Chapter 52 Castle of the Soul - Sinking and Detachment

The special feature of the castle mechanism is that while it pushes people to the bottom of hell, it also urges people to transcend and sublimate from hell through tortuous channels to reach the highest state.The two forces are always equal and act at the same time, like a centrifugal device, while the force itself comes from the rhythm of life.In other words, the power of the castle mechanism is the action of the impulse in K; this force can only work in the centrifugal device forever, the greater the impulse, the greater the tension, and the larger the circle drawn.But at any time, the gravity of the castle is always equal to the momentum of the person, because death is the premise of life.As a foreigner, once K entered the castle, he immediately understood that he could not get rid of the control of the castle fundamentally. The only thing he could do was to try his best to resist under the premise of being controlled and fight for what he wanted.For the castle, rather than stopping him, it was more like inducing him to achieve his goal subconsciously.From the movement of the castle mechanism embodied by K and other characters, we see the amazing depth of human nature, and also see how human nature shines itself under the layers of ruins, so as to achieve a vivid spectacle of detachment.The secret of the castle mechanism is that sinking and detachment are always connected together; there is no real detachment without infinite penetration into the darkest depths; people can only detach during the process of sinking, once conscious or unconscious When the sinking of life stops, detachment becomes an idiotic dream that has lost its basis.

With the vague revelation of the castle (about the land surveyor) in his head, and an analysis of his present situation, K set to work.To act is to enter into the aforementioned device, to sink, and this sinking is a movement towards the bottomless state.First he was demoted from a land surveyor (at least he believed it) to a school handyman, and then he didn't even keep the handyman's position, and fell into the lowest rank of servants, and he was not even a servant. .The accompanying love situation is also similar. After finally hanging Frieda, I thought there was hope in bargaining with the castle, but Klamm frustrated him step by step, and finally snatched Frieda from him. Let him come to nothing.Every step of giving up has been a fierce struggle (self-deception), a self-expression that breaks through the limits, and it is also a real experience of the strong gravity of the castle.If you don't resist or sink, how can you realize how strong the gravity of the castle is?When the position of the land surveyor that the castle and K jointly set is getting farther and farther away from him, and K is sinking more and more irretrievably in reality, what else can K do?Obviously, the only way out in front of you is to sink further, and the harder you try, the lower you sink; the more you play, the less hope you will get out of the predicament.No matter how much he deceived himself, experience and reason always reminded him: there is only one movement, and one is not the way out.The unbelieving K does not give up because there is no way out. The devil in his body will not let him do this. He can only struggle upwards. When he is struggling, his mind is full of Kram, and his body is involuntarily doing the opposite in the reaction. exercise.In a place like a castle, if a person wants to live a real and pure life and pursue his ideals, he will continue to sink.Sinking stimulates the vitality of life, makes people's initiative shine, and continuously develops the spiritual world.Whenever K reached a post in the downward dark tunnel of life, the longing for the castle squeezed him further, forcing him to perform miraculously daring acts.He was dazed, wandered around, and unintentionally accomplished the most brilliant achievements of mankind, but he didn't fully understand it.This half-conscious, half-confused genius always sees the reality of being rejected and cast aside. This reality is reflected in Frieda's unchangeable worry, Barnabas' ambiguous attitude, and the village chief's overall attitude. In the denial statement, it is also reflected in the jeers of the peasants and the severity of Miss Jisha's cold round eyes.Everyone is responsible for the castle's mission, to put into practice the castle's tortuous intention, which is to deprive K of everything and send him to the cold hell, for example, how he communicates with the castle in hell.K, who was chosen by the castle to do this experiment, can't but be said to be lucky.In the longing that accompanied the desperate struggle, his silent communication with the castle was so frequent, it was as if he himself had become music, and merged into the solemn music of heaven.In fact, the voice of heaven, code-named "Kram", never left K's mind at any time; it urged him, awakened him, drove away the inertia in his body, and induced him to fight to the death to fight against the smoking ban. Spiritual release.In doing so, the passive body is injected with vitality, and unexpectedly becomes more versatile and more flexible.

All K's struggles and all the messy activities are the embodiment of people's pursuit of ideals (transcendence) in reality (sinking). Ideals are always a kind of lack, a desire born of lack, and it never shows up.The never-appearing superb mechanism of the castle has made K a noble person who lives by ideals in the long-term effect, a saint who struggles all his life and never stops, but this saint also has human qualities. The seven emotions and six desires have all the humble qualities that everyone has, that is, they have human nature.Human nature is the boat that takes him to the other shore, the carrier of the ideal, he can be aware of it, hate it, but can't get rid of it.Realizing the ugliness of human nature, K did not follow the tide, but tried his best to control it with difficulty, and unswervingly marched towards the goal in the cloud.Castles often appear as a kind of "smell" in real life. Every time K smells this smell, it is when he involuntarily does a despicable thing.For example, when he lied impulsively to the castle authorities on the phone at the beginning, the castle immediately approved him verbally; The relationship is not a one-sided fantasy of K. During his desperate waiting, he breaks into the official's sleigh to steal wine and drinks, and he experiences the freedom of the castle; He learned the secret of the castle's rule over the village; he drove away his assistant out of jealousy, and was abandoned by Frieda himself, and fell to a lower level, where he found a new direction of struggle.In short, if you don't move, don't collide, and don't do bad things, the "smell" will not appear.Every time I sink down, a new understanding and desire for the castle emerges with this sinking, and the image of the castle that appears in the longing is refreshed again.And it was the castle itself that prompted his action and collision.That will, in the form of Frieda, assistants, boys, peasants, Olga, Barnabas, landlady and Pebby, wakes him up, draws him, induces him Watch him and let him make friends with the castle in one burst after another.As he gradually matured, he finally got acquainted with this endless sinking to some extent, and gradually realized subconsciously: the music of the unpredictable heaven may just come from the darkest depths of the human heart.At the end of the article, that is not the end, he stays in the servant's basement without complaint, staring hopefully and waiting for "good luck" to come.There is no trace of sentimentality or nostalgia in him.

The tragic process of the Barnabas family's sinking is just a poem about human beings' unremitting struggle for self-improvement, creating miracles and pursuing the highest realm.Falling originates from pursuit. If Amarina hadn't had that love and the whole family hadn't encouraged her, the mechanism of the castle would not have started.The longing for the ideal starts the fable, so the endless sinking begins its course.The castle's first move is a vicious mockery of worldly love, which renders Amari dumb and the family see the terrible truth.The family who had understood the will of the castle neither made a fuss nor were they passive and world-weary, but everyone took active actions and did everything they could.And because of Amari's deep personality, and because the family's ability to bear is beyond ordinary people, the castle's sanctions are particularly severe and thorough.The castle tells them without saying a word: the pursuit of the highest state is to exert the creativity of people to the limit under the harshest conditions.This is how the castle authorities "provide" them with more and more terrible conditions step by step, to see what miracles their subjective initiative can do.Among human emotions, love is always the closest to the ideal, and the intensity of love makes people have to sink to the darkest bottom to experience it.It was in this deprived situation that the Barnabas family experienced the longing that was triggered by a love, which itself was close to love.In the castle mechanism, "love" is a terrible and fatal thing. Once the highest desire of "love" sprouts, it means that everything that exists will be lost. sinking.The spiritual quest of the Barnabas family presents itself as the most tragic of earthly pictures, but if we leave the surface reality behind and enter their deep-learned souls, then we shall see how complacent these struggling souls are. How self-sufficient, how focused on their own career, how pure; how clearly they feel the powerful gravity of the center in their desperate movement away from the center; how silent communication between them and the castle is like the communication between an artist and an empty ideal !And what is all this but happiness?Maybe we can call them "masochistic pleasure".Olga's narration is vivid and clear. She doesn't need anyone's guidance, because she is thinking and acting according to her instinct and the will of "God".She talked to K in detail about the suffering of the family. This suffering is not just suffering as most people understand, but the spiritual wealth of their family; it can be said that she is showing K the spiritual wealth of their family. Maybe I didn't fully understand it, but I must have been deeply infected.

From the experience of their family, we can also see that sinking is by no means passive, nor is it a helpless giving up.Sinking is caused by the momentum in the body, that is, everyone sinks in a conscious movement.Only in the eyes of outsiders who don't know the inside story, they look like passive and unwilling puppets controlled by a powerful fate.Who actually persecuted them?They persecuted themselves voluntarily, and the persecution of the castle authorities was only a manifestation of the persecution deep in the heart.As long as they give up struggling, the mechanism of the castle will no longer work for them, and of course the ideal place standing on the mountain will disappear.For each of them this is impossible.Just as it was impossible for Amalini to suppress the raging love in her heart, Olga could not suppress the ensuing eruption of fantasy, nor could the old father suppress the flow of confession accumulated over the years like a flood that broke a bank. Nabas could not suppress his insatiable desire to escape the torment of nothingness.Everyone's inner pursuit is premised on the existence of the holy place on the hillside; the fable on the mountain has long existed in the depths of their hearts, and only when they encounter a special opportunity (Amarina's love) do they begin to take full effect , prompting them to overcome inertia and move into action, making it their own reality.The root of all suffering lies in that impulse, and the self-awareness that accompanies it.When people are aware of it, suffering begins, and what happens later can no longer be entirely passive.In this sense, it can also be said that this family is simply planning and arranging their own destiny, and is obsessively torturing themselves in order to get close to that experience—Barnabas is tracking Carat like a dog tracking his master who does not show up. Mu, suffering from unspeakable heart; father bankrupted his own body, neurotic abuse of his body, and finally became crippled; Amari refused all life and turned herself into a wall of silence; Olga became a silent wall. He became a paranoid madman, obsessed with that kind of crazy invention, that kind of wishful thinking.In every human being there is a fire, and from the moment this fire is ignited (by the incident of Amalini), human activity is incorporated into the allegory; Effort, this kind of effort has no pattern to follow, except self-reliance or self-reliance; the goal is the "smell" or shadow that is unpredictable and can never be really approached, or it can be said to be a phantom created by the mind. They want it to have, it There it is, and they use their lifelong efforts to prove its existence.Although the environment "provided" by the castle puts each of them in a state of complete deprivation, from the mental journey of each of them, we can not feel everywhere that they are all voluntary participants of the sober castle mechanism ?They must have realized in their hearts long ago that the ideal is the desire for that gem in the dunghill.It doesn't matter if the gems are real or not.Sinking and being deprived, only in sinking and being deprived can the brilliance of gems be seen, and voluntary suffering has become the only way to escape.On the big stone by the gate of the castle, in the hearts of the two old men who were about to freeze, the dazzling light of the flame of the spirit illuminated the entire darkness of the human soul in an instant.In the pursuit of the whole family, Amali Niu is the spiritual bearer, and this kind of commitment is silent support, although she never utters words of support (that is against her nature).What could be more indicative of her attitude than her taking on the burdensome work of caring for her parents without complaint or regret?Therefore, Amaliniu's "not moving" and her adapting to changes are also a kind of initiative, a kind of silent firmness, and a gesture of challenging reality. The whole family gets encouragement from her and gains confidence.The deeper the family sank in the struggle, the heavier her burden was, which was exactly what she wanted.Had it not been so, her love would not have exploded under impossible conditions.Under the instigation of Olga, Barnabas chooses the job of a messenger, that is, he consciously chooses to suffer, that is, he knows that nothingness cannot be escaped, but he tries his best to get rid of it, and regards this as the meaning of existence. Religious fanaticism.The Barnabas family chose to sink, that is, to choose freedom. The sinking made everyone's spirit extremely purified. The light on Castle Hill penetrated into the soul, and everyone entered the realm of great enlightenment.

Before meeting K, Frieda had been immersed in the abstract love for Klamm. Because of its aloofness, this kind of love had one biggest defect, which was the sense of illusion that deeply tormented her, because the object of love is a lack.The long hunger and thirst finally made her understand: to achieve true love, she must sink, she must abandon everything she has, and go to hell for a while.So under the arrangement of the castle, K appeared in the form of prey.As she captured K. and sank with him, in those wicked games of chase and the chased, there was not a moment when Klamm's voice, his mighty menace, his tight control corrupted her. To be deeply felt by her.At the same time, she also felt that blasphemous, self-defeating happiness. Every little bit of this worldly happiness made her distance from Klamm, her pain deepened, and her desire for Klamm became stronger.She can only develop true love in a situation where her soul and body are separated.The separation of soul and body is not the kind of simple mechanical separation, but the integration in the tearing, the unity in the never-ending struggle.In the later stage, this tearing almost caused her nerves to collapse, and she was mad with pain and mad with longing.In this falling mad love, K and Klamm are two parts of her emotional essence, neither of which can do without; these two parts are irreconcilable, just like the aforementioned centrifugal device, which Constantly pulling Frieda down, away from the center, Frieda constantly experiences Klamm's control in this movement away from the center, and the two forces are always equal.Frieda was exhausted and overwhelmed by the labor of maintaining the opposition of these two parts and making them move in unity.This is exactly what Frida pursued, the castle-like happiness.The coming of love is overwhelming, the very nature of which is overshadowed by death from the very beginning.What is death?Death is the unattainable Klamm, the object of the purest and most illusory love of the Castle; K is the carrier of the real life movement, and Frieda, who joins this movement, constantly bathes in the ideal light from above in the form of sinking downward.Who can calm Frieda's inner storm?Who can understand the mystery of love better than her?In terms of love, she is a natural artist; instead of calming down conflicts and eliminating tensions, she intentionally stirs up conflicts and creates tensions, and again and again consciously plunges into the darker abyss with K This kind of desperate spirit is just similar to the pursuit of art, and it also makes us appreciate the poet's great genius in terms of imagination.From when Kramm called her in the bar room at the beginning of the incident to when Kramm explicitly ordered her to return to the bar to serve him at the end of the incident, what happened between them amounted to a conscious revolution.Driven by the fiery love of reality, she put aside her original identity and position without hesitation, fell into the bottom with K, and became a dubious person, but no matter how bad the conditions were, she always insisted on her original intention and wanted Love him to death, to complete this extraordinary love.The more humble, the more degraded, the more intense the hunger and thirst, so that two people in a narrow coffin clamped together by pliers are close to suicidal metaphors to describe the desire for love and the desire for life.And because no matter how deep they are, and how close they are, Klamm's shadow cannot be shaken off; because real love includes the desire for death, love and the rejection of love come at the same time, Frieda is everywhere. It seems difficult to move but has to.What she seeks is a life that has reached the state of death that can only exist in her and K's hungry imagination.The most memorable thing in this touching love scene is Frieda's extraordinary courage, her determination to achieve the impossible, and her disregard for all norms, in the midst of blasphemy. Detached courage.

February 22, 1998, Yingcai Garden