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."

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

What Has Humanness To Do With Everest Climbing?...मानवाचे माणूसपण असलेच


Henry David Thoreau:

“It is in vain to dream of a wilderness distant from ourselves.” 


Bertrand Russell, 'The Harm That Good Men Do', 1926:

"We all know that Galileo and Darwin were bad men; Spinoza was thought dreadfully wicked until a hundred years after his death; Descartes went abroad for fear of persecution. Almost all the Renaissance artists were bad men."


Orson Welles as 'Harry Lime' in film ‘The Third Man’, 1949:

"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
 
John Gray:

"The Swiss may have produced more than cuckoo clocks, but it was the creative turbulence of the Renaissance that gave us the murderous modern world"

So what do you want? Creative turbulence of the Renaissance that gave the murderous modern world or brotherly love, peace and democracy but no Michelangelo and  Leonardo da Vinci? Remember, it's a package deal.

Pune edition of Marathi daily May 29 2013 Loksatta (लोकसत्ता)  is all Everest. It's celebrating 60th anniversary of Everest conquest.

I don't grudge it but I wonder why there is no introspection and 'the other side' of it.

Read its leader here and I quote a part of it:

"...प्रत्येकाच्या मनात एक एव्हरेस्ट असते. किंबहुना असायला हवे. तसे असेल तर मग त्याचा ध्यास लागतो. ते शिखर गाठायची ओढ अस्वस्थ करते आणि तो अस्वस्थपणा जगण्याचे प्रयोजनच बनून जातो. हे शिखर खेळांतील असेल. लेखनातील असेल. संगीतातील असेल. चित्रनाटय़शिल्पकलेतीलही असेल किंवा साध्या शिडाच्या होडीतून सागरभ्रमंती करण्याच्या इच्छेचेही असेल. कोणतेही असेल. पण ते असणे हे आवश्यक असते. कारण ते तसे असणे हे प्रयोजन असते आणि प्रयोजनाशिवाय जगणे हे फक्त तगून राहणे असते. मानवाचे माणूसपण असलेच तर ते या आणि अशा एव्हरेस्टच्या ध्यासात आहे...."

 ("...there is an Everest on every person's mind. In fact it should be there. Only if it's there, you strive for it. You become restless to scale it and that restlessness becomes the life's objective. That peak could be in sports. In writing. In music. Even in cinema-drama-sculpture or the desire to navigate the sea in a simple sailboat. Whatever it is. But it is essential to have one and living without objective is just a survival. If there exists man's  humanness then it exists in this and such Everest objective...")

This is absolute nonsense, load of rubbish. (I have tackled this theme earlier on the blog. Therefore, I'm likely to repeat myself.)

Who told them every one has to have a lofty objective in life? For most people on the earth, the only affordable objective is 'survival'. And what is wrong with that objective?


Mel Brooks says in a lighter vein : Nietzsche whispers to you: ‘Without audacity there is no greatness.’ Freud whispers to you: ‘Why must there be greatness?’ That fight’s still going on. And you don’t understand either one, because they’re both whispering in German."

The most important point there: Why must there be greatness? 
  
George Orwell on sports:

"...Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved. it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.
Even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than strength, can cause much ill-will, as we saw in the controversy over body-line bowling and over the rough tactics of the Australian team that visited England in 1921..." 

What has 'humanness' (माणूसपण) to do with excellence in competitive / commercial sports, music, sculpting, writing etc.? We all know how many of the great artists are/were lousy human beings.

Most acts of humanness in man's history have been carried out by ordinary anonymous men and women and remain unrecorded.

What about climbing Everest itself since 1953?


Noam Cohen in The New York Times on June 18,2007:

"...While praising Mr. (George) Mallory as “a man of today” and a “pioneer,” Mr. Geffen conceded that because of those qualities “he wouldn’t go to Everest today — people are crawling all over it.”

Lukas Eberle in Spiegel Online International on October 5 2012:

"...Since the first ascent on May 29, 1953, by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, some 3,836 people have climbed Mount Everest, with almost three quarters of them making the ascent in the last 10 years. The Himalayan peak has become "an amusement park," says top Italian alpinist Simone Moro, who has summited Everest four times...."

MICHAEL J. YBARRA in WSJ on June 21 2012:

"On Everest—where about 350 people reached the summit over two days this spring—Sherpas do virtually all the work, fixing lines to the top and sometimes even attaching the clients' ascenders (a metal device that clamps onto the line) so that they don't have to remove their mitts. There is less hand-holding on K2, but some of the 2008 expeditions employed their high-altitude workers as de facto guides, and all of the expeditions—with the exception of a single climber, Alberto Zerain—depended on ropes fixed by Sherpas. "We climb twice," Chhiring tells the authors. "First, Sherpas go up to set the ropes and camps, then we go down to collect our clients and take them to the top.""

(review of 'Buried in the Sky' By Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan)
  
Caitlin Dewey in Washington Post on May 29 2013:

"In the weeks leading up to today’s anniversary, climbers have complained that the mountain has gotten too crowded and commercialized, often with rich, inexperienced tourists looking for a high-prestige vacation. (It’s indicative, perhaps, that one of the most widely circulated videos from the 60th anniversary celebration was essentially a commercial for the Austrian energy drink Red Bull."

 
Artist: Gahan Wilson, The New Yorker, July 3 2000

Why is this obsession with action? Why can't we just see? Why can't we just listen?

John Gray: "Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"

In Satyajit Ray's 'Kanchenjungha', 1962, in the last scene,  the mists at last roll away from the
awesome summit but  the industrialist Indranath Roy (Chhabi Biswas) is so preoccupied.  he no longer cares to admire it.

Although I often enjoyed climbing small hills alone near Miraj fort while in school, I never dreamt of climbing Kanchenjungha. Although I lived in the east for a while, I never even went to see Kanchenjungha.

But when I see the last scene of Ray's  'Kanchenjungha', I am never preoccupied. I just see her. She then occupies me. I scale her and she scales me right back!



Satyajit Ray's 'Kanchenjungha'