Kundera !

“A man longs to be immortal, and one day the camera will show us a mouth contorted into a pathetic grimace-the only thing we will remember about him, the only thing which will remain as a parabola of his entire life. He will enter a kind of immortality which we may call ridiculous. Tycho Brahe was a great astronomer, but all we remember about him today is that in the course of a festive dinner at the emperor’s court he was ashamed to go to the lavatory, so his bladder burst and he departed among the ridiculous immortals as a martyr to shame and urine. He departed among them just like Christiane Goethe, turned for ever into a crazy sausage that bites. No novelist is dear to me than Robert Musil. He died one morning while lifting weights. When I lift them myself, I keep anxiously checking my pulse and I am afraid of dropping dead, for to die with a weight in my hand like my revered author would make me an epigone so unbelievable, frenetic and fanatical as immediately to assure me of ridiculous immortality.”

Immortality, (p-56)

Back to p-55

“Of all the European statesmen of our time, the one who has most occupied himself with the thought of immortality (leaders like Narendra Modi?) has probably been Francois Mitterrand: I remember the unforgettable ceremony which followed his election as President in 1981. The square in front of the Pantheon was filled with an enthusiastic crowd and he was withdrawing from it: he was walking alone up the broad stairway (exactly as Shakespeare walked to the Temple of Fame on the curtain described by Goethe), holding the stems of three roses. Then he disappeared from the people’s sight and remained alone among the tombs of sixty-four illustrious corpses ,followed in his thoughtful solitude only by the eyes of the camera, the film crew and several million Frenchmen, watching their television screens, from which thundered Beethovan’s Ninth. He placed the roses one by one on three chosen tombs. He was surveyor, planting the three roses like three markers into the immense building –site of eternity, to stake out a triangle in the centre of which was to be erected the palace of his immortality."

Incidentally Samuel Beckett’s first work I happened to read was not Waiting for Godot, but his novel Watt. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon a copy of the book on the shelves of a small private library opposite Elite hotel in Fort Kochi over two decades ago. I borrowed the book and read it, if I remember correctly, in one or two sittings.

The experience that reading Watt gave me I’m unable to explain in words. So I borrow from Coetzee. (I’m at the fag end of Youth and here the narrator writes about Beckett).

“Why did people not tell him Beckett wrote novels? How could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of Ford when Beckett was around all the time? In Ford there has always been an element of the stuffed shirt that he has disliked but has been hesitant to acknowledge, something to do with the value Ford placed on knowing where in the West End to buy the best motoring gloves or how to tell a Medoc (wine) from a Beaune; whereas Beckett is classless, or outside class, as he himself prefer to be.” (p-155).

Thinking about, among other things, the sexual attacks and murder of women in recent months. What makes a human inhuman ? (what about the leaders responsible for genocides and wars and military leaderships...)

Psychology teach us that our behavior, thoughts and actions are produced by working together of a complex system of cells, organs and chemicals.

Sin; in the New Testament the Greek word for sin is hermatia, or quite simply, “missing the mark,” is quite easy to do with poor brain function, says Daniel G.Amen in his Healing the Hardware of the Soul. I personally don’t have much faith in any healing process. The question however is, is it alright to simply blame it on chemicals and poor brain function for our (forget Sin) inhuman behaviors? No, we cannot…
As solution, psychology would offer medications, therapy and even meditation, all that which deals with control of the mind. Not control,I feel, education would help. (Not the commercialized, exam-based education which is in vogue today) Education which enable individuals to think for themselves...This, again, as not a solution. There are no solutions. Seeking solutions to me looks rather naive. We should perhaps leave it to the `straighteners.'
Straighteners? This I came across in Aubrey Menen's The Space Within the Heart.

They are the neo-Freudians (Alfred Adler, Carl Jung...) who announced that Freud's view of the condition of man was altogether too gloomy. "We are not cripples who have been twisted and bent to fit into our nooks in a monstrous society," the neo-Freudians would have us believe. But long before neo-Freudians came on the scene, Samuel Butler, having foreseen them,  summed up in one sarcastic word. He called them ‘straighteners,’ says Aubrey Menen.

(‘Sin,’ says my notebook,’ is not sex any more. That has been coped with by the straighteners. To be sinful is not to conform, points out Menen). 

What an hostile territory we're in!

Then what about the leaders responsible for genocides and wars and military leaderships...Should we look into that matter separately? More to do with power perhaps? 

Antjie Krog

"Firstly, one has one life. It would be pathetic to try and keep it pure and bare in the hope of writing The Big Poem. In my book, The Big Poem compensates for nothing. Being embedded in a full-blooded life could enrich what one has to say; the feeding of your children could feed the writing. In those countries with opportunities, if the feeding of the children destroys the writing, then one should also accept the possibility that one perhaps did not have enough to say anyway. 

Secondly, to accept as the only choice the one that Rumens formulates, is to buy into that very male either/or notion. Male writers never had to “give up” penis, balls and beards – they turned it into the very essence of their writing. They never chose between a family and writing – they turned their singularity into the only category. Why do we assume that to be a good writer we have to be like them? Why do we assume that an epic poem about heroism or the loneliness of choice can be part of the canon, but a short poem about childbirth cannot?"

The full interview :

http://www.oulitnet.co.za/nosecret/antjie_krog.asp

Another link:

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/collection/article_item/int_article/368

“To use a phrase I have always been fond of, I discovered that I was living on borrowed time.”

--Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions.

I share a lengthy poem by Ron Padgett posted by a FB friend and google to find out about the poet because the poem  impress me. 

This goes for every work of art, photographs, movies, articles which I come across on social media. This is how I learn. Picking up bits and pieces from here and there, like a rag picker, apart from history, apart from experience gained by staying alive each day...

This is perhaps what sustains me, besides my readings (not very extensive) and small happiness I extract out of life.

On FB,  friends (friends as well as strangers) from countries as varied as Philippines, Brazil and Colombia; a glimpse into their culture, language…This is the reason I befriended many on FB. This, the reason why I continue on social media. Just as it is with my small circle of friends in Chennai and elsewhere, less talk (with friends who are eloquent I enjoy listening to them which too is a process of learning) and more effort on discernment. 

Soldiers are pawns in the games of the State.

Today amid war mongering by the media following the so called ‘surgical strike’ by India on PoK/ camps on LoC; things in Syria getting much worse, amid the all round gloom, I chose to leaf through Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I re-read the passages which I’ve underlined/ marked with blue ballpoint pen and pencil. I also went through some parts that caught my attention. I should say that this activity has spurred me to re-read the work...
About the literary quality of the work maybe some other time.

Now some compelling lines/passages from the book:

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” (p-7)

“Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts.”(p-9)

“The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.” (p-12)

“They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections.”(p-14)

They carried the land itself-Vietnam, the place, the soil-a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity…They marched for the sake of the march…and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. (p-14)

It was very sad, he thought, The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. (p-24)

“The problem though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war.” (p-42)

“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” (p-58)

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. (p-65,66).

J.M.Coetzee's piece on Robert Walser, the German speaking-Swiss writer  in The New York Review of Books, November 2, 2000 issue.
Walser, writes Coetzee, was “a ridiculed and unsuccessful author, who felt oppressed by the censorious gaze of his neighbors, by the demand for respectability."

At his death he left behind some five hundred sheets of paper covered in a microscopic pencil script so difficult to read that his executor at first took them to be a diary in secret code.

Walser, according to Coetzee, is most at home in the mode of short fiction.

The Robber appears a `must read.'

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/11/02/the-genius-of-robert-walser/

Benjamin Kunkel , writing in the August 6, 2007 issue of The New Yorker (Still Small Voice, The Fiction of Robert Walser) says, “ His narrators are all ostensibly humble, courteous, and cheerful; the puzzle lies in deciding where they are speaking in earnest and where ironically.”

Mary Hawthorne (Robert Walser on Everything and Nothing, The New Yorker, March 28, 2012) writes,”  It is one of those perverse ironies of history that this most delicate, self-effacing, and marginal of writers (his books were critically well received and admired by Kafka and Walter Benjamin, among others, but they did not sell), who as a young man enrolled in a school for servants and as an old one dropped dead on Christmas Day during one of his long, solitary walks in a snowy field near the mental hospital he had for more than twenty years been confined to, attracts more readers with every passing year. His completely original voice and sensibility—a blend of sharp and always surprising observation, free-floating digression, ambiguous irony, impishness, tenderness, curiosity, and detachment, all overhung with constant, circling doubt—remain stubbornly resistant to all but ersatz imitation.”

Robert Walser

“Certainly I am poor and up to this day have never lacked in failure,” he admits, but then, in a statement that could serve as his own epitaph, he adds: “life without success can also be beautiful.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dancing-with-words/

Human nature is vicious and predatory.

“I don’t believe that on this earth men, who are wolves preying on their fellow men, will attain global peace. Basically, Fukuyama was thinking about this peace with his idea of the end of history, but recent events have shown that history repeats itself, and always in the form of conflict.”

--Umberto Eco, Some Reflections on War and Peace, Turning Back the Clock.

‘What those people who trot out the jungle analogy really mean, but don’t say because it sounds too pessimistic, too predestinarian, is: homo homini lupus. We cannot collaborate because human nature- leave aside the nature of the world – is fallen, vicious, predatory. (The poor, maligned beasts! The wolf is not predatory upon other wolves: lupus lupo lupus would be a slander.)

--J.M.Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year.

"We cannot call our faults our own: they are invented for us by parents and schoolmasters and the makers of law." --Aubrey Menen

Aubrey Menen & M.Krishnan Nair

If Dostoevsky, Milan Kundera, Coetzee, O.V.Vijayan…are favorite authors, who is Aubrey Menen, a teacher? 

Whatever, I should note here that without the late Malayalam critic M.Krishnan Nair (his column in a Malayalam news magazine) I would perhaps have never read Aubrey Menen. Just as without Kundera it's doubtful whether I would have read Chamoiseau. About Chamoiseau later.

Now, from  Aubrey Menen’s, The Space Within The Heart (p-94)

“Our true self is not superior to other people; it is not inferior either. It is not touched by other people at all. It does not wish other people to be better, or to be worse; it neither punishes nor praises. It can be totally indifferent to the world, as if sleeping; or it can awake and observe, but with the same indifference.

‘Not that, not that,’ say the Upanishads, in the puzzling phrase which has echoed down the centuries. Now I saw its meaning. I was not that; nor anything that you could name in the world around me. I was not good, or bad; I was not a son, or a friend, or an uncle, or a cousin. I was not a success, or a failure. I was not even a middle-aged man in a room in Piazza Farnese seeking to answer a Pope. I was perfectly free of all such things because I had always been free. The world had not made me. It had merely thought it had.”

From J.M.Coetzee, Youth (p-10)

“Besides, who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can he know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?

Things are rarely as they seem: that is what he should have said to Jacqueline. Yet what chance is there she would have understood?

Surrealism!

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-what-is-surrealism

Two favorite writers. J.M.Coetzee & O.V.Vijayan

“After supper the boy is more forthcoming. ‘Ana Magdalena taught us the numbers,’ he tells them. ‘She showed us Two and Three and you were wrong, Simon, and senor Robles was wrong too,  you were both wrong, the numbers are in the sky. That is where they live, with the stars. You have to call them before they will come down.”

--The Schooldays of Jesus (p-59),

“His most cherished memory was of the sky-watch, a pastime in which his mother joined him, though not often, as she was big with child. She told him stories of the Devas. These dwellers of the sky drank the milk of the Kalpaka fruit, their elixir of immortality, and flung the empty husks down to the earth. If you gazed on the sky long enough, you saw the husks as transparent apparitions. The sky at noon was full of them. Ravi saw them slide over glistening cloud-hems and pass softly over pine and rock and grass. He watched, leaning on Mother’s belly as she reclined on a couch.

‘Thirteen!’ Ravi whispered, unable to contain his excitement.

‘Ah, my child,’ Mother said,’ what did you do to them?’

‘Counted them, Ma.’

The shy apparitions vanished. The sky was deserted now, save for a lone crested vulture navigating the precipices of space.

‘My little star,’ Mother said during one such vigil,’ don’t lean too hard, you might hurt your sister.’

--The Legends of Khasak (p-7)

RIP

It’s sad that one more life has been taken to protect the sanctity of Islam. This time it is Nahed Hattar of Jordan. They hounded Salman Rushdie,  chopped off T.J.Joseph’s hand, gunned down 12 at Charlie Hebdo…The custodians of faith (all religions) are running berserk. There is no sign of this tragedy ever ending.

Nahed Hattar's cartoon Link:

http://www.clarionproject.org/news/jordanian-satirist-arrested-cartoon-mocking-isis


At this juncture I find it appropriate to remember Charlie Hebdo.


https://charliehebdo.fr/en/