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MEET UP 77 Chandra Mouli Mudumba. Philosophical Fiction . Zen and the Art of Dreaming . The Big Questions Is writing Philosophy difficult? Agree or Disagree. Or do you agree to disagree . . How are certain big questions tackled? (For instance purpose of life)
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Philosophical Fiction Zen and the Art of Dreaming
The Big QuestionsIs writing Philosophy difficult? Agree or Disagree. Or do you agree to disagree. How are certain big questions tackled? (For instance purpose of life) How do stories evoke an essence of life? The beginning or the end of everything as we know it. The function and role of our society. Ethics vs. Morals, Importance of Zen. Reasoning, A quest for perfection. Evolution vs. creationism. The essence of spirituality or conscious awareness, epitome of emotions. Psychology , dreams, breaking open the mind. Religion vs. Science Normalityvs. Surrealistic or Dark aspects of Human life. www.gagcartoons.com Ay Man! Why are you talking like that? Yyy….. You are scaring me! I thoughtPhilosophy is a warm blanket, sound sleep and blank mind!
What is Philosophical Fiction? There is no definition or standard for it. But we can say it refers to works of Fiction which significantly discuss some of the Big Questions. Are there any Guidelines for such kind of Fiction? There aren’t any. But we can ask, How do we want to explore our freedom? Exercise 1List out some of your Big Questions. We all have our Philosophies and we say it with brilliancy. Take 15 minutes to quote your philosophy. This is will be the foundation of your story, where you will investigate upon.
The Simplest Categories • Natural • Moral • Metaphysical
Philosophical Fiction Exercise 2 From Exercise 1 we now have our philosophical quotes. This will become the foundation of a story we intend to write. Your story/plot can be Sci-Fi (SF), Romance, Murder/Mystery, Mysticism, Surrealistic: An outer body experience, A Dreamscape, etc …(Any Genre of Fiction) Create a character with moral dilemmas that are so hyperbole, challenging the character to go beyond the far reaches of sanity. Use your philosophy to ponder any of the Big Questions. Showcase a triumph over the moral dilemma.
Panchatantra Translated from Sanskrit by Arthur W Ryder Book 1 The Loss of Friends “The forest lion and the bull, Were linked in friendship, growing, full; A jackal then estranged the friends For greedy and malicious needs. What wisdom in a deedThat brings dishonor fell, That causes loss of trust, That paves the way to hell?”
As You Like It William Shakespeare Act 2 Scene 7 Jacques: “All the world is a stage. And all men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,…. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE “Presently she began again. ‘I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think-’….. Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know….. There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.”
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Volume III Part One, I “Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible and makes itself the property of history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance….. When an apple ripens and falls – what makes it fall? Is it that it is attracted to the ground, is it that the stem withers, is it that the sun has dried it up, that it has grown heavier, that the wind shakes it, that the boy standing underneath wants to eat it?”
NIGHTFALL ISSAC ASSIMOV ‘If the stars should appear one night is a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?’ • EMERSON “Certainly! Theremon sat down and crossed his legs. ‘My columns may have been a little rough, but I gave you people the benefit of doubt every time. After all, this is not the century to preach ‘The end of the world is at hand’ to Lagash. You have to understand that people don’t believe the Book of Revelations anymore, and it annoys them to have scientists turn about-face and tell us Cultists are right after all –’ ‘No such thing, young man,’ interrupted Aton. ‘While a great deal of our data has been supplied us by the Cult, our results contain none of the Cult’s mysticism. Facts are Facts, and the Cult’s so-called mythology has certain facts behind it. We’ve exposed them and ripped away their mystery. I assure you that the Cult hates us now, worse than you do’ ‘I don’t hate you. I’m just trying to tell you that the public is an ugly humor. They’re angry.’”
You are your own Philosophy When in water, even the wise Gorilla, loses track of time. Philosophy, perhaps is like, a warm blanket, sound sleep and indeed a blank mind.
FURTHER READINGAs You Like It William Shakespeare Act 3 Scene 2 Rosalind: “Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.”
I, Claudius Robert Graves Chapter XI “Among the people removed from Rome during the famine were the sword-fighters. They were not numerous, but Augustus thought that if there were any civil disturbances they would be likely to play a dangerous part in them. For they were a desperate crew, some of them being men of rank who had been sold as slaves for debt – to purchasers who had agreed to let them earn the price of their freedom by sword-fighting. If a young gentleman ran into debt, as sometimes happened, through no fault of his own or from youthful thoughtlessness, his distant relations would save him from slavery, or Augustus himself would intervene. So these gentlemen sword-fighters were men whom nobody had regarded as worth saving from their fate, and who, becoming the natural leaders of the Gladiatorial Guild, were just the sort to head an armed rebellion.”
Oliver Twist Charles Dickens Chapter XXXIV CONTAINS SOME INTRODUCTORY PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO NOW ARRIVES UPON THE SCENE AND A NEW ADVENTURE HAPPENED TO OLIVER TWIST “There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet, we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and, if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost matter of impossibility to separate the two.”
The God of Small ThingsArundhati Roy The God of Small Things “She sensed her children’s faces hanging over her dream, like two dark, worried moons, waiting to be let in. ‘D’you think she’s dying?’ she heard Rahel whisper to Estha. ‘It’s an afternoon-mare,’ Estha-the Accurate replied. ‘She dreams a lot.’ If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win. Who was he, the one-armed man? Who could he have been? The God of Loss? The God of Small Things? The God of Goose Bumps and Sudden Smiles? Of Sourmetal Smells – like steel bus – rails and the smell of the bus conductor’s hands from holding them?....... ‘If you’re happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count?’ Estha asked. ‘Does what count?’ ‘The happiness – does it count?’ She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts counts. The simple unswerving wisdom of children.”
A Brief History of TimeStephen Hawking Our Picture of the Universe “A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of a lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You’re very clever young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’”
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy Introduction and Notes by Amy Mandelker. Translated by Constance Garnett “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” Chapter I “Happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky’s house. The wife had discovered that the husband was on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt there is no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonsky’s. She tried to please him, not by her words only, but in her whole person. For his sake it was that she now lavished more care on her dress than before. She caught herself in reveries on what might have been, if she had not been married and he had been free. She blushed with emotion when he came into the room, she could not repress a smile of rapture when he said anything amiable to her.”
