Communion, Vampirism, and Remarks on Kafka's Funniness Notes

Communion

  • Blood is wine, but it can be grape juice (especially in some churches).
  • Communion represents a symbolic connection of two becoming one.
  • Eating and drinking together is a fundamental human need and an act of trust.
  • Sharing food is an act of wanting the other person to live, potentially even over oneself.
  • Communes are not always holy; literary communion can occur in various ways.
  • Breaking bread together signifies peace, not conflict.
  • The Eucharist involves either transubstantiation (bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ) or consubstantiation (bread and wine coexist with the body and blood of Christ).
  • Joseph Campbell: Different interpretations of theology exist, such as literal versus symbolic interpretations (e.g., Jesus literally walked on water or it's a simile).
  • Eating is a vulnerable and personal act.
  • Table manners and variations in how food is prepared can reveal character and relationships.
  • There's often a reason or status dynamic behind eating and food-related behaviors.
  • All kinds of desires and alliances are revealed during meals.
  • The last meal given to those facing capital punishment is a sign of respecting their humanity.
  • Sharing a meal acknowledges that everyone will die, connecting everyone to humanity.
  • Recognizing mortality makes life's differences seem superficial.
  • Snow covering both living and dead symbolizes death's universality.
  • A communion of death precedes a communion of life.
  • Vampirism relates to living as long as one is eating and communing with others, while isolation leads to detachment from life.

Vampirism

  • Ghosts and vampires are symbolic and insidious and don't always appear in visible forms.
  • They can represent selfishness, exploitation, or a refusal to respect others.
  • Vampirism often involves an older figure exploiting a younger, innocent figure for their life force.
  • Vampire stories feature an older figure representing corrupt values, a virgin female, stripping away of her youth, energy, and virtue, a continuance of the life force of the old male, and the death and destruction of the young woman.
  • Some works use ghosts/vampires as cheap thrills without thematic significance.
  • The figure of the vampire or succubus represents someone growing stronger by weakening someone else.
  • Social vampirism and cannibalism occur when people exploit others in selfish ways.
  • Kafka's The Hunger Artist portrays an artist fasting to protest injustice who ultimately becomes a spectacle for the crowd, highlighting society's tendency to exploit sensitive individuals.
  • Reference to Metamorphosis.

Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness

  • The speaker is unqualified to talk about the subject.

  • Kafka's Story: "Alas," said the mouse, "the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I'm in the last chamber already." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up."

  • Existentialism: The world makes us run into nearing halls and sets us to an ultimate trap called death.

  • Every life ends in death. We can choose the direction. How are you going to live in such a way where you don't feel like you're running and running.

  • There is pressure and releaser inside the reader.

  • Kafka uses compression.

  • Kafka's writing is tragedy and comedy.

  • Kafka is about literature as a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen sea inside of us.

  • Kafka stories are not fundamentally jokes.

  • Kafka's personal statements-There is hope, but not for us.

  • Kafka would hate the analysis of his writing.

  • Comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also an immense and reverent joy.
    *With respect to the metamorphosis refer to someone as creepy or gross or say that he is forced to take shit as part of his job or to reread in the penal colony in light of expressions like tongue lashing or toward him a new asshole or the gnomic by middle age everyone's got the face they deserve or to approach a hunger artist in terms of tropes like starve for attention or love starve or the double entendre in the term self denial, or even as innocent and fatoid as the etymological root of anorexia, which happens to be the Greek word for longing.