Jim Kacian

wittgenstein and kafka and stevenson¹

This thing I do, I call it mine, but it can only ever exist because of you. I feel—I feel the gap in the language for what I feel, but that’s the point—the language already contains the gap where the new word is to be located.² It’s like capitalism, where something may be novel only once, and for a brief time,³ before it is swallowed whole and becomes part of the yelm. And yet we sit at our windows when evening falls and dream it to ourselves.⁴

certain my green is not your green5

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Notes:

1. Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) postulates: “The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” (“Kafka and His Precursors,” tr. James E. Irby, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964). Perhaps only I could bring these four authors together in precisely this way; perhaps they have invented me.
2. Language and its uses was a chief preoccupation of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), especially how we maneuver across the lacunae.
3. The act of converting anything, even a lack, into a free market commodity, is one of the features of post-modern capitalism. The German social scientist Karl Marx (1818–1883) warns us of the perils inherent in the system extensively in his Das Kapital (1867).
4. The ultimate line from the fragment “Eine Kaiserliche Botschaft” (“An Imperial Message”) by Bohemian novelist Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in Parables and Paradoxes (tr. Edwin and Willa Muir (New York: Schocken, 1970).
5. In response to the haiku of American poet John Stevenson (b. 1948), “pretty sure my red is your red” (My Red. Taylorville, IL: Brooks Books, 2021). The colors I see when I close one of my eyes are different than when I close my other. I can’t be “pretty sure” even about the colors I see myself, much less yours.

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About the Author

Jim Kacian is founder and president of The Haiku Foundation as well as chairman of its board; founder and owner of Red Moon Press; and editor in chief of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013).

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