मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Saturday, October 06, 2012

Blankets of Franz Kafka, Dasopant, G A Kulkarni and Warren Miller's Mr. Bromer

W H Auden:

"If we try
To ‘go southern’, we spoil in no time, we grow
Flabby, dingily lecherous, and
Forget to pay bills
Still, he will ‘go grateful’, he says, glad
To bless this region, its vendages, and those
Who call it home: though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was."


I came across the following by Franz Kafka on Facebook on his birth anniversary:

“Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.”

('The Complete Stories')

It's so true but little sad to read only about unhappy dreams.

Doesn't a blanket lead us to our happy dreams? I remember as a kid I was so fond of a white soft blanket called 'pasodi'(पासोडी) that I refused to give it up even when it was torn. I always felt very secure under it.

[Pasodi has rich literary connotations in Marathi.  Medieval saint-poet Dasopant (दासोपंत) wrote poetry on a piece of cloth- measuring 40 ft by 4 ft- called Dasopant's pasodi (दासोपंतांची पासोडी) . The writing is also illustrated richly. If you read Marathi, read an essay on this here.]

When my pasodi was taken away, I felt both sad and insecure. If I had a choice, I too would have taken up an AK-47, just like Mr. Bromer in the picture below!

Artist: Warren Miller, The New Yorker, April 6 1992

Here is a small passage from G A Kulkarni's story where his protagonist Swami- now treacherously entrapped in a forced solitude- is reflecting on the touch of love of many people in his past and comparing it to a clothing with small mirrors sewn into it. I believe that clothing is a blanket.

जी ए कुलकर्णी:

"...-ही सारी माणसे, त्यांनी आयुष्याला केलेले मायेचे स्पर्श, त्यांच्या या स्पर्शाचे लहान गोल आरसे बसवलेले वस्त्र पांघरून आपण येथपर्यंत निभावत आलो!"

('स्वामी',1973, 'पिंगळा वेळ', 1977)

What I like in G A's writing most is even when he is writing about utter hopelessness, he never ceases to be grateful.

Getting smothered, Swami too goes away grateful.

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