Don't ask. I don't know. You begin with a leap and go wherever it takes you. The title suddenly came to me after too many attempts which all resulted in the usual. Even worse, the mundane. If Kafka was anything, he was not mundane.

"A cage went in search of a bird," he once wrote. Begin with that, I thought.

Nothing can be more mundane than writing a column. It's anybody's game. Including those with little or nothing to say.

I wrote the first one in the 60's for Chicagoland Magazine, edited by a two-fisted Chicago writer, Jay Robert Nash. I was in my mid 20's, teaching high school English, reading Henry Miller, writing short stories, publishing in little magazines, flirting with freelance writing, traveling to Mexico and Europe for the first time, but still very much in love with Chicago and it's literary past.

I figured I had something to say. And it was about time. Legendary newspaperman, Sidney J. Harris of the Chicago Daily News, was one Chicago columnist who had a fierce hold on me. "Strictly Personal" he called it. He had range, attitude, and a compelling intellectual pitch. Newspapers and magazines beckoned the young writer then, offering encouragement, exposure, and camaraderie. A baptism in ink that marked one forever or quickly faded.

Nights I hung around with a bunch of Chicago writers in Old Town. All of whom were trying to find the words to show the way. Some found them. Some didn't. Most disappeared in what today I might describe as Kafka's Castle of thinking-they-were-writers. Or as Kafka put it: "The doorkeeper gave the message of salvation to the man only when it could no longer help him."

I didn't know a hell of a lot about Kafka then. In fact, he didn't speak to me at all. But Chicago did. It's people and its neighborhoods.

An ethnic soul-lover at heart, I came from a Slavic heritage, grew up in a Czech neighborhood where food, drink, work, family, mattered; and memory was honored in the old telling their stories. I lived in the past from the very beginning. Felt at home there. Enjoyed the sound of foreign tongues on the street. Sought comfort and knowledge in food, literature, everything old world, in every ethnic, enclave I could find in the city: Slavic, Italian, Russian, Scandinavian, Greek, Latino, Jew, Irish. Especially the Irish. Their poets, storytellers, novelists, playwrights, musicians. Their sense of knowing and celebrating who they were.

We hung out then in a lively pub in Old Town called O'Rourke's where the Clancy Brothers drank during their Chicago concerts. It felt like a place where a writer belonged. Where a young man-of-words might find himself. Where stories didn't end but continued. Where a guy in a kilt might suddenly walk in the door playing a bagpipe, make his way through the crowd, lifting the whole room in song back to the old sod, then disappear into the Chicago night, leaving us all blessed.

Smell of beer, ale, and Irish whiskey; clouds of cigarette and pipe smoke; dartboards and bagpipes; women, loud voices, music, and laughter. Da Mayor was Richard J. Daley himself. And on St. Paddy's Day he would miraculously turn the river of Chicago green. God, it was great place to become a writer----alive-alive-o in Chicago!

The title of my first column was Himself. Which was perfect. Perfectly Irish. And proper. Which had something to do with all of the above. Whether I was Irish or not, it was all a matter of identity. (A lesson in writing I was slowing beginning to understand). Human identity. Which could be Irish or Czech or Jewish, or what-have-you? Besides, wasn't existential/autobiographical Normal Mailer (of "White Negro" fame) out there about this same time, extolling and honing the virtues of the new, First Person journalism? Fact/Fiction/Me. What could be more `first person' than writing a Chicago column about who you were, where you were, what you thinking and feeling? I carried James Farrell, Frank O'Connor, Brendan Behan, and Yeats around in my head , in search of the human condition. And wasn't it the crazy, drunken, wild, down-to-earth Irishman, Behan, himself, awash with words, who could tell it to you straight: This is life…my life…the writer's life?:

"I respect kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and old women warmer in winter and happier in the summer."

Himself, indeed. Ah, wasn't all the world Irish? Didn't the whole world love a story? Himself was so on the mark I could be writing the same column today had I stayed past my time. But "the times, they were a changin', " as the folk singer droned. And indeed they were and do. Most columns are short-lived anyway …when the writer feels he has other lives to live and write-in other forms.

I abandoned Himself somewhere in the city after a year or so. I moved on. Away. Up north. Left Chicago and Illinois entirely. Himself could not exist in the Wisconsin rural where I had settled. The vices faded. Another lesson for the young writer: Himself belonged to the city, to O'Rourke's, the neighborhood, the night. I was in search of a new identity, a new person in a different place entirely. Himself in the woods? I don't think so. Writing is a long journey toward an authentic self and setting.

Where I found myself next (for almost 10 years) was on the road. Unable to give up a freelance livelihood in the ethnic Chicago-story telling territory I had mapped out for myself, but with no place there to call home anymore, since I had physically left `home'. The disengagement was both physical and spiritual.

On the road, yes, but a long way from Kerouac's road. A different direction, another road entirely. If we shared anything, it was the restlessness of the back and forth movement. Life between places.

When the time and opportunity arose to write another column for a local, somewhat rural newspaper at the time, it's understandable, given my new location (between places) that the title for my new column came quick and true: "Notes Along the Way". (I was into Zen, then-and now. Tao is way).

"Notes Along the Way" in turn and in time (once I finally settled in), lived out its life in weeks, months, years only to be followed by a long period of silence and then broken strings of other columns. I can't even remember them all. But each a reflection of the writer at that time, yet always in the process of change: "Blei/At Large", "Coyote", "Blei At Large & Friends", "Dateline Door County by Salvador Prague", "Word from the Coop" , "The Writer in Residence" etc. More silence.

And now? Enter Kafka.

In my old Czech neighborhood, there was a roofer named Kafka, and that was the extent of my cultural association. But `the' Kafka (Franz Kafka) I came to know years later, was a Czech Jew from Prague who wrote in German, was first published by a writer named Franz Blei, and defined the 20th Century like no other writer since. His presence remains-everywhere. When I journeyed to Prague for the first time in 1990, I traced Kafka's footsteps through the old city, visited his grave, saw his image graffitied on walls throughout Eastern Europe, read him again and again and more carefully ever since.

It's not a matter of understanding him. No matter how many times you read Kafka, you always read him for the first time. Which was another lesson in writing I learned. The beauty of Kafka is invisible. Paradox is poetry. Perhaps even faith. We are all in search of that cage.

Kafka is a Czech Zen master who writes straight to the unconscious. Straight to the dream-or nightmare. His words disappear before your eyes leaving you halfway between wonder and the abyss. It's no wonder, to the Europeans, he is their Dark Prince of literature. Or maybe their God.

I find myself more and more at home here in the north, a long way from my changing neighborhood, Chicago, the writer I was then. Yet all of that is still in me. A sensibility both old world and new, though I am still more at home amongst the old. The journey now is North. And further north. Something about place. About nature. About winter. About silence. Kafka turned silence into art.

If you are not quietly writing who you are, where you are, at the time you are, you are not writing the fictional truth, but living the transparent lie.