Too much imagination risks becoming Kafkaesque

---

July 26, 2022

It was no fabulation: In spring, a fisherman happened upon the skeleton of beloved Kathryne, downstream from the Detroit River bridge. Months back,
the icy river hid her body after she stopped her car at the bridge, left the keys
in the ignition, her purse on the seat, and jumped.

But I didn’t know she was dead until a year and a half later. I thought she merely chose not to respond to my email because, well, I was too much a comedian after so many years apart.

Decades ago, we couldn’t stay together in the short term, because our graduate programs were on separate coasts. So, we didn’t marry, contrary to our committed plan when we lived together in Berkeley.

We tried to keep our bond alive across a continent, but lives must be made where one is.

You know the song, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Youth grows into reconciliation. She married a fellow student during her first year of studies.

Three decades later, neither of us knew that the others’ partner had recently died. I emailed her because I saw she’d re-issued a collection of essays by former students of a well-known Heideggerian literary theorist at UCLA, her mentor, Joseph Riddel, which was compiled earlier to honor him. I presumed she wrote a new “Introduction” to the anthology, and the Berkeley library had only the first edition—not that her earlier introduction to the anthology was especially appealing. Kathryne was rather hermetic, even to me, who knows hermetic!

Maybe it was cruel of me to send a query like any stranger curious about a publication, sign off properly, but then “P.S.” that I’d always loved to remember her affectionately dismissive name for me, which was funny.

Maybe she discovered my hundreds of pages of creative writing online, and found it so informal (she being quite elitist) that she saw no reason to reply.

Who knows? Too much imagination can be a dangerous thing for creative life. One learns to move on, and to love the life one has, can have, whatever; or else becoming quite self-undermining.

A year later, I got an email from a graduate student, Johanna, wanting to know if I was the Gary Davis who wrote to Kathryne in 1975, because she had a love letter to Kathryne that Johanna desperately (romantically) wanted to return to that Gary Davis.

Puzzled, I replied that I was indeed the person she’d been hunting across the Internet—but how did she get that?

I googled Kathryne’s faculty page for her email address again. That was when I learned of her death; and details through exchanges with some of her department colleagues. No one knew why she jumped. Some months later, her brother dumped her library in a used book store in Detroit. Johanna had been perusing that store and bought a used paperback translation of Kafka’s Diaries.

Later, she found my letter, still in its envelop, in the book’s pages. She thought I knew that Kathryne was dead, and would want the letter.

At first, she sought to contact Kathryne: her oversight when selling some old books?

Learning of the death, Johnanna searched for me, based only on envelop information, believing that Gary’s agonizing confession—that he would not be moving to L.A. to marry—expressed a lasting love. (I eventually learned that young Johanna was desperate for lasting romance in her life, which she saw reflected by young Gary’s longing.)

The kicker was that Kathryne had jumped soon after I wrote to her. Apparently (according to a woman colleague), Kathryne had been unable to overcome mourning her husband’s death from cancer. Without hinting any plan to die,
she left life in the middle of her semester.

Meanwhile—between my earlier emails (there had been two, neither bringing even pro forma reply), my creative writing online was incidently having fun with fabulations about literary Jennifer; also, offering extensive advice to a close friend, Terese, about not sacrificing her artistic aspirations for the sake of motherhood with a man who bored her, along with prospecting all manner of literary theoretical enjoyments, as if she could become Jennifer; and apparently showing great happiness with my life (which partly expressed a compensatory love of writing the woman of my heart—i.e., not to someone actual, rather writing enhancement of my ownmost longing for higher flourishing, a hieros gamos, an appellant cohering, a radiant gravity of my own intelligibility).

As the days after learning of Kathryne’s death became weeks and months,
I recalled how intense had been our literary romanticism decades earlier; her divorce from her first marriage; her inability to have any children (which was never an issue for us—but he wanted children, and wouldn’t settle for adoption?); the ease of finding me online; my apparent experience with parenting; the senseless impulsiveness of her death...

So, I increasingly haunted myself with “failure” to have let her know via those recent emails that I was mourning the death of my own partner of 25 years.
I failed to be candid. I unwittingly lost the chance to offer Kathryne friendship which those near her didn’t provide—which is vain of me: as if I could be
a rescue when eveyone who knew her well and loved her was apparently useless. Instead, I quipped to an old love whom I presumed was happy, joking, for the sake of conversation about her work—and maybe literary friendship.

Too much imagination is a dangerous thing, Jennifer. Imagination can’t ground artistic life, obviously.

Kafkaesque, says the M-W Unabridged: “of, relating to, or suggestive of…having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.”

So, how may a good balance (if not the best balance) between idealization and realism be conceived?

Talk about the redundant dyad “being and becoming”: Dear, they are —as Heidegger would say—“belonging together in the Same”: being is the basis of being mirroring being.

Anyway, imagination—troping a hegemony of The Visual in the evolution of modern intelligibility—is a child of conceivability engaging possibly all modes of creative life—which your conception expressed! But that’s not image-ination. It’s the life of all creativity.

So, here’s to imagination: a short introduction—as I’m good with “of” and “relating to,” but not so much “suggestive of” nightmarishness (which, you see, arises easily—not good).