Los Olvidados

 

 

The Sons of Mary  seldom bother,

for they have inherited that good part;

But the Sons of Martha  favour their Mother,

of the careful soul  and troubled heart.

 

And because she lost her temper once,

and because she was rude to the Lord, her Guest,

Her Sons must wait upon Mary’s Sons,

world without end, reprieve, or rest.

 

-- Rudyard Kipling, “The Sons of Martha” (1907)

 

 

Compare, re forgotten veterans:

 

“No, thank you, we don’t want food, sir;

but couldn’t you take an’ write

a sort of ‘to be continued’

and ‘see next page’  o’ the fight?

 

We think that someone has blundered,

an’ couldn’t you tell ‘em how?

You wrote  we were heroes once, sir.

Please, write:  we are starving now.”

 

-- Rudyard Kipling, “The Last of the Light Brigade” (1891)

 

 

These themes are treated in the context of the very beginning of the Christian story, here:

 

=>  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/04/stabat-mater.html

Kiplingian hemi-monostich

. . .   presage  of coming coolness …

[Few poetic genres are so spare, as that of the monostich.

But in this overscheduled day and age -- the time of TLDR --

we must offer abbreviated versions.

The above -- ultimately from Kipling -- is from the forthcoming anthology,

Mini-Monostichs for the Busy Businessman. ]

Found, down by the sea-shore

“The she-seals  seek the shore

  to drop their pups aland.”

[That doesn’t really qualify as Found Poetry:  first, because it was set as poetry to begin with -- Kipling’s “Rhyme of the Three Sealers”;  second, because what he actually wrote was “the matkas seek the shore” and so forth;  a footnote explained that matkas means ‘she-seals’;  and I substituted that, as it is a much more evocative word that matkas, which sounds rather like something Yiddish to eat.  The result, though not Found Poetry, is a sort of Discovered Tongue-Twister;  and as such, I bequeath it to literary history.]

Kipling, chortling

at the way that Dr Justice

has improved upon his verse

.

Kipling monostich

~ … by all things  merry,  musical,  and meet .. ~

That fragment (from a humorous and forgettable early poem, “The Plea of the Simla Dancers”, by Rudyard Kipling) here appears, merely because we are reminded, by a slight, defensive, apologetic piece  that appeared this morning at the tail-end of the (now much diminished) New York Times Book Review,
that Kipling,   when he is recalled at all,
is obnoxious to pot-shots from the politicocorrectati. 

As it happens, I am no particular fan of Kipling, one way or the other.  The title of his children’s-book, Just-So Stories, is immortal, at least among the community of science-philosophers (in particular, as regards Darwinism);  the contents of those charming tales (which I imbibed at my mother’s knee, from the very volume which she had preserved from her nursery) are now less well-known;  and if known, generally not credited.  -- True, the reason that fragment is in my mind, is that I’ve been dipping into a volume on my night-table:  Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Verse.   Yet thát, for no special literary (let alone ideological) reason, but simply because (a) a copy turned up for a couple of dollars, at the neighborhood outlet for remaindered books, and (b) the poems mostly tell stories, and are fun, and are a good antidote to the rhymeless pointless drivel that has infected The New Yorker and the little-magazines, lo now  for many decades.

~

Borne on merely by the inertia of this,  I read the very next poem  in the collection (“As the Bell Clinks” -- again, funny  and forgettable), and notice an odd rhyme-scheme.  Long lines composed of hemistichs, chiming thus:

A     A

A     B

C     C

D     B

(repeat final line with variation, but retaining the rhyme-word, “tonga-bar”)

E     E

E     B

F     F

G     B

(repeat final line with variation, but retaining the rhyme-word, “bar”)

H     H

H     B

I     I

J     B

(repeat final line with variation, but retaining the rhyme-word, “tonga-bar”)

and so forth.

The poem goes on for quite a while;  to show the lengths to which the poet must go, to observe the

X     X

X     B

motif, consider this couplet:

Yet a further stage my goal on -- we were whirling down to Solon,

With a double lurch and roll on, best foot foremost, ganz und gar--

(and no, it doesn’t make much more sense in context.  -- That final phrase is German;  passe encore, only, it is merely metri causâ, and doesn’t otherwise especially fit.)

The point I’m sort of getting at, is:  What an incredibly impoverished literary experience would be that of anyone who approached Kipling  simply with a clip-board of Correctness Check-list Infractions (check all that apply).

~

To keep it in perspective -- Upon that night-table  lies one other book of verse: the Library of America edition, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century.  I purchased this some years ago, but became bogged-down in Volume One -- stuck in the mire of Ezra Pound.   Such muck as this:

Aquinas head down in a vacuum,

               Aristotle which way in a vacuum?

Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu.

Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana

                of a castle named Goito.

“Five castles!

“Five castles!”

                (king giv’ him five castles)

“And what the hell do I know about dye-works?!”

Now, Pound (it is said) was a fascist;  but that is not why I disrelish his verse.  Kipling, it may be, “was an Imperialist” (in the words of the unthinking thoughtless), or:  dwelt at some depth, upon the upswing of History into which he was willy-nilly born;  but judge his verse  on its merits.

~

One thing I do appreciate in Kipling (though it surfaces but rarely)  is any echo of the old Scottish/English border ballads, with their “incremental repetition” (basic to my blood) --

  Long was the morn of slaughter,
      Long was the list of slain,
  Five score heads were taken,
       Five score heads and twain;

(compare “We hadna sailed a league, a league, A league but only three”).

Meaning:  100 slain -- nay, 102.

.

[To Be Continued, as time permits.]

Arabia deserta -- resarta

Poking around  among the poems of Kipling,  I was astonished to stumble upon this:

Azrael's Count

Lo! The Wild Cow of the Desert, her yeanling estrayed from her --
Lost in the wind-plaited sand-dunes -- athirst in the maze of them.
Hot-foot she follows those foot-prints -- the thrice-tangled ways of them.
Her soul is shut save to one thing -- the love-quest consuming her
Fearless she lows past the camp, our fires affright her not.
Ranges she close to the to the tethered ones -- the mares by the lances held.
Noses she softly apart the veil in the women's tent.

Kipling is the bard of the British lands  from India through Afghanistan;  and peppers his poems with Hindi-isms, and slang from the pukkah-sahib.  But now this seems a straight translation -- nay, almost a calque -- from the pre-Islamic Arabic.

I have, in this age, tried my hand at much the same thing.  Sample here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/05/miscellaneous-amatory-preludes.html

Mysteries of Cricket

Cricket matches occasionally end in a tie, and often in a draw;  but that does not make it a futile game;  if no side ever won, the game would lose its point.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 279

Assignment:  Distinguish tie from draw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6FdBZQw2zQ

I am at last resigned to the fact that I shall never understand String Theory;  and a grasp of cricket  must likewise remain  forever beyond my means.

Given that, Kipling’s dig about “the flannelled fools at the wicket” was quite unfair;  you practically have to be a barrister to make sense of the game.

~

More re the point of a given genre of game:

Within the vocabulary of chess, it makes no sense to say ‘That was the one and only move which would achieve checkmate, but was it the right move to make?’  … as someone might ask, whose purpose in playing chess  was to amuse a small child  rather than to win.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  125

(And what is the point, of this game of life? --  Perhaps, to amuse the gods.)

It would be interesting to imagine extragalactic sociologists or philosophers, provided with a complete, objective and uncommented, play-by-play record of every cricket game ever played, and every chess game ever played; we wonder whether, from these, they could deduce what the point was.  Cf. & contrast the card‘game’ that we children called ‘War’, in which again, the ‘point’ is to ‘win’,  only, each player’s moves being completely determined, the resemblance to any normal game is but feeble;  it’s really just a long-drawn-out, inefficient way  of staging a single coin-flip.

~

Back to cricket, with its arcane distinctions and welter of rules -- surely exceding those of tennis (let along ping-pong), basketball, soccer  and much else.    These come at a cost (we want to shout, Just play the game!), but indeed to such an extent, that what would, from a practical point of view, be counter-productive, must surely serve some sociopsychological purpose, delineating the cultural boundaries of the Tight Little Island.   Rather like the Japanese language, with its complex system of grammatical honorifics, which no-one can master who hasn’t grown up in the culture from birth.  Or Anglo-Catholic worship ritual: unlike in an evangelical church, where anyone can wander in off the street and fit right in, for an outsider to attempt to participate  is continually to find yourself sitting when (suddenly, inexplicably) everyone else is standing up,  or standing up when they are sitting down, or kneeling, or crossing themselves.

For an American analogue, we would suggest, not so much our National Pastime of baseball, which physically most resembles cricket, but American football, with its ever-expanding rulebook, its minute schedules of differing penalties for everything from twitching (on the offensive line -- “false motion” -- or the defensive -- “offsides”) to spiking the ball; and its many game-interrupting circumstances. -- What physically most resembles football is rugby;  but here the playing of the game -- the continuous unscripted motion, as in soccer or basketball -- quite trumps the courtly ceremony characteristic of football.

~

There is generally a core of rules that characterize the essence of a given kind of game.  As for the rest, they contribute to its aura of spectacle,  but are not constitutive of the game.

The essense of football is simply that one guy runs with the ball toward a goal, and the other guys try to stop him.   Early football (and kids’ football even today) was largely just that.   Then they added the possibility of a forward pass:  that was a significant addition to the core, constitutive of an extension of the game (Football  v. 2.0), but one in which the earlier nucleus remained aufgehoben:  after all, there are plenty of running plays even in the NFL, and if you laid them all end-to-end, you’d have a simulacrum of original football (though to be sure, they are subtly different, since each play is instinct with the possibility that someone might throw the ball).

The constitutive rules of chess are the powers of the pieces.   That much is sine qua non -- you couldn’t very well specify the moves of all the pieces except the knight, letting that fellow to joust around as the mood might move him.   But now you’ve got a game, which could just as well exist without niggling side-rules like that of castling, or capture en passant (let alone purely ceremonial, non-structural rules like “j’adoube”).

Imitations of Old Arabic Poetry

Miscellaneous Amatory Preludes

(In the style of nasíb, the beginning section of the old qasida.)

(I)

Alas, I am slain, and by bút óne árrow.

Slender the shaft of her, bud-barbed, and gently feather'd,

yet I lie in a mercury sweat  as were it poisoned.

No there  wás nó vénom  in  one  so  young:

this sickness  springs from the cure of it,

from the baneful breath of the blamers.

(II)

She gazed, silently laughing, and her eyes shot arrows,

striking the sight from my eyelids, left me love-blinded.

Now in a daze I blink to recall her after-image:

I pine for a sylph, the mirage of an archer.

(III)

Speak, stones, who like me have felt the press of her!

Whisper me whither  her left foot wended.

Enlighten the eyes  of one by love blinded,

for I trek but for her traces, and breathe but for the breath of her.


[Further reflections here.
Elucidation of (I)  here. ]

[FN] For another example of nervous, punchy rhythm, cf this, from Kipling:

Mine was the woman to me, darkling I found her:

Haling her  dumb from the camp,  held her and bound her.

-- Rudyard Kipling, “The First Chantey” (1896)

Stabat mater

Stabat mater dolorosa
iuxta Crucem lacrimosa,
dum pendebat Filius.

contristantem et dolentem

Round her all the nations wept

in vigil  her in comfort kept,

until her son  to rise was seen.

Now by his side  she reigns as queen.

For her the robes are laundered white,

for her the tapers burn all night,

and daughters named abundantly:

Maria, Mary, and Marie.

*

Yet on that day another stood

alone, beneath a darker rood.

Unnamed, unknown, alone she grieves

beneath the cross reserved for thieves.

To her no dove of grace was sent;

the one she mourns  did not repent.

Her tears are dry as desert sands.

The dust enfolds her.  Still she stands.

*

For a mini-movie

of madness and salvation,

click here:

The Penitent and the Impenitent Thief

[For a somewhat similar theme, of unmediatized suffering,

cf. Kipling's poem of 1891,

"The Last of the Light Brigade."]