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."

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

चाफा मात्र फुलतच राहतो, Champak Goes On and On: Lyrical, Tragic, and Comic

चाफा मात्र फुलतच राहतो, Champak Goes On and On: Lyrical, Tragic, and Comic

Today Oct 18 2011 is 8th death anniversary of my Tai Mavashi (ताई -मावशी ). And I lost my second mavashi- Kumud (कुमुद)- on October 1 2011...Now, including my mother and their mother, all four of them, I like to think, are together. Wherever.

Once I wanted to escort these three Bhate (भाटे ) sisters on a jaunt to Mahad (महाड), their beloved native town, instead I accompanied each of them to crematorium...This is growing up!

कवी गोविंद (1874-1926) (Kavi Govind)

सुंदर मी होणार, आतां सुंदर मी होणार!
सुंदर मी होणार । हो। मरणानें जगणार।...

...जुनी इंद्रिये, जुना पिसारा.. सर्व सर्व झडणार हो..
नव्या तनुचे, नव्या शक्तीचे.. पंख मला फुटणार हो..
सुंदर मी होणार.

There is so much hope in the poet's words above...Death will remake him, get rid of his disability and make him beautiful all over again...easily one of the most memorable poems in 20th century Marathi.

After seeing my Tai-mavashi for the last time at Kolhapur (कोल्हापुर) crematorium on the banks of Panchganga (पंचगंगा), I looked at the evening sky...

It had never looked that beautiful.

What was I doing at that goddamn crematorium instead of looking at pretty girls of Kolhapur at Rankala (रंकाळा) and Mahadwar (महाद्वार ) road, or making plans of which movies to see, or where to eat outside: what we always did while visiting her in the past, when R D Burman song "Yeh shyam mastani" (ये शाम मस्तानी) from 'Kati Patang',1970 never stopped playing?

Sure, death might have made my mavashi more beautiful- it wasn't obvious though- but what about the sky in real life that was even more beautiful than usual after her death? Evening was still graceful (ये शाम मस्तानी) but now in a creepy way.

Can we reconcile this?

Not Mark Twain. He thinks it's a mockery:

“I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother—her incomparable mother!—five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe; and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! … Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night—and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here—writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzlingly the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery."

Not C T Khanolkar (चिं.त्र्यं.खानोलकर) either:

आणि आकाशाकडे बघून त्याने गर्जना केली :
बाप्पा तुला क्षमा नाही
वाड्यावरची माणसे दोंदे वाढवतात
माझ्या काश्याचे पाय जातात
चाफा मात्र फुलतच राहतो

[I have quoted these lines of CTK as I recall them from, I think, a दीपावली (Deepawali) magazine's diwali number from 1970's. Errors if any are regretted.]

Maybe George Santayana:

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence."


Artist: Helen E Hokinson (1893-1949), The New Yorker, March 15 1941

Champak like begonia goes on and on...

A E Housman:

“For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither know nor care”
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