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, December 11, 2013

Dead GA Still Speaks...जी ए म्हणाले आम्हाला, युरिडिसी म्हणाली ऑर्फियसला

Today December 11 2013 is 26th Death Anniversary of G A Kulkarni (जी ए कुलकर्णी)

Paul Koudounaris:
 “Pushed into the footnotes of European religious history, charnels were once part of a dialogue with death that has now fallen silent. For the people who constructed them, however, the dialogue was loud and clear, and the dead were not expected to be mute.”
"Then I saw again all the oppressed who are suffering under the sun, and beheld the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter, and with their oppressors there was violence, and they had no comforter; and I esteemed the dead happy who have died long ago, more than the living who are still alive; and happier than both, him who hath not been born." 

(Ecclesiastes 4: 1–2)
Edith Hall. 2005:

"Greek drama is being performed on both the commercial and amateur stages of Britain, as of the world, with greater frequency than at any point since classical antiquity. At times during the 1990s more plays by Euripides or Sophocles were available to the London theatre-goer than works by any other author, including Shakespeare."



 "Orpheus and Eurydice"  Artist: Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein

"...Several months later, I was sitting in a theater watching Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice. After marrying Orpheus, Eurydice dies. In the underworld, there is a chorus of stones that addresses the audience.

Eurydice wants to speak to you.
But she can’t speak your language anymore.
She talks in the language of dead people now.

This was it. Further to the communiqué I had received at my mother’s grave, and to my problem with poetry while mourning.
The play said: elegies are false. They think they can talk to the dead, but dead people speak in the language of the dead, and we can’t."

(Joy Katz, 'Left Behind", November 2013) 

This reminded me of G A Kulkarni's allegory (रूपककथा) stort-story 'Orpheus' (ऑर्फियस)now part of his book 'Pinglavel' (पिंगळा वेळ), 1977.

Here is an example given by GA of how dead people perhaps speak. 

(मृत) युरिडिसी म्हणाली ऑर्फियसला:

"… तू चुकलास.  माहीत असणे निराळे आणि स्वतः हाडामांसात मृत्यू भोगणे निराळे. तू तो भोगला नाहीस; मी तो भोगला आहे …"

(Eurydice to Orpheus:

"...You are wrong. Knowing is one thing and experiencing the death in one's own flesh and bones another. You did not experience it; I have experienced it...")