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andemic time, like pandemic space, is both endless and claustrophobic: we live in narrow rooms with the remembered simulacra of others, the vestige of scents and tactile sensations, the terror of crowds alongside the loneliness. Franz Kafka's parables have been good company in this dread-inflected space. The immaculate thought-rooms of Parables and Paradoxes draw the eye away from the astonished of streets and empty sidewalks, the costumes of masks, the binaries of threat and kindness, the eugenicist undertone of many pandemic policies legislated by states to ensure the safety of the "fittest."

On the day when my oldest child wept realizing there would be no kisses and physical touching in his 11th grade year of virtual schooling, I read "On Parables," which thinks through the assumption that parables are useless in "daily life, which is the only life we have." Kafka ends with a conversation between two men which focuses around what winning resembles, and whether the moral aim of the parable extends to us in life. The second man says he loses in the world what he wins in the parable. The first replies, "No, in reality: in parable you have lost." Extending the parable to ordinary life is only a win in the world of the daily. The story we use to make moral sense of events feels immoral on the ground.

On the day twitter blazes with longing for pedicures, I read "Pekin and the Emperor," and discover a point of convergence in the end: "To set about establishing a fundamental defect here would mean underming not only our consciences, but, what is far worse, our feet."

On the day a man uses his powerful leafblower to move leaves from the neighbor's yard to our own, on the day this man backs his truck into the fence beside our front window and tears part of it down, I meet the "The Imperial Colonel" who rules a small mountain town. The imperial gaze is the power which causes subjects to obey a despot. Humans offer their obedience to an evil leader because his gaze, like that of a god, does not include them--it renders them puppets or playthings, parts of set. This gaze "a nonchalant, roving, and yet steady gaze, a gaze with which one might, for instance, observe the movements of a crowd in the distance," and the presence of the "indefinable smile" on the Imperial Colonel's face alternates between "irony" and "dreamy reminiscence." Outside of time, the gaze sees everything, reduces persons to an eschatological end, the fulfillment of something a subject can only suspect.

On the day an extended family member posts a meme about how Biden will tear down the walls that protect us from Mexican immigrants, I wander into "The Great Wall and the Tower of Babel", which begins with the "news of the building of the tall wall" penetrating the now of the world. The parable's narrator returns to his ten-year old self, recalling a day with his father in "the smallest circumstances." The big event, here, is broken down into the impressions of a young rememberer; the tremendous meets the tiny in time. What matters is that the father held his hand, and this relationship of proximity to the father blurs the line between the world as experienced by the son and the world as declaimed by a parent. The narrator describes the emperor's pigtail, eating soup, staring at things, and then ends this small piece with what his father had reported "from the threshold of that moment," which he offers in a "verbatim" memory that colludes with other things circulating in that time, and space, suggesting that a child's memory must be fragment, must pull things together into parabolic objects with the words of the father at the end:

Thus, my father said more or less the following: a strange boatman—I know all those who usually sail past here, but this one was a stranger—has just told me that a great wall is going to be built to protect the Emperor. As you may know, the infidel nations, with demons among them too, often gather in front of the Imperial Palace and shoot their black arrows at the emperor.

The problem with building that Tower of Babel to heaven lies in the city, or the builders. Kafka explores this in "The City Coat of Arms," which pivots around the symbolism in a coat of arms that includes, strangely, a fist. As the people attempt to build the Tower, they realize it will not be finished in their lifetimes. Suddenly, the task lacks immediacy, the buy-in dissolves over questions of housing and status: "Every nationality wanted the finest quarters for itself." Faced with the infinite or eternality, humans seek more pressing troubles, like social comparison, envy, the feel of the stadium. The little fights developed into wars, and then new fights, with constant outbursts and calls for vengeance, and with each increased technical skill or invention, "the occasion for conflict" multiplied. The parable ends with the fist's unpacking: "All the legends and songs that came to birth in that city are filled with longing for a prophesied day when the city would be destroyed by five successive blows from a gigantic fist. It is for that reason too that the city has a closed fist on its coat of arms." The city's end is inscribed in its story of origin, preserved in the relic of the fist on the coat of arms.

On the day when I realize vaccinated friends are purchasing their spring break airline tickets and celebrating their election by fine dining experiences, the voluptuous "Green Dragon" enters the room of my envy, saying: "Drawn hither by your longing, I come pushing myself along from afar off, and underneath am now scraped quite sore." He is happy to do it, the green dragon assures me, happy to help me locate myself in comparison to others in the virtue of envy by the gleam of the lottery bin known as modern life.

In the week I cannot stop crying and hiding from my children the reality of delayed treatments, I find myself in "Paradise," smack in the scathing succulence of Eden's paradox, where "we are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life." For Kafka, we are sinful without being guilty; we are wrong without being designated "criminals." Our expulsion from Paradise did not destroy Paradise—and by our sin, we saved Paradise.

"Why do we lament over the fall of Man? We were not driven out of paradise because of it, but because of the tree of life, that we might not eat of it." The expulsion from Paradise is "the eternal recapitulation of the occurrence," which places us there, "in actual fact," irregardless of whether we realize it in the present. This Kafka-time infuses the strange hoops of pandemic, where we juggle the guilt of possibly infecting others with an invisible, silent virus that may be asymptomatic. Aren't we all asymptomatic when it comes to original sin?

The serpent promised "equality with God" to those who ate from the tree; and the serpent kept half that promise, as "man did not become like God", man became like "divine knowledge." A man could think God - could invent citizenship, build walls to protect purity, and also feel his conscience—despite coding errors "in the original fettering." Because we are equal in our knowledge of Good and Evil—because the fall granted us this equality as a condition—we humans have elected morality as the space in which to display "our individual superiority." What the serpent gave us is half the story of God, or the story of the serpent's frustration: to know good but be unable to fulfill it.

In the locked bathroom of the week of vast weeping, the virtue signal is already here, in Paradise, in Kafka's fragments and prisons, since the knowledge requires action, or action in accordance with it, even if man has not been given the strength to do so, lacking that part of God—"he must destroy himself trying." So man pulls back in fear of his own weakness, even though "the accomplished cannot be annulled, but only confused. It was for this purpose that our rationalizations were created," Kafka surmises. We create costumes and identities to collude in our self-delusion which we then translate or hand down to bind others. and oh, the virtuosity of the virtue in being able to tell another person that they are failing to be ideal. We celebrate our expertise in diagnosing that very failure.

The theorist is the winner, since the action is made irrelevant by our weakness. As for the visible world, it is "nothing more than a rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment," Kafka continues, "an attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached." It is the exceptions of theory which are the truest, the most relevant to mankind, or homo sapiens sapiens: the species of mammal that writes books to excuse his selfishness while narrowing the banks of his own insignificance. If we cannot be good, we can at least assume the status of minor gods in diagnosing the badness of others.

On the day of the bear in Transylvania, which is groundhog day in Alabama, I discover other shadows attached to mammals in fragments from Simone Weil's 1943 notebooks, where she considers self-replicating cycles of oppression. "Thus Marx, exactly in the same way as the businessmen of his time or the warriors of the Middle Ages, arrived at a morality which places the social category to which he belonged—that of professional revolutionaries—above sin." Weil marvels at how Marx stumbled into replicating the structures he despised. Relations of dominance create oppressive structures no matter who helms the apparatus of revolt. Dialectical materialism moved from the assumption that, because force rules human relations, injustice is perpetuated by systems, and yet, Marx also insisted that "the weak, while remaining the weak, will nevertheless be the stronger." This eschatological heaven of avenging angels is hard to locate on the ground, or hard to separate from defining justice as the power to punish others. The heart of all prisons lies in this.

As Weil notes, "Marx believed in miracles without believing in the supernatural." From the theoretical framework rooted in rationalism, Weil sees a discontiguousness. She concludes that "if one believes in miracles, it is better to believe in God as well." Both the bear and the groundhog fail to see their shadows this year.

On the day the church put our Black, unmarried, openly gay rector on administrative leave for caressing another man outside of holy matrimony, I find something unbidden in "The Coming of the Messiah," where Kafka tells us when time will end, when the eschatologies will be fulfilled: "The Messiah will come as soon as the most unbridled individualism of faith becomes possible—when there is no one to destroy this possibility and no one to suffer its destruction; hence the graves will open themselves." At question is the nature of messianic salvation itself, which claims to both end the world and redeem it for another one no one can see, describe, or claim. For "the Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the last day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last." The last-est. The last beyond the possibility of lasting.

On the day my youngest daughter decides to set her invisible horse free in a meadow outside Birmingham, I find "Abraham", a man born into all the privileges that made him a prophet. Kafka suggests this privilege of house, wife, land, and status may be the reason Abraham needs something taken from him. But it is the other Abrahams, the unrealized Abes, who interest the author: the ones with half half-built homes, the son-less ones with nothing to offer Mount Moriah, the clever ones who read "magic trilogies" so that their houses would not "be in order" and to block the view of the mountain in the distance. Among these alternative Abrahams, there is also the one who fears starting out as Abraham and winding up as Don Quixote—since who knows where the journey might take you? Kafka posits Abraham the fool—"the unsummoned one"—who goes even though not called: "And perhaps he had made no mistake at all, his name really was called, it having been the teachers intention to make the rewarding of the best student at the same time a punishment for the worst one."

On the day we move snails from the front steps back to the nearby soil, I encounter a 2011 lecture where Judith Butler touches on the parables in the context of Kafka's estate. "Who Owns Kafka?" visits the ongoing conflict over Kafka's letters and papers between his family estate and the National Library of Israel. At issue is Kafka's legacy—what he wished to mean inseparable from what we take him to say. The German state prefers to claim him as purely German. Czech scholars lodge their own complaints about leaving out Prague. Butler situates this conflict in the Kafkaesque context of rising bureaucracies which track, classify, and measure individuals according to demographic, ethnic, religious, and linguistic criteria. Yiddish, German, and Czech converge in Kafka—he, himself, exists as an outskirt of that quest for purity which bureaucracy has made possible, down to the blood.

The fight over legacy is not a fight over Kafka's legacy so much as which nation gets to use it as an accessory for cultural needs. If Kafka's words have a legacy, perhaps it is precisely the way multilingualism, religion, and the claims of multinationalism unsettle one another in the modern state's administrations of justice, a relationship which has been problematic from the start. For Butler, there is irony in how Kafka's words have been monetized, purified, and reconstructed to suit the needs of nation-states and their capitalist octopus arms.

What Butler calls "the poetics of non-arrival," the gaping, infinite distance between departure and arrival in human time, is present in Kafka's parables. She borrows Benjamin and Adorno's use of the word "gestures" to evoke "stilled moments" and statements which move without enacting, thus severing the tie between speaking and doing, and holding us in their unfinishedness. The gesture reveals the gap in the gaze. The Messiah's time of arrival does not exist in human time, but in the absolution of its ending.

On the day my last living parent receives a vaccine, I meet "The Emperor," himself, the embodiment of absolute power leveraging sacralization. The emperor may be "our rightful sovereign" and bearer of "divine mission," but what if he's not the descendant of gods? What if he isn't born into divinity but rather the construction of it? Kafka's narrator carries this doubt which does not change the world, doesn't stir anything, as "when the surf flings a drop of water onto the land, that does not interfere with the eternal rolling of the sea, on the contrary, it is caused by it." I can't read the hours from the eras, the pandemic from the prophecy, the end from the beginning of what is to come.