All Time is Unredeemable

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

In the Knowledge Derived from Experience.

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

EAST COKER
(No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

Sometimes Fate is like a Small Sandstorm

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore) 

This has  also been used in the scintillating trailer of Innaritu's forthcoming  movie 'Biutiful'.Javier Bardem's power packed role in this movie has already fetched him the best actor at Cannes

Mario Vargas Llosa : Peruvian Humour Unveiled

I just finished Mario Vargas Llosa's 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter'. It was a rambling piece of work. A novel which had a innovative narrative technique with eclectic array of soap opera like short stories without a clear end. The main story which is a sort of  semi autobiographical  is about the love affair between Mario with his 'distant' Aunt (Julia) who is 14 years older to him. There is no second distinct story rather we find dozens of different soap opera style fascinating stories. These amusing stories are manufactured by a cranky somewhat brilliant scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho. This  Bolivian scriptwriter's piquant radio plays is the unique part of the novel . The novel alternates between  Mario's real life narrative and Camacho's soap opera plays.  Camacho's intriguing different short stories are quite fascinating like a superb soap opera but at the end of the novel the stories get jumbled up and intertwined in the most absurd ways and in most cases leading to the  sudden annihilation of many characters due to some natural catastrophe. 

The sharp funny moments that dominate the narrative makes the novel quite a real fun to read. This would be one of the most funniest fascinating novels that I have read. The others like this which would come to my mind are Kundera's ' TheLast Waltz' ;V S Naipaul's 'The House of Mr. Biswas' and definitely Marquez's 'Hundred Years of Solitude' and also Rushdie's 'Midnights Children'. In terms of humour I think it stands among these masterpieces.

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Art of Fiction

Mario Vargas Llosa got the 2010 Nobel prize for literature for “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”. He is a fantastic writer. I recently  read his "Feast of the Goat". Reading the book I thought that the  brilliant inter temporal and non-linear narrative structure that we see in Alejandro González Iñárritu's movies can be inspired by Llosa. In the interspersed use of time we can see Faulkner' influence who was one of  Llosa's favourite authors

I recently read his quite interesting article that he wrote long back in New York Times in 1984 'The art of fiction'. Some insightful marvelous excerpts that I found are -

 "In fact, novels do lie - they can't help doing so - but that's only one part of the story. The other is that, throgh lying, they express a cruious truth, which can only be expressed in a veiled and concealed fasion, masquerading as what it is not. This statement has the ring of gibberish. But actually it's quite simple. Men are not content with their lot and nearly all - rich or poor, brilliant or mediocre, famous or obscure - would like to have a life different from the one they lead. To (cunningly) appease this appetite, fiction was born. It is written and read to provide human beings with lives they're unresigned to not having. The germ of every novel contains an element of non-resignation and desire."

"Real life flows without pause, lacks order, is chaotic, each story merging with all stories and hence never having a beginning or ending. Life in a work of fiction is a simulation in which that dizzying disorder achieves order, organization, cause and effect, beginning and end."

"Fiction betrays life, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally, encapsulating it in a weft of words that reduce it in scale and place it within the reader's reach. Thus the reader can judge it, understand it and, above all, live it with an impunity not granted him in real life."

"At the heart of all fictional work there burns a protest. Their authors created them since they were unable to live them, and their readers (and believers) encounter in these phantom creatures the faces and adventures needed to enhance their own lives. That is the truth expressed by the lies in fiction - the lies that we ourselves are, thelies that console us and make up for our longings and frustrations. How trustworthy then is the testimony of a novel on the very society that produced it? Were those men really that way? They were, in the sense that that was how they wanted to be, how they envisioned themselves loving, suffering and rejoicing. Those lies do not document their lives but rather their driving demons - the dreams that intoxicated them and made the lives they led more tolerable. An era is not populated merely by flesh and blood creatures, but also by the phantom creatures into which they are transformed in order to break the barriers that confine them."

Dostoevesky : The Great Seer

There are great works and greater works of fiction but not close to that of Kafka, Camus and Dostoevesky. The work by these triplets are experiences that not all can undergo as it makes one to reflect in a way that may crack the moribund cosy fragile structure in which we all seem to survive. This is the reason that these works are not for 'faint hearted' people as these sort of works makes one  to reflect and the narrative exudes the experience into the reader providing some sort of unease. As Dostoevesky said "It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word." Einstein had once said that "Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss". What is in the narration of Dostoevesky that it spellbinds thinking people across the spectrum. An evolutionary experience is not necessarily joyful but it may be the pathway to 'real joy'. Peaks are reached through arduous and exhausting paths and reading Dostevesky one also reaches the peak of novel writing. A great  work of art has the characteristic of closing the gap between the seer and the object of art,  or in other words the concept portrayed by the  artist  would be an experience in itself for the observer . This is what we can experience in Dostoevesky's Crime and Punishment.
 
The story revolves around the crime of double murder committed by the main protagonist Roskolnikov and then its ramifications. While reading the novel we can experience in the most acute way the near full experience of crime and we are sucked into the psyche of Roskolnikov who commits the crime. The narration is such that we also experience the inner working of the capillaries of the criminal and after the novel is complete we may feel our self as an exhausted  person who was also part of the event. Crime and Punishment cannot be just characterized as a psychological thriller but this a work comprising of astonishing  philosophical undertones. As in any great novel characters are just not individuals rather they are metaphors in large scheme of things. Roskolnikov portrays here the disenchanted bright youth which undergoes unwarranted crime due to the distorted and malaised society in which he lives. "Roskol' niki were sort of gnostic groups who protested against the church and adhered to old rituals opposing the present established authorities. In Crime and Punishment Roskolnikov also is the disenchanted 'youth'  with the socialist and reformist undercurrents prevalent in his society. He finds his own solution to resolve his problems. His 'Napoleonic'  solution for his miseries is based on the premise that if  unworthy people are eliminated for the betterment of a brighter person than the crime is not a crime but a just act and beneficial for the overall society.

"I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people left and right to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all... well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fat that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short of bloodshed either, if that bloodshed - often of innocent persons fighting bravely in the defense of ancient law - were of use to their cause. It's remarkable in fact, that the majority indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals - more or less, of course. Otherwise it's hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to retain in the common rut is what they can't submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it. The common people preserve and populate the world, the extraordinary move the world and lead it to its goal...."


But Dostoevesky in Crime and Punishment shows that there are exterior laws that bring order and a crime committed gets penance through suffering of the soul and the act of redemption would lead the person to a 'gradual renewal, his gradual rebirth, his gradual transformation from one world to another , of his growing acquaintance with a new,hitherto complete unknown reality' . The other major protagonist in the novel is  Sonya (or "Sofya" meaning "wisdom" in Greek ) is sort of alter ego of Roskolnikov and she shows him the way to redemption. She undergoes suffering  throughout the novel and she provides the courage and wisdom to Roskolnikov to achieve redemption through penance. He loves her with a reverential attitude, "I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity."..."They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other."

It is not easy for a novice like me to analyze thoroughly a complex novel such as this. But it is always pleasure trying to understand the work of such great masters as Dostoevesky who is considered more as a prophet than a novelist.

'Herzog' by Saul Bellow

 Saul Bellow is the first proper American novelist that I have read. Herzog was an  ecstatic, enriching and soul searching  novel for me . A very interesting novel which is sort of  meditations of a man named 'Moses Herzog' on self and the human condition. Herzog writes 'what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization." 
 
Herzog is a man who lives in contradictions while being both profound and  mad at the same instance or say precisely a matured 'unpractical' man. "If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.".."In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too" 
The novel is the rapturous exploration of the mind of Herzog where he strips and scrutinies the  individual ,the society and the  human condition . Through out the novel we find this unbundling or outpouring of the mind of Herzog. Herzog does this explorations through sort of a peculiar exercise by writing letters to people which are never sent. "One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment."

One of the interesting things about the novel is that there is no proper story line. It is just an egocentric ruminations or say philosophical vent out of Moses Herzog. We also get a good glimpse into the lives and peculiarities of American Jews. The 1960's America which was undergoing a societal, cultural and individual transition somewhat resembles the transition phase that urban India presently is undergoing. 

The spontaneous letters that Herzog writes is the soul of the novel. It has silly ponderings to sublime thought formation. His letters are addressed to eclectic array of people from Nietzsche to Kierkegaard to President Eisenhower to his ex wife to his mother who had died some thirty years ago. The novel is a sort of a metaphor of the mind which erratically delves into things that reason itself cannot fathom. Herzog engages with people in his letter in his most truthful way. In the fascinating letter to Nietzsche he writes, 

""No, really, Herr Nietzsche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make us able to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ordinary, practical, thieving, stinking, unilluminated, sodden rabble, not only the laboring rabble, but even worse the "educated" rabble with its books and concerts and lectures, its liberalism and its romantic theatrical "loves" and "passions"--it all deserves to die, it will die. Okay. Still, your extremists must survive. No survival, no Amor Fati. Your immoralists also eat meat. They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers. Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those the Christianity you condemn. Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption. I send you greetings from this mere border of grassy temporal light, and wish you happiness, wherever you are. Yours, under the veil of Maya, M.E.H."


Sigmund Freud in his masterwork 'Interpretation of Dreams' puts forward this ingenious argument that unfulfilled desires of a person are accomplished through his/her dreams. Dreams in a sense are an outlet for say repressed thoughts. In Herzog also we find that writing letters has this purging attribute where his unexpressed thoughts are poured out in his letters. This helps him to think through various thought processes in his life and reach conclusions in a way. If we also realize that while completely thinking through a process of thought we aspire for a convincing conclusion which is reached by going through various pros and cons. But the experience of this whole process matures the mind and brings joy in a sense. At the end, Herzog seems to have reached such a joyful state where he is now relishing his solitude. He grows though these letters that he wrote to become a 'sane' person. "The knowledge that he was done with these letters...At this time he had no messages for anyone.Nothing.Not a single word."