Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 6
April 15, 2024
A Review of 'A Tale of Bali' by Vicky Baum
What Geertz failed to Analyse, Baum describes.
I imagine that one of the main aims for this book was building enough of a complex emotional, moral, spiritual and social world that when reaching the final part of the book, the great massacre, in which the radja of Badoeng leads a huge crowd of his people directly onto massed Dutch guns in a great ritual suicide, the reader could both see and intuit both why so many people would be willing to commit frentic mass suicide for a dream, and why they might not do so.
To do that she must build an image of the social and spiritual life of Bali in a few hundred pages, which I think she does pretty well.
Where do I even begin?Bali is full of flowers, trees, wildlife, people, farm animals, its just full. The place is packed. There is nowhere to go where you are not dealing with some complex arrangement of living things. True in many places perhaps but it seems in Bali you feel it more.Someone could probably write an essay on just the use of flowers in, this book alone.
The farmer, Pak has a bunch of Hibiscus flowers. Its pretty common for men in a certain mood to place an Hibiscus flower behind one ear. Pak is having an affair with the daughter of a local landowner and so is mainlining those flowers, meaning the hibiscus bush in his own compound is laid bare. This is something everyone can see and tells them something particular about Pak, even if they don’t know about the affair.
This combination of beauty, cultural ritual & signalling, flora & fauna, plus a dude being horny, is perhaps emblematic of the small rituals, behaviours and interactions with life that form almost a substrate, or a half-tongue of this book and the culture it is trying to talk about.Bali, at least in comparison to the temperate north west Europe where I live, feels like a kind of jewel box of life, or a bulging treasure chest of ecosocality. There are few walls, no, there are many walls, but few completely enclosed spaces. People seem to do much of their living in these part-open shelters within walled compounds but within the compound, though everyone and everything has their and its own place, everything wanders.
Privacy and secrecy in Bali seem to be almost more social modes than actual hard states, for everything that is not meant to be seen, someone sees it, so the matter is really about whether people will communicate about it, pass on the information.There are trees, forests, shrines, everywhere, as there are people everywhere. So anything can be hidden a little and nothing can be well hidden.
......
"Beyond the western courtyards, where most of the slaves lived and kept their poultry and pigs, rose a wall, and beyond this wall the stir and noise of the puri suddenly ceased. It bounded a ruinous part of it where no one lived and no one ever went. Creepers and shrubs had overgrown the tumble-down buildings and dragged them to the ground in their embrace. The chief building of this forgotten courtyard was surrounded by a ditch, but the bridge had given way and sunk into the water. The demons who guarded the entrance were nothing now but moss-covered blocks of stone. Wild bees made their homes in the trees and huge butterflies hovered undisturbed above the flowers. Mosquitoes hung in dense clouds over the stagnant water and the smell of decay mingled with the penetrating scent of salicanta flowers.”
.....
Raka - the Chad;
"But after a while his attention wandered and he looked again at Raka, whom he found particularly pleasing. A black head-dress whose edges had a pattern in gold was wound about his glossy hair; he wore a kain of dark wine-red in which a silver thread gleamed here and there, and a lion-cloth of brown silk encircled his remarkably slender hips and reached to his chest. He was not adorned with hibiscus flowers as the lord and most of the other men were; instead he had a single orchid in the middle of his forehead, which by its shape and the way it crept out beneath his head-dress suggested an animal rather than a flower. This scorpion-like orchid was indefinably in keeping with Raka's fine, arched nostrils and oblique eyes and long eye-lashes. The sensuous outline of his lips made him seem to be always smiling in a half-mocking mysterious way."
.....
Raka in ‘Tale’ is the emblematic example of beloved Balinese manhood. I would say he is the ‘Chad’ of the community, the star football player, the vector of everyone’s hopes and desires. The very beautiful, very charming, expert dancer beloved by all and welcome anywhere. In some ways Raka is what it’s like to be “truly Balinese”, in the same way that being Taylor Swift is what it’s like to be “truly American”. He gives us a view, not from the very top of its hierarchies, but from the very centre of its culture. He is the man who the culture has made and who it is made for. A magnificent man happy to play a magnificent role, a hand within a glove, (until things go wrong in the latter parts of the book).
Alit - the mid Radja (too many books and opium)
"There was only one place on this morning of noise and excitement where silence reigned, and that was the house of the old lord of Pametjutan. The old man had passed the night in great pain and now lay exhausted on his couch, propped up with many kapok cushions at his back. The two balains of Badoeng and Taman Sari has been in attendance. They had massaged him and given him narcotics and now the prince felt easier. He pulled at his opium pipe and his head grew clearer and threw off the fevered haze of the night. Alit, the young lord, his nephew, whom he had adopted, squatted beside him and his usually limp face had a remarkable expression of concentration, of exertion, of perhaps preoccupation. He, too, was smoking opium to clear his head for the hard thinking this critical hour required. Unconsciously he let his fingers run up and down the vertebrae of Oka's spine. The boy crouched at his feet and his warm smooth skin had a warming effect on his master.
"We are agreed then, father,' Alit said, 'we cannot submit to the shameless demands of the Dutch. They are only seeking an excuse to humble us. If we give way to them this time, they will find some new reason for oppressing us. They are proud , although they have no caste, and they have no manners. They do not seem to understand with whom they are dealing. Because a few lords have turned renegades and traitors they think they can cow us all. They will see that they are deceived about Badoeng."
The old lord looked at the younger one before he spoke.
"I am old and tired and sickness has made the fighting blood in me slothful and often clouds my thoughts. But you are young and you must oppose your heart and your forehead to the white men. I have watched you grow up and I was not sure that you would hold to the way of our fathers. Sometimes you seemed to me to think more as a Hrahman than as a Ksatira. I am glad that you would have not forgotten your kris for your books."
"I have discoursed' Alit replied, ' in long prayers with our forefathers. My friend, the pendata of Taman Sari, has spent many days and nights with me and helped me to find the way. The old books, my father, are as string as the kris, and even stronger when they are understood rightly. I have learnt one thing from them - that I am nothing. I, Alit, the lord of Badoeng. I am only a link in the chain, one single bamboo pole in the whole bridge. I must hand on what I have received from my mighty forefathers. I am not free and it is not permitted to me to act by my own choice. I cannot give away or throw away or sell my inheritance and I must stand firm there where my birth has set me. That is what I have read in the books."
.....
Alit, the friend, lets say, very close friend of Raka, and by his descent and culture, literal lord of all, or most, he surveys. A somewhat physically unprepossessing man, like most Balinese aristocracy of the time, doing waaaaaaaay too much opium, and facing the incursions and slowly tightening claims of the Dutch, and of the outside world generally.
Alit does occupy the top of the hierarchy, and while not a perfect expression of his cultures higher qualities like Raka, he knows a lot more about it. (All that time spent with the Palm Leaf texts). He knows the dream of his culture, the background invisible part of any society that its hard to intuit without living in it for a good long time, and maybe without being born in it.
He is not just an aristocrat, in the same way that, in Tuchmans ‘A Distant Mirror’ the Sire de Coucy was not just a soldier, or even just a knight, and like Alit, at the end of his book, de Coucy commits something that looks a lot like ritual suicide by-foe, for equally deep and obscure reasons of honour and selfhood.
A lot of this relates to the Indic tradition still present in Bali. Alits sense of himself of simply fulfilling a role in an inevitable process which will result in him entering heaven would make sense to Arjuna being advised by Krishna in his chariot, just as the general three-part structure of Balinese society would make sense to the steppe invaders of India, who, by a very long chain of circumstance, also gave Europe the same three-part society, and perhaps germinated de Coucy’s final doom-and-honour death charge, a long way away and many years separate from Alit.
Pak – the everyman
Pak is probably the most interesting, frustrating character in the book. An image of the Balinese everyman. He is kind of slightly stupid but at least knows that he is. He is hard working, loves his fields, is trying to save up enough to have his mothers bones cremated, has lost sexual interest in his (probably more intelligent) wife Pluglug, has vague dreams of somehow becoming more, and is sexually obsessed with the daughter of one of his landowners.
A not-that-good, but not very bad man who loves his family, generally, plays his part in the gamelan orchestra (always being sent here and there), the rice hydraulic cult, the village meetings, as a somewhat competent household leader, a son, a father, a slightly crap husband, the guy dreaming and doing most of the heavy plough work, (always kind to his cow, it’s a tragedy when she gets sick and dies).
A man, in Balinese terms, who could go from the borders of poverty to the borders of low wealth in the course of a year, and does.If there is one thing Pak can do relatively well, its work, (and play his role in a crazed plethora of community organisations and cults), and he does a lot of work;
Paks new house;
"'I am employed in building the house for a second wife and her house has to be a finer one than my main house,' he said in one breath, for he had thought out this piece of eloquence beforehand. He could not possibly have hit on a better way of informing Wajan of his designs on Sarna and respecting the proprieties at the same time.
'I heard something about it.' The old man remarked. "I wish you joy and peace in your house.'
'I have been looking round for trees for the timbers of my new house. Nobody has such fine ones as you and I wanted to ask whether you would sell me six durian trees and four palm trees from your northern plantation.
'Why not?' Wajan said. He would reckon the price and perhaps he would let him have them, although he had really intended them for fruit. Pak in his reply again laid stress on his desire to build a fine house, and repeated that Wajan's trees would suit him better than any in the village. But when Wajan asked for six hundred kepengs a tree, Paks heart sank and he gasped for air. he could not pay this price, and yet he did not wish to appear a poor man in the eyes of his future father-in-law.
He offered to pay half down and to work for the rest in Wajans sawahs.
When at last the deal was concluded, Wajan sent his youngest son up a palm tree and offered Pak the milk of a young coco-nut as an honoured guest and Pak walked home on air, swollen with pride and satisfaction.
Next day he went with his axe, accompanied by several of his friends, to fell the first four palms. he did as his father had taught him. He embraced the trunk of each palm. 'Palm tree, my mother,' he said, 'I must fell you not because I wish to kill you, but because I need posts for my house. Forgive me, dear palm, and allow me to cleave your trunk with my axe."
And when they felled the trees and their crowns sank to earth with a loud rustling, Pak felt the strength of ten men in him, for he caught sight of Sarna hiding in the plantation watching him work; and nothing makes a man so happy as when the right woman admires him as he works.
While the trees were left to dry, he went out to cut bamboo stems for the roof, and he was fortunate in having a bamboo thicket on the edge of his sawahs; so he did not have to buy them. The bamboos grew cool and tall, shading the stream that ran beneath them, and Pak had good weather for cutting them and shortening them to the right length. He also mowed alang-alang grass for the thatch; it grew tall in his uncles pasture, almost up to his chest. It hissed and whispered as it fell to his sickle and lay in swathes and was dry in two days and ready to be tied in bundles.
He spoke to Krkek, who sent him men to help him build the roof, and he paid them with rice from his well-filled barns.......For now he had the walls to finish and the door to fix, besides working in Wajans sawahs to pay for the trees.
He also spent a lot of time cock-fighting, for he felt happy and successful and could bet with a good courage. His white cock did, in fact, win three time, and in this way Pak procured seven hundred of the three thousand kepangs he owed Wajan.
And he went to the beach collecting coral, which contained a lot of chalk, and carried it in baskets to the lime-kiln in Sanoer and gave the lime-burner six ripe coco-nuts for burning him beautiful white lime to wash the walls of his house with.
Also he took his copra to the Chinese, Njo Tok Suey, and got two thousand two hundred kepangs for it. It was a poor price, but it helped towards the expenses that still lay before him."
.....
The Srawah
Pak has a great fighting bird of near magical potency and through this we see the dreams of his small soul burn. The whole chapter about Paks fighting cock and how much it means to him is magnificent. People who do not get the cock chapter cannot be my homie;
.....
"He scarcely knew himself afterwards how it happened. he had arrogantly refused various matches, which for one reason or another did not appeal to him, and then when the keeper of the lord's cocks held the red one out to him he did not dare say no.
He looked at the Srawah and he saw that he wanted to fight the red one and conquer him.
Terror and courage laid hold on him at once. And he accepted combat.
It was the same red cock that had killed the punggawa's white one, before whom Pak had beaten a retreat that day. he had been jeered at and mocked. His cock was a good one - as good as any lords cock. He took on the match and won.
Pak never forgot his excitement as the clamour broke out behind him and the men jumped to their feet and the bets got bigger and it dawned on him that this was the match of the day. When he released his cock for its battle with the lord's his arteries were so full of throbbing blood that he felt as if his chest would burst.
He staked twenty-five ringits himself - a fortune. Thousands of ringits were laid against his cock, money enough to buy a whole kingdom. There stood his Srawh, white with his black down-feathers and he himself was but a man of low caste. many of the lords of Bali with all their households betted against him- but the smith had put a hundred ringits on the Srawah.
When the fight began and the clamour ceased on the instant, Pak felt that his heart had stopped, to beat no more.There were five rounds in the fight, for neither cock could wound the other. Five times the coco-nut shell sank and five times the gong went for the next round. Five times Pak carried his cock into the corner, talked to him, bathed him, breathed his strength into him, encouraged and implored him to fight, to conquer, not to leave him in the lurch. The ring was strewn with feathers white and red. Some of the lords jumped down from their platform and crouched on the ground to get a better view. The lord of Badoeng crouched beside Pak, the peasant, and shouted for excitement. Pak could hear himself shouting too.
In the sixth round the Srawah killed the red cock.Pak was bathed in sweat when he bore his cock away. He had to be careful not to drop the ringits he had won. He nearly cut himself as he untied the spurs, his hands shook so. His cocks heart beat so violently that he feared he might after all collapse and die of a burst heart, merely from the excitement of the fight and his victory.
My cock has beaten the raja's, he told himself. My cock has beaten the radja's, my cock has beaten the radja's. He bought him a rice cake and sat down beside his basket on the grass. My cock has beaten the radja's."
.....
The End
But in the end, what happens?
‘A fine cock, the anak Agung said. He bent down and lifted the bird from the grass with his own hands, ran his fingers through his plumage and felt his weight. The cock crowed, flapped his wings and struggled. The anak Agung held his feet and counted the rings on his middle claw. “A genuine Srawah,” he said with awe.
Pak nodded. “I have been offered a hundred ringits for him,” he said. It was more than he could do to keep it in.
“The lord has taken a fancy to your cock. He does you the honour to accept him,” the anak Agung Bima said.
He beckoned to a man and gave him the bird to take away.Pak was left with the empty basket by the side of the road. His gullet was bitter as on the day when the eyes of his brother Meru were put out.’
.....
As well as taking his Srawah by right, the radja had also ritually blinded Paks brother, a sculptor, who can now no longer sculpt or help much in the fields.
This was for probably having an affair with one of the Radjas wives, though the stated reason was for ‘looking’ too covetously upon her.Obviously Alit had to do this because he has to defend his honour and if he lets some guy sleep with one of his wives then his honour, and authority, and role, and the stability it brings, is lessened.
Alit isn’t that interested in most of his wives, he was busy with Raka during the wedding and so had them marry his kris knife instead, which was ritually the same thing.
.....
As the Dutch claims close in, Alit conclusively decides to defy them, not to pay any fine, though several groups offer to help or to pay for him, and to resist with force, which leads to the great ending, where everyone is summoned first to fight for the Radja, then, (the second summoning is explicitly optional), to die with him in a Glorious Sacrifice.
‘”A rumour has come to me on the wind that the punggawa is a friend to the Dutch and is in their pay as the gusti Njoman is. Perhaps he is a traitor as the other is. Who has told you that his advice was is right?” the old man asked obstinately.
Pak folded his hands and replied; “The radja put out the eyes of my brother, your son. He has taken my best cock from me. I will not fight for the radja.”
“We are all the lord’s servants,” the old man replied. “My father served him and I, too, and you. The sawahs whence our rice comes belong to the radja. We belong to the radja. When he sends out the holy kris to summon us, we must go.”
When the old man had said this he spat out his betel-juice and looked straight in front of him. An oppressive silence weighed on the rest. The cocks crowed from the back of the yard. The women in the kitchen had never kept so quiet. The old man got up and crossed the yard and disappeared behind the rice barn. After a while they saw him coming back again; he had a lance in his hand and his kris in his girdle. He stopped in front of his three sons and looked at them all in turn. Meru raised his face to his father, for he could feel his eyes resting on his head.
Pak folded his hands and asked in the ceremonious style used to a superior: “Whither does my father mean to go?”
“To join the radja’s warriors,” the old man answered.“Peace rest with you.”
They bowed themselves with hands clasped and looked after him as he left the yard by the narrow gate. Pak felt as desolate as he used to feel when a child if darkness overtook him out in the pastures with the buffaloes.”
.....
Honestly I’m with Pak on this one. He is a man of no caste and the entire caste system is based on people fulfilling their role. He has been told his whole life that his role is farming and that he absolutely is not allowed the privileges of a fighting caste, then he is told to fight, and not just to fight but to fight with no hope of success in what is at least in part an obscure matter of honour for his lord.
He has a shitload of dependants to take care of; mid guy that he is, he is still the core economic engine and main legal and cultural protection for all of them.
If he goes off to die then who is going to look after his blind brother and two wives, and children, and who will plough the sawas? Even without resentment he has a pretty good argument for not getting himself killed.
Though of course it was resentment that broke the deadlock in this instance; THEY TOOK HIS SRAWAH, (and also blinded his brother).
February 29, 2024
A Review of Sinjin
Sinjin! A PDF (so far) adventure-game by M Diaz and JacksonSmith. Art by Scrap Princess, Julie de Graag, Jackson Smith, Katie Vasquez, andAlfred Stieglitz.
Available here; https://thehexculture.itch.io/sinjin
Some nerds in late-Victorian Fantasy Florida accidentallykilled Death and took their (her?) stuff leaving the netherworld bollocked upand bleeding through in a Florida swamp.
Now YOU must wander about finding stuff and not gettingkilled in a magic swamp that’s a bit (but not very) different every timeyou go back, with the very general aim of making things better, or at least notmaking them worse, and maybe even FIXING DEATH.
(Note, criticisms or analysis are intended to have a neutraltone. I am not claiming I could do better (I haven’t), OBVIOUSLY this is theopinion of one man. I should not have to explicitly state something so fuckingobvious and banal but the west has fallen so here we are.)
Sinjin is an Indy game. Looked at from a D&Dperspective, it’s an adventure with some decision processes attached, looked atfrom a storygame or AW-like perspective its .. perhaps the best descriptionwould be an object-and-location based game with an internal clock and somesimple arrangements for resolving conflicts.
It’s in the blurry boundary between a more hard-edgedD&D adventure, a soft Gauntlet-style ‘scene’ based game and an actual storygame. This might be a cognitive space that is actually quite hard to designfor. When I come to things I would probably question about Sinjin, many of themseem to have roots in its vague and curious origins. It’s a gypsy child in anoble House!
The adventure space is made up from the combination oftwo main concepts; the geographic shape of the Swamp in which you are wanderingaround, and ‘Depth’ a kind of transformation of the play area rooted, in theparacosm itself; in the slowly deepening and decaying power of the supernaturalas the swamp is sucked into the netherverse, and in game design terms; indungeon levels and things like Emmy Allens Stygian Library.
The Swamp
We have causeways, a river system and swamps in between,with a small number of specifically-mapped distinct areas called ‘Landmarks’and a variety of smaller less-specific minor landmarks.
With each new expedition the arrangement of the major Landmarkschanges somewhat, but some aspects of the nature of the linkages betweenthem remain, and the total number of major Landmarks doesn’t change and thedetails of their particular individual geography don’t change.
So for each adventure you have a rough idea of what placescan be found, and of how to get there, but to fulfil your mission and get to,for instance, the abandoned sugar-mill, you will still need to wander aroundinvestigating etc.
“The Territory isunfriendly and unpredictable, but the goal is for navigation to be challenging,rather than impossible. To this end, clearly communicate to players that thegeneral locations of major landmarks don’t change relative to the primary riverchannel and causeways (e.g. the Fish Camp, Great Vine Barren, and RitualWellspring are all linked by the primary channel; the Old Stone Fort, FishCamp, and Sugar Mill are connected to each other with a triangle ofcauseways).”
So in effect a shifting linecrawl, using the river as aguide.
(One of the notable ways that the particular nature ofthe place, the environment, and surrounding and historic culture work their wayinto the game is how deeply and richly embedded they are into every aspect,from the locations themselves, to objects, abilities, characters, monstersetc.)
“Depth”
The Swamp is either sinking into the Netherworld, or theNetherworld is merging with the Swamp and expanding. In game terms, ‘depth’makes reality more phantasmorgic, surreal, dreamlike and dangerous;
“Depth0
Sweltering days and balmy nights. Yousweat, and the air hangs thick and damp around you. The land smells of orangeblossom, wet grass, and, beneath the surface, the sickly sweet scent of decay.”
“Depth 9-12
Quiet as the grave. By day, the Sun is dim and brassy; by nightthe Moon is actinic and painfully bright; you can see clouds pass behind both,and the sky feels claustrophobically low. Vast figures pace the horizon. Hair,fabric, and flora waft and wave as if buoyed by an invisible tide. “
Depth can be accessed by diving into the Ritual Wellspring(one of the main Landmarks).
“ Agreat blue heron lies rotting near the reeds, one glaucous eye toward the sky.It whispers out to the first person who gets near it. It wants mullet from theFish Camp. Each time it gets some, it’s flesh reknits a little more. Afterthree times it will rise up– its neck still broken and slack, and will offer aGhost Contract as a silent stalker.“
You can also dive out of your depth and back up to youroriginal. Depth also re-sets if you leave the adventure area and take a rest –you just come back in at whatever the current minimum depth is.
Some buildings and locations only exist at certain depths. Tofulfil some missions or solve some problems you will need to ‘dive’ toparticular depths and once there, find a specific familiar location, nowpresumably with much stranger and more dangerous things in it.
The land is slowly ‘sinking’ into deeper depths. Humansdying immediately increases minimum depth and leaving without completing goalsalso increases minimum depth. So the more adventures you have in the swamp, the‘deeper’ everything gets. You can also bring Depth back up by achieving somegoals or defeating some major foes. There is an end-point to all this – ifDepth hits 13 then the curse escapes the area and spreads across the world. Thegame is built around this ‘ticking clock’.
While ‘Depth’ in Sinjin it has some relation to DungeonLevels, Emmy Allens ‘depth’ in Stygian Library and Stygian Garden, Vandermeers‘Annihilation’ and the Ballard and Stugatsky stories that prefigures it, andpossibly some forms of madness in Call of Cthulhu, I don’t think I have seen orconceived of anything quite like this before. If you are into game design youare probably reading specifically for the combination of ‘depth’ and thesemi-shifting geography.
I found the particularities and details of Sinjin as, ormore, interesting but less scaleable since their deep interrelationship withthis specific environment and situation is part of the appeal.
So. You are investigating a shifting version of the sameplace again and again. In effect, going back in to the ‘same dungeon’ again andagain. While the ‘rooms’ shift around there are always the same rooms andgrowing contextual knowledge should help you both navigate between places and,in particular, make classic D&D style tactical use of the geographicparticulars of each location, which never change.
But how would it feel to investigate the same ‘places’ overand over again, with them becoming ever more hallucinogenic and strange andpopulated by ever stranger and less comprehensible forms of the dead and undead?
“The Territory isdifferent every time players enter it. There are a handful of key constants,but players can never quite count on things being the way that they rememberthem.”
This puts Sinjin in a complex relationship with the classicD&D-alike game actions of exploration and investigation.
Of course this is not D&D, nor intended to be so. It’sclearly a more drama-oriented ‘Gauntlety’ game. But many of these games thatpresent themselves as ghost stories, soap-operas or interpersonal dramas, stillhave a lot of exploration, investigation and combat, and the interpersonaldrama happens around those props. AW is built for the Soap Opera element in allof its parts but few of the ruleslights that draw from it are.
Would it be interesting or frustrating? Would the concept of‘depth’ add depth or feel repetitious? There are enough supernatural etcconnections and possible intrigues that might create a layered feel as youexplore again, for different reasons, knowing where you will find but not what.
When I talk about a Diaz-esque ‘elegant’ piece of game/worlddesign, what I often mean is the use of natural language concepts and clearcomprehensible idea structures in ways that allow complex gameplay without alot of arguing or difficulties over how many points or whatever you have.
(I am of course assuming that most of these came from Diazbased on some familiarity with his previous work, though he is not the onlyauthor.)
Some Examples;
The main factions of Sinjin are guilds of Necromancers, eachof which is based around some item or tool they took from Death when Death died;a whetstone, inkwell and loom. Each of these is a creative tool that producesitems with certain limited magical effects; sharpened blades, documents andcloth.
They are tools which create or alter other objects, and theoriginals are presumably eternal or don’t decay or wear but the objects they createdo wear and can easily lose those qualities. To whit – sharp blades beingblunted (it’s that particular sharpness and not the blade itself that has themagic), paper being burnt, lost or, in a swamp, rotting or the ink washing out,and clothes tearing and being worn. Presumably the main objects could be stolenor lost, and their creative capacity is focused into one useful and tangiblemodality.
Basing the factions around items, specifically around toolswhich create other items, themselves limited in both effect and in the numberscreated, is a nice neat piece of game design. It unifies faction play with aneat in-game economy of access to magical items with highly specific uses whichwill themselves naturally degrade, and links that to the overarching theme orstory of the game in a way that feels natural, functional, intuitive and right.
As a counter example imagine a faction with a portal,another with a magic book and another with say a non-creative tool like aspoon. In each case the effects produced are vague, hard to intuit, they don’tnecessarily produce objects unless the game tells you, in which case anotherlayer of abstraction is required to describe exactly what the guilds cando, (‘death points’ or something) and probably direct control of the tool isrequired to produce those effects, which then cannot be traded, lost, stolen orcarried. (Unless you specifically describe that in the text; “you lose tendeath points” etc.)
To put it very crudely, Necromancy in Sinjin is kindof ghost-Pokémon, or the indenture of specific incorporeal servants with specificskill and identity-locked abilities.
You can grab certain ghosts in certain situations andcommand them, but only in ways limited by their core nature or their prime orcentral function in life. There is also a material cost if you want to achievematerial ends. So necromancy doesn’t create something for nothing, but insteadis a transformer of one kind of generalised resource (ritual, sacrifice) intosomething more specific. It’s a Bank Account, or like having a clade ofinvisible servants with specific skills who can be called on to do thingsrelating to those specific skills. You can re-interpret what those skills mightmean or how they might be used but you don’t need to argue with someone overwhether you have +5 to your Necromancy roll or whatever.
You can also grab animal souls or murderers souls, and evena flock of crows.
Key Diaz-esque aspects of this are that;
- It’s all in natural language, no numbers.
- It uses directly comprehensible real-lifeconcepts (the soul of a Blacksmith, the soul of a flock of crows) withinherently obvious and clear limitations and abilities etc.
- It directly embodies all of this in theparacosm; i.e. you have to take an hour to burn herbs at sunset rather thanspending +10 Death points for a death surge.
- Its relatively self-limiting and encouragesthinking of new uses for the ‘tools’, (souls) you have and differentinteractions between them and the environment.
You start each game with a mission (taken from one of threegenerated by the DM), for one of the Guilds, for which they will offer aspecific treasure, all of which are magical tools, often with limited uses,which will help you doing stuff in the swamp.
The possible expeditions are; Establish, Scout, Rescue,Recover, Collect and Hunt. Only one of the six core mission concepts involvesnecessary violence, the others involve investigating and getting, or in somecases schlepping big heavy things to places.
The rewards or treasure you get for these have a nice AmericanArcana feel;
“BraggingCoat. A coat embroidered with boasts and depictions of great deads. Once perexpedition, you can attempt a single act of superhuman strength or aptitude(jumping a great distance, kicking down a barn wall, picking a lock with a pineneedle, telling a joke that makes a corpse laugh).”
They feel like elements from a ‘Silver John’ story, though Idon’t know if those tales were an influence, probably any independentinvestigation of American folklore would produce things ‘a bit like’ SilverJohn.
Having specific missions is a good idea because quitefrankly, Players are basic as shit and unless you actively point them at athing they a specifically meant to do, they will just wander blather and getlost in decision fatigue. Being able to pick from three different missions ofdifferent difficulty and lethality from three different factions is neat, as isstarting the game in media-res with the PCs already in-country.
Hopefully the combinations of missions will play a part inadding depth and texture to the repeated missions; if the Guild of Scrivenerspaid you to set up a camp in one mission or grab a hostage then the results ofthat should still be in play organically in future sessions.
As well as the core reward for completing each mission thereis a ‘Wandering Devil Merchant’ who wants to sell you various trinkets, andtreasure, or ‘salvage’ which can be discovered in places you are likely to findit according to DM judgement. This is mildly sketchy, and somewhatgamic, with a touch of ‘Death Points’, but the actual Salvage are all in-worldself-limiting Diaz-Objects;
“Black HeronSpyglass. Once per expedition, you can look through this spyglass to seeyourself at the location you’re observing. When you remove the spyglass fromyour eye, you will find yourself in that location.”
So there is that gypsy child again.
Monsters and Encounters
The creatures are universally interesting. Broken up into‘The Living’ ‘Lesser Dead’, and the ‘Greater Dead, which are mindbending ‘finalhorror’ semi-inexplicable nightmares. There are some stand-outs. The SabalSphinx, one of the ‘Lesser Dead’ has some very good ‘D&D-esque’ rules;
“62 SabalSphinx
A human and panthercorpse twisted and crushed together. One of its human hands holds a palm frondbefore its doubled face, and its four unmatched eyes peer out between thepinnate leaves. Its ruff erupts into palmetto, mimicking the leaves of itsnamesake. The killer and the killed, the eater and the eaten, existing indelightful amity forever and ever and ever.
Statistics
Traits: wise, strong, large, fast,resistant to mundane weaponry
Weakness: lazy, gluttonous, harmed bysalt, silver, and holy water
Tactics
Disappear into and emerge from any twopalm fronds in the Territory.
A Sphinx sequentially reveals its eyesto anyone who can see in the order that is most advantageous to it. Once it’sfull face is revealed it may use any of its abilities at will.Reveal righthuman eye: Charms a person it can see into fighting for it
Reveal left human eye: makes a personbleed from their eyes, ears, nose, and mouth
Reveal the right panther eye: Terrifiesa person it can see into fleeing
Reveal the left panther eye: Paralyzes aperson it can see
Full face revealed: Anyone who sees itis gouged with invisible force as if with panther claws.!”
The Living are less modernist monsters: alligators,cutthroats, packs of wild dogs and rival exorcists, honestly you could go along way with just these, especially the cutthroats and rivals, and if a partyis small or wounded, the wild dogs.
The modernism and abstraction of some of the monsters andGreater Dead makes them excellent art pieces and good elements for a fancyhorror movie, or for a written narrative, but perhaps a bit challenging toactually run.
Is this going to be another game/adventure where the flavourtext promises encounters with impossible entities but the most fun you have istrying to escape a pack of angry dogs? Nothing wrong with that if it’s the casebut…
There is a curious dissonance between the items, fictionalstructures, the imagined idea-space of the game, which is solid in conceptionand simple to relate, clear and interesting, and the decision-forming processof the rules of the game itself, which are very ‘Gauntlet-ey’ with lots of‘just discuss it with your players’ and ‘the DM will inform you if you are inimmediate danger of death’ which isn’t quite the same as a player choosing todo anything at all if they have only one HP left
Auto find soft salvage just for burning time looking inappropriate areas; not sure about this one.
Is this just another adaptation of the basic decisionconcept of Apocalypse World? Basically a quite soft conversational system. Samewith Harm & death, very McDowallian, big on simple roles and clearcommunication of risk.
A foldable coracle in opening equipment, but we don’t knowhow hard or difficult travel will be (yet), but the ‘Car Problem’ from UrbanRPGs might be a thing.
No list of names or likely surnames and no PC-relation chartinstead you just talk about it. Honestly random PC connection stuff issomething I like from Bakerish or McDowallian games.
This is probably because Sinjin itself is a synthesis ofrules and concepts from the two main creators with a chunk of the ‘engine’taken from here;
“ Therules on pg 4-5, the For GM note on pg 10, and the Advancement rules on pg 14are adapted from from 24XX CC BY Jason Tocci.”
I have no idea who or what that is. Man I am out of theloop.
Its competent. Not my preferred style. Moody black and whitephotography. Pen and ink drawings. The individual art is good taken on its ownterms! Just not my preference. (Obviously I like Scraps stuff).
‘Sinjin in colour’ would be a good call, especiallyconsidering the hallucinatory nature of reality as ‘depth’ increases .. and ofcourse, Florida should be bright! More Florida Man energy! More Jorodowski lessAnsel Adams!
The maps are competent and useful.
I like all of the parts of this and I find its elegance ofconception and arrangement very pleasing.
I like the environment, which, in its details and processesseems drawn from life.
I like the worldbuilding through factions, items, foes andgreater organisations which are honed to the point of interaction.
There are mild elements I would not disapprove of butperhaps question;
“There are many detailswe have elided or only gestured at, most significantly the precise nature ofthe disaster that created the Territory and the way to mend the damage it hascaused. This can be an unresolvable mystery or the primary goal of theplayers.”
Hhnnn the disembodied spirit of Jason Cordova rises in theshadows cackling mysteriously. “Why the players decide!”
No! Get they behind me thou serpent!
If there is a chance the game could be an investigative oneabout a big central mystery then the policy of feeding off the players improv& feeding it back to them is one I don’t really like. Its ok in a soapopera like AW but fake investigations only really work if people can all intuitthey are fake investigating to tell the story of the investigation and this isnot fun for me. If a big mystery is part of the game there should be an ActualTruth and clues and layers of shit to finding out what it is.)
The Gypsy child feels slightly awkward to me. Wil theyfulfil their destiny & save the manor with their honest heart or end upbaked and syphilitic in an opium den? YOU decide of course! By purchasing andplaying Sinjin! Available HERE!!!!
February 20, 2024
A Review of 'Negara, the Theatre State' by CLIFF CUKIN GEERTZ
(Made by a friend who wasreading the same book at the same time)
A book I read without much knowledge of the deeper context from which it sprang, and which I did not enjoy at all. It may have been worthwhile, but I did not enjoy it.
I got though this book partly on resentment, partly due to interest in the subject and partly on inertia. By the end I was reasonably sure that that Geertz was awful, that Bali was wonderful, that Geertzs' argument was correct and that he had totally failed to prove that. I will never read anything by Clifford Geertz again.
In 'the Theatre State' Geertz argues that in Bali ritual itself was the primary point, purpose and axis of the culture, that power, economic and spiritual, largely served ritual and not the other way aroud. In a sense its something of an anti-materialistic argument. While other writers peel back the skin of culture to show the 'real' power dynamics that drive it, Geertz tries to pull back the skin of power to show it driven itself by ritual.
He is probably right but he doesn't prove it here. Perhaps no-one could have but he definitely doesn't.
(Walter Spies excellent Bali paintings, which I only found out about because of this book)MY HATRED OF CLIFFORD GEERTZ
It’s rare that I have hated a writer so much based merely on the *tenor of their thought*. I agree with the general drift of Geertzs' argument, I find Bali itself fascinating and am genuinely thankful for this introduction to an incredible subject, I just *really hate this fucking guy*.
He is a pompous sneak.
Reading Geertz gives one the impression of encountering a confidence trickster who tries to overwhelm you with volume of obscure detail, tendentious shifts in abstract analysis, vaguely made points in overcomplex form, regular dispellment of poor and shifting failings, before engaging in exactly those failings, (Geertz would lecture you intensely on the non-existence of feet before gaily dancing away), the avoidance and happenstance mention of actually-massively-important points, airy arguments from authority, (check the notes), and carefully not mentioning that his wife did a lot of the work.
My seething rage and frustration at this behaviour is not helped when, on assuming I am being Barnumed, I carefully read and re-read Geertzs' goat-footed prose and find, most times, that I cannot actually prove him wrong. Or at least I cannot prove him inconsistent.
Feeling like you are being scammed, not being able to find the scam, then having to reluctantly spit out that actually you agree, is a mentally distressing process.
A few things Geertz does, to give you a flavour;
- Goes on a long blather in the intro about this not being a book about kings and drama, then opens the actual book with a direct quote description of the extremely dramatic ritual suicide of the last Balinese king.
- Gets most of the way through the book before offhandedly mentioning that the chief Balinese import was opium. In the *notes* he confirms that most of Balis' economic surplus went on getting everyone high as shit, that everyone was baked throughout much of the book, that in the Royal palace the Opium smoke was so thick that the lizards were falling off the walls.
- "This too is probably the appropriate place to acknowledge that a good deal of the material upon which this study is based was gathered by my wife and coworker, Hildred Geertz, and some by an Indonesian assistant, E. Rukasah." (this hidden in the notes at the back of the book, though he does thank his wife in the intro.
- Doesn't really mention war or violence much as an axis of power in this book about power and ritual, until the notes where he allows that there was quite a lot of irregular violence and large ritualistic battles.
- Oh yeah there was slavery at some point, quite a lot of it. Oh and there were illegal wife burnings up to the 1920s. (again, hidden in the notes).
- "By means of a series of inferences, assumptions and outright guesses, which I will not relate for the simple reason that they cannot bear too much inspection, my own estimate of...." So basically "I made it up"
- "The second approach, however, presents historical change as a relatively continuous social and cultural process, a process which shows few if any sharp breaks, but rather displays a slow but patterned alteration in which, though developmental phases may be discerned when the entire course of the process is viewed as a whole, it is nearly always very difficult, if not impossible, to put ones finger exactly on the point at which things stopped being what they were and became instead something else. This view of change or process, stresses not so much the annalistic chronicle of what people did, but rather the formal, or structural, patterns of cumulative activity. The period approach distributes clusters of concrete events along a time continuum in which the major distinction is earlier or later; the developmental approach distributes forms of organisation and patterns of culture along a time continuum in which the major distinction is perquisite and outcome. Time is a crucial element in both. In the first it is the thread along which specific happenings are strung; in the second it is a medium through which certain abstract processes move."
Now, once decoded, I don't necessarily disagree with this, but I'm not sure how useful it is and I find the manner in which it is said mindbreakingly discursive and suspicious.
This is a Geertzian argument. If you think you can handle it or, god fucking help you, that you might actually enjoy it, then dive in bro.
BALI
Bali is an island you have probably already heard of as a holiday destination. On the Westward edge of Indonesia it has a balmy climate, fruitful wet rice cultivation and a large population for its size.
Bali has a lot of culture. Its large, dense population is very highly organised and it is on the boundary of several big culture zones; the Indonesian Archipelago, the great sweep eastward of Indian-continent, Hindu or 'Indic' culture in the historical past, influences from Oceana, western colonisation at the hands of the Dutch in quite recent history.
The West crashing into Bali relatively recently means that Western ethnography has 'access' via many travellers and scholars who just had to spend some in the wonderful climate and surrounded by the beautiful people of Balie for research and colonisation purposes, we must know more about this tropical island of hot babes and cheap opium. That is was recent means Bali is still weird as shit and there is a lot lot lot to go on about.
There is more. In fact with Balinese culture there is "always more". It is a gumbo of multitudinous cultural, ritual, organisation, religious and governmental forms. Added to this its neatly If ethnologists and anthropologists had a PornHub it would be Bali 24/7. It might be the most interesting place ever.
(There may be a pleasingly sinister Aryan connection. Bali was 'Indicised' by cultural outflow from India, absorbing a lot of Hindu/Indian culture. I did wonder if the ritual wife-burnings described were a distant echo of an origin culture that also lead to the slave burning witnessed by Ibn Fadlan when he encountered the Rus in the European dark age. I don't know if there is any confirmation of the Indo-Europeans spreading wife/servant/dependant ritual burnings at funerals, but it does seem like the kind of thing they would be into. It would be nuts if the Vikings and Balinese were culturally related.)
Is Bali really that much more complex than an equivalent Western/European polity? Its hard for me to tell. Some of the overwhelming nature of the discussion of political groups, ritual groups, rice growing hydraulic groups, family/houseyard groups, temples, rituals, conflicts, layer upon layer of organisation, obligation, lords here, priests there, pass the Opium, is simply because the terms and concepts are unfamiliar. Bali has a lot of things that are a bit like the western version but none of them are actually like that, so a discussion of *anything* Balinese starts with; "this is a bit like a lord/peasant relationship, so we use those words, except not really, and actually totally different, but we don't really have words for exactly what it was....."
But this isn't actually more-dense complexity but only perceived complexity.
Bali has a large and *dense* population by western norms, due to having a really nice climate and wet rice cultivation. (Like java the volcanoes probably mean very continuously fertile fields). So there are a lot of people in very close communication, dealing and interacting with each other in a huge variety of ways. (But no cities as we would understand them).
But this may not be any more complex proportionate to population than the western version, with the same total of people more widely spread.
(Of course many close dense interconnections and relationships can increase complexity purely due to that density.)
Bali is also a hyper-studied place for all the reasons given above, so the simple weight of scholarship, reportage and analysis almost feeds upon itself, producing more analysis and thus more perceived complexity.
Bali is represented here as a very deeply contextual society where the folkways/religion/government/rituals/society are all very deeply interrelated almost all of the time. As Geertz would put it, the culture is woven into every fabric, object, design element, artwork, ritual, temple, house, clothing item, Kriss, rice paddy.. it’s everywhere and everything. Because everything feels so deeply integrated into the directly experienced human lifeworld, it might be actually impossible to understand Bali. To understand it you would need to actually live in it, to breath it, be absorbed by it, in order to drink in the deep context. If you are absorbed in it you cannot truly observe it from outside. So the only person who could really understand Bali is someone born there, growing up and living in the centre of its culture as a natural intuitive insider, AND, who was also born far away and had an entirely different set of values and came to Bali from the outside, learning everything about it from there and carefully observing.
This person cannot exist so perhaps Bali cannot be studied.
One idea that kept coming to mind as I read was the concept of Bali as a living antifossil. (Of course we are not meant to treat Bali as a living fossil of an 'Indic' culture as it would have been before the modern age all over Indonesia, as Geertz argues quite a bit, before typically tacitly doing exactly that).
But Bali as an example of what a post-singularity or post-scarcity human future might look like after mass genetic engineering and the creation of 'human optimal' biomes and plant and animal forms; dense, warm, full of insanely complex groupings and stratification, deeply absorbed in rituals, with some passing trade, not that much interest in things outside the culture, no deep sense of mission but one of continuity, some semi-regular violence. Is this what the 'human optimum' might look like? A dense, warm, relatively static culture where most human basic needs are met?
Of course Bali has scarcity. My observation comes from seeing it from European eyes where, to us, it has everything Europe doesn't, and everything we might wish for in terms of climate, manageable size, a ridiculously productive agricultural system, relative peace and human flourishing in the way that most psychologically average humans would probably conceive it.
If you went back in time, put a European peasant in coma, took them to Bali & woke them up, they might actually think they were in heaven. It has everything a peasant wants from heaven.
I do not really believe in a 'final', optimum, or zero-scarcity human culture as humans create scarcity through their desires regardless of what is or isn’t materially available. But its interesting to try to imagine 'plateau' cultures or 'optimal' cultures we might inhabit on our journey.
(Spies)
Ritual and power interweave at every juncture, so like any complex argument from the human lifeworld where behaviours interweave and support each other and where each is to some extent an expression of the other, the question is less 'which of these things is this behaviour *really* about? But more; in this web of feedback, which of these elements is *more* dominant, and *which* times and under what conditions?
Can we find times in Bali where power and ritual were in conflict and Ritual clearly won? (this would be hard because by definition, whichever aspect of society was behind the Ritual answer, turned out to be more "powerful" because they "won". You can’t disprove the rule of power since whatever does rule, is power.
Something familiar to most of us from Television; experienced Judges witnessing a dance and offering opinions on which of the dancers is really leading at which times.
The dancers in this case are Power and Ritual in Bali.
How useful is this metaphor? The more into the weeds of actual dancing the less useful
but some concepts to consider might be;
- The *complexity* of the *whole* situation with the judges watching the dance and the dancers responding to each other. Multiple observers observing elements that are mutually-observing.
- How genuinely hard it is to judge matters of dominance in complex feedback behaviours. The dynamics existed in-the-moment, between two maximally-engaged and highly responsive sophonts in a flow state. What happened between them might not be 'knowable' by an observer.
- the complexity of the judges *response* to the dance and how they might argue with each other afterwards, each basing their points on what they saw (all slightly different), what they themselves know of dancing (all slightly different) and any contextual knowledge they might have of these dancers in particular.
If you imagine the depth of this imagined situation, the differences of opinion, limits of evidence and some things that maybe even maximal evidence and knowledge can't reveal, then that is perhaps a rough guide to the level of difficulty, complexity of witnessing, evidence and judgement we engage in when we try to untangle these relationships like for instance Geertz's argument that in Bali Ritual was (more) dominant over Power (most of the time).
In Geertzs' defence the thing he is trying to prove is immeasurably complex ad subtle and about an immeasurably complex society, so proving, or even arguing it properly would be a staggering synthesis of rigour, subtlety and vast arcologies of detail. It would be an absolutely peak academic argument, if it could be done.
Few could do it and Geertz is not among them. He writes the wrap-up synthesis at the end but that belongs at the end of a much longer, much better, and paradoxically, much easier to read book.
Geertz is probably right in that in Bali, ritual was a power of its own, its own centre of 'not-power' to which what we commonly think of as 'real power'; guns, money, sex and taxes, was subservient.
But he doesn't prove it. He puts a lot of arguments in the air, considers a lot of things, gestures towards his final summation and then runs for it, like a magician fleeing the stage while the plates are spinning.
December 23, 2023
I fully intended to do at least one full, proper post be...
I fully intended to do at least one full, proper post before the Gackling Moon Kickstarter ends on Christmas Eve..
And I have failed! I am sorry!
At least we have hit some stretch goals;
All backers will get a free interlinked PDF! (the rest of you will have to pay £5)
The Book will now be Hardback for all!
We are taking £1 off the cost (either of the book price or postage, whichever is easier), for all backers!
We have about 24 hours left, so…
Its possible we might hit this one; £2 off for all backers.
And if we get that one..
Gasp!
At backers request, you can now back for two books!
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Take a look if you want to! Merry Christmas Everyone!
December 6, 2023
The Autumn of Summers
Nothing dies like a Summer and the great beasts offorgotten summers, each different.
Seasons here come from the southwest and fade towards thenorth east, vanishing over those black hills, but there is something thereamong the pale lakes which curdles seasons, traps them so, in each season, agreat beast comes forth.
So tit is that this is the land of great beasts. Eachbeast is always different, as each season is different. And so this is a landof hunters and scholars of the hunt. Ao-one knows precisely what will comeforth - the where’s and the hows of it. All can be dangerous, but the parts anddanger of each beast can possess increasable properties, and the hunt is alwaysdifferent for each season.
The beasts of summer are usually the most violent and aggressive,if not the most deadly.
But now comes a great terror, for up int the black hills,a strange moon rose and the world shook, and this autumn has come forth not onebeast of summer but all. A torrent of forgotten summers - one each day or night- slinking sliding or blazing forth so that the cool night shimmers and simmerswith beasts.
It is very terrible, nothing is safe or regular. As badas the beasts are the hunters that flood up the river. Yet we need them; allthe old hunters of past summers. They gather round in creaking hustles, talkinghere with a farmer, there with a thane, the old men and housewives pulling onpipes and speaking what they know of this beast or that;
The hunters at rest Vasily Grigorievich Perov1 - Its form; (d20)
1. Sinious and lizardine, it curleth and windeththat its end might be hither and yon, now near, now far.
2. a lion in aspect and aye ye might say that nonehere have seen a lion in this life or the next but the old books speakmuch of them and tales as well and at all or most points I do say it belionlike.
3. the beast be horned and prancing, like an oldforest god, a great deer or a circus man
4. the beast be a flock or swarm of some flying thing,it be a shimmer in the air, or perhaps like many birds
5. the beast be a river creature swimming in the airas if t’were water above and not below
6. the beast is chimeric, brutal and winged, abeast of many parts and not well arranged
7. the beast is insectile but vast in scael, likea small thing made larger than it might be, or a familiar thing made unfamiliar
8. the beast is a lizard beast of a lost age, orthe bones of one, or perhaps it be an alligator or a huge chicken yet it havesome part of all of those
9. the beast be a platypus
10. the beast be like a crawling baby or toddlingboy with a huge beasts head, or visa versa some say
11. the beast is a great stilted quadruped movingdreamlike yet its feet are cruel
12. the beast is a screeching feathered earthboundmess
13. this is a rapidly tunnelying beast with astrong dorsal fin or spike that preturdeth forth and it do churn its waythrough the earth very busyliy
14. the beast is a rolling pangolin, or armadillo,or a long beast yet that it form itself into an hoop and roll
15. the beast is akin to a rabbit or hare, smallor large
16. the beast is small bird but very big, not alarge bird, but a small one made big
17. the beast is most like an elephant or mammoth
18. I would say it is a wild cackling monkey
19. Of this beast a man might say; “this be alike unto a greatbeetle” but another say “It be not so and you are a foole to say so, lookthee upon a beetle for they be common enough and say again that the beast be soalike, go on with ye ye great foole ye”.
20. Some would call it like a Dragonfly, yet onenot seen hither, others may call it a bird of heaven.
Drunk Hunters Rest with Dog - Unknown2 - Its coat similar to; (d12)
1-3; Skin; naked is the beast
4; It be a hairy beast, which is that its hairs belooser and longer than fur
5-6; The beast have scales like a snake
7-8; It hath fur, mayhap short but not too long
9-10; It is a feathered beast
11-12; It be two of the above each in separateparts.
3 - Its colour; (d20)
1. Like fire embers mixed with falling cherryblossom
2. gold tarnished with nitre but in places waxingseemingly molten yet without heat
3. heat-haze sunset red fading into bluecounter-shading
4. like a shiny copper penny
5. a shifting blue-green iridescence shining as ifalways under summer light even when not
6. from powder blue to ink-black mixingwith its own long ever-present shadow
7. crocus-yellow veined with pink
8. the red of sunbeaten bricks with parts likefine pink-traced marble
9. like deep red polished wood
10. tobacco-stained dove feathers
11. bee or tiger-striped, aggressive yellow anddepthless black
13. shimmering cut-grass green, along with thesmell
14. bright burning yellow-white of a noon sun (it be hardto gaze upon)
15. Eclipse-Coloured (that is pseudo twilight,black ringed with white and many-shadowed)
16. A smooth milky white with dream-coloured markings (acolour not of this sphere), either that or the colour of wounded ice.
17. Rose counterpointing the blood-green ofthorn
18. The soft tan of well cared-for teeth, ringedwith glistening red
19. Perfect lavender with the smell also and beesalways near whether day or night
20. beaten heated iron speckled with the colour of its sparksand with something of its heat
4 - Its size and bygness; (2d6)
2. Very little like a kitten yet faster than theeye and fierce as fire
3. Badger size, deft and ferocious withal
4. A wildcats size and suppleness, and as silentand careful
5. The size of a big dog yea also robust, fearlessand deep-chested that it tire not
6. As wide as a pygg, or boar very thick set andsmall legged and oncoming
7. Big as a foal or mule with long slender partsyet some thikke
8-9. It hath the mass of tiger or great catt, verylarge and at all points well-proportioned
10. More large and mighty than an Aurochs - itcould break down simple walls
11. Alike the tales of the Olyphant claim; that itmay batter houses
12. Like a Wyrm of tales, or mayhap a Whaleof the See. A mighty thing that may push down the tallest trees and fear none
The Hunting Meeting Adolphe Monticelli5 - A Wonderous Aspect the beast hath; (d20)
1. Heat, that it gives out a great warmth that parchesthe green and bakes the earth and makes a shimmer in the air so that the birdsdrop dead and an egg may be cooked in its track, it may also breathe the fireof the sun some say.
2. Winds. It be cradled and woven with winds thatmay blast hunters hither and yon and may even carry it forth in the air.
3. Gold. All those wounded by it corrupt not intofoulness but transmute slowly into purest gold, spreading like infection fromits wound till they die thereof. It may be that its blood be hot gold, or itsbones, or that it breathe gold or its fewmets be so.
4. Sweetness. The beast hath about it an Amoroussweetness which do cause those nearby to look kindly and sweetly upon oneanother and the beast too so that a man may be being eaten by the beast and cryout; hurt it not, the poore thing.
5. Fecundity. A great growth of green thingswherever the beast passes, as much as if the land were left untilled andunmanaged for five or ten years or more.
6. Fertilisation. It be that where the beast is orhas been, if ye be tupped ye shall seed and if ye tupp another they shall bewith child, this being so for all animals even man, and the children be many.
7. Priapism and Satyrification. All males aroundthe beast find themselves in a great heat for what they desire and ever-readyto make their amore with whatever they may see be it alike unto their love ornot. This being so for all animals and they becoming most dangerous as aresult.
8. Mnemophagy. This beast do devour all memory ofit, though how it do this, by bite or sight, or be scent or touch, or byinfection or whatever, none can recall. Likewise whatever be said of this beastbe hearsay only, aye even this.
9. Loss, Listlessness and Dwelling upon Old Things.Those who hunt the beast are become a melancholic sort, as if the very thoughtof it do lead the mind down old and winding paths such that men take to drinkand poetry and hunt it not.
10. Phoenixaliac Rekindling After Death. If thebeast be killed it shall live again another way. How this be done and howstopped none have yet devised/
11. The Engendering of Mazes. Some by growth,others by a changing of the world.
12. It Doth Blind Those Who Look Upon It. As it beits form be but a rumour from seeing it in mirrors.
13. Shamed-to-Mar. All those who pierce, slice,put blows upon or otherwise marr the beast are consumed inwardly by great shameas if they had done a holy wrong and must be kept from blade, rope and poisonfor a good while.
14. That It May Dwell in Reflections. It do seemvery small in a mirror, glass or still water, yet may leap from one to anotherand come again in its true size and largeness.
15. That It May Change Its Size.
16. That Its Blood Become Clever Snakes. Red andpoisonous and at times capable of speech, these issue forth and run up trousersand into joints where they bite venomously and lethally. If a snake may betaken and kept it may give secrets.
17. That Its Roar Makes Panic, Causes Walls to Shatterand Streams to Surge and Doth Awaken Dark Spirits.
18. That It May Not Be Harmed By Weapon Made Of MortalHand. Yet how this be accounted, that it be a thing forged, or simplyassembled by hand, if a sword will strike, an arrow pierce or even a thrownrock hit home I cannot say.
19. That It Maketh a Music or Cry Which Do ExchangeThe Selves Of Those Thereabout As If T’were The Shuffling of Cards. If thebeast do make its sound aye one shall become another as if the spright werehoisted from one wight and placed in another as a card may change hands andthis hath done great confusion for many are not them-selves.
20. That It Be A Phylactery. It be said the beasthave within it the souls of any whom it has slain or who have fallen by itshand and should it die they shall be free’d. Yet whether they will attain theirold wights or where they shall go, who can say?
The meeting of Khusrau and Shirīn on the hunting field. Gouache painting by a Persian artist, Qajar period
6 - the prey of the beast; (d20)
1. Man. The beast taketh any man or woman whereverand however it may and makes little division or distinction between them bethey man, woman, young, old, sic or hale or of this land or that.
2. The Beasts of the Field. It doth eat the cows,sheep, hoggs and Goats and any other beast that the hand of man places in somepasture or closed acre so that the country go bare and the fields overgrown,but of wild beasts it eats not.
3. Bridges. Not only these but perhaps doors,gates, crossing place poles that carry signs it doth gulp and swallow all as ift’were good cheese so that no river may be crossed, door barred and no man knowwhich way go which.
4. Those Sleeping. Both beast and man so that allliving fair and foul in the land fear greatly to sleep, or if they can sleep inshifts and all are tired most times and muchly. Sleep not lest the beast takethee!
5. Princes. Tis well these are few andwell-guarded and rich withal that they may pay hunters to protect them. Yet acrown to travel faster than a ray of light and should one prince fall the crowndo go rightways to another and the beast smells them out rightwise.
6. Children. Oh woe!
7. It Doth Eat of the Greene. As to a locust orplague of voals, the crops are devoured and even the leaves of the trees!
8. It Snuffleth in the Earth. What it seekes therewho doth know, yet it tear up the land in great trenches and pitts and leaves asoily ruine wherever it will.
9. Treasures of Silver and Gold. Such riches belike sweetmeats to the beast and it may smell them out readily enough. It hatheeaten half the gold hearabouts and we must go now on credit. No coin or ring issafe but it will not eat flesh.
10. Yron. And mayhap steel, so that horses go unshoed andnothing of great devise may be made or sustained in this land but that thebeast will smell it out and devour it.
11. Chickens.
12. Clothes and Eyes. Tis very sad to see theblind and naked people hearabouts. Some say it better that the beast do sukkthey yghen outte, others prefer that the orb be pierced and drawn like anolive.
13. Fingers. And it will not discern between buttake all and in great bites and then be gone and ye left with bloody mitts asye may see from some here.
14. Virgins. I be in no danger but in gods nameget ye tupped or get ye gonne.
15. Prey of the Hunt. The great of the land beoffended for not fox nor deer nor bear or even badger can be quested for butthat the beast interrupt and take the prey, even a small man may not take apigeon by arrow lest the beast be upon them.
16. Honey. Aye and good luck to it and it may keepthe hives. But there shall be no honey this year and none left in jars eitherand I take it sore.
17. Those Who Looke Not Behind Them. For this yousee all hereabouts are everglancing and head turning and leaping and twistinghither and yon for if the beast sees you looking towards your own hind to seeit then it shall fear to be seen but if not it shall come at thee.
18. It Drinketh the Streme. And gulpeth all downday upon day, now in one place, now another, as if it were the very see, andthe land by made parched therewith and there be nothing to drink at all.
19. It Taketh Voices and Wind. ……… tisstill ………
20. Wives. And not all are pleased by it (thoughsome are), and do dress their wives in great suits of yron and spikes that thebeast may not get upon them and this do please some men who say t’should’vebeen done afore times yet others divorce & live free & the men be woe.
The Old Hunter by Ferdinand de Braekeleer
7 - manner and habit of the beast; (d20)
1. Fuming and Bellicose, it doth roar and go withgreat bobbaunce and make much of itself as if it’were to be a king of beastsaye and men too.
2. Like a Hott Ember that sits yet sparks fiercelyif poked. If ye see it show care for it may only growl and then leap forth inways unseen and with great pain.
3. It Runs like Water always to the Easiest &subtlest Path.
4. It stalks like a Tiger, leaps and carries awaywhat it desires to where it would and only then devours them.
5. Preening and Ladylike. It pleases to be admiredand preens and cleans often and is much horrored by being fouled. Likes to belooked upon but does revenge itself like a batty matron if assailed.
6. Afearing and Astounding. It pleasures in theterror it inflicts and enjoys to afear and horrible its prey, to hear themquerulous, then to scream and run and be pursued as if the fear itself weremeat to it.
7. Like Stagnant Water in a Well. It lies hiddenin some place where what is needed is kept, as with; water, firewood orsimilar, then takes what comes and lets none pass. A bridge may be its dwellingplace.
8. Its Manner be Circumspect and Little Known.
9. Subtle and Sidling, striking and assailing fromwhere it be not suspected to come. It doth take much pleasure in thisinvention.
10. Hawklike and Striking, it do seek to observewhat it desires from and great distance, giving little sense or sign of what itwould, and in a trice it advance and descend in great speed and silence, aimingat one and only one particular desire of its flesh and either it carry awaythat one or it retreat and sitt and seem to again give little auger that itever desired any such thing.
11. Wheeling and False-Craven. The creature makesa squirrel like hopping and friendliness and a craven wheedling like a beatendogg and a sopping of eyes like a sad child as if to say ay sir let me but beby thy side, but attend it not for it shall eat well.
12. Regular and Castellean. The beast doth patrolits own walls and ways like a well-fed cellarmaster, one may set ones clock byits goings.
13. Playful and Boisterous. Frustrating as asugared child the beast demands attention and runs circling round and round andround and upon tiring itself breaks down and wails, it assails in manic wise astroubled children will.
14. Slovenly and Villainous. A poor and nastycreature that slinks and covertly writhes in great suspicion and clearmalignancy yet it seems not to think it is seen, also the thing by dirty,wrenched and ill-kept.
15. Like a Snail that Knoweth Much. It make is wayslowly but beware for the beast is a player of games and wise withal and shallbe neither outwitted or surprised, instead ye shall have thy hand turned as ifby a sharper of cards for all its slowness.
16. It Goeth about as a Merchant upon highway and road.The jaunty creature travels as if expecting good welcome.
17. Like a Great Shippe, or Drifting Thyng. Ormayhap like a cloud which goeth against the wind, or an old drunk who finds hisway home though bleary, the beast doe drift and hang about and do little andthen drift away.
18. Curious and nose-arching. Like a pompousdrinker of fine wines the beast do sniff here and there and investigate muchand poke about where it will yet if seen it shall seem to give over that itseek not and that whatever it hath found be not what it sought or it do be sobut not of right quality.
19. It Quest Like a Dogge. Very much do it scentand follow seeking and biting at what it wants.
20. It Cometh and Goeth at Strange Hours Alike Unto aMan Confused. No sooner be it in one place but that it look about it andseem to go on as if it came wrongly, at other times it butts in where nothingit desires may be but yet it shall be present and full of wonders till thesense strike and it wander off or seem woeful and leave.
Paulus Potter. The Bull, 16478 - the lair of the beast if it have such; (d20)
1. It Lay Down Where it Will. Who can say wherethe beast be, not I.
2. It Hide in a Nest in a Tall Tree
3. It Seek out Tombs.
4. In the Roof of an House
5. Beneath Something Larger than Itself, often abridge, perhaps a hill
6. In a great Nutt
7. Behind a Clokk
8. It hideth in a myst which emits from a toadthat lives in a tree that grows upon a skul, tho the nature of the skul be of no consequencein this telling and only a matter of chance and I say to thee any skul will doand busy thyself not with this petty aspect but be about your work.
9. It liveth within a Goat and which Goat or wherebe not known except that it hunger for lime for the Beast within do afflict itshumours.
10. It liveth in a place that cannot be foundexcept that of those that pursue it each shall dream of the beast and dream onething true so that if several do seek and do remember and compare their dreamsthe parts of which that are true will be combined to indicate the place yet forthat day or night only.
11. It rest where waters fall.
12. It rest not and cease not but be ever-amovesuch that if it cease it may die.
13. It seeks old castles or ruins of likekind.
14. It be a shape-changing beast and sleeps as a manin a bed, and the man knoweth not that he be the beast.
15. It rest as a sweet Air that drift from asilver harp that be seen only in the reflection of a starlit pool and when day dobreak the harp fade and with it each note do pass away and as each sound dothfall to earth for each one the Beast be painted in the daylight air as with thestroke of a brush till it be real and fierce once more yet if a man do learnits tune and if it be moonlight and have they a silver harp they may cause thebeast to sleep invisible for as long as they do play and play well.
16. It sleep quiet in a cavern of soil beneath thehouse of an Old Maid and she will have none of thee or thy ways and shall allowthee not but turn the country against they for devilling with her floorboardsyet how else shall the Beast be attained I ask thee woman?
17. It rest beneath a great pyre of hott embersand ye may find these by their scent and smoke.
18. In the Cowshed.
19. In three separate parts, one beneath earth,one above and one in neither of those and they may be hunted separate orcombined but if ye strike one ye must strike all at the same moment or ye belost.
20. It build for itself a False House of twigs andthe woods leavings, and why it do this none know for the house be hollow withinand like a nest yet without it do look very like an house.
The Jabberwock, by John Tenniel, 1871
MOON MOON MOON
THE KICKSTARTER FOR GACKLING MOON IS STILL RUNNING!
EVERY BACKER GETS A FREE INTERLINKED PDF(ITS GONNA BE £5 FOR NON-BACKERS)NEXT GOAL IS....
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(i was going to title this 'help Patrick get hard', count yourselves lucky that i did not)
November 24, 2023
MOON MOON MOON
GACKLING MOON is live!
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Go here if you want to learn more;
(On the one hand I am the least successful of the OSR diaspora, on the other I am not doing too badly for a guy with a double-digit IQ.)
November 6, 2023
The City of Drift
(Some Discord bros gave me a hand with some of the scent markers. All images by John Atkinson Grimshaw.)
Once stolen by Ghosts, (allegedly), and still on the run,Drift moves with the mist like a ship drifting at sea, coalescing and emerging,overlapping and interlacing with other places, its streets curving aroundtheirs, its buildings interspacing theirs. So Drift is always changing a littlewithin itself, as it translocates, seamlessly, from place to place.
It is a town without clear boundaries, signified by mistsand gloom, smoke and smog, the ripe interweaving patterning of bells, the cloppingof its slow, thin horses, the whispers that skitter through its alleyways andthe layers and waves of subtle scent that mark its palaces and shops.
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The Coming of Drift
The town no longer has a place reserved for it in clearreality, instead being confined to theocean and the mists, to the gloaming of dawn or the embers of the day, toovercast nights or fog-shrouded days.
Drift comes upon normal places silently, infiltrating itsalleyways between buildings in the fog or smoke, at night or in the afternoon,in silent or ill-travelled streets. The exact moment of its arrival cannot beperceived, (in fact that exact moment does not even exist, lost in therecords of time the same way the location of Drift is lost on the maps).
The first signs of Drift are the pungent scents of itsshops, narrow alleyways between buildings that previously had no gap, theoff-kilter clopping of its pale horses, the smell and distant sound of the sea,no matter how far from the sea you may be, the melodious overlapping of bellstelling one time or another, or signalling one direction or another, and thelow distant vibration, a sound unlike a horn, deep as a beast, but more regular,coming from the statue of Mutability which stands on an island in the citiesharbour.
All the alleys into Drift lead downhill, no matter wherethey emerge or what the rest of the geography is doing. The alleys are narrowand shrouded in mist, perhaps with the gas lamps hanging from the rear of oneof its thin carriages retreating.
Once an entry is there, it has always been there, withevery sign and evidence of its permanent existence in place; with the same dirtand texture of its current location, the same or similar materials, the sameroad surface and a sign, if that is usual, in the style of whatever place itis, pointing inwards, spelling ‘Drift’. The sign and walls and floor will bedirty or worn or clean and sharp, just like the place of its arrival. Graffitiwill lead in seamlessly from walls which were always there, turning on to wallswhich have only ‘always been there’ since a moment ago. Vague half-memories ofDrift emerge in the minds of anyone approaching an entry; it doesn’t much of astir. When its there, people soft of remember that it has always been there. Whenit is gone it is nearly forgotten.
Magicians, adventurers, occultists, mediums,fortune-tellers,sea-captains, rope merchants, perfumiers, opera singers andhooded figures sometimes suspect when drift will arrive and where and quietlypack the local pubs and cafes, sitting creepily and ruining the ambience forthe locals, waiting for a moment that cannot be sensed, after which, the vaguememory of the existence of Drift will be revealed especially to Publicans, theHomeless and Cab Drivers past middle age.
Asking them before this moment will only get you afunny look, but waiting for that senseless un-time and asking then; “Doyou know the turn into Drift? Its somewhere around here I think?” And theanswer will be a clear “Course I do mate, down the road on tha left innit.Dunno why you’d want to go there.”
The History of Drift
Founded By Ghosts
Ghosts walk the streets of Drift City - antechamber tothe shadow world, (allegedly). The founders of Drift City were all dead by thetime they arrived, (they came on a Ghost Ship), that is why it took them solong but also why they could find it.
In other stories the Ghosts stole Drift, either tokeep it or to keep it safe. Maybe it was a High Fantasy thing? Saving it fromthe Dark Lord? Or a Steampunk thing? Some experiment which killed theexperimenters but left them as ghosts in an empty city?
Whatever. At some point early in the history of Drift, itwas an empty city, but for Ghosts. At that same point it was also a placelesscity, drifting, as it still does.
Maybe whatever created the ghosts made the city Drift,maybe not, but the Ghosts were the first residents, the Founders, and they arestill here and are still the Founders. The Municipal Government of Drift hasnever changed, though it has faded in and out of intelligibility over time.Bylaws and judgements are communicated (though not decided) by Mediums. Theghosts are conservative but reliable, difficult to influence via bribery orpork. Because Drift was founded by ghosts its government buildings are cemeteriesand visa versa.
Of course there are new ghosts, now and then. If theyhave a knack for it they stay in place and work their way up the ranks. Changeis slow. But Drift is a relatively safe place for ghosts.
Populated by Exiles and Slaves
Shipwreck victims, outlaws, explorers, outsiders. Exiles.Escaped slaves, forgotten Kings. Like many harbour towns, Drift is a mosaic ofeternal expatriates. Unlike most there is no ‘back country’, and no mainethnicity, apart from the Ghosts.
It is rare for anyone to settle in Drift City who is notan eccentric, outcast, or hunted, or anyone who is not comfortable with ghosts,gloom and strange sounds.
Since all the major governmental roles are occupied bythe dead the living elite of Drift are made up of traders, skilled craftsmen,artists, mediums, magicians, Sea Captains, ship owners and the lords ofinsurance. The lack of (tangible) nobility makes it a relatively flattish, butquite high-toned upper crust. Birth gives a little rank but reputation more.
Turning Into Drift A Maritime Town
Drift is usually a shore city and usually has a harbourof sorts. Sometimes it even has a harbour when it appears far inland. Almostall of its economic activity comes via ship and the sailors of Drift City canalways find their way home; they will get there through the mist.
Usually, one turns into Drift through the alleyways atits periphery and heads downhill towards the moaning of Mutability. On the rareevents one can see a view through fog, smoke or gloom, (that is not a carefulTrompe l’oeil), one sees the tangled towers and alleyways and mixed-up ziplinesof Drift cascading down in a bricolage of driftwood architecture, down to theharbour, the Opera House and the statue of Mutability, the goddess bearing anintermittent torch of fire as pale and translucent as the mist itself, mostvisible to those near death, with the city spread out around it like ashattered crater of houses with about two fifths cut out of it to let in theblack sea.
A City Of Alleyways
The alleyways are crooked, long and thin. There are notreally any streets in drift, or anything you could easily call the Main Way,just alleys leading off alleys. The widest roads are about the width of thosein a Medieval European town; ghostwives can chatter between windows in theoverhanging eaves, people can easily leap across, bridges, improvised orcarefully designed, are thrown between buildings over streets.
It’s hard to tell the difference between a gap leading toan alley or just a deep porch. Turns are hidden in nooks. Alleys are gated offbut the gates are left unlocked. The boundary between public and private isnebulous. Its common to feel that you are trespassing.
When its busy on a lane, people just turn off, looparound. There is always a possible detour in Drift, people percolate throughthe city like chemicals in blood.
Buildings Long, Tall And Deep
Long thin buildings lead off long thin alleyways.. Buildingstall and slender, tenements housing the descendants of pirates, shipwrecks,those lost at sea, traitors, slaves. Drift has famous glassworks, many buildings are tall, slender and glassfronted with iron frames. The curtains are always closed of course, but you cansee lights moving behind them at night.
Others have narrow frontage but go deep to the rear, endingin gardens. Others are long laterally, old manufactories, or built like them, asme buildings occupy differentpositions on the same street, or on another street, either crossing the road ona bridge before dropping down, forming part of the same building but on theopposite side of the road, or even overleaping or burrowing under a whole rowof building by bridge or tunnel before occupying an entirely different street.Sometimes the doors and exits are quite different to the buildings position; enterthrough a narrow door, turn a corner, climb steps to an attic space, cross overthe entire block of buildings through a shared attic, take steps down and findthe bulk of the building facing a different road.
This aids intrigues in Drift - many secret or forgottendoors, dumb waiters, shared rooms, attics or cellars, and many houses oroffices directly adjacent to others across a thin wall while the actual entrancesand addresses are in quite different parts of town
Trompe l’oeil
Trompe-d'oil is prized in Drift, though many of thepaintings are decayed. Most high-status buildings or frontages will be paintedtrompe l’oeil, so that the a description of that painting forms the part of abuildings (or a doorways at least) address. ‘The House of Many Leopards’, the‘fourth door in the Garden of Setebos’, ‘down there on Flamingo Row’.
While the rich can have their buildings painted andregularly upkept, the middling classes must subsist on pasted Trompe. Many ofthe famous painters have tall, thin buildings with tall, thin doors. When theirhuge paintings are complete they are rolled out through the multistorey doorsand shifted into place to block street entrances, to occupy blank walls at the end of longavenues, or have holes cut in them for windows and doors before being pasted upas the front of residences.
Over time all the paintings blotch and stain, and thoseposted up can peel away, or part away, leaving ghost signs or layeredpalimpsests of variegated images from different eras. Though of course at onepoint this very decayed palimpsest style, painted as such, was itself adeliberate artifice and quite in vogue for a time.
Texture
In Drift, everything is textured and patinaed. Nothingshines like new and nothing is entirely clean. It would be nearly pointlessanyway, what with the fog, smoke, rain, gloom, the salt from the sea and thelichen and hot breath of its closely packed, though quite quiet, population.The ghosts wouldn’t like it either.
Ald and worn things are treasured, new made things arenot. Wood smoothed by many hands, or by the sea, cups with long-use stains atthe bottom, even the slight abrasive chipping of glass or crystal. Smokestains, soot stains, sun paling, grooves and bends to things. This is thetexture of Drift. It is a somewhat comfortable City, the chairs tend to bewell-used and easy to sit in. It’s a place where one can slouch easily againsta wall.
Smells and Bells
Because Drift is so gloomy, foggy, smoky, private, narrowand labyrinthine, the city has developed a parallel sensory language tocommunicate place and location.
Businesses communicate themselves via scent. Places of businessthat don't have their own smell will license one from the council. any placethat cooks is allowed to fan its scent about and all do,
though there are bylaws and arguments between placesabout the use of too much smell or spice. Other shops are allowed tocommunicate their presence through a registered system of scent markers.
Coffee beans are popular in Drift, though not fordrinking. Instead people carry small bags of them in deep narrow pockets.(Drift pockets can be so narrow and so deep that a special form of tongs forreaching into them is in common use). If they need their scent palate cleaning,they pull out the bag of beans and take a deep sniff. In the lee of this strongscent, which fades quickly, their sinuses regain some sensitivity anddiscretion which may have been lost throughout the day.
Occupations by Scent
Chandlers smell of beeswax. Blacksmiths of coal smoke andhot metal. Armourers of lapping powder. Jewellers of Ambergris and Furriers ofMyrrh. Gambling houses smell of vinegar, Undertakers of Freesia. Tanners ofurine, Fullers of urine and lanoline, Brewers of Hops but Pubs of Beer. Cobblerssmell of leather and beeswax, Butchers of blood. Bookshops smell of their paperand each shop only sells books printed on paper from the same forest so eachshop has a smell quite distinctive to keen readers but a seemingly randomselection of books. Clerks smell like wig dust and aniseed, Lawyers of wormwoodand brothels of Mint, the slighter and sweeter the mint smell the moreexpensive the brothel. Heralds have purple coats , and they are associated withthe slight fish sauce smell from the marine snails used for that dye whileWhisperers smell of Roses. Mediums smell of incense (the only professionallowed to burn it) and Fortune Tellers of fruitful hemp. Knackers smell ofdeath.
Locations by Bell
Drift has a latticework of bells. Every quarter has alarge Belltower which peals in an agreed sequence with each other quarter, witha slightly different tone and a different pattern to each. So Bells in Drifttell not so much time, (though an experienced habitant can tell time from thebells, due to micro differences in rhythm and pattern), but place.
The large low-frequency bells are raised up about eachquarter and below them in each Rue and Tangle, major notable buildings likeTaverns, Temples or Cemeteries, have their own bells, set to higher pitcheswhich get lost and trapped in the weave of alleyways and so don’t disrupt otherquarters much, and rung in their own evolved patterns of rhythm.
Some residences, usually at least one on each street,hang wind chimes outside their door; silver for the wealthy, wooden for thepoor.
So the city is covered and woven with a pattern of smellsand bells such that those who know the place can easily find their way about,finding general locations by the Great Bells, smaller areas by lesser bells,and single businesses and houses by bell and by scent.
This rolling wave of soft continual sound, underlaid bythe sound of the sea and the moaning of the lamp of Mutability, can be somewhathypnotic and disturbing for new visitors, but after a time one becomesaccustomed to it, and ultimately, becomes an initiate, with the sensory net ofthe city making its structure and places as clear as day, regardless of thecloseness and gloom.
Whisperers
Public conversation in Drift is muffled or whispered.Crowds are never loud, (except possibly if there is a riot at the opera), butthis seems to suit the mood and conventions of the city.
Whispers do infiltrate through the alleyways likeinvisible snakes though, wyrms of muttered sound that fleet past, or curl andspiral, hunting questing, before disappearing into a turnaway or over a roof.
These are not just whispers but Whispers; the substanceof much communication in Drift and the main power of its Law.
Professional Whisperers ply their trade in Drift City,seek the smell of Roses, then give them a lock of hair, or enough personaldetails, (always in riddle form and without mentioning names), and they can seta whisper to chase after someone, susurussing past others like a snake andresounding only in the ears of that one particular person.
In most cases this is used only for urgent messages forthose difficult to find, like a kind of aggressive Telegram service. Harassingor irrelevant Whispers are punished, (though small numbers of CriminalWhisperers exist).
Whispers are also the primary method of policing in Driftand all the strongest ‘Blue’ Whisperers are licensed and well-paid members ofthe Constabulary who whisper under licence.
If a whisper warrant is given for a suspect, name knownor not, only enough details, or some fragments of hair or blood are needed, theBlue Whisperers send packs and flocks of dense whispers after that person,finding them wherever they are, slowly driving them mad with the continualimprecations of guilt and crime until they give themselves up or deafenthemselves.
Sadly the deaf are mistrusted in Drift for exactly thisreason and often drawn into the world of Crime.
Thin Aesthetic
Long thin things are favoured in Drift. Shoes are usuallypointed or square-toed, hats tall and, as we said, pockets very thin and verydeep. One carries pocket tongs to reach things in there and these have theirown inner pockets. Pocket tongs are not carried openly as this is a sign ofcriminality and there are polite genuflections to make if one must employ themin the street. Round people wear tall thin things and are called fools fordoing so; ‘roundlings’ and ‘spheres’.
Thin foods are preferred; slices are slender, baguetteslong. Round foods are disapproved of; the soup bowls are square andsharp-cornered, or shaped like boats as are the spoons, which are like concaveoars. Thin tall glasses and mugs are used. High-status banquets are cascades ofspikes and verticality as the cities cooks, both living and dead, compete toout-do one another in how spired and slender a meal can be made.
The poor subsist on noodles, long fries, eels in batterand long onions, all of which are actually pretty good.
Cabs and carriages can by hired but they are all veryslender, the axles about three feet across, so a carriage sits one, or twofacing each other, or a sumptuous carriage can have two half-decks with twomore seated above and behind those on the lower deck. These are quite unstableand special gyroscopes are made to keep them somewhat steady.
The thin carriages are pulled by horses specially bred tobe similarly thin; the "Driftwood Stretch" breed, a grey to white,somewhat inbred, slow but steady, good at finding their way and so thin theyare uncomfortable for most to sit on. Yellow eyed, they are used almostentirely by the coachmen of Drift. They can walk as easily backwards asforwards, as easily uphill backwards as forwards, and can strafe or sidestepslowly.
Strange Transports
The city has numerous curious boutique travel formsdesigned to deal with its slopes and its dense and winding layout.Single-person micro cable-cars exist to take commuters upslope at high speed.Zipwires can get you downhill fast. Tower-contained hot-air balloon baskets cansave you steps if you need to gain height. Micro-zeppelins are employed byYouths and the Police who pursue them. Registered roof-walks are marked byyellow rope but being seen on the roofs beyond the rope or after dark is anoffence punishable by Whispering.
A City Of Hucksters And Seers
Seers, mediums, clairvoyants, hucksters, magicians andthe like are legally protected and live TAX FREE in Drift, on a 'one drop'basis of possible accuracy or validity. A seer or prophet is judged so if thereis even one drop of possibility that they might be right, or have accuratepredictions or communications. In orderto deprive a Huckster of this protected status one must prove not only thatthey are wrong, but they are reliably and knowingly wrong, a near-impossiblefeat in court.
Despite this legal protection and tax-free status, Driftis not completely overflowing with hucksters as there is quite a lot ofcompetition for accurate soothsaying, too many futures for any single one to beworth worrying over.
Yet the poor, the homeless, the criminal, drunk, derangedor absurd are all, in their own telling, ‘Mediums’, or diviners or soothsayersor something of the like, as groups or ‘organisations’ of such are always validand cannot be easily harassed, no matter how very obviously drunk, criminal orhomeless they are.
Drift City Opera
The major social event, and major social location, of thecity, the opera itself; a massively vertical slender pie-slice with far toomany fragile upper stories and its foundations excavated below floor level soseats beneath the performers can look up at them, with mirrors above the stageso those below can see what is happening at the rear of the stage. Excavationsso deep that the floor of the opera house has fallen away and the basement is apool of black water people sit there in little coracles to watch and hear theperformance.
October 31, 2023
the humanization of warfare Remarks from CALLINICUS by JBS Haldane
This is also a fascinating dive into Haldanes inter-war world-viewwhich includes some "problematic" content as usual (in addition to thecentral argument).
Atomic Power;
"We know very little about the structure of the atomand almost nothing about how to modify it. And the prospect of constructingsuch an apparatus seems to me to be so remote that, when some successor of mineis lecturing to a party spending a holiday on the moon, it will still be anunsolved (though not, I think, an ultimately insoluble) problem."
In fact we would break the atom within a few decades ofthis statement, go to the moon within 40 years, after the atom was cracked.
Blinding Gas;
"Lachrymatory gas was only once used under idealconditions—by the Germans in the Argonne in 1915. They captured a fairlyextensive French trench system and about 2,400 prisoners, almost all unwounded,but temporarily blind."
The Germans opened chemical warfare with blinding gas in1915. I did not know this. New weapons seem staggeringly effective at firstuse. The enemy hasn't even imagined any defence. After that, as we shallsee, the prizes tend to go to whomever can adapt fastest, not necessarily tothe first user.
Gassing the uneducated;
"Gases of the first group were used in cloudsdischarged from cylinders, some- times on a front of several miles.
They probably caused at least 20,000 casualties amongunprotected or inadequately protected British troops. At least a quarter ofthese died, and that very painfully, in many cases after a struggle for breathlasting several days.
On the other hand, of those who did not die almost allrecovered completely, and the symptoms of the few who became permanent invalidswere mainly nervous.
Apart, however, from the extreme terror and agitationproduced by the gassing of uneducated people, I regard the type of woundproduced by the average shells as, on the whole, more distressing than thepneumonia caused by chlorine or phosgene."
Just don't gas the 'uneducated' bro. This brings us intoHaldane being something of a 'special' kind of person. He was raisedexperimenting on both animals and himself and had a detached, and definitelynon-sacralised view of the human body.
German antisemitism;
"On the other hand, the German respirators were badto begin with; and later on were not so good as the British. This was,apparently, because the most competent physiologist in Germany with anyknowledge of breathing was a Jew. This fact was quite well known in Germanphysiological circles, but apparently his race prevented the militaryauthorities from employing him.
The result was that they were unable to follow up theirgas-attacks at all closely, but had to wait till the cloud had passed off, bywhich time resistance was again possible. That was how the Germans paid foranti-Semitism. It is very probable that it lost them the war, as never again,not even in March, 1918, had they as complete a gap in the Franco-BritishWestern front as during the first gas-attack in April, 1915."
I doubt it 'lost them the war' and I believe Haber was aJew so clearly they weren't that anti-semitic yet but I have not heardof this particular story before.
On Mustard Gas;
"Someone placed a drop of the liquid on the chair ofthe director of the British chemical warfare department. He ate his meals offthe mantelpiece for a month."
......
"Thus in April, 1918, Armentieres, the originalNorthern limit of the German attack in Flanders, was so heavily shelled with“mustard” that the gutters in the streets were reported to be running withit."
On fools holding back progress;
the Bayardists have nobbled a curious assortment ofallies in their so far successful attempt to prevent the humanization ofwarfare.
"Mustard gas kills one man for every forty it putsout of action; shells kill one for every three; but their god who compromisedwith high explosives has not yet found time to adapt himself to chemicalwarfare."
On the possibilities of 'Immune Infantry';
"On the other hand, some people are naturallyimmune. The American Army authorities made a systematic examination of thesusceptibility of large numbers of recruits. They found that there was a veryresistant class, comprising 20% of the white men tried, but no less than 80% ofthe negroes. This is intelligible, as the symptoms of mustard gas, blistering,and sun-burn are very similar, and negroes are pretty well immune tosunburn."
Future War by Haldane;
"One sees, then, the possibility of warfare onsomewhat the following lines:—
Heavy concentrations of artillery would keep an area saythirty miles in length and ten in depth continuously sprayed with mustard gas.
...
Suddenly, behind the usual barrage of high explosiveshells appears a line of tanks supported by negroes in gas-masks.
.....
In this way the side possessing a big superiority ofmustard gas should be in a position to advance two or three miles a day.
...
It seems, then, that mustard gas would enable an army togain ground with far less killed on either side than the methods used in thelate war, and would tend to establish a war of movement leading to a fairlyrapid' decision, as in the campaigns of the past.
It would not much upset the present balance of power,Germany's chemical industry being counterpoised by French negro troops. Indiansmay be expected to be nearly as immune as negroes."
The Morality of Chemical Warfare;
"I claim, then, that the use of mustard gas in waron the largest possible scale would render it less expensive of life andproperty, shorter, and more dependent on brains rather than numbers. We areoften told the exact opposite,
In one or two air-raids on other towns it seems probablethat the Germans were not far from out-stripping the capacities of the fire-brigades and producing very large conflagrations."
His aside into the ability of aerial bombing to produce'fire-storms', where the fire becomes so hot and vast it sucks in air like atornado and becomes highly self-sustaining, is a disturbing prefigurement ofthe next war.
Animal-Loving Soldiers;
"We have got to get over our distaste for scientificthought and scientific method. To take an example from the war, thephysiologists at the experimental ground at Porton, in Hampshire, hadconsiderable difficulty in working with a good many soldiers because the latterobjected so strongly to experiments on animals, and did not conceal theircontempt for people who performed them. And yet these soldiers would have hadno hesitation in shelling the horses of hostile gun-teams, and the vastmajority of them were in the habit of shooting animals for sport. "
The British being a race of animal-lovers who often haveno problem shooting animals is a neverending source of incoherent rage forHaldane.
Objections to Reason;
"One of the grounds given for objection to scienceis that science is responsible for such horrors as those of the late war. “Youscientific men (we are told) never think of the possible application of yourdiscoveries. You do not mind whether they are used to kill or to cure. Yourmethod of thinking, doubtless satisfactory when dealing with molecules andatoms, renders you insensible to the difference between right and wrong. And soyou devise the means of universal destruction,"
"..and I note that the people who make these remarksdo not refuse to travel by railway or motor-car, to use electric light, or toread mechanically printed newspapers. Nor do they install a well in theirback-gardens to enjoy drinking the richer water of a pre-scientific age, withits interesting and variegated fauna."
The Deadliness of scale vs the deadliness of weapons;
"Moreover, the Great War was the first since theSecond Punic War of the 3rd century B. C. between two great civilized nations,each fighting with all its might. This fact accounts for its ferocity. Moderntransport and hygiene made its scale possible; the weapons used merely servedto prolong it."
Fear of the Unknown;
"Now, terror of the unknown is thoroughly right andrational so long as we believe that the prince of this world is a malignantbeing. But it is not justifiable if we believe that the world is the expressionof a power friendly to our aspirations, or if we are atheists and hold that itis neutral and indifferent to human ideals."
I AM NOT A CRANK
"The views which I have expressed do not coexist inthe mind of any party leader or newspaper proprietor, and must therefore bethose of a crank. But until some stronger argument can be waged against themthan that they are unusual and unpleasant, there remains the possibility thatthey are true."
Haldanes vision of Future War, what would have actually happened?
Can we imagine a world where J.B.S. Haldane is givenenough power and support to make his vision of warfare a reality? What wouldhappen?
We begin with the mass development of Mustard Gas, sealedtanks and uniforms, the training of vast numbers of 'Immune Troops',(presumably black Africans with white officers), and we would assume,development of a wide range of other chemical weapons and delivery systems.
So, day one of combat; mass firing of chemical shellsbegins, ideally blocking off large areas of the battlefield. Then the 'ImmuneTroops' advance with sealed armour support, easily taking lines and targets,presumably making use of lesser or alternative chem weapons as and when theywould be useful.
Thats your first battle, if it goes well.
Of course even if it goes well, we know Mustard Gasremains horrible for a long time, so the battle zone will be very difficult foranyone other than Immune Troops to occupy. And if you advance non-immune troopsthrough it on trucks then how will you keep them supplied through the zone, andwhat if they need to retreat? They will have a chemical barrier to their rear.
And of course, following Haldanes plan, you are using largelycolonial troops to defend yourself, who may not agree completely with you onall points and who may be a bit ambivalent about entering chemical hell foryou.
And presuming this is a WW1/WW2 situation, you areprobably doing this in France, and the French may not be chuffed about youmelting and poisoning their lovely countryside.
Thats battle One. How do the enemy respond?
Presumably the enemy is Germany, and they are quite goodat chemistry, even without their Jews. (Though the loss of them will hurtthem).
They are also quite well-organised. Presumably they willbe shocked and terrified to begin with, but will adapt fast. This is assumingthey didn't have intelligence on your chemical weapons programme already andhave their own programme.
They will start work on, and improve, their own chemweapons and protective wear as quickly as possible.
This is the 'brains over brawn' warfare that Haldaneenvisions in which victory goes to whomever has the best tech and adapts mostquickly.
But, speaking from the West, where we certainly _think_we have the brains and our assumed enemies largely have the brawn, do even wewant to disconnect war so totally from the flesh it affects as to turn it intoa matter of competing technologies?
If Haldane is right, less people will die. Less of ourown people will die. (_If_ he is right.) But is this most-efficient form ofhyper-tech chemical warfare what we want to create?
(Of course your chem-war is also highly dependant onweather; wind direction, rain, perhaps temperature. And these conditions willbe known, so what happens if the enemy attacks with the wind. When the wind isblowing one direction they advance with chem-suit Immune Troops', when the windturns, you advance.)
Chem weapons would probably be most useful againstcivilians who have not already experienced them, and most useful when combinedwith surprise and some other method of attack. This provides a neat combinationwith incendiary bombing and the creation of a 'Firestorm'. Combining gas withbombs cripples the ability of a city to respond to spreading fires, making amass conflagration much easier to attain.
Is the natural tendency of technology in warfare to separatethe flesh of the people from the conduct of the war, up until some certainpoint when the burning and poisoning of all the people becomes the mainmaterial of the war?
Haldane thinks 'stupid' Chivalric wars are made deadlierprimarily by their scale and not by technology. That if WW1 had beenfought by spears and shields it would have been just as deadly, because of thenumber of men involved.
Trying to deal with Haldanes argument
Is not Conservatism at its most rational and reasonablewhen considering the development of new weapons and methods of war?
Are we not all the beneficiaries of the deep and innateconservatism and ritualisation of warfare by the stodgy midwits who make upmuch of the officer class?"
Could we say that short lethal but evaporating violencecould be more honourable than the soft, suffocating violence of ChemicalWarfare. Would you rather be gassed or shot? Would you rather gas others orshoot them?
War is not an experiment and is not predictable
There are few 'controlled elements'
Everyone is in a heightened state and is, essentially,not quite the person they are outside of war
War evolved, grows, changes and mutates in deepyunpredictable ways. Neither the people, the aims, the methods or the morals ofthose engaged in war are the same as they were at the beginning
this being the case, a highly conservative ritualisedview of war, while probably deeply inefficient, and essentially getting peoplekilled in the short to medium term, is actually pretty good for humanity as awhole in the long term and the larger scale
when we are in a war we want to adapt, kill and destroyas quickly and efficiently as possible, for our enemies death is our life
but looking at any particular arrangement of wars fromfar outside the time and place of their happening; we really want wars ingeneral to be stodgy, ritualised, uninventive, unimaginative, foolish and slow.
The slow stupidity of any particular war is agony andhorror for those fighting it, for their enemy is .. well the enemy, but forthose looking upon all war, and upon the future of the species and of lifeitself, the enemy is not the enemy but the enemy is the cunning, inventiveness,hunger and unpredictability of war itself, for it is a kaleidoscope-tiger,always shifting and trying to escape its cage.
October 7, 2023
A Review of 'Possible Worlds' by J.B.S. Haldane
This book is a lucid scrying pool amidst inthe dark and murky inter-war years. It is like stumbling through a grey andmisty land and discovering a cave within which crouches a wizard who gazes intoclear and glittering pool crystal visions of a future time.
We are in that future time right now and ithas turned out to be just as dark and murky as the bog around the wizards cave,but we can look upwards, at the point of view of his scrying pool, wherepresumably he looks down on us from the past, and wave 'Hello' to the Wizard.
We are looking at Haldane looking at us andthat is where much of the interest arises.
THETRENCHES
I read this based on its near-unanimousrecommendation by anyone involved in the life sciences and I was surprised,(though perhaps I should not have been), to find another WW1 connection. Aswell as occupying seemingly every role possible related to genetics and biologyin the inter-war years, Haldane was a WW1 veteran, a grenades expert with theBlack Watch (for non-military and U.S. readers the Black Watch is generallyconsidered a very high-competence if not elite regiment).
I would love to shove Haldane, the atheistcommunist, Studdert-Kennedy, the fallen Anglican and Sebastian Junger, themedieval knight and not-quite Fascist, all in a room together and have themtalk it out. It would be a hell of a debate.
A VERYBEAUTIFUL MIND
'Possible Worlds' was originally a series ofnewspaper articles written for 'the ordinary man' 'in intervals betweenresearch work and teaching and largely on railway trains'.
These are about science, biology, thescientific life, the future of humanity and Haldane. Many are short, all areclear. A very blessed clarity considering the dithering and extemperousblathering and 'chummy' simplifications of much science writing both now andthen. Haldane writes like a man who does not have much time and earnestly wantsto get to the point.
Some are so simple and so clear and highlightor describe a concept so exactly that nearly 100 years later they are stillbeing quoted mentioned and recommended today
'On Scales' regards thinking about reaches orscales of time and distance far beyond our immediate ken. If you have watchedthe Sagan video, or its modern repetitions then you have seen a visual versionof this essay.
'On Being the Right Size' is quoted ormentioned in many discussions of biodynamics I know of;
"You can drop a mouse down athousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slightshock and walks away, so long as the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, aman is broken, a horse splashes."
HALDANEAND TERRIBLE AND QUESTIONABLE IDEAS
Haldane had a lot of sketchy ideas, the mostprovably-awful are probably being a freestyle vivisectionist, a Communist and aChemical Warfare enthusiast.
Haldane grew up experimenting on animals withhis dad, he was quite willing to experiment on himself, to the extent ofdrinking dilute hydrochloric acid, sealing himself inside sealed atmospherechambers and slowly removing the oxygen and attempting experimental divingsuits at the age of 13, (not all at the same time). If you added some sadismand race-hatred he would probably have done well in various German or Japaneselabs during the oncoming war, but Haldane had little hatred in him, and no sadism,he seems to have regarded the animals around him, and his own body, the way afarmer regards a horse or dog; useful, interesting, necessary, valuable, butnot sacred. He reported that, (like Junger), he enjoyed killing peoplequite a bit. He was an explosives expert, wrote a book on the benefits ofchemical warfare and thought it was stupid not to use more mustard gas than wedid.
He belongs in that very slightly discomfortingmargin of humanity who will quite happily take living beings, including themselves,apart in laboratories and their fellow man apart in wars, but won't do itfreestyle, for pleasure, for no reason or to anyone who asks them not to(except in war).
In 'Some Enemies of Science' Haldanerecommends the complete deregulation of vivisection in the interests of scienceand of popular science.
"... I killed two rats in the course ofexperimental work intended to advance medical science. One of them, if we canjudge from human experience (and we have no more direct means of evaluating theconsciousness of animals), died after a period of rather pleasant delirium likethat of alcoholic intoxication. The other had convulsions, and may have been inpain for three or four minutes. I should be very thankful if I knew that Ishould suffer no more than it did before my death. It therefore seemsridiculous that, wheras my wife" [she had poisoned rats] "isencouraged by the Government and the Press, I should be compelled to apply tothe President of the Royal Society and other eminent man of science forsignature to an application to the already overworked Home Secretary, before Ican even kill a mouse in a slightly novel manner."
Haldanes arguments for the deregulation ofVivisection are strong, coherent, logical and possibly a little mad. His unrelentinghatred for the 'Anti-Vivisectionists' whose hypocrisy, delusion and hatred ofscience is stopping him from killing mice in novel ways, is genuine, deeplyfelt and extremely expressed. He is really outraged about the mouse-chopping.
If Haldanes Lassaiz-Fiare Vivisection policyhad been made real, the results would have been interesting, but probably morebad than good. Mouse-chopping should be licensed.
Like most high-I.Q. lefties in the inter-waryears, Haldane was a Marxist and a Communist. He was wrong and held on to theidea too long. You can tell how sane an inter-war western intellectual was bythe date they stopped believing in Communism. Cordwainer Smith, Rebecca Westand Bertrand Russel; quite soon, the French; never.
Haldane went full-Commie in the mid 30's, whenthe saner types were already leaving. He objected to Lysenkos imaginarygenetics in 1949 but didn't leave and finally resigned from the Communist Partyin 1956. In 1957 he resigned from being British over the Suez incident and wentoff to spend his final years in India. His stupid murder-god had failed infront of him, Britian was still masturbating to dreams of Imperialism so hetook the third way. I think he was also attracted to India because it washere that the direct connection with nature, vast range of life and ability todeal with large populations was closest to the experimental world of his earlyyouth. (He grew up as the son of an aristocrat-scientist the late 19thcentury.) By the mid 20th century the U.K. was even more intensely urbanisedand Haldanes dream of widespread 'Citizen Science' based on animal collections,(and vivisection), and interacting with nature was looking less and lesspossible. But in India, more space, more nature, and a great diversity ofpeople.
In 1925 he also wrote 'Callinicus: A Defenceof Chemical Warfare', which I have not read but his defence of Mustard Gas in'Possible Worlds' is based on the relative bodily destructive power of machineguns and Mustard Gas. His logic is very like that of the pro-Vivisectionargument which is "If we are eating animals and hunting animals why can'tI chop them up when I like since I have very good reasons for doing so?""Likewise, if we are machine gunning each other and bombing each other(ask me how), why not gas each other since it will have the same effect &less human bodies will be destroyed in the process?"
Against Haldanes iron logic I can only offerthe midwits response of 'I think that might not turn out the way you think itwill'.
He was also an atheist, which I don't consideramongst his terrible and questionable ideas but it is slightly boring from amodern-day perspective, listening to him go on about it is a bit dull. Itsinteresting to hear from his perspective about how cowardly and useless mostChristian Padres were in the war, even more interesting that he signals out forrare praise; the Quakers, for their Pacifistic ambulance-driving and more war service.
DON'TTRUST THE SCIENCE BRO
Haldane has largely (and inadvertently)convinced me that scientists shouldn't get involved in politics. They have nointuitive grasp on what politics is on any level, assuming it to be somekind of social machine to produce 'optimum results'.
They should be consulted closely on theirspecial subjects, should not set policy and generally should be kept in specialboxes far from the levers of power.
This applies especially to biologists andother life-science types, especially the more intelligent sort. Their deepunderstanding of the processes of nature and the human body has been bought atthe price of any intuitive grasp of the meaning of nature or the human body anda scientist, if allowed near policy, if asked not to investigate but to decide,will proceed on the basis of optimisation towards a concrete goal, as if theywere dealing with a malfunctioning machine.
This is not what society, a nation or humanityis.
Furthermore, there are politicians whom it isnecessary to have make decisions and who must be fired afterwards. During Covidmost possible choices carried serious moral hazard. Decisions had to be made.Those decisions would by necessity have terrible effects on someone. After theemergency had passed those decisions must be rejected by the very populationsthat required them and the decision-makers disposed of. This is unpleasant butit is the nature of things. If we had hyper-expert scientists actually makingthose decisions instead of advising on them, firstly they would proceed on thebasis of blind optimisation as stated above, secondly when we inevitably had toturn against them after the emergency was over, we would lose, not afundamentally-replaceable politician, but a useful expert, and finally becausethe necessary moral hazard of those choices would ultimately reflect not on oneindividual or administration but on the scientist and on science itself. Fauci,before he dies, may well drag virology in the U.S. back into the stone age,purely as part of the counter-reaction to his mistakes.
EUGENICS
We live in a new age of Eugenics, though wedon't quite realise it yet.
Really, any form of Eugenics that becomescommon enough stops being thought of as 'Eugenics'. It’s not a completelysliding scale but it’s pretty slippery. Condoms, I.U.D.s the Pill, sonic scansof developing foetus' and risk-free Abortions are all fruit of the Eugenictree.
Hasidic Jewish populations are already usinggenome sequencing to avoid dangerous genetic combinations in their (arguablyquite inbred) community.
Genome sequencing is becoming cheaper andcheaper, more and more accurate, and the power of algorithms to predict andcontrol for certain desired qualities in the genome is becoming more and moreeffective.
(Reading between the lines of variousGeneticists, its probably possible to run an algo on a range of IVF foetusesand select for high I.Q. Even though I.Q. is insanely polygenic and we have noidea how it works, the algo doesn't need to understand that and can just findrelationships regardless. The reason this hasn't been done publicly isn'tbecause it can't be done but because Geneticists are nuclear-avoidant oftalking about it or doing it.
Theoretical - likely someone has already triedselecting IVF foetuses for I.Q. and these children have been born.)
Haldane only writes directly about this oncein 'Possible Worlds', though as a Genetor-Prime of the British Empire, he knewas much about it as anyone of his generation, and as the ever-lucid andprescient Haldane, he could predict more than most of his generation.
In 'Eugenics and Social Reform', Haldane is..mixed. Ultimately he thinks it’s necessary and probably inevitable but weshouldn't do it now as we don't know what we are doing and it’s probably morecomplex than we think.
On 'feeble-mindedness', the majority of whichI take to be Downs Syndrome, Haldane might be surprised that it is not ahereditary problem, that we can't find it in the parents genes but can find itthrough embryo testing and more commonly, through scans, and that we arelargely utterly ruthless in aborting the vast majority of such children.Perhaps he wouldn't be surprised. Perhaps our relationship with DownsSyndrome is more like how our relationship with Eugenics will proceed, not butgrand unified programmes but by quiet invisible decisions made by parents indoctors offices, made with ever-increasing data and in invisibly-shiftingsocial consensus, and made silently and not spoken of.
What Haldane seems to be saying is thatthe rich, intelligent and successful, inevitably put themselves out of geneticbuisness by not breeding at a replacement level. They are always outweighed bythe poor or common who breed a lot more. This seems to have been true inHaldanes time, looks to have been true for much of European history, and istrue now. (Despite going on about this at length and being married twice, andbeing pretty well-off, Haldane had no children.)
Yet we still have rich, successful andintelligent people. Whether we have as much as we did in Haldanes time it’shard to tell but it doesn't seem that different.
Probably we do not really understand how thisworks at all, especially on a larger scale and across deep reaches of time.
'On Eugenics and Social Reform' is a must-readbecause of the ideas it deals with, its weaving sometimes-ironic arguments andthe pretty explosive mind-bombs, both when considered as cold intellectualarguments which might apply the same from his time to ours, and for thewild and whacky cultural Messines-level mines woven into every part of it asyou listen to an aristocratic, Marxist, inter-war atheist high-Anglo scientistdrop... comments;
"It was only the emancipation of thenegroes which saved the United States from twice its present black population.This event gave them access to alcohol, venereal diseases, andconsumption."
I think (if I understand his totalargument), that I might agree with Haldane? Eugenics is probably inevitable,but we don't understand it and probably shouldn't do it, especially on a largescale or in a top-down way. Hopefully, like Pratchetts Dwaven Bread, it willremain 'probably inevitable', inevitably.
POSSIBLEWORLDS
Probably Haldanes most beautiful idea is inthe essay which gives this collection its name; 'Possible Worlds'.
This is basically that Dr Doolittle willcreate a University of Animal Minds to help unify our theories of physics andphilosophy into a Unified theory of Everything.
Perhaps only Haldane or someone very like himcould have come close to having this idea because only Haldane was enough of abatty polymath to allow it. He was deeply enmeshed in the life sciences,genetics, the world of blood and animals, and was intelligent enough to also bedeeply interested in and largely up to date in physics, mathematics, logic andfor him the natural companion of those; philosophy.
He was thinking always of the Whole Thing, ofReality itself, and all these little strands were just ways of getting thereand looking at it.
One of Haldanes predictions that never came astrue as he would have wished was that we would 'talk to the animals'. In hisfuture Humanity would gain a deep understanding of animal psychology andcommunication and in effect, be able to communicate with and understand theworld-views of other living beings.
This has not worked out that well but Haldanessynthesis is that the fundamental nature of reality is necessarily opaque to usbecause the way we are made fundamentally limits us from apprehending it. Asenmeshed in both biology and philosophy as he was, he could conceive ofsomething like a Fundamental Human Blind Spot. This wouldn't really be a 'spot'but whole areas and methods of thought that would be not only impossible but,more importantly, inconcievable, to us.
Like there are ways of thinking and perceivingthat you literally can't think about and if you try to conceive of them thenyour mind will just loop around them like an ant walking along a mobius strip,without ever even considering them.
The point here being; how do you try tounderstand that which you are inherently made not to understand?
In 'Possible Worlds' Haldane tries to beginimagining the philosophy of reality of a Bee, or a hyper-intelligent Barnacle.Since they occupy reality in a fundamentally different way their structure ofreality, the pattern of their thought, perceptions and therefore, philosophy,would be utterly different.
Yet if we accept that we are all perceivingthe same Reality, the Bee and the Barnacle would both have world-views which ultimatelycoincide or match up with ours. So if we could learn the 'language' of, orenter in communion with, Bee and Barnacle, we could learn something of theirParadigm and that might help us see the gaps in our own, to ask the questionspreviously inconceivable to us.
(A slightly boring and lessened version ofthis which might sound less weird and whacky to a modern reader is like in aStar Trek world where there are a bunch of forehead aliens and we can fly offto this or that alien world and talk to them and learn their weird alienphysics and philosophies which are all very strange and different but which stillactually work, if we could learn them, we might understand more about reality.Except we don't have aliens but we do have Bees and Barnacles.)
THE LASTJUDGEMENT
Haldanes last article is a deep-time ScienceFiction story in the report of a Venusian historian describing the death ofEarth in forty million years time.
This future is one in which humanity hasdiverged into two species which, curiously, match the dystopian futuresimagined by many 20tC authors; the engineered, happy, incurious andunadventurous sybarites similar to the humanity of 'Brave New World', and theVenusian Collective who are a mix of the Borg and the final evolution of thesociety depicted in 'We'.
This is a reality where rocketry is very veryhard, (Haldane had not yet seen the V2s landing on London, let alone the SpaceRace), and where moving between planets takes multi-thousand-year plans,including engineering specific new versions of Humanity to live on them.Therefore, Humanity barely leaves earth and only a bunch of radicals get toVenus. Terran Man monopolises the tidal gravatic power of the Moon to energisetheir vast aesthetic schemes of global pleasure, which speeds up the moonsdescent into the earth. Terran man can't be bothered to stop this andeventually the two crash into each other, though not without a few thousandyears of excitingly apocalyptic but still-liveable earth with the moon giganticin the sky, vast discs and spumes of lunar matter forming a silver river in theair, mountains quaking, seas rolling around the planet, its pretty great stuff.
Haldane absorbed in Deep Time and the meaning,if any, of humanity, exhibits all of his elegance, imagination, mediocrity,didactic authoritarianism and weakness.
"If it is true, as the higher religionsteach, that the individual can only achieve a good life by conforming to a plangreater than his own, it is our duty to realize the possible magnitude of sucha plan, whether it be God's or man's. Only so can we come to see that most goodactions merely serve to stave off the constant inroads of chaos on the humanrace. They are necessary, but not sufficient. They cannot be regarded as activeco-operation in the Plan. The man who creates a new idea, whether expressed inlanguage, art or invention., may at least be co-operating actively. The averageman cannot do this, but he must learn that the highest of his duties is toassist those who are creating and the worst of his sins to hinder them."
September 18, 2023
Four Books on War
“ .. Belgium’s leading living poet whose life before 1914had been a flaming dedication to socialist and humanitarian ideals that werethen believed to erase national lines. He prefaced his account with thisdedication: “He who writes this book in which hate is not hidden was formerly apacifist … For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. Itstruck him with such violence that he thought himself no longer the same man.And yet, as it seems to him that in this state of hatred his conscience becomesdiminished, he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.”– Tuchman quoting Emile Verhaeren in ‘The Guns of August’.
…..
It’s pretty quiet in the shop on a night shift. This leadme to fulfil a long-time promise to myself to finally read Barbara Tuchmans‘The Guns of August’, her celebrated history of the opening weeks of World WarOne.
At the time I also had two books of WW1 poetry on theshelf, both from less currently-popular poets, which I had picked up because Iwanted to find out what the actual man-on-the-street/jingo poetry of the warwas like.
At about the same time a friend online mentioned theManga ‘Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths’, which I grabbed a copy of.
· Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by ShigeruMizuki.
· The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.
· The Poetry of Jesse Pope.
· Rough Rhymes of a Padre by ‘Woodbine Willie’.
So, with one very long book and three quite short ones,having finished ‘Guns of August’ why not add the rest and make an event out ofit? (Because its stressful and depressing as hell but, being in idiot, I hadnot fully processed that.)
(Tuchman is actually a character in her own book too. She is the little girl interviewed by the American Ambassador about the British hunt for a German Battleship in the Med.)Reading this book was like having a low-level panicattack, at times I had to get up and walk about to de-stress. At times itdidn’t really matter who’s side I was on (the book is on the side of the Allies).I wouldn’t have thought a beat by beat breakdown of the days and hours beforethe second battle of Tannenberg, between Imperial Germans and Tsarists, wouldhave me biting my nails and shouting at the screen (in my mind) but it did.
The intensity, vividness, complexity and madness of thefog of war can, even when dealing with armies and factions I don't care muchabout, cause a kind of disaster-driven engagement.
The book is a kind of anti-procedural. Instead of a castof characters who are very good at things facing a big problem, working outwhat to do and coming together at the last minute against the odds, we have amassive spread of characters, all struggling against each other in big teams,arguing, perceiving and acting in different ways and coming togethercatastrophically, against the odds.
It is the tension of confusion, the agony of crippled ormisguided plans. Everyone has their own little section of reality and isstruggling to do what they think they should and absolutely everyone isdeluded, mistaken, or wrong.
We, as the minds-eye of Tuchman, fly and flow across thebattlefields, seeing more than any single person at that time ever could,simultaneously aware, as no-one living through those events ever could be, ofthe mutual, asynchronous and chaotic reality stuttering forth across thewestern front, an orchestra of staccato mistuned instruments, playing in blindopposition. Like two teams of Jazz musicians separated by a curtain, each grouptold to improvise and at the same time, to precisely counter the improvisationof the other side. Except no-one on either team actually likes each other.
It is one thing to be locked in a story with your heroespoint of view and to see thing going wrong. It is quite another to be slightlyabove that point of view, to see more of the situation than your protagonist,and to see why things are going wrong, in ways they can't. This is wherethe agony comes in, and yet another thing to zip across the scene, into thepoint of view of the antagonist, who is in fact the hero of their own story,and who’s enemy is the original hero, and to also see their schemesgoing wrong, and to see why they are going wrong.
double-agony
At the same time we are living in the future of theseevents and know that no-ones plans will go as expected and no-one (except maybethe Americans) will come out of this well - for all this striving we arewatching a continent take itself apart.
so really a poly-agony
a poly-agonist history
Irony, Readability and Satire
Oh, the Kaiser and his whacky schemes, his military-stylesleeping gown. The dithering-to-the-point-of-wooly-mania British Cabinet, thetop-down but extremely secret and authoritarian French plans,
or French Plan, which can only be executed byhaving one guy in charge, and that guy not really telling the government what’sgoing on - was nearly the Dictator of France during the opening parts of thewar, the SECRET DEALS, the French and their obsession with red pantaloons, Russiahaving the exact opposite of a Philosopher King - a guy genuinely dense but notquite dumb or weak willed enough to do a Coup against or just shuffleoff to a Palace somewhere, all of this is part of what makes the book so readableand such a good and complex synthesis of history.
But there is a danger to irony, in its distance, its easysynthesis and perhaps most in its argument-without-arguing. Tuchmans is anarrative history and, looking for the most interesting criticisms of the bookI found that it was easy to avoid many of the more broad and obvious statementsby claiming “well, Tuchman doesn’t really say that”.
But what does she say?
She makes few absolute and explicit value judgements, butthe whole thing is an intense and vivid value judgement, only communicatedthrough choice of detail, focus, method and rhythm of communication. Astoryteller is not making a specific argument, one can hardly counterpoint-by-point, but they are convincing you of a something more ably thansomeone making a more explicit, leaden, and less persuasive statement.
Hair-Thin Cracks In History
the Russians being so badly organised that they startsending their orders for the next day out in Clear radio signal instead of code- this having a massive effect on the next days pivotal battle.
Von Moltkes apprehension that the German line is tooextended and loose, communicated just a day too late.
The sheer and staggering number of times that personalityconflicts between generals leads to serious problems in the war effort - theyare as neurotic and sensitive as cats.
It feels like there were not just one but a whole rangeof time-travellers zipping about making sure a series of cataclysmicco-incidences did and did not take place.
Is this just the natural pixel-resolution of all history,made much more visible through this well-recorded super-crisis? Or were thingsgenuinely more utterly bollocked than ever before? It truly is a kind ofscience fictional 19th century war; radio’s, codes, rail plans, the Germansbring an actual super-gun. World War One seems to take place at a fringe ofcomplexity where nations and governments have just enough technological andorganisational power to organise truly insanely massive groups, plans and actionsbut just not enough experience, or rapid or subtle enough technology, decisionplans, structures, feedback systems or ideas to deal with the results of thatcomplexity.
Its curious how everyone seems to ‘play to type’. TheGermans are angry and somewhat autistic, the French have a cartesian top-downview of everything, the British are dithery and pull something out of theirarseholes at the last minute, the Russians are brutal, slow and fall apart. Isthis just a feature of Tuchmans re-telling? I recently finished Julian Jacksonsbiography of De Gaule and he had a somewhat tragic view of European history inwhich no-one ever really changes and nations are fated to play out theconflicts of their essential character again and again over time.
Criticisms Of Tuchman
What are the most coherent, specific and least-whineycriticisms of Tuchman?
The clearest is that for a book about the start of WorldWar One, there is relatively little about whatever was going on between Serbia,Austria, Germany and Russia around and after the assassination. Neither isthere a huge amount about the eastern front.
She goes on a lot about how awful the Germans were inBalgium, but they were.
Sir John French comes out as a borderline treasonousjumbled coward. His general reputation in history doesn’t seem anywhere nearlyas bad as in this book, has anyone written about that?
Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths
A manga by a sweet old man; Shigeru Mizuki
This cute little guy! About the experiences of his youth!In east Asia. In the 1940s..
As part of the Imperial Japanese army....
Familiar Things
I have read a few soldier-autobiographies including,oddly enough, 'Quartered Safe Out Here' by George McDonald Frasier, which isabout some Cumbrian soldiers in the British army, fighting the JapaneseImperial Army, not in the same place, but in a similar environment.
A few things flow between them; hunger, boredom,incoherent orders, officers and sergeants ranging from stupid to decent, thejungle being beautiful yet horrible, being permanently sweaty, dirty, hungryand damp, accidents and disease taking people out more regularly than the enemy,"there are people hiding in the Jungle", people popping out of holesor shooting at you from trees and whatever, if you see a dot in the sky betterscatter till you know whose it is.
It’s just guys hanging out you know!
just some guys having a time.
It’s curious to see the 'villains' from Quartered SafeOut Here' from the other side. The main difference between the forces, from theperspective of a common soldier, seems to be that, in the Imperial JapaneseArmy, literally everything is worse in every conceivable way.
The Japanese soldiers are insanely hungry, on half a cupof rice a day, about 500 calories.
Instead of being shouted at and condescended to byofficers and sergeants the new boys are literally slapped repeatedly in theface and punched to the ground. This is when they do something wrong, or justfor existing. The end of a normal day is almost lining up to be repeatedlybrutally slapped in the face for no reason
Their officers, or at least some of them, or many of themmuch of the time, are in a death cult.
Their immediate commanding officer seems to fantasisepretty much continually about executing a Banzai charge and going to an'honourable death' to the extent that he has to be talked out of it whenever acrisis happens, and eventually they can't talk him out of it.
Re-Banzai
The central 'plot element' of the book is that the Lieutenantfinally manages to order the suicidal midnight jungle Banzai charge of hisdreams.
HQ finds out about this and valorises their noble sacrifice,making it a point of propaganda; the Japanese soldier never surrenders! Whenthey are finally doomed they do a mass Banzai! For the Emperor!
But because it was dark and the jungle a bunch of soldiersmanage not to get themselves killed and get lost. Come morning they meet up anddecide to go get some food before trying to Banzai themselves again.
When this gets back to HQ, that there are still guysalive from the suicide charge, it becomes a major problem and an officer issent down the river to re-Banzai them, at sword or gunpoint if necessary (he shouldn't join them of course).
The author was part of this outpost and either got ill orwas knocked out by bombs during the whole thing, went missing and only got backafter the remnants had been 're-Banzai'd'. This left him.. sceptical of war.
Hell in the Pacific
Looking into the war in the Pacific and the ImperialJapanese Army was definitely on a vibe.
The Imperial Army ate quite a lot of people, specificallythey ate quite a lot of Indians, often alive, carving out the flesh of theirthighs while they were still living and throwing them in a ditch to die whilethey ate them like steak. There are accusations that some officers ate theirown men.
I don't really know where to go from here..
The Poetry of Jesse Pope
I picked this up I think after hearing it referenced inan episode of 'In Our Time'.
I wanted to hear about the war poets who were not of thealienated faction, I wanted the Patriots and jingoists. WW1 has been re-writtenin our imagination, well perhaps not entirely re-written, but re-emphasised, reorganisedand reset around the 'sad victim soldier' stereotype and the 'vague cataclysm'tale.
These views have a lot of truth to them, they are notreally 'lies', there were a lot of sad victim soldiers and it was a vaguestumbling cataclysm, but the left likes to remember things a certain way
and the popular imagination of WW1 has essentially beentransmitted by the left; Siegfried Sassoon, Pat Barker, All Quiet on the WesternFront. I mean think of a WW1 tale and you know what you are going to get (inthe anglo/westosphere at least) Amilie, Blackadder, you know the scenes, thecharacters, the tone, the mud and the vague emotional tenor that hangs over itall.
Peter Jacksons documentary about WW1 ‘They Shall Not GrowOld’, had an interesting piece of editing which exemplified this. It’s based oninterviews with soldiers. The opening interviews are all have a relativelypositive view of the war, while the voices at the end all have a negative view.The way they are distributed creates the impression of the grieving 'sadsoldier' who went in with high spirits and was crushed and alienated by theexperience of the war. But, both of those strands, those interviews andrecordings, are taken from the same people, all recorded long after the war. Itis their dividing up and the way they are edited which creates the nice neatmoral story of the 'sad soldier', not the actual recordings themselves.
The views of a lot of WW1 soldiers, certainly of a lot ofAnglosphere soldiers (the ones I am familiar with) might well strike a modernear as not what they were expecting at all. many of those men were proud oftheir service and convinced they fought in a good cause, to save Europe and theworld from Prussian militarism.
Those recordings wouldn't be free of trauma and deadfriends but the moral view those men had of their own actions, the weight and colourthey placed on various parts, would be very different to that of latergenerations.
That is why I wanted to read the poetry of Jessie Pope,because it was the popular poetry of the Daily Mail, the actually-popularpoetry of the opening years of the war. The actual voice of the time ratherthan the remembered voice.
I also wanted to know if she was as utterly awful as thehistorians claim she was.
She was.. not *quite* as bad.. entirely
but still pretty bad
"A Humble Appeal
She was a pretty, nicely mannered mare,
The children's pet, the master's pride and care,
Until a man in khaki came one day,
Looked at her teeth, and hurried her away.
With other horses packed into a train
She hungered for her masters voice in vain;
And later, led 'twixt planks that scare and slip,
They slung her, terrified, on board a ship.
Next came, where thumps and throbbing filled the air,
Her first experience of mal de mare;
And when that oscillating trip was done
They hitched her up in traces to a gun.
She worked and pulled and sweated with the best;
A stranger now her glossy coat caressed
Till flashing thunderstorms came bursting round
And splitting leaden hail bestrewed the ground.
With quivering limbs, and silky ears laid back,
She feels a shock succeed a sharper crack,
And, whinnying her pitiful surprise,
Staggers and falls, and tries in vain to rise.
Alone, forsaken, on a foreign field
What moral does this little record yield?
Who tends the wounded horses in the war?
Well that is what the Blue Cross league is for."
Many of the poems are quite interesting. Not allthe rhymes are leaden or as faintly ridiculous as the one above. There is a lotof early stuff from 1914 to 1916 in praise of ANZACS, the soldiers, the war.She is not as bigoted or wrathful as a really hardcore blood and soil type butis more glib, positive, patriotic, a booster-upper cheering from the sides ofthe football match (a football match is one of the metaphors used in thepoems), there are fragments of sort-of feminist stuff about war-girls doing jobs.
I went in for Jesse Pope and what I got was pretty muchwhat I half expected, a very British Church-Hall type quite common before the1960’s. That she doesn’t seem to write much after 1916 means we don’t see anydevelopment. She is more shallow than evil and so tea-stained mildly bad a poetthat I would feel bad for making fun of her.
(The BBC of all people argues here that the Pope vs Owen match is a stitch-up).
Rough Rhymes of a Padre
Willie is G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, an Anglican Priest whoserved as a chaplain on the western front and gained the name ‘Woodbine Willie’for offering wounded and dying soldiers Woodbine cigarettes.
This book ‘Rough Rhymes’ was mainly written in and aroundthe front.
Its great virtue for this review is that it is a directand explicit search for meaning. Mizuki, with whom Willie would perhaps have hadsome things in common is, in ‘On Towards Our Noble Deaths’ seemingly detached,almost ironic, but possessed of a deeply buried rage. Tuchman is actuallydetached and ironic (apart from about Sir John French). Pope is patriotic,glib, 'keen', jolly.
‘Rugh Rhymes has a combination of emotions andexperience that was missing from every other book in this list. Even 'OnwardToward Our Noble Deaths' has little of hatred for the enemy, they barely playmuch part directly and are rarely depicted.
"Whats the Good?" [first two verses]
"Well, I've done my bit o' scrappin',
And I've done quite a lot;
Nicked 'em neatly with my bayonet,
So I needn't waste a shot.
'Twas my duty, and I done it,
But I 'opes the doctor's quick,
For I wish I 'adn't done it,
Gawd! it turns me shamed and sick.
There's a young 'un like our Richard,
And I bashed 'is 'ead in two,
And there's that ole grey 'aired geezer
Which I stuck 'is belly though.
Gawd, you women, wives and mothers,
It's sich waste of all your pain,
If you knowed what I'd been doin'
Could yer kiss me still, my Jane?”
Studdert-Kennedys post-war journey is quite a ride. He went into the war delivering stirringsermons about the virtues of the bayonet and came out a Christian Socialist. Hewrote a book called "Lies!",was 100 per cent behind Bismark being essentially the antichrist was deniedburial in a Cathedral for being too much of a leftie.
From his Wikipedia;
“"After the war, Studdert Kennedy was given chargeof St Edmund, King and Martyr in Lombard Street, London. Having been convertedto Christian socialism and pacifism during the war, he wrote Lies (1919),Democracy and the Dog-Collar (1921) (featuring such chapters as "TheChurch Is Not a Movement but a Mob", "Capitalism is Nothing ButGreed, Grab, and Profit-Mongering" and "So-Called Religious EducationWorse than Useless"), Food for the Fed Up (1921), The Wicket Gate (1923),and The Word and the Work (1925). He moved to work for the Industrial ChristianFellowship, for whom he went on speaking tours of Britain."
He was also capable of some rather spicy gothic verse;
“Truth [lines 34 to 45]
The shadows have departed,
And black night
Lies brooding over all the earth,
And hideous things find birth.
The world brings forth abortions,
And then weeps with bloody tears,
Because her womb is shamed,
Her children maimed,
And all her home become a wilderness of sin.
The sun is darkened,
And the moon turned into blood
And down upon us sweeps a flood
Of Lust and Cruelty.”
These are not really an accurate representation of thefull tone and weight of the poems but are some of the darker fragments which Ipersonally like and which I think will grab your attention and will also make vividthe contrast between Willie and Pope. The full range of the verse is morereligious, with much more seeking and finding of divine grace, and I thought ifI put that stuff in right away my audience would find it a bit twee.
“Thy Will Be Done [last verse]
And Bill, 'e were doin' 'is duty boys,
What e came on the earth to do,
And the answer what came to the prayers I prayed
Was 'is power to see it through.
To see it through to the very end,
And to die as my old pal died,
Wi' a thought for 'is pal and prayer for 'is gal,
And 'is brave 'eart satisfied."
Fundamentally ‘Rough Rhymes’ is a religious text aboutthe search for meaning in a crushing and annihilating place, with the centralpraxis or dichotomy being between deeply held faith and the martial virtues,and hatreds, of a soldier and a patriot. The two don’t mix but that hasn’tstopped Europeans, and Abrahamics generally, for a couple thousand years. Andyou get a lot of interesting thinking and reflection out of it.
For me G. A. Studdert-Kennedy is the most human of thesewriters, or the one who seems to exhibit the greatest humanity or the greatestand deepest range of feeling and questions. Tuchman comes close but the sheenof her irony, which aids her in gliding over great spans of history andsynthesising its details into a coherent and engaging story, also keeps her awindowglass' depth from the image.
Willie is also the person who seems most like a fullor real soldier, someone ready to stab crush and shoot his fellow man, sometimesfeeling bad about it after. Sentimental, patriotic, though not as thoughtlessor stupid as Pope who is just those things resigned, sometimes despairing,resolute, breaking down, wrathful at the war and at the enemy. Mizuki has this too but his war was so muchdarker and there are deep elisions in his telling. I don’t know if anyone couldgrapple with the whole thing head-on.
“Her Gift [lines 12 to 47]
"We’ve seen men die,
Not once, nor twice, but many times
In agony
A ghastly to behold as that.
We’ve seen men fall,
And rise, and staggering onward fall again,
Bedrenched in their own blood,
Fast flowing like a flood,
Of crimson sacrifice upon the snow.
We’ve seen and would forget.
Why then should there be set
Before our eyes these monuments of crime?
It’s time, high time,
That they were buried in the past;
There let them lie,
In that great sea of merciful oblivion,
Whereour vile deeds,
Andoutworn creeds,
Areleft to rot and die.
Wewould forget,
Andyet,
Do you remember Rob McNeil
Andhow he died,
Andcried,
And pleaded with his men
Totake that gun,
Andkill the Hun
Thatworked it dead?
Hebled
Horribly. Do you remember?
I can’t forget,
I would not if I could,
It were not right I should,
Hedied for me.
He was a God that boy,
The only God I could adore.”
