Monday, March 16, 2009

The Fact of Crap-Ness

Monsieur Fanon, Forgive me.
It's been a long time since I read anything substantial. I tried reading 'Waiting for Godot'(Samuel Beckett) and 'No Exit'(Jean-Paul Sartre) with very limited success.I came across certain poems of Charles Baudelaire. HBH Morrison was quite in love with them.My own favourite piece of poetry is from Book II of Paradise Lost.Playing the absolute nincompoop, I came across it while reading 'His Dark Materials'.
Here Goes:
"Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage."
Sheer brilliance. As is HDM. I still remember how I was reading the third book a day before my chemistry paper in Class XIIth. It was intricate and exciting to the point where you're rendered open-mouthed with awe.In terms of Cinema, Bunuel and Kubrick have managed to do that to me.In terms of music, hail Morrison.
Sociology paper tomorrow.We have 3 referral texts: 2 that deal with the institution of race and 1 that deals with the institution of family.The text on family, albeit lengthy and boring in parts, makes for very good reading if one is to read it detached from exam mania.Certain explorations, and certain assertions, are so simplistic that a reminder of their existence or the rationale behind them manage to
bring that flash of clarity in your mind. Frantz Fanon, in his quite verbose and abstruse text on race, has quoted Mian Jean- Paul Sartre in places. Sartre's works have never really found a good reader in me due to my sense of impatience with his form of writing.Yet,'Antisemite and the Jew' made a lot of sense and also brought forward certain inherent characteristics of humankind which are contradictory to the point of splitting the mind.Every field has its Gods and I believe human nature was best understood and explained by the absurdists and existentialists, particularly Camus(I know Ipshita shall mock me for this) and Sartre.To be fair to classmates, I am smug. I like it this way. However, I am not self-obsessed. I am obsessed with the realisation of the self. Which is why I watch 'Gunda'.

1 comment:

Wandermust said...

Wah re wah, all hail Camus!!:)
After the expected, I thought to comment because some of my favourite pieces came from His Dark Materials, too, and I felt like a complete fool. William Blake, anyone?