Commixture manifests itself above all in this: the social order is superimposed on the cosmic order, to the point of covering it and swallowing it. But the majesty and the articulations of the old order are retained even as the memory of it is erased. In the village no one of course speaks of the cosmos. Even nature might almost not exist at all. The only one who mentions it is Pepi, the servant girl. And the image is one of winter: “a long, terribly long monotonous winter.” Color too has been revoked. But no one seems to need or remember it. Differences express themselves in gradations from chiaro to scuro. The lavish wardrobe of the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn admits only shades of dark: “gray, brown, or black clothes,” as ordered and compact as a phalanx. The mythic landscape has lost its pigmentation.
The cosmic order, as it presents itself in myths, could vanish with the myths themselves. Scientific knowledge could supplant it with an image that is ever more complex, ever changing, in which dimensions multiply to the point of pointlessness. But that’s not how it happens. Camouflaged within the social order, the cosmic order continues to exist and operate. After all, it has dealt not only with stars and spheres but also with powers and archons. And those powers haven’t gone away. Indeed now, in the absence of names to call them forth, they can operate more freely and wildly, even in plain view. K. puts this to the test every day during his harrowing residence in the village.
The gentlemen (Herren) of the Castle are the archons. It isn’t that “archons” is an interpretation that accrues to or superimposes itself on Herren (“gentlemen,” “lords,” “rulers”) but rather that archon, if only we give the word enough room to resonate, means “ruler.” And this constantly happens in Kafka: behind the formulas of common speech a space suddenly opens where words reverberate and sprout meanings, acquiring an intensity that at times is paralyzing. The common speech par excellence is the language of the servants, hence of the servant girl Pepi. Accordingly, when it’s her turn to speak to K., her words sound overloaded with meaning and seem to ask what we are always, secretly, wondering about him: “What does he want? What strange sort of man is he?” And indeed out of Pepi’s mouth come what may be the most drastic words we’ll hear: she goads K. to find “the strength to set fire to the entire Gentlemen’s Inn and burn it to the ground, so that not a trace is left, to burn it like a piece of paper in a stove.” To burn it like that sheet of paper torn from a notepad and left on the records cart, which K. (only hours earlier, during the scene of the “distribution of records”) thought might be his record, that sheet on which would have been written his fate, because the record that concerns an individual can be nothing less than his fate.
Kafka can’t be understood if he isn’t taken literally. But the literal must be grasped in all its power and in the vastness of its implications. One such implication is this: the records (Akten) with which the Castle gentlemen incessantly concern themselves must be the acta, that is to say the record of actions of every kind. The Castle maintains the archive of actions, the immense record of all actions that is karma. That’s why the officials must always be on the job: actions never stop taking place. As Krishna explained to Arjuna on his war chariot, even when you think you’re not acting, you’re acting. That’s why the secretary Momus is in such a hurry to fill in the last blanks of a report describing the events of the previous few minutes. Castle activity consists above all in taking down what already automatically happens: the accumulation of karma.
But one mustn’t think that the records that pile up in columns in Sordini’s room or those crammed into the superintendent’s cabinets or those continually offered to Klamm and waved away by him pertain only to the villagers. Though poor and wretched, they nonetheless have been granted the dismal privilege of sharing a border with the Castle. And that’s enough to mark their destiny. But the Castle records all actions, even those of foreigners, like K., who thinks he recognizes, in a little sheet of paper left on a records cart, his own file, the record of his own acts, as it is about to be distributed or dispersed in one of the officials’ rooms. Karma is terrible even because of this: it exists independent of every faith and every cult. We may be irreverent or disbelieving, even in the extreme, but our actions accumulate and are filed, beyond our reach, just as with true believers. For karma not to exist, every action would have to dissolve immediately — as if without a trace. Were that the case, no premeditated, interrelated actions would be feasible. And if we observe village life, we can assert that such is not the case: it proceeds in a sensible way, like the dull, consequent lives everyone leads.
On one side, the progeny of the archons: the magistrates of the court that judges Josef K. and the officials of the Castle by whom K. wishes to be appointed. They are preoccupied by something known only to them, with respect to which every outside fact is a potential disturbance. And among those outside facts, on the opposite side, is the incessant, unstoppable swarm of defendants, or parties. Each day they swell toward the archons like a vast army, driven forward in a tidelike motion. Looking closely, we may discover that there exists also a counter-movement, more irregular and barely perceptible, like an undertow that flows from the archons back toward the parties (if we use that word as a generic term to indicate whoever waits to be processed and judged by a higher authority). The archons are subject to erotic obsession, which draws them outward. The court’s obsession is crude, marked by the harshness of the penal code; the magistrates are a pack of “womanizers,” and their reference books overflow with obscene images. Among Castle officials, who wait to be surprised and overwhelmed by the parties in the dead of night, the obsession is more lyrical and vague: they yearn to be forced to do something, they who spend their lives forcing others. Archons behave toward the world as the mind behaves toward what’s external to it. They think themselves sovereign and self-sufficient, but they are continually drawn toward something foreign and refractory that resists them and that they want to dominate. They always fear, even if they never admit it, that a little grain of the outside world will penetrate their inaccessible regions, there where they gather only among themselves, and devastate them.
The celestial hierarchies — even the terrestrial or infernal ones, even hierarchies in general, even simply beings that occupy concentric circles — present themselves like this: “I was helpless in the face of that figure, who was sitting quietly at her table looking at the tabletop. I circled around her and felt as if I were being strangled by her. Around me circled a third who felt strangled by me. Around the third circled a fourth, who felt strangled by the third. And so it continued outward as far as the motions of the heavenly bodies and beyond. Everything felt that grip on the neck.” That “grip on the neck” is the feeling through which beings communicate. As Canetti observes, “the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres has become a violence of the spheres.” This is Kafka’s cosmological tableau, implicit in his every word.
Everything is made of concentric circles. Each circle contains, next to something else, an exact reproduction of the preceding circle. For this reason it’s easy to overlook the existence of the circles.
Each circle is self-sufficient. It offers a foundation and a justification to whatever belongs to it. The circles do not communicate, at least not officially. There is no constant or guaranteed means of access from one to another. In special circumstances — or, more commonly, by mistake — temporary passages open between them. Then they close again, leaving no trace.