The Elephant's Child

Beyond the Veils of Scarlet

“You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.

In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. It was an empty world because no man had yet joined sticks to make a house or scratched the earth to make a road or embedded the transient symbols of his artifice in the clean horizon. But it was not a sterile world. It held the genesis of life and lay deep and anticipant under the sky.”

―Beryl Markham, West with the Night

Kipling's Kim.

In the last few years I've gotten in the habit of reading mostly non-fiction books and a few sci-fi novels here and there.  To blame is the fact that I'm a stay-at-home Mom and am constantly interrupted during the day.  I'm stretched thinner than I used to be.  Richer reading requires more concentration and fewer interruptions than I have at my disposal.

But I'm determined to read more of some of my favourite authors, and so this week I plunged into Rudyard Kipling's Kim.

The lama, very straight and erect, the deep folds of his yellow clothing slashed with black in the light of the parao fires precisely as a knotted tree-trunk is slashed with the shadows of the low sun, addressed a tinsel and lacquered ruth which burned like a many-coloured jewel in the same uncertain light. The patterns on the gold-worked curtains ran up and down, melting and reforming as the folds shook and quivered to the night wind; and when the talk grew more earnest the jewelled forefinger snapped out little sparks of light between the embroideries.

Pure music. Listen:

folds of his yellow clothing slashed with black in the light

And listen again:

parao fires precisely as a knotted tree-trunk is slashed with the shadows of the low sun, addressed a tinsel and lacquered

See all those /s/ and /l/ sounds with "knotted tree-trunk" dropped right in the middle?  The sound of the words paints the knobby, knotty trunk right into your mind. Say "knotted tree trunk" and count how many time your tongue hits the roof of your mouth.  The phrase is all edges. 

Pure joy in the English language is why I love Kipling's writing.

The hardest thing for me to remember to s l o w  d o w n when reading Kipling and F. Scott Fitzgerald (another one of my favourite authors).  I tend to read too quickly, partly because I'm a fast reader anyway, but also because the last nine years of being a mother have trained me to cram as much reading in as short a time as possible, since I'm about to be interrupted.  Again.  So I sometimes skim, which is fine for some sorts of reading, but is a grand disservice to Kipling.  It's a hard habit to break.

 

What I Know.

Richard Dowden knows this about Africa, and I know it, too:

. . .[W]hen outsiders do go they are often surprised by Africa's welcome, entranced rather than frightened. Visitors are welcome and cared for in Africa. If you go you will find most Africans friendly, gentle and infintely polite.  You will frequently be humbled by African generosity.  Africans have in abundance what we call social skills. [. . .] Africans meet, greet and talk, look you in the eye and empathize, hold hands and embrace, share and accept from others without twitchy self-conciousness.  All these things are as natural as music in Africa.

Westerners arriving in African for the first time are always struck by its beauty and size -- even the sky seems higher.  And they often find themselves suddenly cracked open.  They lose inhibitions, feel more alive, more themselves, and they begin to understand why, until then, they have only half lived.  In Africa, the essentials of existence -- light, earth, water, food, birth, family, love, sickness, death -- are more immediate, more intense.  Visitors sudently realise what life is for.  [...] It is the prize that African offers the rest of the world: humanity.

-Richard Dowden. Africa: Altered State, Ordinary Miracles.  (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 1-2.

Marriage.

J.R.R. Tolkien writing of his wife, Edith, to his son Christopher Tolkien,

"She was (and knew she was) my Luthien. I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography--it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in the tales and myths--someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began--all of which (over and above personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives--and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed the memories of our youthful love. Forever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting."

~Explaining why he wished to include the name "Luthien" on Edith's tombstone.

(Who is Luthien? So glad you asked.)

 

Mr. Dewey's Dirty Secret

I came across this yesterday.

"You can't make Socialists out of of individualists - children who know who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent."

-John Dewey (Yes, that Dewey. Now you know.)

Thanks, Mr. Father of Education! I prefer the following. (Emphasis mine.)

"Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other person's experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, as the educators do, attacks the very center of our being... He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience, has no value."

-John Holt

This kind of stuff always sends me running back to John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education.   A school is a factory for creating "productive members of society."  Why should I send my child there?  I want her to be human, not a producer for the collective. If she contributes to the common good, and I pray that she will, it will be out of her love for God and for her fellow man, not because she's been conditioned to do so by an artificial environment, and stripped of her ability to make a free choice. 

So how are our public schools doing on creating that harmony in the collective society, where everyone is interdependent? Pretty harmonious out there, isn't it, Mr. Dewey?