It must have been this that I had been looking for; it was what I wanted. How aware I was of what I discovered in my heart! Peace, sleep, death, time! I was both here and there, in peace and waging a bloody war, insomniac as a restless ghost and also interminably somnolent, present in an eternal night and also in time that flowed away inexorably.Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (1997)
Friday, October 3, 2014
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Thursday, September 25, 2014
She shrank within herself and tried to hide her voluptuous form as much as possible. But her whole body was blooming like white kathana flowers. How long could she veil it from the eyes of the world? Even through the cracked mud walls of this ramshackle house, her growing body yielded tantalising glimpses to prying eyes, like the broken, scintillating image of the moon on the ripples of Jagalia.Indira Goswami, The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker (2004)
Benedict Anderson demonstrated with much subtlety and originality that nations were not the determinate products of given sociological conditions such as language or race or religion; they had been, in Europe and everywhere else in the world, imagined into existence.Partha Chatterjee, Whose Imagined Community (1991)
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Once upon a time the birds held a conference. The great bird-god, the Simurgh, had sent a messenger, a hoopoe, to summon them to his legendary home far away atop the circular mountain of Qâf, which girdled the earth. The birds weren’t particularly keen on the idea of this dangerous-sounding quest. They tried to make excuses—a previous engagement, urgent business elsewhere. Just thirty birds embarked on the pilgrimage. Leaving home, crossing the frontier of their land, stepping across that line, was in this story a religious act, their adventure a divine requirement rather than a response to an ornithological need. Love drove these birds as it drove the mermaid, but it was the love of God. On the road there were obstacles to overcome, dreadful mountains, fear- some chasms, allegories and challenges. In all quests the voyager is con- fronted by terrifying guardians of territory, an ogre here, a dragon there. So far and no further, the guardian commands. But the voyager must refuse the other’s definition of the boundary, must transgress against the limits of what fear prescribes. He steps across that line. The defeat of the ogre is an opening in the self, an increase in what it is possible for the voyager to be.Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line (speech delivered at Yale University, 2002)
So it was with the thirty birds. At the end of the story, after all their vicissitudes and overcomings, they reached the summit of the mountain of Qâf, and discovered that they were alone. The Simurgh wasn’t there. After all they had endured, this was a displeasing discovery. They made their feelings known to the hoopoe who started the whole thing off; whereupon the hoopoe explained to them the punning etymology that revealed their journey’s secret meaning. The name of the god broke down into two parts: “si,” meaning “thirty,” and “murgh,” which is to say “birds.” By crossing those frontiers, conquering those terrors and reaching their goal, they themselves were now what they were looking for. They had become the god they sought.
These women would prowl in the night, haunting the spacious backyards of houses, to poke and probe the washed dirty cloth pieces hanging out there, for the tell-tale marks of menstruation, hoping to find some signs so that they could get their vicious pleasure in denouncing the girls as outcasts...Indira Goswami, The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker
Golokdham: A game of dice. In the dice board, portraits of various abodes of Hindu Gods are drawn. As the final goal, a Golokdham, which is known as the abode of Lord Krishna with his consort Radha and the gopis, is depicted. The dice player who reaches it, crossing all the hurdles wins the game. It was a popular game among the women of South Kamrup in those days (1948).
Friday, April 4, 2014
interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down - perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion - in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutationroland barthes, from work to text (1971)
Monday, March 31, 2014
for freud, as is well known, the human psyche is a stratification of tokens or representatives. one term is constituted by the manifest meaning of behaviour, another, by its latent or real meaning (it is, for instance, the substratum of the dream); as for the third term, it is here also a correlation of the first two: it is the dream itself in its totality, the parapraxis (a mistake in speech or behaviour) or the neurosis, conceived as compromises, as economies effected thanks to the joining of a form (the first term) and an intentional function (the second term)roland barthes, mythologies (1957)
true, as far as perception is concerned, writing and pictures, for instance, do not call upon the same type of consciousness; and even with pictures, one can use many kinds of reading: a diagram lends itself to signification more than a drawing, a copy more than an original, and a caricature more than a portrait. but this is the point: we are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification.roland barthes, mythologies (1957)
myth grows spiral wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted. its growth is a continuous process whereas its structure remains discontinuous. if this is the case, we should assume that it closely corresponds, in the realm of the spoken word, to a crystal in the realm of physical matter.levi-strauss, the structural study of myth (1958)
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Saturday, March 29, 2014
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