Episode 112: Kipling’s Lightworks
Kipling shed light! This second talk on his poems and short stories, but especially his poems, sings the praises of the inspired bard. Interestingly, two of his best hymns were cut from The Hymnal (1982) — and not on “political correctness” grounds but on Christological grounds. It was thought that “Recessional” and “Children’s Song” were not specific enough. Whether this was right or wrong, we lost two inheritances, two great poems, for my money, rooted in “love to the loveless” and the critique of power.
I hope you will want to read “Epitaphs of the War 1914-1918”, and maybe even think of drones. In any event, no one could lay on the author of these epitaphs anything resembling a charge of nationalism.
Take a look, too, at Kipling’s last story, written just before he died. It is called “Proofs of Holy Writ” and can be found here.
It concerns Bible translation. “ARISE, shine, for thy light has come.”
Podcast 112 is dedicated to Stuart Gerson.
They are Gerald Fried (b. 1928) and Gerald Heard (d. 1971). Both mined the unconscious: Fried in B-movie (and other) musical scores; Heard, in novels of detection and fantastic short stories.
There is nothing like Fried’s intruding tonalities to hook you in your un-abreacted pain. There is nothing like Heard’s monistic short stories to turn religious assertions into subterranean echoes.
For reference, see Fried’s Mack-Truck track for the character ‘Jane Lindstrom’s’ “Breatkthrough” in Cabinet of Caligari (1962), with Glynis Johns and Dan O’Herlihy. Or rather, hear it! (at the end of the podcast)
Or read Heard’s 1944 short story entitled “Despair Deferred…?”. I’ve read no other story like it, this un-masking of the world’s “tyranny of the urgent”.
Both of the two Geralds understood about the non-rational characteristic of human actions. Their work embodies the characteristic, and is therefore therapeutic.
Had Christ been in a position to publish his parables and similes, under what name would he have published them? Gerald Heard chose “H.F. Heard” for most of his fiction. He hid a part of himself within it. Fried was content to be the “background” to works with titles like “I Bury the Living” and “Curse of the Faceless Man”. (Yet who isn’t “faceless”? and who isn’t “buried”, though “living”?)
This podcast is about sub-rational communication. It is also a handbook for preachers.
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