KAFKA, CANETTI AND THE CCNY PROFESSORS

Kafka’s stories -intended or not- speak to the experiences felt under totalitarian regimes. At some point the weight of the dark mass moving against a certain type of person can lead him to become a roach, waiting to be stepped on. What Kafka does not describe is the behaviors of other individuals that are not part of the mass but respond to it and follow the same actions. The individual who can become a roach or is persecuted by a group of bureaucratic types might sense ahead of time, based on reality or simply a kind of paranoia, that there are others who get sucked in by the dark mass in such a climate. Canetti writes about it in The Torch in My ear. Why would a person answer your saluting smile some times in the elevator when no one else is seeing him or her; and some times not, when in public. I just ran into a former colleague who worked with me for a period of around five years, a white female professor, and completely ignored me, not because there was a crowd or she did nor see me. We came across face to face with each other in front of one of the buildings in the complex where we live. It cannot be that in Trumpian times, like the creeps currently running the USA, some Americans are so scare that, sometimes, they choose not to say hello, when passing by a Latino. Or is it just me? I know a lot of white Americans who whenever we encounter each other say hello or smile or make a hand gesture or nod. Humanity is more than being part of a species; but not for all. Some live and act by pure personal instincts or fall into the contemporary version of the Kafkian’s dark mass. Since she had answered my hellos before, I wondered why, and the only reason, at first. I came up with was that she is an old neurotic woman, but then I say to myself, I know lots of old neurotic single women, like I know lots of old neurotic single men -me included-, who would not be so unstable as to deny a smile or a nod or a hand gesture, showing recognition of the other. What makes a white older woman who works and lives in a multi ethnic community in Harlem refuse to recognize the other person of color? Could it be that she is showing signs or early senility? Fear? Could it be that I have written about racist and homophobic experiences at the City College, a place that likes to see itself as the bastion of tolerance and integration and she has taken it personally? It was not such a tolerant place for me and many others. The evidence is there to be discussed openly. All those questions came up, but then I had to stop exploring the subject and its relation to the current social and political climate, since a few moments later, another neighbor asked me for the trillionth times to join the building's garden committee; and I had to say no, because I am environmentally challenged.