Kafka and Oasis in a Same Song

“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.”

“Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That’s why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.”

Franz Kafka
Letters to Felice

 
 

 
 

Every day I wake up and it’s Sunday
Whatever’s in my eye won’t go away
The radio is playing all the usual
And what’s a Wonderwall anyway

Because my inside is outside
My right side’s on the left side
‘Cause I’m writing to reach you now but
I might never reach you, only want to teach you
About you but that’s not you

It’s good to know that you are home for Christmas
It’s good to know that you are doing well
It’s good to know that you all know I’m hurting
It’s good to know I’m feeling not so well

Because my inside is outside
My right side’s on the left side
‘Cause I’m writing to reach you now but
I might never reach you, only want to teach you
About you but that’s not you
Do you know it’s true but that won’t do

Maybe then tomorrow will be Monday
And whatever’s in my eye should go away
But still the radio keeps playing all the usual
And what’s a Wonderwall anyway

Because my inside is outside
My right side’s on the left side
‘Cause I’m writing to reach you now but
I might never reach you, only want to teach you
About you but that’s not you
Do you know it’s true but that won’t do
And you know it’s you I’m talking to

 
 

The song was written by Fran Healy, who admitted that he took the guitar chords from Oasis‘ Wonderwall; as an overt acknowledgement of this, the song contains the lyric “and what’s a wonderwall, anyway?”. In 2004, both Writing to Reach You and Wonderwall were mixed with Green Day‘s Boulevard of Broken Dreams in the popular mash up, Boulevard of Broken Songs,Boulevard of Broken Songs by San Francisco, California DJ and producer Party Ben.

As Fran Healy stated:

“Writing To Reach You was actually inspired by Franz Kafka’s Letters To Felice. He wrote to this woman he was in love with hundreds of times, yet never met her. None of her replies are in the book, so you have to piece together their relationship. I was reading that one day, and Wonderwall came on the radio. I nicked the chords, then changed the rhythm and the melody. I’m pleased we managed to draw on Kafka and Oasis in the same song.”

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Thus There Are Butterflies in Kafka, Too

Und die Schmetterlinge beginnen zu singen (And the Butterflies Begin to Sing). Max Ernst, Paris, 1929

 
 

Thus there are butterflies in Kafka, too

with the name of the worshiper

their fullness is crammed into the fullness of the world

like the totem poles of primitive peoples,

the world of the ancestors took him down to the animals

he must really have known it all along

just as K.

engraves curlicues on the backs of guilty men

forces Kafka to move cosmic ages in his writing

convert poetry into doctrine

in the face of reason

so faithfully

 

Walter Benjamin
Illuminations

Hotel of Sparks

André Breton chasing butterflies with Benjamin Péret, c. 1959

 
 

The philosophical butterfly
Alights on the rosy star
And that makes a window in hell
The masked man is still standing in front of the naked woman
Whose hair glides like in the morning the light on a streetlamp that has not been extinguished
The learned furniture urges on the room that juggles
With its rose-windows
Its circular sunbeams
Its glass mouldings
Within which a geometric sky is turning blue
In memory of the inimitable breast
Now the cloud of a garden passes over the head of the man who has just sat down
And is cutting in two the woman with the bust of magic and the Parma eyes
It is the hour when the polar bear with the highly intelligent look
Stretches himself and counts a day.

 

André Breton