Idling; the hum of thinking (Kafka’s “The Chinese Puzzle”)

The hum of thinking, idling (the car metaphor), compared to intentional, directed thinking, can, perhaps, reveal much about the metaphysical world we live in. Perhaps, like the track of the story, idling can reveal the fate, the channels or paths of intentional thinking. But what I propose here differs from meditation because the idling of thinking is not emptied of intention. Nor am I proposing a reflective observation of my idling. Rather, the issue here is an imagination or a story of idling, and hence, arguments or claims involving idling

THE BALL — The ball wanders freely over a plane that is *just barely* etched with the channels. The difference is subtle but apparently also all important, because it is the very subtlety of this distinction around which idle thoughts turn. The control of the ball on this plane involves a precarious movement with too many degrees of freedom; it’s not back and forth but always there is the potential of departing from the track.

The daydream of the game player drifts towards the problem of remaining on the track, as work. Indeed, it’s a very small part of the overall machine of the empire, we imagine — but actually the central one. Kafka’s vision of China is that of an infinitely distant emperor premanently hidden by busywork, so that it would be more accurate to say that the busywork comes first, that the emperor is merely some mysticism that hovers behind such busywork. The busywork is the playing of the game, which we can relate to speaking, to truth, or various other endeavors.

The design is set, so that what is left is the communicating, or the task of the messenger. This work, which is all we see, is compared to that of guilding the ball along these subtle recesses. One wants to feel out these recesses, even if our vision is able to provide feedback to our hand. Truth is not the correspondence with internal truth — that has perhaps already been taken care of — but merely the transmission of this message, to say it in the right, and not the wrong, way. Such apparently tasks seem to occupy all of our time.

WORK — The difference between work and idleness is subtle, perhaps too subtle, perhaps just beyond or at the very edge of our grap, like turn of phrase of the final line, or like the border between waking and sleeping. The pleasantness of the grassy field, through which the ball strolls, the void of the sky — beyond work there is nothing, but work itself is nothing too. In other words, the idle reverie of the story attempts, it seems, to capture or to grasp at something, to imagine the game as a kind of reflection of my own condition, but also to feel how this imagination itself seems to reach out for a kind of perfect expression, that is, in accordance with some kind of etched groove.