Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let fresh air in, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.
In this photo, taken after Franz Kafka awakened from unsettling dreams to find himself transformed into a fashionable badass, Kafka pioneers the skinny necktie. It combines with the pompadour haircut to metamorphose his appearance into one that gives a sense of effort and care for one’s appearance without an excess of trial. With the suit, it’s a versatile fashion choice fit for events ranging from a country wedding or a soiree at the local castle, though the fit on Kafka’s left side seems a bit off.
As is the case with much bespoke fashion, Kafka must have waited forever for those pieces to be made.
“Sweet serpent, why do you stay so far away, come nearer, nearer still, enough, no further, stay there. For you, too, there are no frontiers. How am I to attain mastery over you if you recognize no frontiers? It will be hard work. I begin by asking you to curl yourself up. Curl yourself up, I said, and you stretch yourself. Don’t you understand me? You don’t understand me. But I speak very clearly: Curl up! No, you don’t grasp it. So then I show you, here, with the staff. First of all you must describe a large circle, then inside, adjoining it, a second, and so forth. If then finally you are still holding your little head high, lower it slowly to the tune on the flute that I shall later play, and when I cease, you shall have become quiet too, with your head in the inmost circle.” -Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
A pair of somewhat surreptitious early-morning shots of Al-Mogamma (the complex”) the infamous landmark of Egypt’s sclerotic state bureaucracy, a 14-story Kafkaesque labyrinth of government offices where identity paperwork is obtained, permits are sought, documents are processed, authorizations are stamped and filed, connections are leaned on, bribes are paid.
Built in the early 1950s in the last days of the old monarchy, in the decades hence it has only become more Byzantine, stuffing as many as 30,000 bureaucrats in a building meant for a fraction that much, its role symbolizing ordinary Egyptians relationship with their government has been portrayed in Egyptian film. There is near-constant rumor and speculation about its closure, dispersing the state’s administration to various, probably distant suburban facilities—indeed a New Cairo capital city is under construction 40kms east of the city center, but year after year Egyptian citizens are made to return to the same, huge old edifice to try to get through “the process.” Muhammad Kamal Ismail & Fahmy Momen, architects, completes 1951. Photos March 2020 Bauzeitgeist.
The all-encompassing Egyptian state is architecturally symbolized by huge buildings all across the vastness of Cairo. Many of these date from the earliest years of the post-monarchical, post-colonial Republic—the optimistic era of Gamal Nasser’s socialism, which promised to propel Egypt into the modern era of the mid-20th century, and carry the rest of the Arab world with it.
Here is one of those primary symbols, both of yesterday’s optimism and today’s tyranny: the State Radio and Television Headquarters, built in 1959-60 to the highest standards of international production and broadcasting. Informally known as the Maspero (the name of a nearby street that honored a French archaeologist), it rose as a skyscraping symbol of Arab modernity and unity—Cairo had long been the media, publishing, literary and theatrical capital of the Arab world, and the Maspero, its proud tower’s reflection glistening in the waters of the Nile, promised to refresh this status in a new technological age.
What was decades ago a symbol of the Arab world’s embrace of progress has over time come to embody the intentional abandonment of those hopes. What had momentarily been a socialist pan-Arab miracle is today a shabby and suffocating state bureaucracy, functioning only to disseminate propaganda. In its immense dimensions, especially of its horseshoe-shaped lower portion as much as its encrusted tower block, it physically manifests the bland, decrepit brutality conjured by the term Kafkaesque.
