The Silencing

The Silencing of Theo van Gogh.

The Dangers of Relativism.

I think relativism is the dangerous death of liberalism. If you will justify anything that anybody does because it comes from their tradition, it means you abdicate your moral sense and you cease to be a moral being. Going back to the article you mentioned which talks about the question of women, if you were to take religion away as the justification, nobody would tolerate that for a minute. The kinds of limitations that women have been placed under and the crimes against women in the name of religion are so profound, and yet somehow people don't get as agitated about them as when the same things are done by somebody who wasn't using God as the reason. That seems like nonsense to me.

-Salman Rushdie, in conversation with Gauri Viswanathan of Columbia University.

Some excerpts from the conversation which was published in The Hindu this month. I adore this man to an atom!

VIII

Lest I should know you too easily, you play with me.

You blind me with flashes of laughter to hide your tears.

I know, I know your art;

You never say the word you would.

Lest I should prize you not, you elude me in a thousand ways.

Lest I should mix you with the crowd, you stand aside.

I know, I know your art;

You never walk the path you would.

Your claim is more than others; that is why you are silent.

With a playful carelessness you avoid my gifts.

I know, I know your art;

You never accept what you would.

Francesca- by Ezra Pound.

You came in out of the night
And there were flowers in your hand, 
Now you will come out of a confusion of people, 
Out of a turmoil of speech about you. 

I who have seen you amid the primal things 
Was angry when they spoke your name
IN ordinary places.
 I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind, 
And that the world should dry as a dead leaf, 
Or as a dandelion see-pod and be swept away, 
So that I might find you again, 
Alone.

Heinrich Theodor Böll- nobel lecture 1972.

Writing is - at least for me - movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen - and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives - on paper to boot! - towards incarnation. In this respect there can be no successful literature, nor would there be any successful music or painting, because no one can already have seen the object it is striving to become, and in this respect everything that is superficially called modern, but which is better named living art, is experiment and discovery - and transient, can be estimated and measured only in its historical relativity, and it appears to me irrelevant to speak of eternal values, or to seek them. How will we survive without this gap, this remainder, which can be called irony, be called poetry, be called God, fiction, or resistance?

-Heinrich Theodor Böll, nobel lecture 1972.

On the importance of humanity over patriotism

Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine. Therefore it hurts me deeply when the cry of rejection rings loud against the West in my country with the clamour that Western education can only injure us.


-Tagore

6 impossible things

""I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, some times I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

When you dare to dream, many marvels can be accomplished. The trouble is, most people never start dreaming their impossible dream. "

p.s: found this in an old newsletter today. loved it enough to keep it.

The Ending

He sat by the southern window after the sun had set. It was the best hour to view the Taj- the saddest. He heard nothing, just the silence of the completed mausoleum free of labourers and architects. Not a leaf stirred in the garden, the river still like a mirror. The bazaar and the caravanserai were empty, not even a beggar stooped for alms before the mosque's closed door. The Emperor had left with his soldiers on a campaign far from Agra.

He saw the Chota Mimar crossing the mountains on a mule as he returned home to Persia, stopping every now and then to cast a look back at the queen's tomb - glowing in the dark like the heart of an angel.

the ending of The Accountant, from the Japanese Wife by Kunal Basu.

Byron's

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper - even a rag like this - ,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that's his.

from Don Juan

Milk (2010)

Dan White: Society can't exist without the family.
Harvey Milk: We're not against that.
Dan White: Can two men reproduce?
Harvey Milk: No, but God knows we keep trying.


-Milk

Milk (2010)

Politics is theater. It doesn't matter if you win. You make a statement. You say, 'I'm here, pay attention to me.'
-Milk

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.


-Wislawa Szymborska

Passing Time

Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning.

-Maya Angelou