Madeleine Thein’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing should help stimulate our memory and provide an understanding into what life is like under tyrannical regimes, past and present, in any part of the world.

It is a Book of Records. A piece of virtuosic music. Hidden within this fictional world are true names and true deeds. Sparrow and his cousin Zhuli (for whom Prokofiev, Bach, and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation, and Chairman Mao occupied for others), Swirl, Wen the Dreamer, Big Mother , Ba Lute..."They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionists but as intangible as ghosts."

The novel begins with Marie Jiang recalling her father Jiang Kai, a pianist, who commits suicide at Hong Kong in 1989 when he was only 39 years old. He defects from China in 1978. Alive when the demonstrations began in Tiananmen Square in April 1989, he disappears from his wife and daughter in Vancouver and on June 4 the military crushes protests in Tiananmen Square. In October the family comes to know about Jiang Kai’s death.

Ai Ming, a fugitive who seeks shelter in Marie Jiang’s house for a brief period, is the daughter of Sparrow, a great composer and musician and Jiang Kai’s teacher at the Shangai Conservatory of Music.

Music lovers, the two men love each other. Sparrow gives up his talent to protect his daughter and work in factories making wooden crates, then wire and then radios for 20 years... He dies during the Tiananmen massacre. The official record would, however, say he died of "A Stroke." "At Home."

The lives of this two families intertwine and forks as the novelist, through them, takes us through the history of the country--the 1949 civil war to the year 2016...

"Tiananmen Square, that place that Chinese architects once imagined as the zero point, the location that determines all others."

It's over the sweat and blood of ordinary people and poor jawans and the political spectacle played out over the dead- photo-ops and lies, authoritarian regimes sustain themselves. So it calls for conscientiousness from our part to `new dawns' which are otherwise prone to let us down.

From, Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

“Like thousands of other surviving counter-revolutionaries, she would be informed, after years of prison labor, that she had never been a criminal. Would she weep?Would she feel joy?...”

“The camp was the very end of the earth. I am no counter-revolutionary and neither were those exiled with me. In my heart, I believe that it is this age and our leaders who one day will have to account for their crimes.”

-----------------------

“My father stood in front of me, naked / in the hospital’s basement
He spoke to me / his voice muffled by cotton
Listen to me Claudia / listen to me
And all I could think of was to say / Cover yourself, Daddy / You’ll tell me all another time.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/09/poetry

Is it too much to expect of our so-called reviewers and critics to first comprehend (at least try to) a book for themselves before writing about it? This question arises because a couple of `reviews’ on J.M.Coetzee’s two works-The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, which I came across in some magazines recently was all about the reviewers’ flaunting of their ignorance and the consequent desperation than anything about the work.  If a work is incomprehensible why write at all about it in the first place? Perhaps to show-off, I have read the book but the author is at fault for not producing a work which is easily understandable or palatable to the reader?

Anyhow, it’s alright being not able to comprehend a work. Coetzee himself makes an admission in The Good Story (his discourses –exchanges being the precise word used in the book--with Arabella Kurtz) when the discussion comes to Sebald’s Austerlitz, he says that despite his admiration for the book, he have struggled with it in the past and still struggle with it. 

So coming back to the Jesus `reviews' or blathers, the problem seems to lie in approaching a work with the anticipation that it will be malleable; it would bend easily to a supine reader's whims...

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel warns that like all of the culture, the novel is more and more in the hands of the mass media which “distribute throughout the world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by the greatest number, by everyone, by all mankind.” 

The termites of reduction at work?

This Brain Pickings link on Jeanette Winterson's essay "Art Objects" (today's find on twitter) is of utmost relevance in this context.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/jeanette-winterson-art-objects/

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel: "Every novel says to the reader: ”Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and lock it off.

“For Musil," Italo Calvino recalls in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, "knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude-or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality –while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos. Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands…”

“the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states,” says Orhan Pamuk in The Naïve And the Sentimental Novelist.

J.M.Coetzee makes a similar point as he concludes his exchanges with consultant clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz (The Good Story, Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy). This is the second 'intellectual engagement' between them. The first titled ‘Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazov’s’ was published in the journal Salmagundi.

“As a genre," Coetzee says, "the novel seems to have a constitutional stake in the claim that things are not as they seem to be, that our seeming lives are not real lives. And psychoanalysis, I would say, has a comparable stake.”

Instead of following a ‘linear train of thought’ Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz-- starting with `a well-shaped story versus telling the true story,' poetic and pragmatic truths, memories (procedural and episodic), consciousness, remorse et al--  pursue lines of thinking without always knowing where they will lead in the hope that they may here and there ‘open a new or unusual perspective on the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and on the psychotherapeutic project in its wider social forms.'

Here's an illuminating observation Arabella Kurtz makes: “You write about an objective or a transcendent truth, a truth outside or above the realm of human understanding. I am working on the basis of a subjective and an intersubjective truth, a truth to experience, which is what I believe to be at issue when one is trying to help a patient who is suffering. People come for psychotherapy because they feel dreadful and are in subjective distress, not because they do not know if God exists or how to read the weather...”

This is one of the books I'm presently re-reading.

“My father had once said that music was full of silences…”

--Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing. 

The silences Madeleine Thien refers here is what, I feel, adds elegiac and ethereal qualities to the writings of O.V.Vijayan or the films of G.Aravindan...

The same shines through like a gauzy light in this terse Yehuda Amichai poem reproduced below.

Forgetting Someone

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light
in the backyard so it stays lit all the day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.

“No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy- that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analyzed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Salim Bachi. A fantasist from Albert Camus' land.

Being conscious of the insufficiency of my readings, the discovery lately of the Algeria-born Salim Bachi who writes in French reminds of the vast literary treasures, especially in foreign languages, (for various reasons imperceptible to English literary scene) which await to be unearthed and explored.
If it was the mention in Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed that I came to read Patrick Chamoiseau, I stumbled upon Salim Bachi while browsing at a bookshop in the city during a modest Sunday evening outing with family yesterday. (Besides Bachi I bought Eduardo Berti’s Agua. Berti is an Argentine writer and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing).

Salim Bachi is the author of The Silence of Mohammed and Dog of Ulysses. But the novel of his that was available in the outlet was The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor (Translated by Sue Rose/ Pushkin Press). Halfway through the work, I'm convinced he's one of those authors not to be missed at any cost.
In Sinbad he resurrects Sinbad, the fictional sailor, to narrate the experience of waves of North African immigration into Europe.

Here're a couple of excerpts from the work:

”Our world illuminated by Nothing, was a Cave whose walls showed terrible images that had men mimicking actions they didn’t understand, while governed by urges they concealed under the guise of reason…”

“Had he fallen asleep yesterday after Ben M’Hidi (a prominent leader during the Algerian war of independence) had been arrested, or the day before yesterday after Emir Abdelkader (Algerian religious and military leader) had been captured?Had he gone into exile in Damascus to spend the rest of his days with the wise old man,amid prayers in Umayyad mosque (one of the largest and oldest mosque in the world)? Perhaps he had died in Bolivia, trapped in the jungle, abandoned on the revolutionary path? (Che Guevara?) Or, going back even earlier, was he washing Jugurtha’s (King of Numidia, Algeria) feet, kissing Jesus’s feet, accompanying the Prophet on his hegira? He might be Jewish, Roman or Berber; he might have walked with the Arabs alongside their caravans; crossed the Atlantic on a slave ship; perished in the silver mines of Mexico…One question, though, kept pestering him like a persistent mosquito: why had he woken up here? And where had the six other sleepers gone?”

Story and Plot

“ ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. ..If it is in a story we say:’And then?’ If it in a plot we ask: ‘Why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by ‘And then-and then-‘ they can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

“The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: ‘Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

John Stuart Mill who gave us the idea of the free and sovereign individual had, in the aftermath of a crisis of faith discovered in the poetry of Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the philosophy of Coleridge, Saint Simon and Comte, a fusion of thought and feeling, an appreciation of the ‘many- sidedness’ of human nature and society, that went far to fill the vacuum created by utilitarianism.

(In turn he lost the sense of community provided by the utilitarians,”the assurance of a common purpose shared with others of like mind.”)

Utilitarianism: Greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Mill’s crisis was caused by this fateful question:

‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’

The answer was an irrepressible ‘No!’ The end had ceased to charm! The feeling there is nothing left to live for.

Gertrude Himmelfarb in the introduction to On Liberty says that what depressed Mill even more than the sense of vocation was the absence in him of any natural and spontaneous feeling, any poetic and artistic sensibility. “He was convinced that the exclusive cultivation of the ‘habit of analysis’ had destroyed in him all capacity for emotion.”

Coming to his treatise Mill predicted the crises largest democracies will go through caused by the rise of popular governments, which he saw as the pre-condition of a new and more formidable despotism, for he comprehensively explains that ‘society is itself the tyrant.’  He hits the bull’s- eye when he says that the society imposes a new despotism of custom. “It dictates,”he says,” its will by means of public opinion; it presumes to tell men what to think and read, how to dress and behave; it sets itself up as the judge of right and wrong, propriety and impropriety; it discourages spontaneity and originality, personal impulses and desires, strong character and unconventional ideas; it is fatal, in short, to individuality. And all of this, Mill predicted, was bound to get worse as the public more and more felt its power and acted upon it.”

From Anthony Doerr’s About Grace.

“The human brain, he wrote, is seventy-five percent water. Our cells are little more than sacs in which to carry water. When we die it spills from us into the ground and air and into the stomachs of animals and is contained again in something else. The properties of liquid water are this: it holds its temperature longer than air; it is adhering and elastic; it is perpetually in moton. These are the tenets of hydrology; these are the things one should know if one is to know oneself.”

"Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared."

"These were facts, bounded by inviolable laws: water was elastic and adhesive, it held its temperature longer than air, it was perpetually in motion."

“To live in the tropics is to always be reminded (I find a hornet in my rice, a minnow in my shaving water) of the impossibility of ownership. The street in front of me belongs more to whatever is tunneling up those hundred or so little mounds of red dirt than to any of us. The beams of this apartment belong to houseflies; the window corners to spiders; the ceiling to house geckos and roaches. We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours – the time we’re given on earth – does that belong to us?.”

What is personal (private realm) stays personal in Anthony Doerr's first novel About Grace, the story of an hydrologist and his perilous dreams... Later on in the novel he stops dreaming, even if he does, it is not the kind of frightening dreams relating to deaths particularly of his dear ones.

The writer as not only a witness of catastrophes; someone who grapples with the puzzle of human condition, but as someone who tries to reconstruct an image of the past so that it would allow us to imagine a future.

The contemporary author in the words of Carlos Fonseca Suarez must also, to some extent, "make whole what has been wrecked," unlike Walter Benjamin's "angel of history" contemplating how the past has been reduced to a giant pile of debris by the catastrophic passage of time.

"The twenty-first century author must reconstruct, out of the ruins of the twentieth century, an image of the past that would allow us to imagine a future." Fonseca sees in the self-exile of Alexander Grothendieck a new way of bearing witness. The only adequate testimonial way of  interacting with a century that had been marked by a constant repetition of man-made catastrophes.”

Carlos Fonseca Suarez/ Alexander Grothendieck/Chuck Close/  Mexican painter Dr. Atl

http://bombmagazine.org/article/5694106/carlos-fonseca

Alexander Grothendieck 

He burned many of his papers and retreated to the French Pyrenees, where for more than 20 years he lived the life of a recluse, rarely speaking to people, refusing to indulge visitors or mathematical tourists, and reportedly subject to periods of religious mania and apocalypticism.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/25/alexander-grothendieck

In a letter to Welsh mathematician Ronnie Brown, Mr. Grothendieck wrote about why mathematics was important: It allows people to do difficult things — and it creates the tools by which difficult things can be made simple.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/alexander-grothendieck-mathematical-genius-who-went-into-self-exile-dies-at-86/2014/11/15/1e65f69a-6cf2-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html

Alejandra Pizarnik:  A rare anthology of poems trying to figure out psychic wounds, predicaments and helplessness of the living…?

This Buenos Aires' bequest to literary world, one gathers, madly worked with elements from the inner shadows. Her works, like surreal puzzles penned out from pitch-black darkness?

“Redemption is a theme that concerns me. We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.”

--Stanley Kunitz in the Paris Review interview.

In the same interview he says Bob Dylan ( Robert Allen Zimmerman) couldn’t have existed if Dylan Thomas (Remember Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night?) hadn’t existed before him.
Do Not Go Gentle... was a call to the poet's father to fight death. It explores the personal experience of grief and death. Dylan Thomas, in the words of Robert Lowell, is a "dazzling obscure writer who can be enjoyed without understanding."

"Understanding," writes Knausgaard, "must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing- but should there be, for example, skirmishes in the borderlands of an ex-Soviet republic somewhere in Asia, whose towns I had never heard of, with inhabitants alien in everything from dress and language to everyday life and religion, and it turned out that this conflict had deep historical roots that went back to events that took place a thousand years ago, my total ignorance and lack of knowledge would not prevent me from understanding what happened, for the mind has the capacity to deal with the most alien of thoughts. This applied to everything..."

On reads Julian Barnes’Levels of Life, which comprise an essay on his personal grief over the loss of his wife Pat Kavanagh, and goes back to Joyce Carol Oates' A Widow’s Story.

(Levels of Life also contain brief biographies of three Balloonists)

Joyce Carol Oates says hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.”  (this when her husband was in hospital).

A Widow’s Story deals with the death of Raymond J.Smith, author and editor and Joyce Carol Oates’ husband for 47 years. He died in 2008. Pat Kavanagh, a formidable literary agent, died in the same year. She and Barnes married in 1979 and were together till her death.

Switch over to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death In The Family, My Struggle:1 (My Struggle is an autobiographical series of six novels).  The death of narrator's father.  Knausgaard and his brother Yngve are on their way to the chapel where the Dad was "lying on a bier with his eyes closed and features composed."

Having reached the chapel,  scrambling out of the car…the he reflects:

“Some birds circled high above us, under the sky, which was still a pale grey. The Dutch painter Ruisdael always painted birds high in his skies, to create depth, it was almost his signature, at any rate I had seen it in picture after picture in the book I had about him.”

Altitudes and Heartaches

Julian Barnes' Levels of Life soars to colossal heights and plumbs depths like all good works of art. The book is a slim volume of 117 pages. All the three essays, The Sin of Height, On the Level and The Loss of Depth are interspersed with philosophical reflections and metaphors. Lucidity and brevity are the mainstay of Levels of Life.

The first two essays offers a peek into the lives of balloonists; Colonel Fredrick Gustavus Burnaby, Nadar aka Gaspard- Felix Tournachon and the French stage and film actress Sarah Bernhardt, nicknamed The Divine Sarah.

The third essay deals with the loss of the author's wife and literary agent Pat Kavanagh. The book is in fact dedicated 'for Pat.'

Sarah Bernhardt: She is temperamentally drawn to ballooning because her dreamy nature would constantly transport her to the higher regions. She feels the balloon to be the 'emblem of uttermost freedom.'

Fred Burnaby believed that shape was the key: an aerostat in the form of a tube or cigar and propelled by machinery, was the way forward- as it eventually proved.

(Ballooning represented freedom-yet a freedom subservient to the powers of wind and weather).

Nadar: Journalist, caricaturist, photographer, balloonist, entrepreneur and inventor...a tireless self-publicist. His infidelities coexisted with uxoriousness. He wrote that the three supreme emblems of modernity were 'photogarphy, electricity and aeronautics.' 

(Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the Truth.' Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers:'How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness  drop away...and forgiveness descends)

The government in Thailand has stepped up scrutiny for material on social media deemed insulting the monarchy in the wake of King Bhumibol Adulyadej's death on Thursday. The broadcasting regulator, National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) had on Friday asked internet service providers to monitor content and block anything inappropriate besides asking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and messaging apps to block material deemed insulting to the monarchy, reports Reuters.

Thailand's Lese majeste (insulting the monarchy) laws are among the strictest in the world. 

Convictions have become more frequent, and punishments more severe, under the military government that seized power in 2014, the report points out. 

Article 112 of Thailand's criminal code says anyone who "defames, insults or threatens the king, queen, the heir apparent or the regent" will be punished up to 15 years in prison (BBC, June 10, 2016)

In Tamil Nadu, at least seven persons have been arrested so far for publishing and circulating rumours about chief minister's (who is undergoing treatment at a private hospital) health status. 

But what we should keep in mind is that unlike Thailand, India is  a `democracy.' 

http://bangkok.coconuts.co/2016/10/15/phuket-man-accused-lese-majeste-his-shop-mobbed-over-social-media-post

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37651953

From a "news journal of Catholic opinion"

The first explicit example of conscience is to be found in ancient Greece in Sophocles' female character, Antigone. When faced with the choice between obeying a royal command to leave her brother unburied, on the one hand, and flouting the king’s authority, on the other, Antigone does what she considers to be right after careful deliberation. 

Like Sophocles' Antigone whose personal morality turns a kingdom on its head, women who seek birth control or abortion services cannot be ignored, contends Daniel A.Dombrowski, a professor of philosophy at Seattle University in this article, The Heart of the Matter: A Very Brief History of Conscience. 

The author traces the origin of conscience (ancient Greece) and the trajectory it has taken with the help of Martin van Creveld's Conscience: A Biography, as compass.

One passage that is particularly noteworthy and relevant to the present times is on how civil disobedience differs from conscientious refusal. To put in a nutshell, in civil disobedience, one breaks some particular law out of respect for law in general. By way of partial contrast, in conscientious refusal it is the government that initiates a confrontation with a citizen by commanding her to do something that violates her deepest moral convictions.

http://consciencemag.org/2016/08/22/the-heart-of-the-matter-a-very-brief-history-of-conscience-2/

Here’s another remarkable Nobel Lecture.

This, of  Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."

"My disillusion with statism and collectivism and my transition to the democrat and liberal that I am – that I try to be – was long and difficult and carried out slowly as a consequence of episodes like the conversion of the Cuban Revolution, about which I initially had been enthusiastic, to the authoritarian, vertical model of the Soviet Union; the testimony of dissidents who managed to slip past the barbed wire fences of the Gulag; the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the nations of the Warsaw Pact; and because of thinkers like Raymond Aron, Jean Francois Rével, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper, to whom I owe my reevaluation of democratic culture and open societies..."

"I despise every form of nationalism, a provincial ideology-or rather, religion-that is short -sighted, exclusive, that cuts off the intellectual horizon and hides in its bosom..."

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2010/vargas_llosa-lecture_en.html

While leafing through an old notebook of mine lately I stumbled upon this excerpt from a Joseph Brodsky poem which I had copied out from some websites. It is from Brodsky's I Sit By The Window. What shines through the all-pervading disenchantment with reality is the honesty. ..

I'm by now acquainted to the function of such unfeigned lines in revealing to us the vanity of things as much as it preserves us as we make our way through this farcical and fake world.

I reproduce here the lines.

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,

I proudly admit that my finest ideas

are second-rate, and may the future take them

as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out

which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

"Apropos of Rojas Gimenez, I'll say that madness, a certain kind of madness, often goes hand in hand with poetry. It would be very difficult for predominantly rational people to be poets, and perhaps it is just as difficult for poets to be rational. Yet reason gets the upper hand, and it is reason, the mainstay of justice, that must govern the world. Miguel de Unamuno, who loved Chile very much, once said: "The thing I don't like is that motto. What is it all about, through reason or force? Through reason and always through reason."

--Pablo Neruda, Memoirs.

“Oh, Christ!” she said upon hearing the news, adding, “I couldn’t care less.” Doris Lessing’s initial reaction when journalists informed her that she had won the Nobel prize for literature.

I like to think of Bob Dylan (one of my all-time favorites) quietly laughing at the whims of the Nobel committee...

Meanwhile link of Doris Lessing's thought provoking Nobel lecture: 

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html

A copy of Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs which I own is a gift to me by friends in The New Indian Express, Chennai, years ago upon my transfer to Coimbatore.Scribbled on the front page of the copy is, “To gladwin All the best from Express reporting team Chennai.” I cherish the memories as much as I cherish the Memoirs and Neruda poetry. 

Béla Tarr: Celluloid wizard from Hungary

His Satantango is the film adaptation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's dark but amazing novel by the same name. In the very first shot itself the director surprises you. On and on and on….Béla Tarr weaves, unveils, reveals magic in Satantango. Though a dark theme...

Béla Tarr’s cinemas portray people, deprived people mainly in rural Hungary and their struggles to lead a dignified life.

In an interview he says that he was interested in human emotions; the real humans and the whole stuff. He places himself in the "middle" of the two groups of the Budapest Movement-one which made documentary style movies and the other, the experimental group which set out to find a new film language.

Andrzej Wajda’s ‘Kanal’ (Canal): A company of Polish army; men and women trapped in the endless sewer of war. People who have so much to live for realizing they cannot go on. Kanal is about love, courage and cowardice. And above all war. This is a black and white movie made in 1956.

In Kanal even light is a booby train amid death and destruction, though of course we see light in the courageous Daisy.

Inside the sewer struggling to make their way to the other side, Jacek who is tired and sick suggests to her: "We'll never keep up shall we call to Michael"

"It doesn't matter I know the severs," comes the reply.

"We'll get there if we go slowly and steadily," she reassures him.

Jacek: "You're very strong as though you'd heaved sacks".

Daisy: "That I've never done."

Kanal may not have the technical brilliance of movies made today but it has poignant and moving moments which makes it memorable.

Andrzej Wajda’s ‘Kanal’ was the first film made out of the Warsaw uprising, an operation by the Polish army to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany.  It was the second of the War trilogy preceded by A Generation and followed by Ashes and Diamonds.

Movies like Kanal (although the Iranian masters and directors like Krzysztof Kieslowski are my favorites) would open our eyes to the fact that most present-day movies touted as "award winning" and "classic" by the mainstream media and the critics here are, in fact, merely mediocre shows. That technical brilliance, good screenplay, arresting cinematography or stirring music alone is not enough to make a movie great. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/10/movies/andrzej-wajda-towering-auteur-of-polish-cinema-dies-at-90.html?smid=tw-nytimesarts&smtyp=cur&_r=0

Life perhaps teach us, ‘I in You and You in Me,’ is servility.
Yet we can break ties. We can't break free.
To be free is not man’s destiny?

The herdsman wants his flock together, to be in order.
Nature
laughs.

Milan Kundera

The starting point of totalitarianism resembles the beginning of Kafka's The Trial.

Totalitarian society, especially in its more extreme versions, tends to abolish the boundary between the public and the private; power, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to be entirely transparent. The ideal of life without secrets corresponds to the ideal of the exemplary family: a citizen does not have the right to hide anything at all from the Party or the State, just as a child has no right to keep a secret from his father or his mother. In their propaganda, totalitarian societies project an idyllic smile: they want to be seen as “one big family.”

The Art of the Novel. (p-110)

Joseph K.’s story also begins with the rape of privacy: two unknown men come to arrest him in bed. From that day on, he never feels alone: the Court follows him, watches him, talks to him; his private life disappears bit by bit, swallowed by the mysterious organization on his heels.

Lyrical souls who like to preach the abolition of secrets and the transparency of private life do not realize the nature of the process they are unleashing. The starting point of totalitarianism resembles the beginning of The Trial: you’ll be taken unawares in your bed. They’ll come just as your father and mother used to.

-- The Art of the Novel (p-111)


Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas.

With a wicked passion, Flaubert used to collect the stereotyped formulations that people around him enunciated in order to seem intelligent and up-to-date. He put them into a celebrated Dictionnaire des idees recues. We can use this title to declare: Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas. Flaubert’s discovery is more important for the future of the world than the most startling ideas of Marx or Freud. For we could imagine the world without the class struggle or without psychoanalysis, but not without the irresistible flood of received ideas that – programmed into computers, propagated by the mass media – threaten soon to become a force that will crush all original and individual thought and thus will smother the very essence of the European culture of the Modern Era.

--The Art of the Novel (p-162, 163)

Titbits

Mussolini was a dominant influence on the younger generation of socialists before he denounced the P.S.I (Socialist Party of Italy) and founded the Fascist Movement.

He was in fact the acknowledged leader of the party’s left wing and the editor of Avanti!, the party newspaper (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks).

Michelangelo Antonioni worked on Fascist films during the Second World War.

"During the Second World War he did after all work on Fascist films and as assistant director to Marcel Carné, whose artifice and formal control — although to very different effects — show parallels with the mature Antonioni,” Ian Johnston, Bright Lights Film Journal.

Antonioni, Mida and De Santis worked with Rossellini who had some explicitly Fascist film, according to P.Adams Sitney, vital crises in Italian cinema.

Pier Paolo Pasolini took part in the Fascist government's culture and sports competitions... A trip to Germany helped him to perceive the provincial status of Italian culture in that era. These experiences helped him to rethink his opinion about the cultural politics of Fascism and to switch gradually to a communist position.

‘Twice I almost hated the Chinese.’

Sudhir Kakar recalls a dialogue with Dalai Lama in 1994 in the introduction to his book Mad And Divine,  Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. 

During the dialogue Kakar gave the orthodox psychoanalytic view which finds something wrong with a person if he cannot hate. ‘No, no!’ the Dalai Lama exclaims. Stating that this is not true of Buddhist psychology, he proceeds to tell a story of a friend, a spiritually advanced lama who was incarcerated in a prison in Tibet and tortured by the Chinese. After many years the lama manages to escape and reach Dharamsala.

‘How was it?’ the Dalai Lama asks his old friend about the long years of imprisonment.

‘Oh, twice it was very bad,’the lama replies.

‘Were you in danger of losing your life?’ the Dalai Lama express his concern.

‘No.Twice I almost hated the Chinese!’

The psychoanalyst then proceeds to explain that spiritual transformation is not a once for ever achievement even in case of enlightened spiritual masters and saints. It remains constantly under threat from the darker forces of the psyche. One is never not human-‘Twice I almost hated the Chinese.’

Kakar examines the lives of Osho, Gandhi and the Buddhist saint Drupka Kunley in the book.

"The spirit when it soars often pulls up the psyche in its wake."

The one on Rajneesh, Childhood Of A Spiritually Incorrect Guru: Osho, concludes thus:
“Today, as we gain a more intimate knowledge of lives of saints and spiritual masters than was provided by hagiographies, we can say that the spirit when it soars often pulls up the psyche in its wake. But we also know that the spirit never completely escapes the gravitational pull exerted by the forces of narcissism, aggression and desire in the psyche. What may be essential for our gaze, however, is to attend to the vision of the spirit’s soaring, not the oft-repeated tragedy of its fall.”

Vaclav Havel is important today, not only as a writer/ playwright but also as a statesman. Tweets coinciding with his 80th birth anniversary recently brought to my mind this leader (quite inspiring in this dispiriting times of Kim Jong- uns, Donald Trumps, Rodrigo Dutertes and Narendra Modis) and spurred me to read his powerful political essay The Power of the Powerless. 
I first came across Havel (like Kundera, Kazantzakis and such greats) in the columns of late Malayalam critic M.Krishnan Nair.

In the essay Havel cites the example of a fruit and vegetable shop manager who places in his window the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" Havel says the manager is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan. He does it (places the slogan along with vegetables in his window) because everyone does it.
The the sign, Havel notes, helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology!

Ideology, according to Havel is "a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo."

Now, more excerpts from The Power of the Powerless.

"Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals. The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself."

"The post-totalitarian* system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of in formation is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system."

-----------
* Post-totalitarian (different from the traditional dictatorships) system is the system we live in today. The term dictatorship `tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system,' Havel says. He expatiates the factors that distinguish classical dictatorship from post-totalitarian system.

Going by the description of Havel's biographer John Keane it is:  "Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments...themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a 'secularized religion'.."

The New York Times in its obituary dated December 18, 2011 described Havel as the Czech writer and dissident "whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Mr. Havel himself into power."

A few gems from  Naguib Mahfouz’s Sugar Street.

“Viewed from another perspective, love seemed to him a dictator, and Egypt’s political life had taught him to hate dictatorship with all his heart.  At his aunt Jalila’s house, he surrendered his body to Atiya but then quickly reclaimed it, as if nothing had happened. This girl, shielded by her modesty, would be satisfied with nothing less than possessing his spirit and his body, forever. Afterward, there would only be one course for him to pursue:  the bitter struggle to earn a living to support his wife and children properly – a bizarre destiny transforming an existence rife with exalted concerns into nothing more than a means of “gaining” a living. The Indian sadhu might be a fool or a lunatic but was at least a thousand times wiser than a man up to his ears in making a living.”

“Lust is a tyrannical beauty readily felled by disgust. The heart cries out as it vainly searches in agonizing despair for eternal bliss. Complaints are endless. Life is a vast swindle. To be able to accept this deception gracefully, we must assume that life contains some secret wisdom. We’re like an actor, who while conscious of the deceit implicit in his role onstage, worships his craft.”

“In his living dictionary, the only meaning for love was pain…an astonishing pain that set the soul on fire. By the light of its raging flames amazing secrets of life became visible, but it left behind only rubble.”

“In his powerful voice, Abd al-Muni’m said,’ We’re not merely an organization dedicated to teaching and preaching. We attempt to understand Islam as God intended it to be: religion, a way of life, a code of law, and a political system.’ “

“Is talk like this appropriate for the twentieth century?’’

The forceful voice answered,”And for the hundred and twentieth century too.”

“Confronted by democracy, Fascism, and Communism, we’re dumbfounded. Then their's this new calamity!”

When i feel lost, 
shopping malls, 
noisy book stores; eateries...
are getaways 

or i let the routine stifle, 
muffle, black out,  
hush, 
kill…

or recline on a couch
snug, yet insecure, 
lonesome, detached, 
forlorn...

or stare at a pigeon
on a sunshade, 
roaches crushed in the kitchen
a spider swept away… 

hooked to agony
as clock heels tip toe
the question:
is it enough to simply survive?


July 21,2012
(11: 15 pm)

Unforeseen “No” unsettles “Historic” peace deal in Colombia.

The past refuse to die? 

(What the dailies & websites say)

Writing in The Hindu, Vijay Prashad is of the view that if the (referendum to ratify the peace deal between the government and the FARC or The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army) “had gone the other way, Colombia might have shown the world that even intractable civil wars can come to an end. It would have been a message to Syria and to the Congo, a message of the power of negotiation towards a new civic compact.”

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/columbia-peace-deal-a-lost-opportunity/article9184857.ece?homepage=true

Scepticism

Elvia Solarte doesn’t trust any of them. Not the media, which “never show things the way they actually are.” Not the NGOs, which parachute in with their fancy experts and “keep the money for themselves.” Not the activists from the center of the country, who lecture her about peace but “don’t know what the violence has been.” Not the politicians, “shameless bastards” the lot, who steal from the poor and sell the country to the multinationals. Not the military, “the real human rights violators” in the Colombian armed conflict. And especially not the government, “barefaced corruption” incarnate. 

https://newrepublic.com/article/137382/colombia-said-no-peace


Crushed by the "No"

“First Brexit, now this,” she said. “This means Trump is going to win in the United States. What will you do?”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-colombias-voters-rejected-peace

Not the End says TodayColombia.

“Uncertainty is sweeping Colombia following the narrow rejection of the government’s pace deal with the FARC guerilla in Sunday’s referendum, against all odds,” says an article by Rico in Today Colombia. “The possibility of the “No” side winning in the referendum was never contemplated by Colombian authorities; President Juan Manuel Santos confidently boasted in June that he had “no plan B.”

http://todaycolombia.com/referendum-in-colombia-does-not-spell-end-of-peace-process-with-farc/

Room for optimism?

An article in The Bogota Post is optimistic stating that “while the ‘No’ vote presented a major setback on the road towards peace and raised a lot of post-plebiscite questions, there is also the small hope that it could represent an opportunity to lay a stronger foundation for an agreement, with more buy-in from this divided society.”

http://thebogotapost.com/2016/10/04/next-post-plebiscite-questions-possibilities/

The Colombian government and left-wing FARC rebels signed an agreement on September 27.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-37477202

The horrible night persist.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/27/colombia-farc-peace-deal-resounds-homeland-uribe

FARC was responsible for massacre of 119 civilians (48 of them children) in 2002 (The Hindu). It has consistently carried out attacks on civilians, unleashed violence against indigenous people. It was accused of sexual abuse and forced abortion, extra-judicial executions and human right violations...

“Even though he was a man in his prime, he seemed to be ageing rapidly. He had been expelled from the paradise of simple faith in Emperor and virtue, truth and justice, and, trapped in silent suffering, he could see that it was guile that underwrote the world, the might of the law, and greatness of crowned heads…”

--Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March.

"Joseph Roth, who died as Hitler began to destroy Europe, was a great predictor of doom—civilization’s and his own. In this way, he was a perfect man for his era, and perfectly unsuited to live in it."

BOOK EXCERPT: THE LETTERS OF JOSEPH ROTH

The New Yorker Link

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/book-excerpt-the-letters-of-joseph-roth

"Sometimes Hofmann seems to nudge Roth in a direction in which Roth is not actually going: the pressure of a man’s fingers on a girl’s arm is “insistent” when in the original it is merely soft. Sometimes, on the other hand, he misses a telling emphasis."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/02/28/emperor-of-nostalgia/

“…At a little distance, Chekhov seems upright, decent, civilised, broad in his thinking and feeling; a letter from him is a balanced and considered document; if he goes on a bit, he sweetly apologises for it. He has leisure to think forward and back and sideways; he is the master of his (short) life, and sets his own terms, between Moscow and Yalta and Melikhovo, with literature his mistress and medicine his wife. 

Roth, meanwhile, even before the Nazi takeover of 1933 (or the derangement of his wife in 1928), was a man whose element was turbulence. He claims to have been an alcoholic from the age of eight. He lived out of two suitcases in six countries. His characteristic mode of progress was the somersault, his temperature generally off the scales. His letters burn off the page with intelligence and fury. Chekhov and Roth may both have died at the age of 44, and I love them both dearly, but there isn't otherwise much in common between them.”

--Michael Hofmann

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/17/michael-hoffman-joseph-roth-flight