Every Day is Like Sunday

There is something about the experience of Sundays which makes the Kafka quote resonate for me, though perhaps not in the Aggadic sense that Franz intended. Because I associate Sundays less with Kafka than with a more prosaic set of lines, from a poem by Dylan Thomas, ‘That Sanity Be Kept’. I always imagine Thomas’s poem must have been written on a Sunday, though there is no evidence for this belief apart from a few suggestive lines.

Sunday is certainly not a day for those, like Thomas’ narrator, ‘sitting at open windows in their shirt’, observing ‘what passes by’. It is a day to walk arm in arm across English parks, lending love illustration. The pathos of distance in Thomas’s narration is that of a writer who does not feel fully part of the world he is observing, observation is a consolation for isolation, the writer is inevitably an outsider. Here one sublimates ones inability to lend love illustration by illustrating others doing so. The dispassionate tone of ‘regarding’, ‘observing’ (twice), ‘watching’ (twice), ‘seeing’ conceals the passion of a will to power as knowledge. In the poem’s final lines this becomes apotheosis: the narrator is ‘like some great Jehovah of the West’, achieving that omniscience to which the poet or the intellectual aspires, even though such knowledge is known to be a burden.

In the chapter of Husserl’s Ideas entitled ‘The Annihilation of the World’ the philosopher considers the possibility that the physical world be completely destroyed. Though we can conceive our embodied ego no longer existing, we cannot think the annihilation of the cogito, the transcendental ego, as it is the precondition of any ‘world’ rather than a product of it. The total absence of consciousness is inconceivable, an insane thought.

Thomas’s narrator could almost have drawn on the insight. Separation’s counterpart is the nihilism of an observation (whether phenomenological or poetic) which contemplates the world’s destruction. Thomas already conceives it. ‘Thinking of death’ is sure enough the contemplation of the narrator’s own demise, his embodied disappearance; but it also seems the possibility of this world disappearing, perhaps in the act of a vengeful God whose omnipotence complements his omniscience. Thomas’ narrator, seemingly implacable, aloof, ‘unobtrusive’, all but threatens it. This is the nihilistic implication of the apotheosis, that either myself or the world could go under, what would it matter? Impotent melancholy’s alter ego is the fury of destruction. That sanity be kept, this is to be contemplated, though it is an insane thought it is one which will keep him from insanity. The thought that he is no mere ego, but Jehovah, this megalomaniac notion is surely the result of his separation from alter. But it is his simultaneous recognition of others who, despite their painful distance, are not so very different from himself, this thought can keep insanity at bay.

Thomas’ narrator is the third, the phenomenological observer who recognizes the recognition and the misrecognition of others, ‘marks the couples’ as well as could a philosopher, but as poet brings language to bear where concepts only say so much. It is at the level of the symmetry of words that ‘invitations’ prompt ‘inventions’, a ‘gesture’ calls up a ‘grimace’. We read too quickly and overlook how well drawn this picture is. But the subtle symmetry of expression does not last; the penultimate stanza moves uncomfortably towards the imbalanced, the upset, in rhythm as in life.

Thomas probably wouldn’t recognize himself in such a reading. It may be too abstract a take on what is actually rooted in place and time. After all, he gives us the detail of a particular world, the alter of Englishness confronting the Welsh self, Welsh difference amongst English self-sameness. And what would Thomas say were he around today, looking down on the same park? He would no doubt see on the ‘littered grass’ not ‘matrons’ and ‘brass bands’ but cohorts of carefree Sunday Times readers. Or ‘letting the traffic pass’ he would see countless Sunday shoppers thronging the unquiet roads, a different litter in tow. They too somehow lend love illustration. Though beneath their calm exteriors one could detect, now as then, a certain insecurity, the dark fear of being alone or being unemployed, unable to pay the extortionate mortgage without their precarious double income. It still expresses itself in gesture and grimace. A dawning sense that this could be all there is to their lives, what Thomas calls (in a line I carry about with me every Sunday) ‘a vague bewilderment at things not turning right’.