213. Censorship at Bedtime

(from mamalisa.com)

When singing or reading to my young son at bedtime, my first choices were naturally the songs and books beloved to me as a child, but sometimes I found myself editing them in mid-stream. One song that required revision in his infancy was the lullaby, Rock-a-bye Baby, in which the baby is rocking in a cradle high in a tree:

When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
And down will come Baby,
Cradle and all.

Not a very reassuring little ditty for a babe as it falls into the Land of Nod! I changed the words to:

When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
But Mummy will catch you,
Cradle and all.

Sometimes Nikhil himself made it clear at the outset that I needed to shut the book and put it away, as in Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, which I hadn’t read before, and which opens with James’ parents being unceremoniously eaten by a rhinoceros. (See also TMA 65. Curb Your Enthusiasm: A Bedtime Story.) At other times, however, in the midst of reading a work I thought I knew, I would find myself brought up short by shocking words, imagery, and sometimes entire passages and perspectives that I must have overlooked or taken in my stride in my own childhood; in particular, passages in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. I’m referring to the racism that was pervasive at the time the works were written, even if the authors themselves may have been well-intentioned.

If the offensive passage reared its ugly head while Nikhil was tucked cozily into bed, with his eyes half-closed and a peeled-and-sliced Granny Smith apple close at hand on a little plate, a lecture on Orientalist stereotypes or the displacement of Native Americans by white European settlers in the American West was not an immediate option. Sometimes I would make a comment, hardly pausing, simply registering my disapproval; but most of the time, for better or worse, I would censor the problematic passage altogether, saving the conversation for another time, and in the meantime protecting his innocent mind from the poison.

Readers of The Secret Garden will remember that the protagonist Mary Lennox had been born and raised in India. Since little Nikhil knew nothing of the evils of colonialism, and since I don’t remember the novel actually saying explicitly that Sarah was white, I let it be assumed that, like his own mother, she was Indian or half-Indian, with an English uncle. Much of the point of the novel is that Sarah, having been raised to be selfish, arrogant, and imperious in India, redeems herself in Yorkshire through hard work, caring for her cousin, and the democratic spirit of the English servants.  The narrator of the novel certainly presents the Sarah who is newly-returned from India as a spoiled brat who needs taking down a peg or two. Nothing wrong with that—at least, not in itself; the problem lies in the assumption that Indians are inherently cringing, servile, and undemocratic. The forthright Martha who will not take any nonsense from her charge is contrasted with Mary’s ayah in India who loved her too, but allowed herself to be abused by the young Memsahib. Somehow I managed to elide the worst of this while reading to Nikhil, judiciously skipping over particularly offensive bits as they came up.

Illustration by Pauline Baynes in The Horse and His Boy (narniawikia.com)

My main problem with the Narnia books, which I loved and still love, was the pervasive and pretty overt Crusader mentality, in which the bad guys, particularly the Calormenes in The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle, fight with scimitars, not swords, have beak-like noses, Arab-sounding names, and are generally portrayed, like scimatars in contrast with swords, as not straight (in the English sense of the word; that is, essentially crooked). Similarly, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the bad guys, such as the pointedly-named Easterlings and the Haradrim, all seem to be “swarthy” hordes. (Disappointingly, Peter Jackson faithfully reproduced the representation in his films.) In the latter case, I simply excised such words; I tried to do the same to the most blatantly Orientalist images in the former, but it was not always  easy.

Illustration by Garth Williams (from newspaperrock.bluecorncomics.com)

In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, particularly Little House on the Prairie, it was the representation of the Indians that was the most troubling for me. At the time I read the books to Nikhil I had not yet read Michael Dorris’ moving essay, Trusting the Words, describing his reactions as he re-read the Little House series in order to determine whether or not it would be appropriate to read them to his own children, and explaining his ultimate decision not to do so. When I did, years later, I understood his conclusion completely, much as I love the series (see TMA 177, The Sugar Snow). I had chosen to read them to Nikhil—again, pausing to comment on the passages in question, or, in some particularly egregious cases, censoring them out—but I might avoid them altogether today.

In the Little House books, Ma was portrayed as the racist parent, with a visceral revulsion toward Native Americans (Indians, as they are called in the novels) and Pa—to whom the protagonist Laura was closest—as the more enlightened one. However, even Pa (who reprimanded Laura when she said she wanted a little Indian “papoose,” reminding her that it was a real baby whose parents loved it, not a doll designed for her pleasure), who seemed to show respect for the Indians and who acknowledged that it was their land that the government had declared open for settlement, seems to fully accept that this is the order of things. And despite the novels’ acknowledgement of their humanity, the Indians are portrayed as irredeemably alien, their ways incomprehensible to the white settlers.

I don’t make a practice of recommending censorship; in general, I would prefer to review a book in advance in order to decide if it was appropriate to read to the child. And, where possible, I would prefer to tackle the issue head-on by discussing it with the child—in age-appropriate terms, of course. But when I come across disturbing content unexpectedly, it depends on the child and the setting whether I talk about it on the spot or whether I simply cut it out.

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212. ¡Viva la Literatura!

(from latinorebels.com)

Back in 1968 I was unaware of the student movements breaking out all over the world. Only distant ripples of those storms made their way to me, mostly through popular songs. Those songs, in turn, reached me  through the distorting medium of television (See TMA 119. Top of the Pops 1968-69). At 14, new to the medium and not yet trained to talk back to it, I swallowed its version of reality hook, line, and sinker. The 1968 Olympic Games were a case in point.

Opening of Summer Olympic Games, Mexico City, 12 October 1968 (photo: Sergio Rodriguez)

Just about all I knew about the 1968 Summer Olympics (although they were the first Olympics to be held in a Spanish-speaking country, the first in Latin America, and the first in a developing country), was in Long John Baldry’s Mexico, a song in the top 40 that Autumn which entered the charts at #30 in late October and reached #15 at its height in mid-November. It turns out that it was the U.K. Olympic team’s theme song, but I didn’t realize this then. It was a catchy little tune, the kind that has a watered-down Latin rhythm of the kind one might expect to find in a video made by a British travel agency for British tourists. But that is a cynical comment made by the jaded older me, not something that I would have thought at the time.

Fast-forward forty-five years to New York City’s Howl! Festival 2013, the only public event I know that is dedicated to a poem. Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 Howl is now an anthem of the Beat Generation and the counterculture in general. (Here’s an audio recording of Ginsberg reading it and here’s the text of the complete poem.) Held in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park, the festival’s kick-off event is a group reading of the poem by a lively gathering of poets, conducted by the redoubtable Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, father of slam poetry. One of those poets was Sarah Murphy, and sharing stories afterwards in the Odessa Café, I learned from her the terrible truth behind the façade of the 1968 Mexico Olympics.

(from photoarchivesbos13.blogspot.com)

Many people will remember that two African American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, supported by Australian athlete Peter Norman, caused a big stir at the 1968 Olympics for silently raising their fists during the medal ceremony to symbolize Black Power and Black Unity in the face of racism in their home country. In the year when Martin Luther King had been assassinated, this doesn’t seem such a shocking action. At the time, though, they were expelled both from the U.S. Olympic Team and from the Olympic Village and widely criticized for having violated the Olympic spirit by drawing politics into the Games. But how many people are aware, even today, that the biggest civilian massacre in modern Mexican history, a massacre on the scale of the one in Tiananmen Square, had taken place in Mexico City itself just ten days before the Games began?

New photos that demonstrate the complicity that existed between the police and the military (from blog.yaninapatricio.com)

In the Year 2000, President Vicente Fox came into office having campaigned to get to the bottom of government political secrets, chief among them the events of the night of October 2^nd, 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco, Mexico City. A short account can be found at Machetera, an extended audio story, Mexico’s 1968 Massacre: What Really Happened?, on National Public Radio, and a video in Spanish, Masacre en Tlatelolco, 2 de Octubre 1968.  The official cover-up had been so successful that more than thirty years after the massacre we still had no idea (and still haven’t, according to Kate Doyle, principal investigator of The Mexico Project) how many people were actually killed on that night, when the army opened fire on a large group of students demonstrating against police brutality and demanding greater political freedom, as were their peers the world over. At the time the official line was that the students themselves had started it by firing at the military, who had shot back in self-defense, so that there were casualties on both sides. However, it has recently come to light that in fact another branch of the military had planted snipers in a nearby building to fire the first shots as if they were from students, so as to provoke the army into opening fire. Although reports of the number of people killed vary wildly, from 200 t0 2,000, even as high as 5,000,  the official Mexican Government word that went out to the national and international press set the death toll at just twenty-nine. According to Sarah Murphy, who was living in Mexico and writing for Sports Illustrated at the time, the U.S. media parroted these figures unquestiongly, eager to get on with the real story, the Olympic Games, which must, at all costs, not be contaminated by politics.

It sickens me now to think of myself singing “Mexico (Underneath the Sun in),” so soon after cleaners had literally been sent out to wash the blood off the streets. Parroting that happy little promotional jingle, I was unknowingly helping to perform the same whitewashing function.

Mexico! You gotta be in so much to see in Mexico!
Take it from me you’re gonna see the greatest show
Underneath the sun in Mexico.

It was the greatest show all right, as in the greatest cover-up.

While TV viewers in Britain were happily sing-songing along with “Mexico,” students in Mexico were singing Chilean singer-songwriter Violeta Parra’s Me Gustan los Estudiantes (“I like students,” sung here by Mercedes Sosa), a song that became a movement anthem throughout Latin America, learned from each other in the streets, not from a telescreen. You can find its lyrics here, in both Spanish and English. One of my favorite lines in it is “Viva la Literatura!” When, I ask myself, did I last cheer for literature in the open air, making history shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow lovers of literature and life? The answer comes: just last weekend, at the 10^th Annual HOWL! Festival, where hundreds of people paused for poetry and howled for the state of our humanity! There’s hope yet.

(from machetera.wordpress.com)

 

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210. The Potters’ Tale

Tregurnow pottery

It’s marvelous where a train of thought can lead you in a day, and how sometimes things seem to come together all at once.

Just yesterday I was looking at some photographs I had taken of favorite pieces of pottery and china. I particularly treasure the mug, sugar bowl, and milk jug from Tregurnow Pottery, started by Mag and George when they moved down from London to a fishing village in Cornwall. They were part of my parents’ close circle of friends in London before I was born, and they all had their first children within a few months of each other. Mag is the one who pierced Mum’s ears for her, using a red-hot needle, or perhaps a red-hot safety pin. She is also the one who gave me my pet name. Visiting Mum and me when I was just days old, she first called me by the name that was to supplant my given name until I was thirty, and is still the one preferred by my family and oldest friends.

In the summer of 1971, on a trip to England after we had graduated from high school, Andrew and I took a coach down to Cornwall to visit Mag and George and camped on the clifftop near Treen. We went to a performance of Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl at the Minack open-air theatre, waded in the fantastically cold ocean water at Porthcurno (where George swam year-round), tasted nut rissoles for the first time (Mag and George were strict vegetarians), and learned about the importance of conserving water from George, who was decades ahead of his time in his commitment to a simple, sustainable life.

Porthcurno Bay (wikimedia commons)

So I looked up Tregurnow Pottery on the Internet, and found the website of the couple who, back in 1999, had bought it from Mag and George after they retired, and started their own studio. Imagine my delight when I found that one of them, John Nash, had written a book about my parents’ friends, telling the story of their struggle to establish the pottery. I wasted no time in ordering The Potters’ Tale, and am looking forward eagerly to receiving and reading it soon. I was even more delighted to receive an e-mail message from his wife Mim and to learn that she is now a close friend of Mag’s. This in turn led to an e-mail exchange with my Uncle Ted, who had heard from Mag just last week and had greetings from her for my mother.

One thing led to another. I found myself looking up the Minack Theater and learning that it was built by hand in the  1930s, stone by heavy stone, by a remarkable woman called Rowena Cade, who died in 1983 at age 90, and would have still been going strong back when Andrew and I visited the theatre. I found a video postcard of the Minack on YouTube and showed it to my father. I even found the archive of all the shows ever produced there since The Tempest in 1932, confirmed exactly when we had seen The Italian Girl, and learned that Iris Murdoch herself had participated in the play’s adaptation from the original novel.

The Minack Theatre (from thenakedcreative.co.uk)

This morning, over tea and a doughnut with Andrew, he brought out an old paperback and presented it to me: “I found this while I was sorting through some papers.” Wouldn’t you know—it was Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl!  My father-in-law picked it up for me at the town dump (er, sanitary landfill) a long while ago, but it had slipped out of sight and I had forgotten all about it—until just now. Synchronicity.

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208. Zee, Zed, Go to Bed

inhabitots.com

There is a famous song for learning your ABC’s, to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” (You can listen to Mozart’s virtuoso variations on it here.) When I first came to the United States, American children used to sing the ABC song like this:

ABCDEFG
HIJK
LMNOP
QRS
TUV
WX
Y & Zee

Now I know my ABC
Tell me what you think of me.

But sometime in the 1970’s or 1980’s, or so I imagine, my generation of New Age parents felt that this version was too evaluative and could place an unacceptable degree of performance anxiety on their children. Their new version, now the dominant one, ended like this:

Now I know my ABC
Next time won’t you sing with me?

This child-friendly version presented the teacher and the children as equals, joining together in a shared learning enterprise.

The British version of ABCD that I was raised on was altogether different, so I searched YouTube for it. Aha! Surely the ABCD song on the British Council website would be the traditional version. But no, it was the new America version trying pathetically and disappointingly to preserve a thin veneer of Englishness:
 nothing but the American version with the British Zed tacked on.

In my childhood, children were taught their place in no uncertain terms:

ABCDEFG
HIJK
LMNOP
LMNOPQ
RST
UVW
XY Zed


XY Zed
Sugar on your bread
All good children go to bed.

No nonsense about sharing or equality. After reciting their lessons, good children will go off to bed as they are told to do, and without a fuss. No ifs, ands, or buts. Still, unlike the saccharine-sweet American version that now seems to have gained near-universal status, English children were compensated with bread, butter, and sugar. Delicious, and right before bed, too.  So crunchy and calming. So good for the teeth.

I searched the entire Internet in vain for my childhood version. The closest I could come was this bossy-pants of a little Indian girl who recited, sing-song style:

XY Zed
Sugar on the bread
If you don’t like it you can go to bed.

In India, as in Canada and many other ex-colonial countries, many people still say Zed, although Zee is gaining ground.

(from billcasselman.com)

In regard to the pronunciation of the last letter of the English alphabet, take your pick, but I know what I like. Zed is the older form, apparently derived from the Greek Zeta (which is the sixth letter of its alphabet, far from holding pride of place at the end), in its turn taken from the Phoenician Zayid. The U.S. Zee, it seems, is a late- 17^th Century English dialectal form brought over by early English colonists.

While I was looking all this up, I discovered that Izzard is an old form of Zed. This gives me an entirely gratuitous excuse to include Eddie Izzard, one of my favorite stand-up comedians, discoursing here on British and American English.

And while I’m on the subject of British comedians, what better way to close out the 2013 April A-to-Z Challenge than with the A-to-Zed of Monty Python?

CODA: In the The Apple Pie ABC, the alphabet doesn’t end with Z, but with ampersand. Taking its cue, as the 2013 Blogging from A to Z Challenge comes to an end, I will do the same, and hope thereby to be granted a continuance. Thanks to the organizers and to all the bloggers I visited, and who visited me in turn. Do come again.

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207. The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

The first book I remember owning was Nonsense Songs by Edward Lear. My mother must have bought it for me, along with a few other English children’s classics, like The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, to take back to India with us when I was four. I still have the book today, countless moves later, and have read and recited the rhymes in it so many times that their deeply humanistic nonsense is an integral part of who I am. (By the way, my father told me just the other day that the Marathi folk tradition is full of nonsense rhymes, too, which I didn’t learn as a child because when in India we lived clear on the other side of the country and I went to English-medium schools.)

Picture books and board books were not as prevalent as they are now, so my first book was a beautifully printed hardcover, which I regret to say I drew and wrote on, though thankfully only on the end papers. But in so doing I made it all the more my own, by bestowing upon it special marks of my affection.

The two most well-known of Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes are The Owl and the Pussycat:

They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible [Lear's own neologism] spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

and The Jumblies:

Far and Few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.

These I soon learned by heart, including the song in the case of the former, although the tune has now escaped me. Just about every poem in that entire collection is weird and wonderful, including The Pobble Who Has No Toes, Mr. and Mrs. Spikky Sparrow, The New Vestments, and Mrs. And Mrs. Discobbolos. But perhaps the quirkiest, the most touching, and overall the most perfect of them all, the one lodged most deeply in my brain, is The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

First of all, the story is set on the Coromandel Coast. All I knew was that it had a certain ring to it; little did I realize that it was in fact the southeast coast of India, a Portuguese corruption of the original Cholamandalam. It was the saddest of love stories, not unrequited love, but love fully requited yet impossible because of the ridiculous strictures of society. At the same time it was hilarious, exemplified by the verse reproduced below, in which the Lady Jingly Jones reluctantly turns down the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’s proposal of marriage.

That is all you need to know. It is patently obvious that the illustrations are inseparable from the text, both having come out of the zany head of Mr. Lear. Here’s a curiously English 1966 recording of David Davis reading it aloud, I leave you with another picture from my beat-up old edition, still holding together after all these years. Now just read, reciting it out loud, again and again, whenever and wherever possible; and, if you have any human feelings at all, shed a few tears for the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

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203. Ultra

Ford Super Deluxe V8 (gomotors.net)

In my childhood we used super to refer to something especially big, or good, or powerful. When we really needed a super superlative, there was the reduplicative super-duper. There was lots of super-modern talk about sub-atomic particles and super-atomic bombs; and, of course, Superman. The advertising industry always needs to go one bigger and better, so they brought us super deluxe. But to express the extremes of the age, its unimaginable depths as well its over-the-top heights, we began to use ultra.

Ultra, the Multi-Alien (dialbforblog.com)

Ultra has been around since the early nineteenth century when it was used to refer to the extreme right in France, the ultra-royalists, and ever since, it has been used to describe rabid extremes or extremists, ultra-conservatives, for example. In the Second World War, apparently, Ultra was a code name used to refer to ultra-top-secret decrypted information from the enemy. John Burgess coined the term ultra-violence to refer to the gratuitous violence in his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962).

(zazzle.com)

The A to Z Challenge is the ne plus ultra of blogging; nevertheless, with five letters to go, I am bushed, done in, gutted, knackered, and ultra-exhausted.

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197. O, Oh, and the Wonderful O

Illustration by Ronald Searle (1962 Puffin Books edition)

Years ago, while I was just starting my graduate studies, I attended a talk by the eminent scholar Christopher Ricks. I freely confess that I was able to take away very little from the lecture, but for one thing: the difference between O and Oh. He illustrated this difference with instances of each of their use in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra.

According to the Grammarist, O is used as a poetic form of address (poetic apostrophe) and always precedes the name of the person being invoked (or the pronoun referring to that person). “O Beloved Guru,” one’s ideal student might say, “O Wise and Wonderful One, vouchsafe to us thy blessing as we go forth into the wide world.”

“Oh” is used much more commonly today. It is an “interjection used to express a range of emotions, including pain, sorrow, hesitation, and recognition. . .usually set off from its surrounding sentence by commas.” Take, for example, the opening lines from Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there. . .

Or—to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous—Sybil’s “Oh, I know” in Fawlty Towers.

But what O and Oh have in common is O itself, without which neither of them could even be uttered. James Thurber’s 1958 story, The Wonderful O imagines, brilliantly, what it would be like to have to live without that most fulsome of vowels. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t yet come across this little gem, but suffice it to say that the benighted Island of Ooroo was reduced to a shadow of its former self, lovers could no longer spoon under the moon, and the unfortunate Otto Ott was reduced to a stutter. O was worth fighting for, and when it was recovered, the islanders learned to value their most precious treasure, previously taken for granted.

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193. Kindling

kindling (from megscoutguide.nic.in)

I’m speaking of the material one uses to get a wood fire going—dry twigs, thin sticks, or twists and knots of newspaper that will sustain the first, fragile, licks of flame, so that the larger pieces of wood will catch fire.  Having a supply of dry kindling on hand is essential to building a fire, whether indoors in a brick fireplace or woodstove or outdoors in a makeshift firepit.  As a verb, kindling refers to starting a fire, setting fire to something that will burn or, figuratively, arousing emotion. Etymologically, the word comes from cundel, “to set fire to,” thought to be of Scandinavian origin and related to the Old Norse kynda, also meaning “to kindle.”

How to Build a Campfire (npr.org)

There’s something very satisfying about building a good fire, setting it in the shape of a small teepee, carefully positioning the kindling so that it will get enough oxygen to catch fire and the flames are directed to the larger logs above, slipping the lit match in at the bottom, and watching it all flare up and slowly take hold. It warms your body and also kindles the cockles of your heart. Don’t forget, though, that the art of building a fire also includes the art of keeping that fire safe.

I suppose I have to mention (though I refuse to advertise) a commercial product, on the market only for a few short years (since 2007), that has appropriated this ancient word and still more primal human activity. I resent the fact that this brand of electronic reader seeks to be the object that comes to mind  when the word is mentioned. As a book-lover and former co-owner of a small letterpress business, I resent that this device even seeks to supplant the printed book, repository of human knowledge for more than a thousand years.

Amazon Kindle: Digital Book Burning (redicecreations.com)

If you think that this new means of delivering information to readers will be more durable or more enviromentally sustainable, think again. “The printed book is by far the most durable and reliable backup technology we have. Printed books require no mediating device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence. Paper is also extremely stable, compared with, say, hard drives or even CD’s,” writes Kevin Kelly in a New York Times article on the Google Books project, digital technology, and the printed book. Librarian and cultural journalist R. H. Lossin has recently given a lecture on book-burning, Nazis, the 21^st-Century digital library, and the fascinating question of why both major brands of e-reader have names that signify the act of setting something on fire. Thought-provoking, eh?

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192. Jam Today

In my mid-twenties I participated with many others in an effort to stop the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power station from being built. We did not succeed in Seabrook, although we did raise awareness about the costs and dangers of nuclear power. The anti-nuclear movement grew and flourished throughout the 1970s, but in 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan, like that of Margaret Thatcher in Britain the year before, began a long period of what we called the clampdown (echoing The Clash’s prescient Working for the Clampdown on London Calling), and put a serious damper on the movement, along with so much else. Early in 1980, though, oblivious of all that was to come, we were making serious preparations for non-violent direct action to occupy the site, in a decentralized system of self-organization based on affinity groups and consensus decision-making. One of the affinity groups, friends of ours, called themselves Jam Today.

I never asked any of the members of Jam Today what lay behind their choice of name, but it seemed clear enough. They refused to go along with a society that demanded endless deferral of desires and their fulfillment to some indefinite future.

illustration by John Tenniel (from thevictorianweb.org)

The phrase “jam today” comes from the exchange between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), in which the queen offers Alice a job with the promise of “twopence a week, and jam every other day.’ Pressed further, she reveals “the rule. . . jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

‘It MUST come sometimes to ‘jam today,”‘ Alice objected.

‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: today isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’

Having been raised to believe in delayed gratification, part of me secretly found the idea of Jam Today a little self-indulgent. But my friends showed me otherwise: they combined concentrated hard work for a better future with an irrepressible joie-de-vivre. They lived in the moment and clearly loved every moment. And time was to prove them right: throughout those long Reagan years, as unemployment skyrocketed, unions were smashed, public services defunded, and environmental protections gutted, the rich only got much, much richer, while continuing to dangle before the rest of us the lying promise of Jam Tomorrow, a tomorrow that would never turn into today.

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191. The Iliad at Bedtime

(theminiaturespage.com)

I don’t know who looked forward to bedtime more when my son was little, but I know we both did, because we could slow down, get comfortable, and read. I was an easy touch. “Just one more chapter,” he would plead as I made to close the book and turn out the lights, and that’s all it would take for me to settle in again with a sigh—of resignation or relief? There was a mere handful of the many, many books we went through together that I couldn’t wait to put down, glancing surreptitiously at Nikhil every so often out of the corner of my eyes in the hope that I would see his eyelids drooping and take that as a cue to say good night. One of those books was The Iliad.

It’s not the fact that it was a classical epic that made the going tedious. In fact, I had consciously decided to expose him to the epics from both the Indian and the Greek traditions. We started with an abridged children’s edition of my favorite, the wonderfully compendious Mahabharata—of which it is said that what is not in it, is not—followed by the Ramayana. Then, after a bit of an interval, we took up the Odyssey and eventually, the Iliad. I’d never read the Iliad myself, and what I’d heard of it hadn’t particularly pre-disposed me to it; still, I proceeded with it dutifully, if only to round out my son’s education.

Except for this one particular night I confess I don’t remember much of what we read; and, to be quite honest, I’m certain we didn’t finish it. This was entirely due to me: Nikhil would have been prepared to listen to it until long after the cows had come home, if only to postpone indefinitely the moment of actually having to go to sleep; in the end, it was I who didn’t have the stamina. But on this particular night, we were in the middle of what seemed to be an interminably long listing, contingent by contingent, of all the ships making up the army of the Achaeans (that is, the Greeks, also called the Danaans or the Argives in the epic) that had sailed to Troy. Here’s a taste of it:

Tell me now, Muses, who live on Olympus – since you are goddesses, ever present and all-knowing, while we hearing rumour know nothing ourselves for sure – tell me who were the leaders and lords of the Danaans. For I could not count or name the multitude who came to Troy, though I had ten tongues and a tireless voice, and lungs of bronze as well, if you Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus, brought them not to mind. Here let me tell of the captains, and their ships.

First the Boeotians, led by Peneleos, Leitus, Arcesilaus, Prothoenor and Clonius; they came from Hyrie and stony Aulis, from Schoenus, Scolus and high-ridged Eteonus; from Thespeia and Graea, and spacious Mycalessus; from the villages of Harma, Eilesium and Erythrae; from Eleon, Hyle, Peteon, Ocalea and Medeon’s stronghold; from Copae, Eutresis, and dove-haunted Thisbe; from Coroneia and grassy Haliartus, Plataea and Glisas, and the great citadel of Thebes; from sacred Onchestus, Poseidon’s bright grove; from vine-rich Arne, Mideia, holy Nisa and coastal Anthedon. They captained fifty ships, each with a hundred and twenty young men. (from The Iliad, Book II)

And that was just the first contingent; it went on and on in this vein until I thought I was going to keel over from boredom. I hoped that Nikhil was getting as tired of it as I was and that I would soon be able to call it a night. But, inexplicably, it appeared to be holding his attention. I went on manfully, trying to muster up the requisite epic resonance in my voice, though in truth I was beginning to flag. Every few minutes I’d steal a glance at the reclining Nikhil, and finally, when it seemed that he’d been still and quiet for a long time, I stopped reading. In an instant, he sprang to life:

“Why have you stopped, Mom?”

“Oh, I thought you were asleep.”

“No I wasn’t; I was counting.”

“What?!”

“There are seven hundred and forty-four ships so far; I don’t want to lose count.”

So he had been listening intently all along; rather than counting sheep, he had been counting ships!

I learned only yesterday that this section is known as the Catalogue of Ships  and that the Greek catalogue alone  “lists twenty-nine contingents under 46 captains, accounting for a total of 1,186 ships.”

I guess my son and I don’t have altogether identical tastes in bedtime reading.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents