Hafez and Heisenberg

 One of the best books I have read of all time is 'When We Cease to Understand the World', 2020 by Benjamín Labatut.

"A year before the Munich conference, Heisenberg had become a monster.

In June 1925, while he was working at the University of Göttingen, an allergic reaction to pollen had deformed his face so that he was no longer recognizable. His lips looked like a rotten peach with the skin ready to come off, his eyelids puffed up until he could barely see. Unable to tolerate even one more day of spring, he boarded a ship to travel as far as possible from the microscopic particles that were torturing him.

His destiny was Heligoland—the name translates as “holy land”—Germany’s only outlying island, so dry and inclement that trees barely rise from the ground and not a single flower blossoms amid its stones...."

"...Sweating from head to toe, he (Heisenberg) spent the day memorizing the West-Eastern Divan, a book of poems by Goethe that a previous guest had left behind in his room. He read the poems aloud, over and over, and certain verses echoed from his room and through the empty hallways of the hotel, to the bafflement of the other guests, who heard them as if they were the whispers of a ghost. Goethe had written them in 1819, inspired by the Sufi mystic Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, known simply as Hafez. The German genius encountered the great Persian poet of the fourteenth century in a bad translation published in his home country and came to believe he had received the book at the behest of the divinity. He identified with him so closely that his voice changed completely, melding with that of the man who had sung the glories of God and wine four hundred years before. Hafez had been a drunken saint, a mystic and a hedonist. He devoted himself to prayer, poetry and alcohol. When he turned sixty years old, he traced a circle in the desert sand, sat down in its centre, and swore not to rise until he had touched the mind of Allah, the one and only God, mighty and sublime. He spent forty days in silence, tormented by the sun and wind, and when he broke his fast with a cup of wine given to him by a man who had found him on the verge of death, he felt a second consciousness awaken within him, superimposing itself over his own. That other voice dictated more than five hundred poems to him, helping Hafez to become the pinnacle of Persian literature...."

 inside a 19th-century copy of the Divān of Hafez (courtesy: Wikipedia)

पर्वत स्तनाकार...60 Years of Silicone Breast Implants

 विंदा करंदीकर, जातक, १९६८-१९८३: "स्तन्यसूक्त : स्तनाकार आकाश । पर्वत स्तनाकार ।..." (मूळ प्रसिद्धी : मौज, १९६०)

In January 2022, Witness History Podcast of BBC  had: "How a Texas woman became the first in the world to have the popular cosmetic procedure in 1962."

Kira Cochrane

"...The implanted breast is obviously sexual, but has often lost some, if not all, sexual sensation. It represents fertility, but can interfere with breastfeeding. Kimball sees it as an image of health, which is also often the case for women who have had mastectomies, whose breast implants allow them to look in the mirror without seeing their surgical scars, without being reminded of a horrible disease. But unfortunately the implanted breast isn't exactly synonymous with health. The function of the breast that's enhanced for cosmetic reasons is its sexual display. The implanted breast represents a "perfect, unused breast", says Marilyn Yalom, author of A History of the Breast, "and I say unused, because they're not there for nursing. And that attitude goes back at least to the Renaissance, where you have men not wanting their wives to breastfeed, because the breasts will be used by the babies, they'll change their shape, and so wet nurses come in. There have been times and places, historically, where it was uncommon for women of a certain class to breastfeed."

The popularity of cosmetic breast implants also reflects just how utterly in thrall we are, as a culture, to gender distinctions. The breasts are the biggest physical sign we have of difference, and perhaps, at base, that's why they're so enormously popular. "It's an external symbol of a woman's gender, and we need and want that affirmation," says Biggs...."

 Breast augmentation: Late-generation models of silicone-gel breast implants, a spherical model (left), a shaped model (center), and a hemispheric model (right).

courtesy: Wikipedia

बंडखोर सेक्स ची जागा काफ्का यांच्या दी कॅस्टल मध्ये स्पर्श घेतो...But for Kafka, the Touchstone is the Tenderness

सुरवातीला या ब्लॉग वरची ऑगस्ट १६ २०१७ ची पोस्ट पहा.

Clive James, 'Franz Kafka' from 'Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts', 2007:

"...For the narrator of The Castle, the girl Frieda is his only connection with a sane order of events as he reluctantly but steadily realizes, in the opening section of the book, that the castle has a mind of its own, and the mind will marshal infinite resources to shut him out. In Frieda’s arms he can momentarily believe that she, at least, is not doing what the castle wants. The lovers soon find that they can’t go to sleep together without expecting to find spectators gathered around them when they wake up. Even during their first sexual encounter there are probably other people in the room: it is hard to tell, but one of the novel’s mechanisms is not to permit us to rule out such a possibility. Much later, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell reprised the same relationship of physical love to hopeless odds. Orwell wanted the tenderness reduced to raw sex: Winston Smith presses Julia to admit that the act itself is enough, as if Orwell was looking for a touchstone, an irreducible impulse that the totalitarian state cannot eliminate even by control. But for Kafka, the touchstone is the tenderness. Presciently, Kafka’s nightmare state is even more controlled than Orwell’s..."

ऑरवेल आणि जीए यांच्या वाङ्मयातील बंडखोर सेक्स ची जागा काफ्का यांच्या दी कॅस्टल मध्ये स्पर्श घेतो.... 

जेम्स ह्या विषयावर पुढे लिहतात:

"...Allegorical interpretations of Kafka’s major novels are no doubt valid – with the usual proviso that if they are all valid they might all be irrelevant – but for once the biographical element begs to be brought in. In real life, Kafka sent his imagination to rest in the minds of women. If he had not done so, his fiction would have been less different: more like ordinary fiction, and less like fact – the facts that were yet to happen. There are good reasons for believing that he could prophesy the nature of the totalitarian state because as a Jew he had already lived with its mechanisms of exclusion, the first parts of the totalitarian state to develop: he knew them so intimately, and thought them to be so pervasive, that he came to agree with them, providing one of our most tragic examples of self-directed Judenhass. But much of the prophetic element in Kafka comes from his extreme sensitivity to evanescence, and that sensitivity was centred squarely on what time could do to a woman’s life. Milena Jesenska, the woman worthy of his intellect, was wooed from the distance at which she was kept. Felice Bauer (on whom the Frieda of the book was probably based) never had a chance: even if a marriage had followed upon the repeated engagements, nothing would have happened. Kafka thought sex was a disease. But he also thought that it was a gift, or he would not have asked himself, only a short time before his death: ‘What have you done with the gift of sex?’ (Was hast du mit dem Geschenk des Geschlechtes getan? You can hear the integrative rhythmic force of his prose even at the moment of resignation.) We hope that Dora Dymant, with whom he shared a brief spell of happiness in Berlin, would have said that he had done at least something with it. And he would never have written to Milena with his desperate complaint about the certainty of their never living together Korper an Korper (body to body) if he had not wanted that above all things, even in his consuming fear of the wish coming true...."

Quoth the cat: 'Raven tastes like chicken.'...Poe@213

# एडगरअॅलनपो२१३
आज जानेवारी १९ २०२२: एडगर अॅलन पो यांची २१३वी जयंती 

पूर्वी पो ब्लॉगवर त्यांच्या नेव्हरमोअर रेवन सकट येऊन गेले आहेतच.


Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

त्या रेवन ला गट्ट करून, मांजर म्हणतय...."Quoth the cat: 'Raven tastes like chicken.'"

आर्टिस्ट: हॅरी ब्लीस