Just Drowning....Goya's The Dog

Stevie Smith (1903-1971):
"And not waving but drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning."

Stephen Phelan, The Guardian, January 2019:

"...And I keep coming back to The Drowning Dog, which is funny only in the sense that it makes me cry in public. What long-dead pet served as Goya’s model? The artist loved dogs and wrote about them often in his letters. It reminds me of my own dog, now old and grey around the snout. How long do we have left together? I look at this painting and I see in that poor animal our condition in general, and our historical moment in particular. I’m the dog and you’re the dog, our heads held just above a dark, rising tide."


Jonathan Jones, The Guardian:

"A dog is drowning in quicksand. Its grey head pokes defiantly out of the brown sludge, even as a dead yellow sky above insists there is no hope. No saviour....

...Surely it was the madness of this war, not deafness, that drove Goya into the darkest regions of his mind. Here in Zaragoza – where people fought French soldiers in the narrow streets, and where as a young painter he churned out consoling religious nonsense about miracles and holy pillars – Goya looked into hell. And the Black Paintings are what he saw"

'The Dog',  It is one of Goya's Black Paintings,

 Artist Francisco Goya, 1819-1823

कोण सांगितल होत तुला ह्या अवतारात यायला?...Egypt

Maxfield Parrish, "Egypt", 1922

  

स्त्री : "चल पटकन आवर , माझ्या ढुंगणाला केंव्हापासून चटके बसतायत."

पुरुष: "कोण सांगितल होत तुला ह्या अवतारात यायला?"

 

Why Language Was Invented....!

#मराठीभाषादिवस #कुसुमाग्रज१०९

Artist : Carolita Johnson, The New Yorker, January 2019

Negative Capability...We Still Talk of Keats’s poetry....After 200 Years

 The late Rishi Kapoor: "...There are times when I think there is nothing new left to be said, not just in India but anywhere in the world. Can you name one good story that has emerged in the last twenty years in world cinema? We still talk of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, of Keats’s poetry, of Picasso and Michelangelo’s paintings. We go and see the Pietà in Rome. We gawk at stuff that’s 500 years old. But there is nothing to wonder at today, no great writers, sculptors or artists, because there is nothing new to narrate or portray. The West has offered us new ideas in animation and futuristic films but there is little else. There is a void everywhere, not just in RK..."

Maria Popova: "...In a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, found in Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (public library; public domain) and dated December 21, 1817, Keats uses the phrase that has come to be the single most emblematic phrase of his entire surviving correspondence, even though he only makes mention of it once: “Negative Capability” — the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity. Triggered by Keats’s disagreement with English poet and philosopher Coleridge, whose quest for definitive answers over beauty laid the foundations for modern-day reductionism, the concept is a beautiful articulation of a familiar sentiment — that life is about living the questions, that the unknown is what drives science, that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious..."

 Amy Wilcockson, History Today, February 2021: "... Since the 1930s Keats has continued to epitomise our ideal of the Romantic poet, with his beautiful verses, tragic life and early death. His writings are beloved by generations and his life continues to be scrutinised in the 21st century perhaps to a greater extent than ever before. Despite believing that he had ‘left nothing to make [his] friends proud of [his] memory’, it is ultimately owing to the work of those very friends and fans that his memory did live on. Thanks to them, on the bicentenary of his death, Keats is still read, studied and remembered."

 Artist:  John Buckland Wright (1897–1954) , illustration for The Collected Sonnets of John Keats 1930

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