Conversation on 'And they fight'

 Francoise:

"When I read the text for the first time, I had not paid attention to the date, 2015.

Putting aside the mention of some specific places anchoring the facts in a specific context ("wilderness of rarified heights"), the text is striking for its universality and plunges my reading into the atrocity of a present war where combatants strive to survive in the horrific "intimacy" of what only they witness, the anonymity of pain, loss and suffering.

Stirring write for its capacity to take the reader right on the scenes of the war, and in the minds of the fighters"

Sushama:

" My brother-in-law retired from Indian Army as Major General. He told us what it really means for the soldier by loyalty. He said that in the immediacy of fighting the loyalty is not towards that abstraction called nation. It's towards the battalion, and the fellow soldiers. and that covers all things."

Fancoise:

Yes, I understand that very well, Sushama, and admire it.

There are many letters left by the French soldiers during WWI expressing the immediacy of fighting in the trenches and how deep the care and attention to fellow fighters was. These soldiers's letters have been studied in school as an example of one of the highest forms of good behaviour

These French fighters are referred to as "les poilus", the hairy men, as unshaved.

Most French families own letters from them. We have a few that we have kept preciously and they are stories of silent bravory and untold heroic acts.

I totally understand the idea of immediacy that you mention in the poem: it definitely has a universal echo.

Bruce Roberts:

"So grieved. So many die. So much grief. So little consideration or consolation."

Hamid Ben

"War is always an abomination, so many lives sacrificed, wasted existence of tragic destinies. No cause should, in principle, justify the carnage but reality being what it is, appetites, greed... the fighter finds himself engulfed in a dynamic he can no longer control, the survival of himself and his comrades-in-arms becomes the utmost priority. Thank you for your text, thinking about a burning and current topic"

Francoise:  "A laudable bravery, an acute sense of duty, and a depersonification of war driven to the paroxysm of detachment. And behind all this, the poet shouts a suppressed anger, muffled and silent. Crude and uncompromising but humane and poignant."

Conversation on Camus' Outsider

 Francoise:

"I like the way you address Camus directly, as asserting him recognition for his philosophy of the absurd.

There is absurdity in the"divorce" between Man and the world. Man tries to know his reason for being but the absence of answer from his environment makes him blind, like when Mersault is dazzled by the sun light and commits a murder which he cannot justify.

I like the spiritual interpretation you give of the novel, the rich dimension you see in the main character, ie, Camus's voice.

Meursault accepts his fate, he accepts this lack of exit, and, at the very end, reconciles himself with Life: "As if this great anger had purged me of evil, emptied of hope, before this night loaded with signs and of stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world."

Pessimistic about the human condition, but optimistic about man, this is the way I understand Camus.

Camus's daring cruelty is to show us the world as it is, indifferent to our sorrows. Yet, through Meursault, we can hope.

And your spiritually oriented mind has given another dimension to the novel."

You may like to listen to this short talk:

Camus must be understood in the historical context of Algeria and France relationships.

I like his nuanced attitude.

https://youtu.be/AuVZ_4v3VYQ

Yesterday, France celebrated the 60th anniversary of the peace accords, the Evian accords, between Algeria

and France.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Accords

YouTube.com Albert Camus: Algerian Chronicles

"I will read this link a little later. I found Meursault weird when I read the novel for the first time, rather, I felt bewildered and fatigued. I found no spirituality in it at all in my first reading. Later, as I grew in my understanding of writers and how and why they write, I realised that it was an allegory that began to widen to take into its folds the society, man, and existence, boldly taking responsibility as individuals without the possibility of escape or exit. I saw a different version of existence. I saw the spirituality in its recognizable form in this speech he made in the most humble way to his audience. Thanks Francoise. It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity of talking to you."

"Definitely, right from the incipit, the reader is confused by the very factual presentation of the events, while the story is written in the first person. Moreover, the text is marked by the total absence of a psychological lexicon that would express the feelings or emotions of a narrator.

In that sense, right from the very first lines, Mersault appeears to be weird, as you mentioned and in fact, a total stranger or outsider to himself.

The philosophy of the absurd is there, right from the opening lines: existence has no meaning, it seems, and only fate guides our steps."

Sushama:

"That part, "Only fate guides our steps " puts him in some sort of an alignment with faith , but we have to take faith as as synonymous with the face of the absurd."

"Faith as the acceptance of a force above? It will take Meursault the whole novel to understand this and death will paradoxically make him free.

Thank you, Sushama, for this "brainstorming" that has rekindled wonderful memories of my teaching years."

Sushama:

Listening to Prof Kaplan, I understood the pathos of Camus' role as a writer facing the excitement of the turbulent society and his failure to convince them about the need for peace..

Francoise"

" Therefore, his silent, until he gathered enough intellectual strength and wrote the "Algerian chronicles""

 Cutting the Golden Bough, the Siren warns, is the passport you carry to the underworld. The tree knows the gravity of these words which Aeneas in his passion overlooked . The ritual is repeated time and again and Aeneid with access to the Pan's knowledge, watches. The truth unfolds. Each phase enacts the story of man and woman's love, the fire that consumes unrelenting.

Tighe O'Donoghue Ross

  · 

CUTTING THE GOLDEN BOUGH…(final)

 This is the night

when the stars follow a lonely moon

and fairies jump into a boat

to catch the last ferry to return to home in the sky.

I am breathless

following the wind.

Slow down;

let me catch up.

Walk, do not run.

The rain is beating upon my back;

I am soaked, shivering to the bones.

Indiscreet, the touch of rain,

like a charade acted out,

asking me to guess your word

leaving just a touch for a clue.

Sushama Karnik.

 You, the rainmaker and the rainer,

and I the one who feels the wind on my face;

treacherous, aggressive.

Halfway up the top,

the road did not stop.

But I stopped. The rain drops

falling on my face

intensely,

and I

did not want them to stop. And I stopped

to catch up with those gone far ahead.

Sushama Karnik. (c)

16 March 2022

Rita PudduInspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson

  · 

March 16, 2020

 Between the passing spring

and the onset of summer,

the sight of the tree beyond my window

with drops of sunlight

twinkling and dancing with the breeze,

I watch the serenity

and let go of my blues.

The solitary crow is one with my mood of quiet retreat.

It's swinging with the branch of the tamarind tree,

preening and lazily spreading its wings.

The light shifts and gives way to shadows;

momentary break, a change on the palette

between greens and the yellows.

I watch the crow with a casual courtesy and solicitude

until all cleaned and preened, it flies away,

not aware of what it meant to me.

All reactions:

22Sonali Dalal, Sem Xtz and 20 others

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 Sep 15, 2015

Like the sudden drop

the sun , the fireball of the day in the desert,

vanishes,

the cold winds blow over the sands of the Arabia;

the daily winter starts.

The silence chills more than the winds

and the desert like an ocean sways.

Your heart has no way to escape;

the eye of the desert is the eye of a power.

The night in a desert must humble the spirit;

the way the peaks of the mountains do.

The wind tells you why the breezes

traveling across the vast terrains of lonely lands

reach the mosque and the poignant notes

of the aching pain

transmute into prayers of a universal sadness

that seeps through the soul and makes me cry.

All reactions:

2Dipak Varu and György Fülöp

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