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."

Sunday, July 28, 2019

The Agony of Marsyas is the Inevitable Agony of the Human Soul in its Desire to Achieve God.


#IrisMurdoch100
Iris Murdoch, 'A Fairly Honourable Defeat', 1970:
“...‘I’ll love you forever.’

‘Decent of you. Could we get in there, I wonder?’

‘No, I don’t think so. You’re Apollo and I’m Marsyas. You’ll end by flaying me.’

‘That’s an image of love, actually. Apollo and Marsyas.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The agony of Marsyas is the inevitable agony of the human soul in its desire to achieve God.’

‘The things you know.’

‘The things you failed to learn at the Courtauld.’

‘I don’t believe it though. Someone is flayed really. And there’s only blood and pain and no love.’

‘You think our planet is like that.’

‘I think our planet is like that?’

‘No redeeming grace?’

‘None at all.’...”







The Flaying of Marsyas

Artist: Titian, c. 1570–1576

courtesy: Wikipedia


Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review, July 2015:
“...The painting was one of Titian’s last, and it’s full of primeval fire. It’s drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the satyr Marsyas brags that his skills on the auros, a double-piped reed instrument, are superior to Apollo’s on the lyre. The two agree to a kind of duel-cum-jam-session. But Apollo is, of course, a god, meaning he’s not just a better musician but a more temperamental one, inclined to punish all who defy him. And so he flays Marsyas alive for his hubris, a fate Ovid describes with violent relish:
As he screams, the skin is flayed from the surface of his body, no part is untouched. Blood flows everywhere, the exposed sinews are visible, and the trembling veins quiver, without skin to hide them: you can number the internal organs, and the fibres of the lungs, clearly visible in his chest. The woodland gods, and the fauns of the countryside, wept … The fertile soil was drenched, and the drenched earth caught the falling tears, and absorbed them into its deep veins.
Titian, painting with his brush and his thumb from a palette of squalid browns and reds, depicts the flaying every bit as vividly. There’s something especially gruesome about that little dog at the bottom, sniffing, if not lapping, at a puddle of blood. “Did Titian know that really human life was awful,” Murdoch writes in Henry and Cato, “that it was nothing but a slaughterhouse?” Short answer: yes....”
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