मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Friday, February 11, 2011

जी.ए.,तुझ्या रुपकांप्रमाणे जर जग बदलत जाऊ लागले...

Author G A Kulkarni (जी ए कुलकर्णी) was very fond of metaphors/ allegories.

Quite a few of his stories are allegorical- an extended metaphor wherein a story illustrates an important attribute of the subject.

A character is his short story says:

"अरे, निर्बुद्ध, जड जगाविषयी बदलती रुपके करत राहण्यापेक्षा तुझ्या रुपकांप्रमाणे जर जग बदलत जाऊ लागले तर तुला तरी जास्त काय हवे सांग."

("...hey, instead of creating changing metaphors for stupid, gross world, if the world started changing to suit your metaphors, tell me what more you want.")

['Pinglavel' (पिंगळावेळ) 1977]

Another one:

"छट, असली हजार माणसांनी आपल्या अर्ध्या सोंडी खुपसलेली, हजार जणांनी ढुंगण पुसलेली मलिन चिंध्यांसारखी वाक्यं मी कधीच वापरत नाही ! मला शब्द हवेत नव्या नाण्यांसारखे कलदार, मला वाक्य हवं ते सुरीच्या नव्या धारेसारख स्वच्छ, जिवंत."

("...ditch it, I never use sentences pierced by half trunks of thousands of humans, like rags which have been used to wipe asses by thousands! I want words jaunty like new coins, I want a sentence like an edge of newly sharpened knife- spotless, alive.")

['Ramalkhuna' (रमलखुणा), 1975]

Just count the number of metaphors in the quote above!

Eric Felten says in WSJ February 7 2011:

"Metaphor is crucial to the way the brain works. Is it also dangerous?

...Metaphor works, most obviously, when we recognize a similarity between two different things. It is a matter of "pattern recognition," which may be more important in the working of the brain than logic. "Early human thought proceeded by metaphor," according to Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Gerald Edelman. And this imprecise sort of figurative thinking is "a major source of imagination and creativity in adult life."...

...For Aristotle, a command of metaphor was "the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances." The psych-lab linguists can pump the primes all they like, but the proper use of figurative language may well remain an art rather than a science."

"Early human thought proceeded by metaphor...a major source of imagination and creativity in adult life..."?

GA would have been glad to know!


Artist: William Steig, The New Yorker, 12 September 1931

(Almost eighty years later, Mr. Steig is as funny as he always was.)

p.s. This is one metaphor- 'old rusty gate'- that one day I'll be eligible for!
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