28th Edition Of Shadow Dancing With Mind and Celebrating 250K Hits..

Celebrating 250,000 hits and more on my blog with 390 followers with my 28^th Editions of Shadow Dancing With Mind. I am grateful for the loyal friends and critics who made my blogging journey all the more worthwhile. Their thoughts and encouragement that kept me going on and on…

In this edition, you will find many interesting thoughts, stories and poetry but there is something that touched me to the core… The 10 Bomb Blasts in Bodh Gaya which shattered the peace of the most serene temples of Buddhism, the place where Buddha himself attained peace…

Anyhow, here you go with topics in this 28^th Edition, if you like something, please click to read more, I am sure you will not be disappointed…

THOUGHTS THIS WEEK:

Commenting Is dead?

Recently I have been wondering why there are not many comments on my blog post. Started having doubts on my writing capabilities and content that I am sharing with my followers. After digging a little deeper I found that though there are not many comments but my hit rate on the posts are going up steadily. From 100 per day to 1000’s (An average of 500 per day, and recently crossed 250,000 hits), its been going upwards…  so what do you think is happening?

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“The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga” By Carl Jung

As early as 1912, in Transformation and Symbols of the Libido, Jung provided psychological interpretations of passages in the Upanishads and the Rig Veda.

"Indian philosophy is namely the interpretation given to the precise condition of the non-ego, which affects our personal psychology, however independent from us it remains. It sees the aim of human development as bringing about an approach to and connection between the specific nature of the non- ego and the conscious ego. Tantra yoga then gives a representation of the condition and the developmental phases of this impersonality, as it itself in its own way produces the light of a higher  supra-personal consciousness."

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TALKING POINT: Einstein and Tagore - 19th August1930

Bertrand Russel said once for Tagore, “I regret I cannot agree with Tagore. His talk about the infinite is vague nonsense. The sort of language that is admired by many Indians unfortunately does not, in fact, mean anything at all.” And I believe … Scientists and logicians are handicapped by the limitations of sense perception. I am happy that someone like Einstein has the humility to accept it and some like Stephen Hawking (He went on to famously proclaim, “God Does Not Exist”)feel that what they know, is absolute truth.

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THE READER:

Don't Kill Him (OSHO) - by Ma Ananda Sheila

A book by Ma Anand Sheela (Sheela Ambalal Patel) Secretary of Osho (He was called Bhagwan Rajneesh by his disciples) from 1981-85, about her life and experiences with Osho, and account of, as she said in the book, “building an entire commune in Oregon and how in fit of rage, Osho destroyed it, after I resigned from his services in the year 1985.” Personally I feel that "Don't Kill Him" is about her side of the story after being accused of bio-terror etc even by OSHO himself…

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Family Happiness - Leo Tolstoy

An interesting story (Novella) that I recently read about life. A girl's desires and feelings, before and after marriage to a much older person so beautifully envisaged by Tolstoy. His amazing description of young girls emotions, his take on the feelings of young and then matured person in the ways of the world of Russian Social life, before and after marriage, is great and to me, looks quite truthful.Though never married, it seems Tolstoy wrote ‘Family Happiness’ – which is about marriage, to prove to himself that their marriage would not have been successful…

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Testament Betrayed by Milan Kundera

Testament Betrayed is a book which brings out the times that we live in and how we become what we are. A collection of essays which brings out arrays of ideas in a coherent narrative. For the writer’s its kind of challenge that Milan Kundera throws to come out of the set thought pattern and travel out of one’s comfort zone to explore spaces that sometimes are dark, filled with unknown doubts but sometimes brings out the light as at the end of tunnel. If you are a serious aspiring author, then you must read this book.

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STILL LIFE: In Shadows of Bomb Blast, rememberingserenity of Bodh Gaya

Woke up to the sounds of Bomb blast’s this Sunday morning  and looked up images from my last visit to Bodh Gaya. The images took on the shadows of darkness as the Peaceful serene atmosphere of Buddha’s place of enlightenment lay shattered…

Click here to walk with me to Bodh Gaya and more…

WHISPERS: Burning Bridges....

She wanders alone

(You know any path will take you,

if you don’t know where you are going)

And moves in and out of my thoughts

Like waves upon waves

That crash on the bounded beach

Weaving a cosmic design

With her foot prints

In my heart.

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HAIKU TEA: SESSION IV-V - 'Before it all ends'& 'Journey of life'

Read the collaborative efforts of dozes of poets from across the world. And if you write, love collaborative writing, enthusiast of poetry and enjoy writing short verse like Haiku, Tanka, Renga, Renshi etc, then Haiku Tea sessions are for you...  Click here to join in for the Session VII (which will start from 15^th July…)

Click here to read more…

Hope you will enjoy this edition... look forward to your comments and visit to the next Edition... please click on the “Join this Site” button on the right hand side top corner to follow my posts on this blog... I will be grateful.

__
Shashi
ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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27^th Edition                                                                  28th Edition

THE READER: Testament Betrayed by Milan Kundera

Testament Betrayed is a book which brings out the times that we live in and how we become what we are. A collection of essays which brings out arrays of ideas in a coherent narrative. For the writer’s its kind of challenge that Milan Kundera throws to come out of the set thought pattern and travel out of one’s comfort zone to explore spaces that sometimes are dark, filled with unknown doubts but sometimes brings out the light as at the end of tunnel. Inspired me to think beyond the form of writing novel, structure and the limits of thought out characters. Made me to write the way one talks to a friend… 

Giving below some of very powerful thoughts from the book “Testament Betrayed”. If you are a serious aspiring author, then you must read this book and if you have time, check out my feature on “How To Write A Book” based on his thoughts from “The Art Of Writing Novel”. Click here to read…

MILAN KUNDERA – A Brief Biography

Milan Kundera (born 1 April 1929) is the Czech Republic's most recognized living writer of Czech origin, he has lived in exile in France since 1975, having become a naturalised citizen in 1981.

Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. He lives virtually incognito and rarely speaks to the media. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions

He belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the pre-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic. Their ideology was greatly influenced by the experiences of World War II and the German occupation. Kundera remained committed to reforming Czech communism, and argued vehemently in print with fellow Czech writer Václav Havel, saying, essentially, that everyone should remain calm and that "nobody is being locked up for his opinions yet," and "the significance of the Prague Autumn may ultimately be greater than that of the Prague Spring." Finally, however, Kundera relinquished his reformist dreams and moved to France in 1975. He taught for a few years in the University of Rennes. He was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979; he has been a French citizen since 1981.

He maintains contacts with Czech and Slovak friends in his homeland, but rarely returns and always does so incognito.

TESTAMENT BETRAYED

Kundera is more concerned with the words that shape or mould his characters than with the characters'

physical appearance. In his non-fiction work, The Art of the Novel, he says that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's vision. He, as the writer, wishes to focus on the essential insofar as the physical is not critical to an understanding of the character. For him the essential may not include the physical appearance or even the interior world (the psychological world) of his characters. Other times, a specific feature or trait may become the character's idiosyncratic focus.

Thoughts from  Testament Betrayed

The removal of Gods from the world is one of the phenomenons that characterize the Modern Era.

An important note: imitation does not mean lack of authenticity, for the individual cannot do otherwise than imitate what has already happened; sincere as he maybe, he is only a reincarnation; truthful as he may be, he is only a sum of the suggestions and requirements that emanate from the well of the past.

All of man’s love seeks to win woman’s good will and kindness – Kafka (The Enchanted Kingdom of Love)

Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation (its oblivion)

Ecstasy is absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting of past and future.

Living is a perpetual heavy effort not to lose sight of ourselves, to stay solidly present in ourselves, in our stasis. Step outside ourselves for a mere instant, and we verge on death’s dominion.

History is not necessarily a path climbing upwards (Towards the richer, the more cultivated), that the demands of art may be counter to the demands of the moment (of this or that modernity), and that the new (the unique, the inimitable, the previously unsaid) might lie in some direction other than the one everybody sees as progress.

“Among it’s mad enticements, one could only walk still farther, go still astray” Kafka

His seeking mouth found hers, which was now pressed against his like the muzzle of an animal against a pane of glass, and Esch was enraged because she kept her soul imprisoned behind her set teeth, to prevent him from possessing it.” – Broch’s “The sleepwalkers”

“She was seeking something and he was seeking something, maddened, grimacing, heads thrusting into each other’s chest as they sought, and their embraces and their tossing bodies did not make them forget but rather reminded them of the necessity to seek, as dogs desperately paw at the ground they pawed each others body… “ Kafka in The Castle

“A thought comes when it wants to, and not when I want it to” Nietzsche

We should neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us” Nietzsche

Great changes often have an unobtrusive appearance.

Tolstoy thus offers us another conception of man: he is an itinerary; a winding road; a journeys whose successive phases not only vary but often represent a total negation of the preceding phases.

They (People) change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged.

Rock is the only light music in which melody is not predominant; people don’t hum rock music.

Memories are only confirmation of an absence.

What is an individual? Wherein does his identity reside? All novels seek to answer these questions.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. … Present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

Beethoven saw that the only way to get around, what Milan Kundera termed as ‘Stupidity of music’ ( – weeping into their adagios, and then turning into little children when the last moment starts, starting into the school yard to dance, hop, and holler that all’s well that ends well) is to make composition radically individual.

Milan’s music teacher to him “There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It’s like lawn – if it weren’t there, we could not enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it.”

__
Shashi
ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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HOW TO WRITE A BOOK

How To Write A Book? - A Serious Guide for Aspiring Authors

How to write novels and books…

I have read Milan Kundera’s (Czech Republic's most recognized living writer, who has lived in exile in France since 1975, who has been nominated numerous time for Noble Prize) most famous book ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ almost two decades ago. And then recently I came across his two other books ‘Testament Betrayed’ and ‘TheArt of Novel’, which I have been reading last week. Interestingly, both the books were kind of a powerful DIY of ‘Novel Writing’ which gave me an idea to create a kind of Guide for “Writing novels” for the aspiring authors based on his selected thoughts from both the books.

Milan Kundera
Image Curtsy http://www.larepubblicadellelettere.it

I hope this will help and inspire serious writers and aspiring authors to reflect on their art of writing and help in creating a master piece.

ON WRITING BOOKS

What is a Novel?

 “A book is product of a self, other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices. The writer’s true self is manifested in his books alone” - Proust

And Milan Kundera (MK) says in the Book - The book of Laughter and Forgetting, through one of his character, Banaka, “You know the novel is fruit of human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another? …all anyone can do is give a report on oneself… anything else is a lie”

“…every one dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self,… no one listens to any one else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others”.

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But somehow I tend to agree more with MK’s thought from his book ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ that the novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. As MK says that a novel is often nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions, which for some reason I believe is what an aspiring author is searching for, if not an established writer. 

According to a well known metaphor, the novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel. And the aspiring author has this junoon (Passion) to do that over and over again, through each one of their attempts to share their dream house. Though, as MK relates in Testament Betrayed, “…every one dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self,… no one listens to anyone else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock (music) is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others”

How To Write A Novel?

MK advises that the composition (the architectural organization of work) should not be seen as some pre-existent matrix, loaned to an author for him to fill out with invention; the composition should itself be an invention, an invention that engages all the author’s originality. The novel “Life Is Elsewhere” was begun with this working hypothesis, a definition I (MK) set down in my notebook: “The poet is a young man whose mother leads him to display himself to a world he cannot enter.”

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(Nowadays) novel is too much weighed down by technique”, by the conventions that do the author’s work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into a historical situation, fill time in the character’s lives with superfluous episodes; each shift of scene calls for new exposition, description, explanation. MK’s own imperative is “Janacekian”: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism; to make it dense.

‘Making a character “alive” means: getting to the bottom of his existential problem. Which in turn means: getting to the bottom of some situation, some motifs, even some words that shape him. Nothing more’. And MK goes on to share a valuable technique of Kafka, for aspiring authors...

“Because apprehending the real world is part of the definition of the novel: but how to both apprehend it and at the same time engage in an enchanting game of fantasy? How be rigorous in analyzing the world and at the same time be irresponsibly free at playful reveries. How to bring these two incompatible purposes together? Kafka managed to solve this enormous puzzle. He cut a breach in the wall of plausibility (Not in order to escape the real world – the way romantics did, but to apprehend it better); the breach through which many others followed him, each in his own way: Fellini, Marquez, Fuentes, Rushdie…  and other, others”

Theme – The Wisdom of the Novel

According to MK, “A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: A novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words… In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the row (words) goes: Forgetting, Laughter, Angels, Litost, Border. Over the course of the novel, those five principal words are analyzed, studies, defined, redefined and thus transformed into categories of existence. The pillars of The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Weight, Lightness, soul, body, the grand march, shit, kitsch, compassion, vertigo, strength, weakness”.

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“When Tolstoy sketched the first Draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I (MK) do not think his moral ideas changed in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice that that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that supra-personal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

And in the End…

Milan Kundera (MK) gives some great tips on creating a master piece…

All great works (precisely because they are great) contain something un-achieved.

When you reach the end of a book you should still find it possible to remember the beginning. Otherwise the novel loses shape; its “architectonic clarity” is clouded.

Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

And the best thought … that I personally loved reading…

Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does poetry lie?

Hope you have liked this Guide to Writing Novel... leave a comment, if you like, so that I can share more of my books and Help Guides... 

__
Shashi

ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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