Ages have passed

Ages have passed
since I saw him
go in to the waves,
in the dark and lonely beach
in that town.
In this town, now,
when waiting for another sunrise,
it seemed I could identify
the man coming out of the waves
to the shore.
Did he swim for so long?
or
Am I sitting here for so long?

extract from Rudyard Kipling's Evaluation of His Own Mother by G. V. Desani

If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose tears would come down to me,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling's proposition is obvious, chairman. He says if he were hanged, drowned and damned, then (a) his mother's love would follow him still, (b) his mother's tears would come down to him, and (c) his mother's prayers would make him "whole. " If none of these disasters happened, then -- he asserts -- the above results would not follow. (To assert something is to deny something. To assert it is day is to deny that it is night. Necessarily, though obliquely.)

Let us amplify his argument by an in-depth analysis.

First, if he were hanged (contingency), on the highest hill (location), then, he aserts, (he knows, he says), love would folllow him still. Now, as for location, Kipling, quite clearly, refers to the top of Mt. Everst in Tibet (the highest hill can be read as the highest mountain -- a minor point).

Now the combination, of the event and the location -- being hanged upon Mt. Everest in Tibet -- envisages a human agent other than Rudyard Kipling: to wit, a hangman. Because of this all-important factor, we must consult the law of probability. The suggestion that a court of a civilized country would condemn a man to be hanged on the peak of Mt. Everest in Tibet -- only recently reached by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sri Tenzing Norgay -- and provide, be it noted, at the same time a hangman, with the gear, to carry out the sentence so that the victim's mother's love could follow him still -- he does not predict her physical presence at the hanging but merely the continuous flowing up to him of an emanation of hers, to wit, her love -- is, though not an impossibility, an improbability. (by asserting improbables, Kipling falsifies. yet, one is bound grant, that since his propsition is not experimentally verfiable, it cannot be proved false. Still, his very foci make his utterance predictably erosive though viable.) ...

Mysecondlife, were you Denice in yourfirstlife?

Huzefa Kapasi wrote:
...Kipling's proposition is obvious, chairman.... Still, his very foci make his utterance predictably erosive though viable.) ...

who wrote the above and the lines in between? desani?

Huzefa Kapasi wrote:extract from Rudyard Kipling's Evaluation of His Own Mother by G. V. Desani

If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose tears would come down to me,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling's proposition is obvious, chairman. He says if he were hanged, drowned and damned, then (a) his mother's love would follow him still, (b) his mother's tears would come down to him, and (c) his mother's prayers would make him "whole. " If none of these disasters happened, then -- he asserts -- the above results would not follow. (To assert something is to deny something. To assert it is day is to deny that it is night. Necessarily, though obliquely.)

Let us amplify his argument by an in-depth analysis.

First, if he were hanged (contingency), on the highest hill (location), then, he aserts, (he knows, he says), love would folllow him still. Now, as for location, Kipling, quite clearly, refers to the top of Mt. Everst in Tibet (the highest hill can be read as the highest mountain -- a minor point).

Now the combination, of the event and the location -- being hanged upon Mt. Everest in Tibet -- envisages a human agent other than Rudyard Kipling: to wit, a hangman. Because of this all-important factor, we must consult the law of probability. The suggestion that a court of a civilized country would condemn a man to be hanged on the peak of Mt. Everest in Tibet -- only recently reached by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sri Tenzing Norgay -- and provide, be it noted, at the same time a hangman, with the gear, to carry out the sentence so that the victim's mother's love could follow him still -- he does not predict her physical presence at the hanging but merely the continuous flowing up to him of an emanation of hers, to wit, her love -- is, though not an impossibility, an improbability. (by asserting improbables, Kipling falsifies. yet, one is bound grant, that since his propsition is not experimentally verfiable, it cannot be proved false. Still, his very foci make his utterance predictably erosive though viable.) ...

Hahaha, I have to look up this Desani guy now.

Jeremiah Mburuburu wrote:

Huzefa Kapasi wrote:
...Kipling's proposition is obvious, chairman.... Still, his very foci make his utterance predictably erosive though viable.) ...

who wrote the above and the lines in between? desani?

yes, that is entirely a reproduction from one of desani's short stories. you are clearly getting old and senile sirjee. do something.

panini press wrote:
Hahaha, I have to look up this Desani guy now.

this is from the book: http://www.amazon.com/Hali-Collected-Stories-G-Desani/dp/0929701127
it keeps going in and out of print. amazon says only 2 copies remain (?? marketing gimmick?). i am ordering one today for my existing copy, that i bought in the bookstore of taj hotel, mumbai, in 1999, is falling apart.

i read all his short stories, including ones not included in this anthology, in college, before this book was first published. i found them in the microfilch copies of the illustrated weekly of india in the library of the school of international affairs that stored IW editions, from the 50s and 60s, in microfilch form. he was not a regular contributor -- kushwant singh was editor then -- and it was a laborious job fishing out his stories; it took me weeks but the it was worth the effort for the sheer joy i got upon finding and reading his stories! i photocopied some on an impulse then and have reproduced one in this forum because it is not in print. i have more to say on desani but i will do in another thread and at leisure. there are two scholars that i know of who have studied desani in great detail. one is amardeep singh, prof. at lehigh U and the other is molly daniels ramanujan. i was in conversation with the former a few months ago. he pointed to me a paper he had written on desani that i found very comprehensive (he relied partly on molly's research). his paper attempts to understand the man (about whom we know little). although i do not fully agree with amardeep's conclusions (and never found the time to discuss this with him -- then he is so busy; would he be able to find time for me?), and i feel he missed the real truth about desani, the man, by a whisker, his research and analysis is quite remarkable. his dream is to write a fully annotated version of AAHH. my dream is to sponsor him when i am richer. we both are just that -- dreamers.

i wrote like desani before i read desani (i'm tipsy right now). i want to write and to write about him but so little time. so much to say, so little time to waste. after i read him, i realized that desani, my lord, had cheated me. i went back to my college pourings and double checked and found that yes, i did write like him -- we shared the egsactu same to same sensibility (not exactly so -- i somewhat shared his sensibility; for he was the lord and i his servant). i call him my lord because after reading him, i understood that i was not as gifted as him to rise above him (perhaps i would rise in other ways in prose but everything got aborted because everything happened very quickly and my lifetime would be spent in amusing confusion and recollection -- amusing to me, that is). desani was gifted. he was a polyglot and a master orator. he was a master of english, hindi, urdu and sanskrit and other languages perhaps (we know little about him so we don't know everything about him). his command over sanskrit, for instance, can be summarized in this comment he made to a colleague (when old, in UT, as a prof.) -- the gita canot be translated into english my friend; it can be translated only as a musical score!

rushdie and ghosh do great injustice to him when they interpret him as a man who kneaded english because he wished to express himself in a language not native to him. bastards. both play the victim card. i am surprised why ghosh has been insincere. ghosh rightly calls him a "hero" -- in a worldly way and not an artist way. desani kneaded english because he was above english. seth, another polyglot, has often been asked why he chooses to write in english alone. that question should have been asked of desani! seth answers as desani would have. seth says "english" is my tool; rest merely languages.

ghosh and rushdie give a subaltern slant to desani's kneading of english. this is not just. the man kneaded enlglish, like joyce and nabakov, not as a subaltern but as a master of the language. (yet he was not god. he was not infallible. i have to thank atcg for pointing out the error in desani's "medico influenced" usage of english. i will post more later when i am sober).

(to be continued)

Huzefa Kapasi wrote:

Jeremiah Mburuburu wrote:

Huzefa Kapasi wrote:
...Kipling's proposition is obvious, chairman.... Still, his very foci make his utterance predictably erosive though viable.) ...

who wrote the above and the lines in between? desani?

yes, that is entirely a reproduction from one of desani's short stories. you are clearly getting old and senile sirjee. do something.

i asked who wrote that passage - you or desani - because the following contains a logical error:

Kipling's proposition... He says if he were hanged,... then... his mother's love would follow him still... If none of these disasters happened, then -- he asserts -- the above results would not follow.

"if he were hanged, mother's love would follow him still" does not imply that "if he were not hanged, mother's love would not follow him still." the second statement is the inverse of the first, and is equivalent to the converse of the first: "if mother's love follows him still, then he was hanged." there's no reason to conclude that he was hanged because mother's love follows him still; perhaps mother's love follows him still because he's swimming alone and without protection from cuba to florida through shark-infested waters, not because he was hanged. as you might know, the converses - and therefore, the inverses - of many statements are not true.

i had not expected desani to make that error.

Huzefa Kapasi wrote: he was not infallible. i have to thank atcg for pointing out the error in desani's "medico influenced" usage of english. i will post more later when i am sober).
(to be continued)

I don't recall this - what is "medico influenced" and what was the error?

"medico influenced" was mentioned by me in the wrong (and a spirited) context -- my bad. but you pointed out that "et al" was to be used when referring to people alone. desani uses "et al" incorrectly here.