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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://literarydiscussions.myfreeforum.org/ftopic680.php

The Sound Word

Sound mind, sound doctrine, Long Island Sound, sounding the depths, are
all the same word “sound.” Sound right?

"Conversation is an art," they say. Reading may be an art or a science
depending upon whether you simply read or read into. When I was a
child, I read as a child; thought as a child; understood as a child. When I
matured, I did not put away childish things, but began to play ruthlessly
with words and ideas. Words are instruments of thought and make a
music more than tinkling symbols and brash prose. Siddhartha upon the
banks learned from a stringed instrument of the middle way that we must
not be too loose or we shall not sound nor yet too tight lest we break.

When we play an instrument just right then we say that it “sounds.” The
sound lurks within, a secret, hidden. When we publish and publicize, it
becomes more secret; more hidden. We supply breath or spirit;
inspiration. A music of the spheres is a circle of fifths on a scale of one to
eight. We play instruments and we play on words. Play is the industry of
childhood and adults are a by-product of concern to environmentalists.

To speak or read or write we must have an “about.” “Speak of the Devil,”
Goethe did. We speak about this. We write about that. We read about
something else. “About” suggests a circle. Now, to talk in circles is
reckoned not a virtue but a flaw, though not a tragic flaw.

Speaking of circles, Milan Kundera ends his novel, “The Unbearable
Lightness of Being,” with a circle:

Quote:

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Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large
nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room.

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Plato is circles. Aristotle is lines.

Aristotle asks Kundera, “Why the circle?”

Kundera replies:

Quote:

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Therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a
circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy:
happiness is the longing for repetition.

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Plato asks Kundera, “Why the butterfly?”

Kundera replies:

Quote:

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No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do
so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love
between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising
scenes; it knows no development. Their dog, Karenin, surrounded Tereza
and Tomas with a life based on repetition, and he expected the same from
them.

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Sitaram asks Kundera, “Why Karenin?”

Tolstoy replies:

Quote:

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Happy families are all alike.

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Words are instruments of thought and some linguists say they shape
people's vision of the world. If this is the case, people speaking different
languages see the world in different ways and the conclusions you draw
about 'sound' and 'play' or 'about' only arise for English speakers.

I don't know what the Kundera of 'the lightness of being' thought, but the
Kundera of 'Ignorance' does not believe that happiness lies in circles or
repetition. Children like to read a story as soon as they finish or watch a
film they have just watched over and over. Adults don't. Perhaps some
adults are still happy with repetitions but most prefer lines - straight lines
or zigzags, trying to reach for something rather than going back.

Sitaram 17th August 2005 06:53 AM

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The Language of Fireworks

I am grateful for your thoughtful reply. Such a response is not easy to
come by, but it is what I desire.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by from Peter Quince at the Clavier - Wallace Stevens

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring ...

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Each sentence which enters our mind, enters with an explosion of
thoughts, of memories, like a holiday firewords display. And yet, it is bad
manners, and poor style, to ramble on in such a stream of consciousness.
If I am to respond properly, then I must pick and choose sparks from
that expanding sphere of fire or, I suppose embers is a better word for
them by the time they fall into my grasp, for they have cooled down a bit,
and reorganize them into some respectable, linear, thematic sequence,
or syllogism (of the A implies B, B implies C, Aristotelian variety, train of
thought, line of reasoning).

Would you believe, that I actually unconsciously made a Freudian slip in
the above paragraph, and typed firewords display when what I really
meant to type is fireworks display! Perhaps no one will believe me that it
was an honest mistake. They shall accuse me of being coy and sly; a
dissembler.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by clueless
Words are instruments of thought

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I feel like being playful and turning your sentence around, to see what
happens.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sitaram
Thoughts are the instruments of words

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(I hope to fill in here, in the coming hours and days, with some thoughts
from Wallace Steven's essays "The Necessary Angel", on the nature of
imagination, to explore what it might mean to say that thoughts are the
instruments of words. The mind is a faithful servant, but a cruel master.)

Let's take a look at the opening pages of Wallace Steven's essays, "The
Necessary Angel."

ISBN 0-394-70278-6

Vingate Books

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wallace Stevens

In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of the soul in a figure.

He says:

Let our figure be of a composite nature - a pair of winged horses and a
charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all
of them noble, and of noble breed, while ours are mixed; and we have a
charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of them is noble and of
noble origin, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble origin; and, as might
be expected, there is a great deal of trouble in managing them. I will
endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the
immortal creature. The soul or animate being has the care of the
inanimate, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing; -
when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and is the ruler of the
universe; while the imperfect soul loses her feathers, and drooping in her
flight at last settles on solid ground.

(end of Phaedrus quote)

We recognize at once, in this figure, Plato's pure poetry; and at the same
time we recognize what Coleridge called Plato's dear, gorgeous nonsense.
The truth is that we have scarcely read the passage before we have
identified ourselves with the charioteer, have, in fact, taken his place and,
driving his winged horses, are traversing the whole heaven. Then
suddenly we remember, it may be, that the soul no longer exists and we
droop in our flight and at last settle on the solid ground. The figure
becomes antiquated and rustic.

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Oh yes, Kundera! Well, don't worry. I shall try to stay on topic and speak
more of Kundera in a while.

Modern warfare has developed an ordnance of missiles with marving
warheads, which, though they travel to their target in more or less of a
straight line, yes, as they approach their target, burst into a fireworks
circle of smaller weapons. (Notice how I have nudged the topic back to
circles and straight lines?)

Regarding the notion of a changing, evolving Kundera, slightly different
with each novel, I agree that an author may change in such a fashion.
Excellent point you make. And since the poor bloke is still alive
somewhere in France, we might in theory hunt him down and grill and
cross-examine him until he explains to us in detail his own evolution.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by from the end of Peter Quince at the Clavier
Beauty is momentary in the mind --
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

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Sitaram 17th August 2005 07:06 AM

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Embroidering Earth's Mantle - Remedios Varo

What a wonderful idea, to write an essay such as you seem to suggest,
about the Kundera of "Immortality" vs the Kundera of "The Unbearable
Lightness of Being"

Certainly, this is a project I would enjoy working on. I just recently read
both novels (within the past 6 months)

======================================
I am going to make certain observations about this painting by Remedios
Varo, Embroidering Earth's Mantle. I shall attempt to bring certain aspects
to bear upon the art of the novel in general, and Kundera's novels in
particular.

Quote:

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In Mexico City, they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by
the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a
triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls
with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top
room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out
the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all
the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the
earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.
Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had
noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd
wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the
tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She
could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the
world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as
yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked
down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she
stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in
her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had
taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so
desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to
think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her
ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic,
anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason
at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to
examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure
its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on
superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or
marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of
deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

--The Crying of Lot 49, end of Chapter 1

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Here are other paintings by Varo:

http://www.angelfire.com/hiphop/diablo4u/remedios.html

This little passage is from "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon.

But this little passage is an entire novel in itself. It is a nuclear explosion,
a tsunami, a Krakatoa.

Allow me to do some wild, extemporaneous, expository conjecture, word
by word, phrase by phrase:

"a number of" = the human race, all who have ever lived or shall ever
live; the collective consciousness of the Zeitgeist.

"frail" = humanity in one word, frail, weak, ineffectual, self-destructive,
sisysphean.

"girls" = humanity as feminine. God or the Universe is masculine. The
final line of Goethe's Faust speaks of "the eternal feminine which draws us
above," it is Beatrice which draws Dante upward.

"prisoners" = "the mind is its own beautiful prisoner" e.e. cummings

"top room" = upper chamber, the mystical supper

"tower" = tower of Babel, ivory tower, Borges "Library of Babel"

"embroidering" = Socrate's warp, woof, and shuttle of the dialectal
process.

These frail young women are all faithful Penelopes, fending off the
Philistine suitors, awaiting Odysseus return.

"which spilled out" = Rapunsel lets down her hair for her lover to ascend.

===================
Scenes and events from works and biographies become the vocabulary of
my own private tapestry which I weave as reader and beholder of art. It
is only through this private weaving, this creation of my inner world, that I
make these things my own.

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This painting, Embroidering Earth's Mantle, by Varo, combines two very
ancient metaphors for the acquisition of knowledge and power: churning
and weaving.

Notice the central figure who is reading a book and stirring a vessel.

There is an ancient Hindu myth about the churning of an ocean of milk in
search for the nectar of immortality. There is a less ancient symbol of
Socrates' weaver's loom, with warp, woof, and shuttle, as an image of the
dialectic process. We are always weaving and churning. But, weaving and
churning are two very different processes.

Sitaram 17th August 2005 07:12 AM

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A Lightness that is Too Heavy

Not long ago, I was passing by an outdoor cafe, and noticed a
middle-aged woman sitting at a table reading a novel. I am always
fascinated by what others are reading. We struck up a conversation. I
mentioned to her that I was reading Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness
of Being. She explained that she had tried to read it, but it was just to
heavily laden with ideas (my words, not hers) for her to finish it. She does
not like to read heavy things. She prefers light things.

It sounds like I am trying to make a bit of pun. She found Unbearable
Lightness too heavy. No pun intended. This is actually what she said.

There is nothing wrong with that. Each of us has our own agenda as to
what we seek to achieve when we read or when we write.

Sitaram 17th August 2005 07:16 AM

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Seeing the Gates of Eden

I suppose if I reserved enough threads, then I would have sufficient space
for a Doctoral dissertation on Kundera. That would be fun! There must be
someone in the world at this very moment working on such a
dissertation. I once read that at any given time in the world there were
300 students doing Masters and PhD papers on Derrida!

I want to mention one of the images I saw in my "mental fireworks"
display this morning as the words of clueless entered my mind.

I saw, Adam, or perhaps Eve (in the myth of Genesis), biting into the
forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge, but, as they are taking that
very bite, before they have even chewed, much less swallowed, there
eyes just happen to notice that there are GATES in the distance, the gates
of Eden. But, being innocents, they have yet to learn the meaning and
function of a gate, to make possible exits and entrances.

Sitaram 17th August 2005 07:32 AM

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That which transcends language

You make an excellent point about the words sound and play being unique
to English, and the "play on words" falls apart in translation.

Kundera has quite a few complaints about the untrustworthiness of
translators. Milan is, understandably, quite fussy about how is works are
translated from Czech into other languages.

All morning, I have been thinking about the Undertoad in that novel (now
I will have to check a thread to remember the title and author, oh yes,
"The World According to Garp" by John Irving).

http://www.stanuu.org/riptides.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by The Under Toad
"The undertow is bad today."

"The undertow is strong today."

"The undertow is wicked today." Wicked was a big word in New Hampshire
- not just for the undertow.

And for years Walt had watched out for it. From the first, when he asked
what it could do to you, he had only been told that it could pull you out to
sea. It could suck you under and drown you and drag you away.

It was Walt's fourth summer at Dog's Head Harbor, Duncan remembered,
when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He
stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves,
without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the
water's edge to have a word with him.

"What are you doing, Walt?" Helen asked.

"I'm trying to see the Under Toad." Walt said

"The what?" said Garp.

"The Under Toad," Walt said. "I'm trying to see it. How big is it?"

And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all
these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting
to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.

Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float?
Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for
ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.

Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for
anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt ("Undertow,
dummy, not Under Toad!" Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked
the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the
traffic was heavy, when the road was icy - when depression had moved in
overnight - they said to each other, "The Under Toad is strong today."

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A child hears parents discussing the dangers of the undertow at the
beach, and the child mistakenly believes that they are discussing an
under-toad, some hideous toad which is lurking in wait to drag off
unsuspecting victims.

A child's misunderstanding is a felix culpa, a happy accident.

Someone at another forum mentioned reading that book in translation, in
a Scandanavian language, and the translator had rendered "undertoad" as
"underlobster".

We see a felix culpa in the serendipitous beginning of Kundera's
Immortality

Our dreaming life is a transformative world located somewhere, in a
twilight zone, between truth and falsehood.

Sitaram 19th August 2005 03:02 AM

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A Game of Negative Badminton

Suppose our discussions of literature and authors are like a game. Let's
pretend they are like the game of badminton. How far might we take this
analogy, and how might such an understanding help us in this current
discussion of the novels of Milan Kundera which is in progress, or any
discussion for that matter?

The various topics are the birdies, and we swat them back and forth to (or
at) each other across a net which is our theme perhaps.

When I was ten years old, our neighbors set up a badminton net in their
back yard. I watched them playing the game in the traditional fashion. I
decided that there must be a much better way to play the game. I
invented my own game of badminton, a sort of negative badmintion. The
object of my game was to keep the birdie in the air as long as possible.
The first person to cause the birdie to fall to the ground was the loser.
One might only be a real winner as long as the game continued in
progress, and the birdie continued in flight. Now, should we christen our
game of negative badminton as goodminton?

When you are playing traditional badminton, or tennis, or some other such
competitive game, you are playing against your opponent. You attempt to
win by beating or defeating your opponent. When you are playing
goodminton, then the other player is not your opponent, but rather your
partner. Your true opponent becomes yourself, lest you make the wrong
moves and cause the flight of the birdie to cease.

Now, I have recently learned the new bb command list, so let's see if I
can make it work and list the various birdies or topics we have up in the
air:

(for the sake of brevity, I shall refer to The Unbearable Lightness of Being
with the acronym TULOB.

The changing Milan Kundera's (of TULOB and Immortality)

The linear (Aristotelian) approach to human happiness

The circular (Platonic) approach to human happiness

Native Language Dependent (DNL) literary devices

Native Language Independent (INL) literary devices

Words as instruments of thoughts

Thoughts as instruments of words

Well, I have finally make my list command do what I want, after a bit of
google and soul searching. I shall add to the list from time to time, as new
topic headings, or birdies emerge.

By the way, it occurs to me that the language of Jungian archetypes,
found in the myths and stories of every culture, is a language which is
INL.

Devices like the Undertoad, which is always threatening to become the
Underlobster at the hands of a translator, is a DNL device.

We can easily understand why an author like Kundera is very fussy about
translations.

The metaphor of game playing can be quite instructive.

Here is something else, related, that I wrote about this metaphor, entitled,
Playing the Game

http://forums.thebookforum.com/showthread.php?t=7494

My accidental discovery, in childhood, of goodminton is my own felix
culpa.

Sitaram 19th August 2005 03:03 AM

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Madly Splashing Colors

This thread is a canvas, and I am madly splashing colors and slashing
lines.

Your mind is a canvas, and mine. Your thoughts are the instruments of my
words, my firewords which kindle and ignite displays in your imagination.

Why does a tuning fork have two prongs?

Why does a dialogue have two people?

Sitaram 19th August 2005 03:04 AM

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The Underlobster Playing Goodminton

I am please with my discovery of the game of goodminton. Somehow that
game was concealed in badminton all these years, hiding, waiting, waiting
for Sitaram, just as the under-toad was hiding, waiting, for so many
years, for John Irving to come along, to be discovered.

But goodminton is a DNL literary device.

My ark will only float in the English Channel.

Being afloat and sailing anywhere, even if only in a puddle, can be
preferable to being shipwrecked, a stranger on the shore.

http://members.tripod.com/RoadSide6/dbpoem.htm

I am reminded of this stanza from Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre ("The
Drunken Boat")

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If there's water in Europe for me
It's the cool, dark pond at balmy twilight
Where a child squats full of sadness, launching
A frail boat like a butterfly in May.

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Regarding the notion of a changing, evolving Kundera, slightly different
with each novel, I agree that an author may change in such a fashion.

I do not know how he has changed, if it is in the way I mentioned or in
any other, but he has changed, hasn't he? He is writing in French now,
instead of Czech.

A circle is reassuring for those who fear the unknown. A 'better the devil
you know' position could be dominant in a society devoid of freedom. It is
reassuring to wake up in the morning in your own bed rather than a police
cell; return home from work and find your family there; go to work to
find out that you still have a job and you are not in some blacklist written
by the authorities.

It was Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, who said that we cannot
step into the same river twice.

Reflections upon the river of Heraclitus give a different hue to Nietzsche's
doctrine of Eternal Return.

I wrote a poem about Heraclitus' river.

Heraclitus' Baptism
(written 1:00pm Saturday, August 4, 2001)

In the Citadel
Of the Ephemeral
The Glory
Of the Transitory,
Changeless in constant changing,
Hymns itself glorious,
Perennially evanescent
And nascent,
A holiness notorious.

Escher's river
Flows back to it's source
And we are ever
Baptized in it's course.

- Sitaram

I like this idea of returning to the same place, or attempting to, but it is no
longer the same. I would like to illustrate that idea, powerfully, with the
poem by Wallace Stevens, Sea Surface Full of Clouds. Then, as I re-read
Kundera's TULOB and Immortality I shall be on the lookout for examples
of frustrated return.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...ens/clouds.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens

Stevens' poem describes the same scene, as it is revisited by the same
person upon five different occasions. But each visitation finds a different
scene. That which is beheld is the same, but the beholder has changed.

Sea Surface Full of Clouds

I

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In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck
And made one think of rosy chocolate
And guilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine

Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.
Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude
Out of the light evolved the moving blooms,

Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds
Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm?
C'e'tait mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme.

The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm
And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green
And in its watery radiance, while the hue

Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled
Round those flotillas. And sometimes the sea
Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.

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II

Quote:

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In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck

And made one think of chop-house chocolate
And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green
Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine

Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay.
Who, then, beheld the rising of the clouds
That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen,
Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms
Of water moving on the water-floor?
C'tait mon frere du ciel, ma vie, mon or.

The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms
Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms.
The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread

Its crystalline pendentives on the sea
And the macabre of the water-glooms
In an enormous undulation fled.

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III

Quote:

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In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And a pale silver patterned on the deck

And made one think of porcelain chocolate
And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine

Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds.
Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms
Unfolding in the water, feeling sure

Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then,
The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?
Oh! C'etait mon extase et mon amour..

So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds,
The shrouding shadows, made the petals black
Until the rolling heaven made them blue,
A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth,
And smiting the crevasses of the leaves
Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.

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IV

Quote:

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In that November off Tehuantepec,
The night-long slopping of the sea grew still.
A mallow morning dozed upon the deck

And made one think of musky chocolate
And frail umbrellas. A too-fluent green
Suggested malice in the dry machine

Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.
Who then beheld the figures of the clouds
Like blooms secluded in the thick marine?

Like blooms? Like damasks that were shaken off
From the loosed girdles in the spangling must.
C'etait ma foi, la nonchalance divine.

The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn
Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing,
Would -- But more suddenly the heaven rolled

Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green,
And the nakedness became the broadest blooms,
Mile-mallows that a mallow sun cajoled.

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V

Quote:

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In that November off Tehuantepec,
Night stilled the slopping of the sea. The day
Came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck.

Good clown, . . . One thought of Chinese chocolate
And huge umbrellas. And a motley green
Followed the drift of the obese machine

Of ocean, perfected in indolence.
What pistache one, ingenious and droll,
Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery

And the sea as turquise-turbaned Sambo, neat
At tossing saucers -- cloudy-conjuring sea?
C'etai mon esprit bâtard, l'ignominie.

The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch
Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind
Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue

To clearing opalescence. Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

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clueless 19th August 2005 06:22 AM

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sitaram
Why does a tuning fork have two prongs?

Why does a dialogue have two people?
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To keep the birdie in the air, like in goodmington. When is not a real
dialogue but an alternation of monologues, the birdie goes out of the
players' reach and fall. It is cacophony; nobody really listening so the
sounds clash with each other.

The Hebrew vision appeals to me more than the Greek. For someone to
miss the mark, one needs to be competitive and have a target. The wrong
path seems more appropriate but, perhaps not to return, but to make
another path. 'There is no path; paths are made by walking'.

Sitaram 19th August 2005 07:59 AM

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The Crowd and Duet

Tomas is torn between the crowd and duet.

Perhaps there is some connection between goodminton and fidelity.

Tomas in TULOB (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) desires promiscuity,
but is falling in love with someone who desires fidelity. These conflicting
desires create a tension. The string of an instrument must be drawn
taught between two points, before it can sound. Sound is vibration. At the
proper frequency, a tone may cause a second fork to vibrate in
sympathy. An ancient philosopher in India, Pantanjali, speculated that
everything reduces to vibrations, or vritti.

When two minds are drawn to the same subject, there is a tension, and a
tone is sounded. Sometimes there is sympathy; two feeling similarly.
Sometimes there is a harmony.

I have been thinking about Faulkner as I add to this thread. I am
searching right now for something that Faulkner said about writing. As I
search, just now, it occurs to me that perhaps each author, each novel, is
a piece from the same grand puzzle. The many pieces, scattered on our
livingroom carpet, seem unrelated, but, ultimately, they all fit together
perfectly, if only we have the time and patience.

This is what started me thinking:

Quote:

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

I don't know what the Kundera of 'the lightness of being' thought, but the
Kundera of 'Ignorance' does not believe that happiness lies in circles or
repetition. Children like to read a story as soon as they finish or watch a
film they have just watched over and over. Adults don't. Perhaps some
adults are still happy with repetitions but most prefer lines - straight lines
or zigzags, trying to reach for something rather than going back.

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

Faulkner said of his own work:

Quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As regards to any specific book, I’m trying primarily to tell a story, in the
most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive.
But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do…I am telling
the same story over and over, which is myself and the world. Tom Wolfe
was trying to say everything, the world plus “I” or filtered through “I” or
the effort of “I” to embrace the world in which he was born and walked a
little while and then lay down again, into one volume. I am trying to go a
step further. This I think accounts for what people call the obscurity, the
involved formless “style,” endless sentences. I’m trying to say it all in one
sentence, between one Cap and one period. I’m still trying to put it all, if
possible, on one pinhead. I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to
keep on trying in a new way. I’m inclined to think that my material, the
South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don’t
have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time.
…Art is simpler than people think because there is so little to write about.
All the moving things are eternal in man’s history and have been written
before, and if a man writes hard enough, sincerely enough, humbly
enough, and with the unalterable determination never never never to be
quite satisfied with it, he will repeat them, because art like poverty takes
care of its own, shares its bread."

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

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

It is true that there are very few themes to write about, but there are so
many ways to write about them as there are different ways to see or feel
about those themes. There is also the question of form - how to write
about them.

Sitaram 20th August 2005 11:23 AM

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

The Circling of Vultures and Eagles

Milan Kundera defines a critic as someone who discovers other people's
discoveries.

An eagle is noble, the symbol of churches and nations. A vulture is ignoble
and despised, gracing no flag or carpet. But both eagles and vultures are
flighted scavengers which circle and wait.

I try to read through this thread from beginning to end each day. My
flights of fancy take a circular path. Vultures such as we must patiently
circle for days or weeks before we can finally land and take a bite from
our corpse or corpus.

Sitaram 20th August 2005 11:35 AM

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

Lines as the Arrow of Tragedy Missing the Mark

As I meditate upon this thread, I am thinking of circles and lines. Lines
make me think of "straight as an arrow". Arrows make me think of
Aristotle's Poetics where he uses the Greek word hamarteia to denote the
tragic flaw of a hero. Hamarteia was originally a term used in archery.
Hamartenein means to "miss the mark." In a competition, even hitting the
target, but missing the bullseye, constitutes hamarteia. Hamarteia
becomes the Greek word used in the Epistles to denote sin.

In Hebrew, the word KHATAUAU is the analog of the Greek hamarteia.
The Greek term has the sense of a missing of the goal, or a straying away
from the right path.

The Hebrew "Khata" carries a meaning more closely related to "taking the
wrong path" which is considerably different than the Greek "hamartia" -
"missing the mark."

One may take the position that anything less than absolute perfection in
performance would be "missing the mark."

Can you see any connection between this duo of hamarteia and khata and
our two very different games, badminton and goodminton?

The Hebrew word "Khata", on the other hand, is related much more
closely to a lifestyle perspective. "Walking the wrong path" is less
concerned about individual actions than overall ways of living.

The Old Testament is concerned with actions of the individual, but the
emphasis seems to be centered around how a person lives life, not on the
specific things that he or she does. Khata reflects this. We see this
emphasis also in the Hebrew word for repentance, "shub." "Shub" means
"to turn around," which is what one does when correcting for walking the
wrong path. The New Testament word, "metanoein" (to repent) also
carries the connotation of change, lit. "changing one's mind," but Hebrew
is a more visual language.

We may see errors in terms of straight lines. We may see repentance or
regret in terms of circles. But, may we ever really return to the same
place twice, on the banks of Heraclitus' river?

Sitaram 21st August 2005 08:37 AM

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

e. e. cummings

Quote:

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

Originally Posted by clueless

What you said about the painting and Beatrice reminded me of Lawrence,
The Plumed Serpent. The main female character – I always forget
characters’ names – had two husbands. The first, an Irish politician
worshipped her, put her in a pedestal; the second, a Mexican
revolutionary general, was her master. Neither of them saw in her a
human being – she was an unreachable queen, a creation of a male
imagination or a slave, dominated by elementary forces. In both cases
she was a prisoner, although Lawrence did not see it that way. He thought
she was free in the second case. The girls in the painting are prisoners
and at least one of them is aware of it and is dreaming of freedom, of
being rescued, of running away.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is an on-line text version of D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au...rence/dh/l41p/

The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. - e. e. cummings

In Pynchon's passage, Varo's painting helps Oedipa to realize that she is
the sort of prisoner which cummings describes.

Varo's painting is the human mind and culture itself, fabricating its world
on the fly, just as our sense of consciousness is fabricated in the brain
from moment to moment. Our world is a heaven or hell of our own
making. Reality is something we devise and there are different kinds of
reality.

In the opening pages of Immortality Milan Kundera speaks at some length
about the state between waking and sleeping.

Robert Ornstein studied the manner in which the limbic system
synthesizes our moment-to-moment experience of consciousness.

Scientists study the transitory state between waking and sleeping:

http://dreaming.diebitch.net/explori...d_dreaming.pdf

Quote:

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

Sometimes the REM systems don’t turn on or off at the same time. For
example, you may awaken partially from REM sleep, before the paralysis
system turns off, so that your body is still paralyzed even though you are
otherwise awake. Sleep paralysis, as this condition is called, can occur
while people are falling asleep (rarely) or waking up (more frequently). If
you don’t know what’s happening, your first experience with sleep
paralysis can terrifying. People typically struggle in a fruitless effort re or
to fully wake up. In fact, such emotional panic reactions are completely
counterproductive; they are likely to stimulate the limbic (emotional)
areas of the brain and cause the REM state to persist. The fact is, sleep
paralysis is harmless. Sometimes when it happens to you, you feel as if
you are suffocating or in the presence of a nameless evil. But this is just
the way your half-dreaming brain interprets these abnormal conditions:
something terrible must be happening! The medieval stories of incubus
attacks (malevolent spirits believed to descend upon and have sex with
sleeping women) probably derived from fantastically over interpreted
experiences of sleep paralysis. The next time you experience sleep
paralysis, simply remember to relax. Remind yourself that you are in the
same state now as you are several hours every night during REM sleep. It
will do you no harm and will pass in a few minutes. Sleep paralysis is not
only nothing to be frightened of, it can be something to be sought after
and cultivated. Whenever you experience sleep paralysis you are on the
threshold REM sleep. You have, as it were, one foot in the dream state
and one in the waking state. Just step over and you’re in the world of lucid
dreams.

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

Sitaram 21st August 2005 09:01 AM

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

A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose

I am glad you brought up Gertrude Stein, since Immortality concerns
Hemingway, and what is a Hemingway without a Gertrude Stein.

My high school teacher enlightened us once by point out that (A rose is a
rose) is a rose; that is, the simple tautology or solipsism itself is
beautiful, like a flower.

=================================

A novel is a long story composed of many little stories or events which we
call episodes.

I spent two hours last night trying to find such a passage in one of Milan
Kundera's novels. I searched three of his novels manually, flipping the
pages. I gave up and went to bed. I couldn't sleep and I though, perhaps
it is really in Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot", but it was not. I was certain
that I had read it in Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." I
was correct! I found what I was looking for, at last, on page 129.

Quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Passing a wolf, a beaver, and a tiger, they came to a wire fence where ostriches were.

There were six of them. When they caught sight of Tamina and Hugo, they
ran toward them. Now bunched up and pressing against the fence, they
stretched out their long necks, stared, and opened their straight, broad
bills. They opened and closed them feverishly, with unbelievable speed,
as if they were trying to outtalk one another. But these bills were
hopelessly mute, making not the slightest sound...

Tamina gazed bewitched, as the ostriches kept on talking more and more
insistently....

"It was as if they were trying to tell me something very important. But
what? What were they trying to tell me?"

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

Much later in the book, I shall have to search where, a reference is made
to this scene. We realize that for Kundera, the behavior of the ostriches
represents the behavior of the majority of people, mouths moving
constantly, urgently, but saying nothing. The reader is fascinated by the
initial scene with the ostriches, wondering what it might mean and what
Kundera is trying to tell us. We are shocked and amused, much later in
the book, when we realize what it is that Kundera is trying to tell us.

Notice how perfectly this device of the Ostriches is INL (Native Language
Independent). Such a device would survive and work in any translation.

=================================

It seems to me that if Varo had an "only this and nothing more" mentality,
then she would not have been a Surrealist. I think she would have been
like that artist who did all the Saturday Evening Post covers, Norman
Rockwell.

http://www.nrm.org/norman/

Of course, it is always possible that I am mistaken. And, even if I am not
mistaken, it is always possible that I am boring.

Question: When is it that a Surrealist is mistaken?

Answer: When they are boring.

The goal of the Surrealist is to capture our imagination. But the
imagination is unique in that it is only in captivity that it finds freedom.

Sitaram 27th August 2005 01:35 PM

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

Milan Kundera on Tragedy

This morning, I would like to touch upon something Milan Kundera brings
up, regarding tragedy, both in The Unbearable Lightness of Being TULOB
and also in The Art of the Novel.

We shall be striving to articulate the nature of tragedy in modern drama,
and how it differs (if it differs) from the tragedy of Shakespeare, and how
they both differ from the tragedies of Sophocles.

As a preface to our exploration of what Kundera said, let us consider our
own choices in a hypothetical scenario in which we are the victim.

Consider this exercise a moral calculus, a what-if scenario in the
spreadsheet of the imagination. It is an interactive
create-your-own-tragedy in which fate, necessity, and your freewill all
interact. This will be an unusual way for you to step into the shoes of
Oedipus and evaluate his choices, for he did have choices, in spite of the
tragic notion of ineluctable Fate.

Imagine yourself and your child being held prisoner by a madman who
has total control over you both. Now, some who read this will be male and
others, female, some shall be old, some shall be young, some with
children of your own. You are free, in this what-if scenario, to imagine
yourselves as a mother with a daughter, or with a son, or as a father with
a daughter or a son.

Now, this mad man, who presently has you in his clutches, is quite well
known. He always operates in exactly the same fashion. He is absolutely
notorious for keeping his word in the bizarre offers of alternatives that he
makes to his prisoners. Since it is a given that the madman will abide by
his word, you must not allow into your reasoning that if you make a
certain choice, that the madman will fail to live up to his word.

The madman has you and your child both securely bound. You see before
you a surgical table with instruments, and next to it a bed. The madman
tells you that you have several choices. Once you both make your choices
and agree to it, he will makes certain that your choice is carried out, and
then you will both be free to go, with no further harm. This scenario is a
modern day Oedipus with a Sophie's Choice twist.

Here are the two broad choices that he presents to you.
Either, (1) You will choose between you which of you will climb upon the
operating table and have your eyes surgically removed (like Oedipus, who
chose to blind himself as his reaction to incest),

OR (2) you will both elect to climb upon the bed and perform some
incestuous act of your choosing.

Within the framework of these two main choices, you have some leeway
of permutations and combinations of who suffers what and who does what
to whom.

Your captor tells you that you will have one day to discuss your options,
and then he will return and ask for your decision, and see that it is carried
out.

He warns you that if you both fail to agree, and fail to make a choice, then
you will both be tortured in the most hideous fashion imaginable, a fate
worse than death, which shall last for weeks before you finally die.

If we really wanted to make this interesting, we could give our madman a
weapon of mass destruction. He could tell you that if you refuse to
choose, then he shall destroy the entire world together with all humanity
and human culture. If we allow this, then you place yourself in a
Christ-like position, as savior of the world, if you choose, at the price of
taking sin upon yourself (for it is said that Christ literally became sin
taking upon himself all the sins of all mankind, past present and yet to be
born).

Now remember, Oedipus hears a prophecy that he shall kill his father and
marry his mother, and when he discovers that it has come to pass, he
puts out his own eyes.

One instructive assignment would be for you to write this as a story, and
compose the dialogue which transpires between parent and child.

Sometimes, life itself is our cruel captor, forcing upon us terrible choices.
Consider the expectant mother who is told that her fetus is seriously
abnormal and the child will be born into a dreadful, pointless life of
suffering and misery. You are then offered the choice of terminating the
pregnancy or giving birth to the child.

I personally knew a man in his eighties who was diagnosed with cancer.
He had the choice of undergoing very uncomfortable chemo and radiation
therapy, in the hope that he might gain several extra years of life. He
chose instead to take his one year of life expectancy, in relative comfort.
During that year, he was able to do a little traveling, eat well, take a drink
or two.

While you are pondering your predicament with your madman, I will now
tell you what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus.

Quote:

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

from The Unbearable Lightness of Being (TUL0B)- page 177

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are
exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal
regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they
had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so
valiently that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became
clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore
murderers.

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

I am always mindful of Socrates point that no person willingly desires
what is bad. Everyone by nature desires what they deem to be good
(even madmen).

I am also always aware of Plato's Euthyphro problem: "Is the good good,
ipso facto, by fiat, simply because God loves it, OR is there something
objective, some inherent quality, in the nature of Goodness that inspires
God to choose it. God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Sarah asks
Abraham to father Ishmael. Madmen try to play God, but God never plays
the role of madman.

Another movie I am going to suggest for consideration in this exploration
of tragedy is Indecent Proposal. I shall mention more about that movie
later, and it will be a SPOILER, so, forewarned is forearmed.

Quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Did they really know?
TULOB page 176 -

Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists; You're the ones
responsible for our country's misfortunes...

And the accused responded: We didn't know! We ere deceived! We were
true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!

In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they
really not know or were they merely making believe?

...

Is a fool on a throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a
fool?

...

It was in this connection that Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus:

Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he
realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the
sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by "not knowing," he put out his
eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.

When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity,
he said to himself, As a result of your "not knowing," this country has lost
its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no
guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you've done? How is it you
aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes you would
have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

The analogy so pleased him that he often used it in conversation with
friends, and his formulation grew increasingly precise and eloquent.

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

I will now turn to what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus in The Art of the
Novel

Afterwards, I will try to gather my thoughts and bring some of this to bear
upon the question regarding the nature of Tragedy (ancient, Elizabethan,
and modern) and the connection between Tragedy and Deity, fate,
destiny, predestination, necessity, chance and freewill choice.

Sitaram 27th August 2005 01:43 PM

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

The Art of the Novel

"The Art of the Novel" - Milan Kundera

(a continuation of Milan Kundera on Tragedy from the post above)

We have seen what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus in The Unbearable
Lightness of Being (TULOB).

Oedipus is a figure who becomes aware of his crime and then seeks his
own punishment of self-inflicted blindness.

Now, let us look at what he says about crime and its punishment in The
Art of the Novel (TAOTN).

Kundera discusses the Comic and the Tragic in the world of Kafka.

We may see Kafka as that elusive fellow which Socrates spoke of in the
Symposium, the one who is master of both Comedy and Tragedy.

Quote:

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

from The Art of the Novel, Part 5 "Somewhere Behind" - page 106

(In The Castle) it is a small consolation to the engineer to know that his
story is comic. He is trapped in the joke of his own life like a fish in a
bowl; he doesn't find it funny. Indeed, a joke is a joke only if you are
outside the bowl; by contrast, the Kafkan takes us inside, into the guts of
the joke, into the horror of the comic.

In the world of the Kafkan, the comic is not a counterpoint to the tragic as
in Shakespeare; it's not there to make the tragic more bearable by
lightening the tone; it doesn't accompany the tragic, (the Comic) destroys
(and annihilates the Tragic) in the egg (while it is still inchoate and
nascent) and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation to be found
in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy. The engineer looses his
homeland and every body laughs.

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

(Sitaram experiments with adding a soundtrack of applause and laughter
to Silence of the Lambs)

Quote:

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

from TAotN, Part 5 "Somewhere Behind" - page 105

Raskolnikov cannot bear the weight of his guilt, and to find peace he
consents to his own punishment of his own free will.

In Kafka, the logic is reversed. The person punished does not know the
reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so
unbearable that to find peace the accused needs to find a justification for
his penalty: the punishment seeks the offense.

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

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s70778.htm

Quote:

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

from The Bible as Shakespeare before Shakespeare

David Zane Mairowitz: Well of course Jews in Prague at that time are Jews
anywhere in Eastern Europe at that time who were always considered to
be the outsiders and did not have all the rights that non-Jews had, and
couldn't work wherever they wanted and so on. And for someone like
Kafka, who immediately accepts the moral judgment of society against
himself, if somebody points to him on the street and said, 'Dirty Jew',
instead of defending himself, he takes that upon himself. One thing we
know about Kafka is that he was always fascinated by animals. You find
animals in his stories all the time. Of course he transforms himself into a
cockroach and a dog, and a mouse, and so on. And a lot of this has to do
with real epithets that were used against Jews at that time on the streets.
Someone would see a Jew and say, 'You dirty dog', or 'You're nothing
more than a cockroach', or something like that. For Kafka, this became a
kind of literal condemnation which he accepted into himself. OK. 'You point
a finger at me and call me a dog, the next thing I have to write is a story
about a dog,' in which a dog has human qualities; or he transforms
himself into a cockroach. A lot of this has to do with the anti-Semitism that
was absolutely rampant all around him at the time.

...

the mythical Bible, that is, the (Old Testament) is a huge book of stories
where man is ... totally rotten, it's not at all like the New Testament. In
the Bible you see no-one is saved, the (essential nature of man) is to fail,
to be evil; David is an adulterer... So I think Kafka knows about that but
he has the freedom that Jews have (this is my opinion of course, it's not
at all something that I can theorize in a way that would be orthodox). I
think there's a kind of freedom that Jews have because there's no dogma.
You know, the Bible is Shakespeare before Shakespeare; it's just a mass
of Macbeths, of King Lears, of Richard IIIs, but it's a vision of mankind
which is absolutely merciless, and so it's true to reality. So I think that it
gives Jews the freedom to look at human beings as being tempted.
They're tempted beings. They're not saved, they're tempted.

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

http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/tragedy/

Quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from Abandonment - Blanchot:

The tragic heroine is thrown against necessity; she is abandoned to what
she cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom, necessity: the former
breaks against the latter. The grandeur of tragedy lies in her rebellion.
She is dashed to pieces - but for a time, she brought herself into a
splendid freedom.

...

Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on
dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance
of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he
is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his
actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking
to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of
indecision, a yes-no without resolve.

‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not
take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he
cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot
open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd.

...

Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can
no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a
lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to
be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’.
Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one
another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the
power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not
triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

...

What can be retrieved of Greek tragedy today? Schelling and Hölderlin
understood each in his own way the fatedness of the tragic for our age.

‘Our age’: but what does this mean? Schmidt, to whose excellent On
Germans and Other Greeks I am indebted here, gives a clue: Kant argues
that limits do not merely belong to human experience but are its
condition; then it is possible to write what might be called a ‘tragedy of
reason’. See the opening sentence of the first Critique with the reference
to the ‘peculiar fate of reason’.

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

By the way, take a look at what L. James Hammond has to say about
Tragedy and "the desire to die".

http://www.ljhammond.com/cwgt/02.htm#33

Sitaram 27th August 2005 01:59 PM

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Oedipus' Tragic Choice

If you did choose to do the exercise of the "what-if" scenario, and if you
chose self-inflicted blindness, then it seems to me that you choose to
imitate Oedipus in his horror at the thought of incest. Why does Oedipus
blind himself? Does Oedipus have a choice?

For me, the greatest tragedy in Oedipus is that he chose to blind himself
when he could have chosen to get on with his life.

Hamlet resists the temptation to harm himself, and in the end, he gains
revenge and justice, even if it costs him his life.

There are honorable and valiant ways to sac

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