Just a place to jot down my musings.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

On hunting birds and God

I just came across Galway Kinnell’s beautiful To Christ Our Lord on this blog post by Alan Jacobs:


The legs of the elk punctured the snow’s crust
And wolves floated lightfooted on the land
Hunting Christmas elk living and frozen;
Inside snow melted in a basin, and a woman basted
A bird spread over coals by its wings and head.

Snow had sealed the windows; candles lit
The Christmas meal. The Christmas grace chilled
The cooked bird, being long-winded and the room cold.
During the words a boy thought, is it fitting
To eat this creature killed on the wing?

He had killed it himself, climbing out
Alone on snowshoes in the Christmas dawn,
The fallen snow swirling and the snowfall gone,
Heard its throat scream as the gunshot scattered,
Watched it drop, and fished from the snow the dead.

He had not wanted to shoot. The sound
Of wings beating into the hushed air
Had stirred his love, and his fingers
Froze in his gloves, and he wondered,
Famishing, could he fire? Then he fired.

Now the grace praised his wicked act. At its end
The bird on the plate
Stared at his stricken appetite.
There had been nothing to do but surrender,
To kill and to eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder.

At night on snowshoes on the drifting field
He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?
The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.
Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,
The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.

Reading it on the first clear night after the first real snowfall of this winter, I could not help but think of the beginning of the Rāmāyaṇa and of the birth of poetry in Sanskrit. The great seer (and composer of the Rāmāyaṇa) Vālmīki witnesses a hunter killing one of a pair of birds mating. Appalled, and overtaken by grief, he curses the hunter with what forms the first poem in Sanskrit:


mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ |
yat krauñca-mithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāma-mohitam ||

I wrote about this poem and about its ingenious re-reading by the medieval Śrīvaiṣṇava commentator Govindarāja earlier on this blog.



Friday, December 21, 2012

The moral lessons of The Hobbit

After having defended Peter Jackson’s Hobbit from some of its most common critiques, I shall now turn to some of the things I enjoyed the most about the movie. Most of these come from Tolkien’s Hobbit, but again, just because a story sounds good in one mode does not automatically mean that it will “click” when told in a different mode.

The great challenge in a visual depiction of the Quest of Erebor is this: this is an event on a much smaller scale than the War of the Ring. For viewers who are looking for epic set-piece battles (or as a little birdie put it to me, for those “who don't necessarily share the love for the books and just walked in to see Orlando Bloom buckle his swash”), there really isn’t anything in the Quest of Erebor that provides this, except for the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. Even the One Ring, which is mildly important for the War of the Ring, plays a minor role here. Its importance wasn’t even recognized by most people at the time of the Quest!

But as Tolkien repeatedly tells us, small does not have to mean insignificant, and this applies to everything, from the hobbits to the Quest itself. 

Thursday, December 20, 2012

A fanboy defends The Hobbit

Anybody who knows me knows of my obsession with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s legendarium. This is not the place to enumerate the reasons for my obsession. My goal is far narrower: to explain why I loved Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The Critiques
In good Indic fashion, I begin with the pūrvapakṣa, the opponent(s’|’s) view. A number of criticisms have been leveled against Peter Jackson’s Hobbit enterprise. At the root of many of them is his decision to split the original book into three three-hour films, only one of which has been released so far. (His Lord of the Rings runs close to twelve hours, but then it covers nearly a thousand pages of text.) This opened him up to criticism from multiple directions, even before the movie came out:
  • that his motivation is purely financial; that, since fanboys of Tolkien are going to watch whatever he serves up, why not make three times as much money by making three movies?
  • that the original story is far too thin to support nine hours of film, which will force him to draw out some scenes interminably and possibly to add extra plotlines
  • that his intended demographic is no longer the demographic that Tolkien targeted with his original book
I made some of these criticisms myself, while also recognizing (only slightly ruefully) that I fall squarely into Jackson’s target “sucker fanboy” demographic.

Now that “Episode I” is out, critics have duly rehashed all these critiques. They claim that the movie plods along interminably; that it should really have been trimmed down to 100 minutes (which would have the added benefit of making it more accessible to children); that a number of changes have been made to the plotline that simply make no sense other than adding screentime (stone giants! Jar-Jar Binks, I mean, Radagast!), and so on. They have also made two additional critiques:
  • that the movie is far more violent than the book, and thus violates Tolkien’s vision (among other things)
  • that the story has been changed fundamentally, in ways that are completely unnecessary (in particular, referring to the alteration of the Battle of Azanulbizar and the survival of Azog)
My Response
I loved every minute of the movie. There wasn’t a single instant when I was bored. Part of this is certainly because I’m a fanboy, but I also didn’t go in expecting to love it. Frankly, after having all these criticisms, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I loved it because of Jackson’s decisions, because of what he had added, and because of the changes he had come up with. Part of this post is me trying to reason out why these things matter to me, but not to other critics, fans, and critic-fans. I suspect at least part of this is that I explicitly hold the following view, which some of these critics may reject:
Peter Jackson’s Hobbit is not Tolkien’s Hobbit. And that is an entirely good thing.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Boredom

When asked to define “boredom” recently, I came up with this ‘masterpiece’:
Boredom: an external symptom of the deeper inability to be at peace with oneself, characterized by restlessness and by discontent at the inability of external stimuli to permanently fill a soul-shaped void in one’s life. 
(Yes, I did tag this wisdom. Tags don’t always mean what they mean; their vācyârtha can be overriden by a lakṣyârtha, and sometimes they suggest a vyaṅgyârtha over and above and/or alongside that.)


Wednesday, December 12, 2012

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

These lines from Tennyson’s Ulysses are recited by M (played by Dame Judi Dench) in the recent James Bond release, Skyfall. The whole poem, available here, is gloriously recited here by Sir Lewis Casson.







Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Appayya Dīkṣita on pratīpam (“upstream”)

Continuing our series on arthâlaṅkāras from Appayya Dīkṣita’s Kuvalayānanda, let’s look at the figure called pratīpam. It’s usually called “reversal” or “contradiction” or, perhaps most accurately, “inversion”, but I’ve chosen the etymologically accurate “upstream” instead. “Against the flow”, “against the grain” would all fit in with what the name means. But why is it used here?

[pratīpam]

[1]
pratīpam upamānasyôpameyatva-prakalpanam |
tval-locana-samaṃ padmaṃ tvad-vaktra-sadṛśo vidhuḥ ||

[2]
anyôpameya-lābhena varṇyasyânādaraś ca tat |
alaṃ garveṇa te vaktra kāntyā candro bhavādṛśaḥ ||

[3]
varṇyôpameya-lābhena tathânyasyâpy anādaraḥ |
kaḥ kraurya-darpas te mṛtyo tvat-tulyāḥ santi hi striyaḥ ||

[4]
varṇyenânyasyôpamāyā aniṣpatti-vacaś ca tat |
mithyā-vādo hi mugdhâkṣi tvan-mukhâbhaṃ kilâmbujam ||

[5]
pratīpam upamānasya kaimarthyam api manyate |
dṛṣṭaṃ ced vadanaṃ tanvyāḥ kiṃ padmena kim indunā ||

The figure called pratīpa has five different, but related, definitions:
[1] When the yardstick of comparison is imagined to be the thing being described. Thus: “the lotus is like your eye; the moon like your face.” Here the natural order of things (i.e., the thing being described is compared to the yardstick) is inverted.

[2] When the thing being described is treated with contempt because of another (i.e., the yardstick) being obtained. Thus: “Enough of your arrogance, o Face; the moon is your rival in terms of beauty.”

[3] When the other (i.e., the yardstick) is treated with contempt because of the thing being described. Thus: “What’s is your cruelty, Death? Women are your rivals.”

[4] When the impossibility of the other being a yardstick is established by the thing being described. Thus: “O girl with lovely eyes, it’s totally false that the lotus is like your face.” (This essentially comes down to negating an assertion of the type [1].)

[5] When the pointlessness of any yardstick is indicated. Thus: “when the slender girl’s face is seen, who cares about the lotus? who cares about the moon?”



Auxiliary verbs, a roadmap

Nothing of substance is discussed here. I just want to collect hyperlinks to all of my posts on auxiliary verbs in one place.

We began with auxiliary verbs in English.

We then turned to French, beginning with an overview of the French verbal system, and then turned to compound verbs, and finally concluded with a session on the vagaries of the French passive.

Finally, we moved to German, beginning with an overview of the German verbal system, and then finally getting down to auxiliaries, modal and non-modal, in German.

Fin.



Auxiliary verbs, in German, part two

Too long have I tarried; I shall finish this series ere dawn.


So what are the various forms that a German verb can take? We’re talking here not of specific conjugations but of different combinations of tense, aspect, and mood (usually abbreviated tam). Like  English, these are usually listed in infinitive form, but the sequence of infinitives in German is the reverse of the English sequence. In addition to the Präsens and Präteritum, we will see forms generated from (a) the non-modal complex infinitive, (b) the future infinitive, and from it, (c) the future perfect infinitive.

Participial Past Tense
The non-modal complex infinitive takes one of two forms: 
past participle sein, or past participle haben.

Like French, but unlike modern English (if you exclude Tolkien-esque “Out of the Great Sea unto Middle-earth I am come” sentences), German uses both sein and haben as auxiliary verbs to give rise to the non-modal complex infinitive. Verbs strictly take one or the other (more or less—but this being German, less rather than more).

When haben is conjugated in the Präsens, the verbal form so generated is the Perfekt; when it is conjugated in the Präteritum, the verbal form so generated is the Plusquamperfekt



The highest reality of all

vaṃśī-vibhūṣita-karān nava-nīradâbhāt
pītâmbarād aruṇa-bimba-phalâdharôṣṭhāt |
pūrṇêndu-sundara-mukhād aravinda-netrāt
kṛṣṇāt paraṃ kim api tattvam ahaṃ na jāne ||

This is an oft-recited verse in praise of Kṛṣṇa, but I stumbled across Pandit Jasraj’s version of it for the first time recently. The verse is quite straightforward, but possesses great beauty in its simplicity. Here is an attempt at a translation.


A hand ornamented by a bamboo-flute,
A complexion like a fresh monsoon rain-cloud,
A yellow garment,
A lower lip, red as the red bimba fruit,
A face, beautiful like the full moon,
A pair of eyes, like lotuses

        ——greater than that Kṛṣṇa,
        there’s simply nothing I know.



I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this verse was by the great Mughal-era Advaita scholar Madhusūdana Sarasvatī. Digging a little deeper, I found this verse to be part of his upasaṃhāra (conclusion) to his Gūḍârtha-dīpikā (“Lamp for Hidden Meanings”), a commentary on Śaṅkarācārya’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. It turns out that Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, in addition to / despite his Advaitic leanings (depending on which way you swing), was a fervent devotee of Kṛṣṇa and held that bhakti to Kṛṣṇa was a path fully equal to, and distinct from, the renunciatory path leading to the Advaitic ideal of kaivalya





Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

About Me

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”