तरीहि बकरी पाला खाते;...Still the Dogs Go On With Their Doggy Life: W. H. Auden@114

Today February 21 2021 is 114th birth anniversary of W. H. Auden
 
"...How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree...." 

('Musée des Beaux Arts', December 1938)

John Sutherland writes of the poem:

“...‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is not, in itself, a difficult poem but it is baffling if one does not know where it is coming from. Auden was a much travelled poet. In 1938 he spent several months in Belgium. They were ominous months: war was looming.

The ‘Musee’ in the poem is the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels. It has a magnificent collection of the 16th-century artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings. We should picture the poet sauntering, on a quiet summer afternoon, through the galleries, savouring Bruegel’s masterpieces. The poem has no rhyme scheme – it’s a stream of unstructured consciousness.

The first painting the poet sees is that of Herod’s census – the sinister search for the unborn Jesus narrated in the Gospel of Luke. Mary and Joseph flee to Bethlehem. In the gospels ‘the miraculous birth’ is an all-important event. But in the painting it is no big thing. Not as important, for example, as unloading a cart is to the carter, or skating is to children on their ‘pond at the edge of the wood’. A baby is born in a barn? So what. It happens every day in Bethlehem. The census-taking is going on at an improvised office window. The painting is all detail, as is everyday life...”

Has this poem influenced B S Mardhekar's (बा सी मर्ढेकर) following poem?

"अजून येतो वास फुलांना

अजून माती लाल चमकते;

खुरट्या बुंध्यावरी चढून 

अजून बकरी पाला खाते.

... 

भूकंपाचा इकडे  धक्का 

पलीकडे अन्  युद्ध-नगारे;

चहूंकडे अन् एकच गिल्ला,

जुन्या शवांवर नवे निखारे.

 ...

तरीहि येतो वास फुलांना,
तरीहि माती लाल चमकते;
खुरट्या बुंध्यावरी चढून
तरीहि बकरी पाला खाते;

..."

'The Census at Bethlehem', 1566

Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569)

courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

‘Bismillah! Here comes her highness, Shahzaadi Jahanara Begum! Bismillah!’...

Ira Mukhoty, ‘Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire’, 2018:

“....It is a glittering spring day in Shahjahanabad in 1654 and the usually raucous crowds at the stalls lining the Chandni Chowk have fallen silent, beguiled by the magnificence of the procession moving down the wide, tree-lined street. In front of the slow-moving elephants, liveried men sprinkle water on the street so that no dust rises off the ground. Cavalry and infantry follow, the horses tripping and impatient, the soldiers fierce and sombre. Eunuchs walk behind the soldiers, surrounding the imperial elephant on all sides. ‘Hoshiyaar!’ they shout, and make a great show of keeping back the crowds. They raise their silver sticks, ‘shouting out, pushing and assaulting everyone without the least respect of persons’. The Abyssinian eunuchs are particularly fearsome, their muscles rippling beneath their dark skin like a promise. The traders at the shops stand back respectfully and there are Armenians, Persians, Italians, Turks, Portuguese and French adventurers who will spread the stories of Mughal grandeur throughout the world. While the procession passes by, the merchants forget to haggle over the Chinese eye glasses, the jewellery, the perfumes, the gemstones, the slaves, the eunuchs and the caged cheetahs. The elegant white-robed men at the coffee houses drinking the dark brew made from imported beans from Persia set down their tumblers and stand to watch the commotion. Servants walk next to the imperial elephant, driving away flies with peacock feathers stuck into handles of enamelled gold. Others hold perfumes and incense as they walk next to the elephant, so that no offensive smell reaches the exalted passenger. A woman-servant walks in front of the elephant, swinging an incense holder in her hands and shouting out at each step: ‘Bismillah! Here comes her highness, Shahzaadi Jahanara Begum! Bismillah!’...”

'The Queen of Sheba', 1911

Artist: Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

Lola Montez@200

#LolaMontez200

Gene Tierney as Lola Montez 

Cover for The American Weekly Nov 17, 1946 

Artist: Henry Clive 1882–1960
 

Love or Static?

#Valentine'sDay

Artist: Mick Stevens, The New Yorker, 2018

आजारपण, व्हर्जिनिया वूल्फ, दुर्गा भागवत...Mrs. Dalloway, Durga Bhagwat@111

#DurgaBhagwat111 

Virginia Woolf , ‘Mrs Dalloway‘, 1925:

“…Later she wasn’t so positive, perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy (though, goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park, now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. (Very likely she would have talked to those lovers, if she had thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite,…”

दुर्गा भागवत: "... त्यानंतर मग अगदी तरुण वयातच खूप आजारी पडले होते. बरीच वर्षं अंथरुणाला खिळूनच होते..." (पृष्ठ १९०, 'ऐसपैस गप्पा: दुर्गाबाईंशी', १९९८)

'... कमळीचे (कै कमल देसाई) लेखन कुणाच्या लेखनाबरहुकूम बेतलेले नाही. पाश्चात्य वाङ्मयाची जाण असून त्याचा आधार तिने घेतलेला नाही. खरे तर तिची जातकुळी दाली ब्राँटी , शार्लट ब्राँटी व व्हर्जिनिया वूल्फ यांचीच आहे. पण त्या लेखिकांचा विशेष असा, की त्या दुःखाचा शोध व वेध घेत राहिल्या. कमळीने दुःखच निवडले पण तिचे दुःख या लेखिकांच्या मानाने फार कमी क्षमतेचे आहे. तिचे दुःख तिनेच भोगलेले असून ते आत्मकेंद्रित झालेले आढळते. कमळी आणखी कादंबऱ्या लिहीन म्हणते, पण तिचे वर्तुळ रुंदावेल असे सध्या तरी वाटत नाही. कारण तिची पठडी आता ठरल्यासारखी वाटते. कमळे, तू  चाकोरी तोडशील का ग?" ('मुंबई रविवार दिनांक', दिवाळी अंक १९९४, आता समाविष्ट: पृष्ठ १५६, 'भावसंचित', २०१५)

दुर्गाबाई ह्या व्हर्जिनिया वूल्फ यांना किती मान देतात हे वरील अवतरणा मधून कळतेच. 

Michael Cunningham, The New York Times, December 2020: "... Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” is a revolutionary novel of profound scope and depth, about a day in the life of a woman who runs a few errands, sees an old suitor and gives a dull party. It’s a masterpiece created out of the humblest narrative materials.

Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf insists that a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly rather ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life, in more or less the way nearly every cell contains the entirety of an organism’s DNA.

With “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf asserted as well that we are all embarked on epic journeys of our own, even though, to the untrained eye, some of us, many of us, might look as if we’re only there to tidy up or to do our best to amuse our bosses.

Woolf knew that questions of scale are relative — that the movements of heavenly bodies seen through a telescope are not any more mysterious or revelatory than those of subatomic particles seen through a microscope. Each is an all but imponderable vastness. Each is in constant motion according to a series of apparently cogent, but by no means fully comprehensible, rules and principles. Only God, and a handful of mortals, understand that the differences between a proton and the planet Jupiter are negligible, if we eliminate the essentially irrelevant factor of mass...."

दुर्गाबाईंचे 'ऋतुचक्र' ("It’s a masterpiece created out of the humblest narrative materials") आणि आणखी काही लेखन हे असेच काहीसे जन्माला आले नाही का? 

दुर्गाबाईंची आजाराने केलेली साथसंगत पाहून, व्हर्जिनिया वूल्फ त्यांच्या एका निबंधात आजारपण ह्या विषयावर किती संवेदनशील पणे लिहतात ते आठवले...

 

ON BEING ILL

 

"CONSIDERING how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions—De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater; there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust*—literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens,...."

 

 Virginia Woolf, 1902

 

Credit...George C. Beresford/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images