पिवळीच मी पाकोळी की....Caterpillar to Dead

दुर्गाबाई भागवत आपल्या 'निसर्गोत्सव', १९९६ सालच्या पुस्तकातील “पिवळीच मी पाकोळी की” या लेखात लिहतात:
"...क्रौंचवध पाहून ज्याचा शोक श्लोकत्व पावला, त्या वाल्मिकीला फुलपाखरू दिसले नाही, मग इतरांना तरी कसे दिसावे?...आणि व्यासाचे उच्छिष्ट खाणारे आम्ही? व्यासाची प्रज्ञा तर घालवून बसलोच, पण आमची प्रतिभाही आटली… मानवी अंतरंग असो किंवा बाह्य सृष्टी असो, प्रकृतीचे आकलन, व तेही सूक्ष्म असल्याशिवाय, कल्पना उंचावत नाहीत, भावना संयत होत नाहीत. विभूषित होत नाहीत. आणि म्हणूनच फुलपाखरांचा अभाव हा भारतीय साहित्याच्या अनेक अभांवाचा प्रातिनिधिक अभाव आहे असे मला वाटते… "

हे मी अलीकडे ट्वीटर (https://twitter.com/spectatorindex) वर पहिले:

Decline in global population, past decade.

Butterflies: 53%
Beetles: 49%
Bees: 46%
Dragonflies: 37%
Flies: 25%

 दुर्गाबाईंना हा दिवस आपल्या मृत्यू नंतर (साल २००२) इतका जवळ आहे असं कधी वाटल असेल? 

"पिवळीच मी पाकोळी की
....
दूर्गेनंतर निम्मी नाश पावले मी
भारतीय साहित्यातूनच केंव्हाच नव्हते विशेष
आतातर जगातूनच नष्ट होत निघाले मी..."

 

Artist: Emily Flake , The New Yorker, August 2019

मनमुराद...Turkish Cigarette Brand Murad Employing Phallic Imagery

Known as ‘the Turkish cigarette’, Murad was one of many brands employing phallic imagery in their ads, such as this 1919 insert.

Photograph: Courtesy Jim Heimann Collection/ TASCHEN 

Catch Me If You Can!

Artist: Liana Finck, The New Yorker, February 2018

जीए त्यांच्या 'ऑर्फियस' पर्यंत कसे पोचले?...Myths, Ovid, Metamorphoses, and GA

Ovid, Metamorphoses (ca. 8 AD) as quoted by A. S. Kline, Ovid: The Metamorphoses (2000):
“[Orpheus] had abstained from the love of women, either because things ended badly for him, or because he had sworn to do so. Yet, many felt a desire to be joined with the poet, and many grieved at rejection.” 

Rainer Maria Rilke:

“There rose a tree. O pure transcendence!

O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear!

And all was silent. Yet still in this silence

proceeded new beginning, sign and transformation.

...”

Ian Johnston:

“No work from classical antiquity, either Greek or Roman, has exerted such a continuing and decisive influence on European literature as Ovid's Metamorphoses. The emergence of French, English, and Italian national literatures in the late Middle Ages simply cannot be fully understood without taking into account the effect of this extraordinary poem. ... The only rival we have in our tradition which we can find to match the pervasiveness of the literary influence of the Metamorphoses is perhaps (and I stress perhaps) the Old Testament and the works of Shakespeare.”

दुर्गा भागवत:
"मिथ्यकथांमध्ये त्या त्या संस्कृतीचे प्रतिबिंब आपल्याला दिसतं. त्या त्या समाजाला गरज वाटते म्हणून मिथ्यकथा त्या त्या समाजाला स्फुरतात. त्या कथा मग समाजाला स्थिरता देतात. एका पिढीकडून दुसऱ्या पिढीकडे, एका ठिकाणाहून दुसऱ्या ठिकाणी हा वारसा जात असतो. म्हणून त्या टिकून राहतात. साहित्यात मिथ्यकथा रचण्याची शक्ती ज्या प्रमाणात अधिक आणि सात्यताने चालूच असते; त्याच प्रमाणात ते साहित्य, पर्यायानं  तो समाजही अधिक समर्थ, चैतन्यमय आणि सतत वर्धिष्णू असतो...."
(पृष्ठ १९, 'ऐसपैस गप्पा: दुर्गाबाईंशी' , ले: प्रतिभा रानडे, १९९८) 

जीएंची 'ऑर्फियस' - मूळ प्रकाशन 'सत्यकथा', १९७३; आता समाविष्ट 'पिंगळावेळ', १९७७-  ही माझ्या ब्लॉगवर आणि मी तयार केलेल्या फेसबुक पेज वर अनेक वेळा उल्लेख झालेली गोष्ट आहे.

आज पाहूया 'Orpheus and Eurydice' ह्या मिथचा कलेच्या प्रांतातून झालेला प्रवास. 

हिस्टरी टुडे, ऑगस्ट ८ २०१९ मध्ये खालील माहिती आली आहे :

"Orpheus and Eurydice, hand in hand, walk away from the fiery underworld and its deities, Pluto and Proserpine. Orpheus, singer, musician and poet, carrying a lyre on his shoulder, had recently married Eurydice, but on the day of their wedding, ‘in the very bloom of her life’, she was bitten by a viper and died of its venom. Distraught with grief, Orpheus descended into the underworld determined to restore her to mortality. He pleaded with Pluto and Proserpine for her return and his eloquence ‘melted the hearts of the gods and the denizens of the underworld, and all fell silent’. Even Cerberus, the fierce three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell, lies meekly at Proserpine’s feet.

The gods agreed to Eurydice’s return: Proserpine no doubt sympathetic as she recalled her own forceful abduction by Pluto. The only caveat was that Orpheus must not glance back at Eurydice until she was safely ensconced in the upper world. If he broke his word, she would descend once again into Hell.

In Peter Paul Rubens’ painting, Orpheus is depicted struggling to look ahead soon after the deities have consented to her return. On leaving the underworld, the lovers ascended a steep and misty path and, as they neared the earth’s rim, an anxious Orpheus looked behind for his bride, who fell and murmured a final farewell before dying again. ‘No reproach passed her lips’, according to Ovid in his Metamorphoses, because Eurydice now knew for certain that Orpheus loved her unconditionally.

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has inspired numerous works of art: in literature, a cast as diverse as Boethius, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Pynchon and Carol Anne Duffy have created variants on its themes, while the filmmakers Jean Cocteau, in his trilogy – The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orphée (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1959) – and Marcel Camus, with Black Orpheus (1959), have captured its resonant tragedy. Fittingly, it is in music that the myth’s greatest legacy lies. L’Orfeo, Claudio Monteverdi’s opera, the form’s earliest surviving masterpiece, composed in 1607, became the first of many musical dramas to tackle the story: Christoph Willibald Gluck (Orfeo ed Euridice, 1774), Jacques Offenbach (Orpheus in the Underworld, 1858), Harrison Birtwistle (The Mask of Orpheus, 1986) and Anaïs Mitchell’s current Broadway hit Hadestown, set in America’s Deep South, are among those to have added to a canon that continues to expand."

जीए ह्या मिथ पर्यंत कसे पोचले ?

आपले आपण? का रोमन कवी Ovid यांच्या 'Metamorphoses' कडून? ('The Death of Eurydice' episode occurs in Book X of Metamorphoses, 8 AD)

माझ्या मते Metamorphoses कडून...  जसे ते 'यात्रिक' ला 'Don Quixote' कडून पोचले, तसे...वर दुर्गाबाई म्हणतात तस: एका ठिकाणाहून दुसऱ्या ठिकाणी, जीएंनी 'वारसा' ६,६०० किमी दूर (रोम ते धारवाड) मराठीत आणला.

पण त्यावर त्यांनी भारतीय पुराणे आणि तत्वज्ञानाचे (हिंदु, बौद्ध, जैन) संस्कार करून, मूळ मिथ बदलत (त्यांची युरिडिसी शेवटी जीवनात परत जायला नकार देते)  एक अजरामर प्रेम कथा निर्माण केली. जीए मूळ मिथ लाच, त्याच्या पूर्णत्वाला challenge  करतात असे वाटते.

Ovid यांना सुद्धा अशा  कथेचा आणि कथालेखकाचा अभिमान वाटला असता!

 ऑर्फियस, युरिडिसी, देव , देवता

'Orpheus' by Peter Paul Rubens, 1636-38.

Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin@80

ALAN CUMMING:

“...In reading these pages again, I also realized the fallacy of Isherwood trying to tell us he is merely a literary vessel, the unthinking camera of the first page with its shutter open, some sort of lucky Zelig of a scribe whose age and circumstance and sexual proclivity all led him to be at the center of a social and political storm in Berlin in the late twenties which he merely records for future regurgitation. This feigned modesty combined with his casual, often impersonal, very English style belies the passion and the pain of the time he is retelling, his spare and precise descriptions so brutal in their accuracy in nailing the human condition, even in circumstances most of us will never have experienced, and I certainly hope I never shall.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have been there to feel the turn in the public conscience, to actually see the beginning of the violence and the acceptance of Nazism as a mainstream political alternative and finally a national edict. But I don’t need to. Christopher Isherwood tells me, and each time I return he has more insights and revelations for me....”