it. [1]

But, isn’t there a limit to how much suffering is acceptable? It is a question that has been asked by literary and philosophical giants for centuries. One such figure that challenges Weil’s philosophy is the character Ivan Karamazov from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan cannot reconcile individual suffering by accepting particular cases as incidental. This denial that suffering has meaning results in his renouncement of a higher harmony: “I don’t want harmony. I don’t want it, out of love I bear to mankind. I want to remain with suffering unavenged and my indignation unappeased, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price has been placed on harmony.”[2]

Ivan rebels and refuses to be part of a system of salvation that necessitates individual suffering. He is particularly distressed with the suffering of children. In trying to determine why children suffer, he refuses to accept any larger construction other than that innocent children suffer: “I want to stick to the facts. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. For if I should want to understand, I’d instantly alter the facts and I’ve made up my mind to stick to the facts.”[3]

The facts tell Ivan that children often suffer horrible fates and brutal deaths. Ultimately, for Ivan, if the sufferings of children are the quid pro quo for purchasing truth, truth is not worth the price: “It is not worth one little tear of that tortured little girl who beat herself on the breast and prayed to her “dear, kind Lord” in the stinking privy with her unexpiated tears. It is not worth it, because her tears remain unexpiated.”[4]

In her essay on “Evil,” Weil responded to Ivan’s rebellion:

I am in complete agreement with this sentiment. No reason whatsoever which anyone could produce to compensate for a child’s tear would make me consent to that tear. Absolutely none which the mind can conceive. There is just one, however, but it is intelligible only to supernatural love: “God willed it.” And for that reason I would consent to a world which was nothing but evil as readily as to a child’s tear.[5]

Weil can accept the suffering of a child where Ivan cannot because of her unrequited obedience and faith that there is a legitimate reason for suffering. She cannot prove to Ivan that every case of incidental suffering will result in individual harmony and grace; she can only have faith that it will.

What does any of this have to do with us in 2007? Maybe nothing, but consider the terribly short life of Christopher Michael Barrios Jr. of Brunswick, Georgia. According to indictments in the case, Christopher was sexually assaulted in March 2007 by a convicted child molester and his father (who had plead guilty to incest in 1994), while the molester’s mother watched. The despicable trio then choked the boy to death. A “family friend” assisted in the cover-up, completing a lopsided quartet of adults versus one helpless six-year-old.

Christopher loved Spiderman and, according to his father, always said “goodnight, God Bless, and I love you,” before he went to bed. He was abducted while playing on a swing close to his home.

Like many children who suffer similar fates, Christopher’s resting place became a trash bag dumped on the side of the road, about three miles from his family’s mobile home.

Brunswick is a small town in Southern Georgia, which is nestled close to the Atlantic coast and dates back to 1771. My lasting mental association with Brunswick was the rotten egg smell of the pulp and paperboard plants as I crossed railroad tracks on U.S. 17, which snakes its way through south Georgia and down into Florida. The concrete road seemed to me to have the highest concentration of auto body shops and Quality Motor Inns of any road in the U.S. highway system. The frequent slamming doors of a domestic dispute brewing across the hall dominated my overnight stay at a U.S. 17 motel in Brunswick, before I escaped to the serenity of a Saint Simons Island’s inlet the following morning.

Saint Simons Island is just east of Brunswick, connected by a long causeway which spans the Saint Simons Sound. A little further north is the exclusive enclave of Sea Island. Brunswick, Saint Simons, Sea Island and nearby Jekyll Island comprise Georgia’s “Golden Isles.” In the 1920’s, prestigious clans with names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Goodyear established Jekyll Island and Sea Island as vacation retreats for the wealthiest industrialists.

By 2007, some of the names had changed, but Sea Island is still populated by Captains of Industry and Masters of the Universe from the corporate, entertainment and sports worlds. The private Sea Island is home to The Cloister, a five-star resort that boasts $800 a night hotel rooms and hosted the G-8 Summit several years back. The Heads of State, combined with the island’s indigenous residents, created a ridiculous concentration of global muscle, but the impotent, fleeting power could do nothing to protect a small child less than five miles away.

Christopher’s story hit the national papers and TV tabloid news shows with the force of a hurricane but then, for the most part, quickly disappeared from the national consciousness. Frankly, you can only absorb so much inexplicable suffering before you are dying to return to rooting for your favorite team to win The Amazing Race 11 or get the latest Internet update on whether T.O. actually pulled or only “tweaked” his hamstring.

You see, the more you know, the more you are forced to confront the fact that evil truly does exist.

In The Brothers K, Ivan introduces us to The Grand Inquisitor – the man who rebuked Christ for giving Man too much freedom. Man was given the freedom to choose between good and evil and yet, there is nothing more tormenting. If given the choice, how many people would accept that responsibility today?

The Grand Inquisitor views Man as Man perceives the common herds: as wild beasts who are concerned solely with being fed with material bread, and not spiritual virtue. In the end, Man will be happy because The Grand Inquisitor will make all of the good versus evil decisions for him:

And they will be happy, all of the millions of creatures, except the hundred thousand who rule over them…we alone shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy infants and one hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of knowledge of good and evil.[6]

So which one is it, then? Are we herd-like creatures who live a predominantly material existence, concerned only with sustenance from food, TV, sports, and shopping, or do we possess a consciousness that elevates us above the beasts into that rarified air where illusions dissipate but suffering clutches around your heart like a vice slowly crushing your skull.

I am asking myself, and so I ask you: Are you one of the happy herds, or one of the ones left waiting at the foot of The Gate, miserable, starving, and just a little bit confused about what the fuck you are doing there.

THE END OF THE GATE AND THE SUFFERING OF CHILDREN

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[1] Michael K. Ferber, “Simone Weil’s Iliad” in Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life, ed. George Abbott White (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), p. 68.[2] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 287.

[3] Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 284.

[4] Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 286.

[5] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1952), p. 126.

[6] Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 304.

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The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can?t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.
Franz Kafka
Reflections On Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way
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If you happen to notice the term "Kafkaesque" being used in a magazine, newspaper or Internet article, or book or movie review, invariably it is in connection with the description of a giant beetle or an individual suddenly thrown into the nightmarish world of a mammoth bureaucracy. For example, Swedish pop group "Day Behavior" sings: "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band is lethal/I see Kafkaesque scenes of waking as a beetle." Arianna Huffington describes the "Kafkaesque" bureaucracy of this nation’s school system. An article on Linux security asks: "Mandatory Access Control: Silver Bullet or Kafkaesque Nightmare? Part 2." To "Average Joe" Joe Brancatelli, AOL telling him he can’t get his usage information via e-mail is "Kafkaesque." Last but not least, Dilbert, the final arbitrator of all things Corporate America, receives e-mail pleas from his Faithful describing "Kafkaesque" tales of business expense deductions being disallowed by internally inconsistent company policies.

Surprisingly, given the generous use of the term across many spectrums, you won’t find any analysis of the subject around which most of Kafka’s writing revolves: the nebulous "Law" and its pernicious affect on the modern individual.

In many of his works, including The Trial, The Castle, "The Judgment," "Before the Law," and "An Imperial Message," Kafka presents the "Law" as the omnipotent, intangible controlling force which is constantly at odds with, and yet removed from, his protagonists. The elusive Law appears to be the source of power for the court system in The Trial, for the Castle hierarchy in The Castle and for most other instrumentalities of authority in Kafka’s fictional universes. The Law pervades everything and yet remains totally inaccessible to man. The Law’s trial process is incomprehensible to the accused, as are the court’s exalted hierarchies and the unknown power that presides over them. The court system is manifested by an endless string of insignificant officials, each of whom knows only a small portion of the Law and are totally subservient to the supreme authority that exists somewhere in the distance. The gargantuan bureaucratic machinery of the court system becomes an evil depiction of a world of expediency and rationalism.

While "The Metamorphosis" is the most quoted of Kafka’s works, Kafka more directly examined the Law’s supposedly rational system of justice in his short story "In The Penal Colony." A foreign traveler is invited to witness the execution of a soldier condemned to death for disobedience and insulting behavior. Neither the traveler nor the penal colony itself exhibits much interest in the execution. The Officer overseeing the execution, on the other hand, zealously protects and preserves the penal colony’s brutal rituals of punishment and its intricate killing apparatus known as "the Harrow;" all of which were developed years before by the former commandant who was soldier, judge, mechanic, chemist and draughtsman, all in one. The Officer religiously follows the guiding plans drawn by the godly former commandant. This "script" — when shown to the traveler — is revealed to be a labyrinth of lines, crossing and recrossing each other, which covered the paper so thickly it was difficult to discern the blank spaces between them.

The condemned man — who is chained before the Harrow like a submissive dog — does not know his crime or his sentence. As the Officer explains, the crime is revealed to the prisoner only as the Harrow inscribes it on the guilty man’s body.

Can you follow it? The Harrow is beginning to write; when it finishes the first draft of the inscription on the man’s back, the layer of cotton wool begins to roll and slowly turns the body over, to give the Harrow fresh space for writing. Meanwhile the raw part that has been written on lies on the cotton wool, which is specially prepared to staunch the bleeding and so makes all ready for a new deepening of the script. Then these teeth at the edge of the Harrow, as the body turns further around, tear the cotton wool away from the wounds, throw it into the pit, and there is more work for the Harrow. So it keeps on writing deeper and deeper for the whole twelve hours.[1]

Kafka’s Harrow machine is perhaps his single best physical representation of the Law. The Harrow, with its intricate display of gears and cogwheels functioning in perfect sequence, embodies the notion that the Law’s justice system is based on a total belief in rationalism; that is, an implacable faith in a scientific universe governed by fully comprehendible principles. The corollary notion, as expressed by the Officer, is that through the functioning of such a rational system of justice, one receives "enlightenment."

But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour. Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. [2]

In a bizarre reversal of fortunes, the condemned man is set free, and the Officer places himself on the Harrow, fully assured that he will be bestowed with the promised enlightenment. At the simple wave of the Officer’s hand, the Harrow adjusts itself to accommodate the Officer’s exact height, size and weight. Instead of the expected glow, however, the Harrow goes berserk and the Officer receives through his forehead the point of a great iron spike:

And here, almost against his will, he had to look at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign was visible of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the Officer had not found; the lips were firmly pressed together, the eyes were open, with the same expression as in life, the look was calm and convinced, through the head went the point of the great iron spike. [3]

Kafka shows the irrational nature of the Law when the Harrow goes haywire. The world in which the Harrow once performed flawlessly in accordance with the established principles of science has become a world in which a rational, predictable system of justice is no longer wholly rational and no longer fully predictable. In a larger sense, for Kafka, the Law represents the world order, and at every turn in the labyrinth, Kafka undermines the belief in the existence of a world order that is rational and humane. Kafka concludes that the belief in a rational system of justice gives us a false sense of security. Just as the Officer was undone by the very machine he thought he knew so well, we are lulled into thinking that reason alone will insulate us from the irrational forces, which lay just beneath the surface.

Though it is tempting to be beguiled by the fantastic transformation of Gregor Samsa into a giant beetle, what deserves our attention is the force beneath which has the unfettered power to turn a man into an insect while the rest of the world sleeps. It’s the same force that flourishes in the shadows which feed off police artist charcoal sketches of missing children, distorted even further by age progression software; it revels in radioactive oatmeal fed by institutional Caesars to helpless retarded children and orphans; it dabbles in medicine, in dermatomyositis and polymyositis, rare skin and muscle diseases that cause a heart attack in a bruising 18 year-old running back; it patrols a Somali refugee camp at the turn of the millennium, stripping the inhabitants of any sense of promise or the worldwide moment, their time continuum beginning and ending with their last meal; it’s in the 1000 yard stare of a roadside memorial teddy bear marking the spot on the country road where two sweethearts’ innocent expectations of senior prom night were abruptly swindled from them by the utter futility of a single car crash. Kafka saw a more immense and darker evil than any rational legal system - no matter how extensive - could even begin to understand, let alone contain.

The nightmarish world in which a man finds himself suddenly transformed into a giant cockroach is the world in which we live. The macabre and distant penal colony — where the guilty learn their crime (only after it is too late), as it is inscribed on their body by a thousand judicious needles — mirrors the world in which the modern individual places blind faith in reason. The crucial lesson Kafka taught through his absurd stories is that man understands his own law only as he comprehends the "Law;" and with an inability to see beyond even the most conspicuous veneers, man’s inner self will remain as unfathomable as the Law. The inevitable result of such failure will be direr than Kafka portrayed, because while an impersonal bureaucracy can surely be oppressive, senior proms and oatmeal can be far more lethal.

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[1] Franz Kafka, “In The Penal Colony” in Kafka, The Complete Stories  (New York:   Schocken Books, 1976)  150-1.

[2] Franz Kafka, “In The Penal Colony” in Kafka, The Complete Stories  (New York:   Schocken Books, 1976)  150-1.

[3] Franz Kafka, “In The Penal Colony” in Kafka, The Complete Stories  (New York:   Schocken Books, 1976)  166.

 

END OF SUBTERRANEAN KAFKA