Stub in a Season of Winter

Coal is for the reckless — solar for the slow —
Wind is for the deserts which will never grow.
"Good!" said the Alien, looking down from high,
"But Fusion — Cold Fusion — is master of the sky."

...with apologies to Rudyard Kipling.

Batman Returns

I was brought up partly on Kipling by my father's judicious intervention, as I've mentioned before. (It brings to mind an old British cartoon which I've always found amusing, but I digress.)

It occurs to me that because of this kind of paternal education, I actually came across the word 'Batman' a long time before I came across the Caped Crusader in comics or on TV. A batman is a commissioned officer's orderly — his runner, valet, and general dogsbody all in one. There's also a Batman province in Turkey and all kinds of other Batmen (Batmans?), including one that has a mass of 16.4 metric tons.

This kind of education has an odd effect on the young. It makes them grow up with a terrible urge to make funny associations that nobody else will get, laugh like a maniac at a particularly pleasing but abstruse joke, and ask riddles with answers that will either elicit groans or require explanations (this latter then makes the riddle lose its humour and die).

All this came to mind when my 7-year-old niece started asking me riddles from one of those '1001 Riddles' jokebooks (like 'jukebox' but with different vowel sounds in it). We had a lot of fun inventing better answers than those provided. My niece approves of that kind of thing. She has said to me before, "Uncle, you're a tricky man!"

She means it in a good sense, I think. At least, she laughs a lot when saying it.

If...

Sometimes you realise that people who lived and died a long time ago have still got something to say about the times in which we live. This is of course an obvious sort of observation. But when I say 'realise', I use it here in the sense of 'make real (to yourself)'. This is the sort of epiphany you get when you idly leaf through the poems of long-dead people like Chesterton, Blake, Donne or Kipling, stuff you used to read as part of an English Lit course or just for background atmosphere.

And then it hits you how some of these poems line up; how sometimes it becomes clear that the issue being written about was something that may actually have consumed the author in his search for meaning.

Take for example the third stanza of Kipling's 1897 Recessional:

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
   Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

And the first lines of Kipling's 1895 Ballad of East and West:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

It's quite clear that Kipling, for all his jingoistic reputation and tendencies, was conflicted between his appreciation of non-white humanity and his inborn (inbred?) urge to see his own nation as the crown of all humanity. The caution he sounds for his own people and the readiness to praise the qualities he found elsewhere don't quite jibe with the idea that he was an out-an-out racist.

The conditional 'if' also gets a full measure of elaboration in this famous poem of his. To my mind, this piece perhaps shows that perhaps Kipling's idea of real dichotomy was not that between different kinds of race, in that Victorian sense; rather, it was that between the real person working and getting his hands dirty and living life, and the person who was not so exposed. It was, to him, a real issue that a man should know how to use power and not be corrupted by it; it was a real issue about how people should strive to be more than their natural inclinations would have seemed to allow.

The Cultural Capital of the World

In the conversations of the week that is passing, I have been forced to confront a specific truth that I have always shied away from. It's the fact that in some ways I possess (through little fault of my own) a whole lot of cultural capital of a certain kind. As various chthonians have suggested, this capital is something to be envied by others, and is possibly a source of provocation and inflammation.

In the last few months, I've had people come up to me and tell me why they remembered my work and my teaching. Quite often (where the memories are positive), their memories centre around the appropriate deployment of cultural capital, and/or the investment of that capital in young people so that they will gain interest from it. They mention the choice of words, the kind of language, the perspectives, the presentation of content, the devotionals, the ideas of the sacred and profane, and the way in which I seemed to see things differently from some people.

I am deeply grateful. Yet, as I mentioned before, I have always shied away from the fact of cultural capital. Somehow, it seems like an unfair advantage, and I have always favoured fair and open exchanges of ideas. The problem has sometimes been that cultural capital gives a person the power to speak as if from the seat of authority in a particular cultural environment, even if he does not intend to do so. For example, a person who has been identified with a certain cause (such as the advancement of African-American rights) might not be descended from African-Americans, and yet speak with such authority that people will listen to and take to heart whatever is said on the topic.

If you are envious of such capital, then three solutions are most obvious.

1. Eliminate the person. If you can dispose of the holder of the cultural capital, this renders the effect of such capital moot.
2. Eliminate the culture. If you can somehow dispose of the tangible and intangible structures that give this capital its value, then the capital is devalued.
3. Gain cultural capital of your own. For various reasons, this is very difficult. As Bourdieu says, you have to inherit it, buy artifacts that represent it, or gain certification or institutional approval that symbolises it. Sometimes, you may have negative cultural capital (such as having been a disciple of Hitler) that disqualifies you no matter what you do.

Obviously, these solutions are very risky. Failure to succeed will lead to successful failure. There is, however, one option that is not so obvious. You can borrow cultural capital by close positive association with those who have it. You can attempt to understand where it's coming from, and why you haven't been to that place. You can be culturally humble; if you feel humiliated, then this course of action is not for you. Eventually, assiduous devotion to the source of capital will gain you some.

This last option is seldom embarked upon. Anyone powerful enough to want to resist or channel cultural capital is unlikely to be a humble person. But in the end, as Kipling wrote in Recessional, 'an humble and a contrite heart' may be the source of our salvation. Such thoughts have ever been close to my own heart.

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Note: Kipling's line is of course not his own; some will recall its origin in the Book — for example in Isaiah 57 and in Psalm 51.

The Plan: Part I – Criterion 1 Situational Appraisal

Every organisation needs a plan, as Nodachi and I were talking about over the last few weeks. Coincidentally, as I was visiting the Great Powers at their little base far away from the White Tower, I bumped into a little book by John C Maxwell. Yes, there are many books by John C Maxwell, and I've read many of them in my career, but this one struck a chord.

As a leader, what kind of people are in your inner circle? That was one of the questions Maxwell posed in that book. He said a few interesting things:

1. If the organisation is to grow, the leader has to develop his inner circle.


2. If the leader doesn't develop his inner circle, the organisation will stop growing effectively and efficiently – although it may continue to grow in size and in terms of accretions.


3. If this happens, the leader is not being a leader.


4. Hence, true leadership involves the correct development of the inner circle.


5. And therefore, you can predict the future direction of an institution by looking at this inner circle.

So, what kinds of people should be in a leader's inner circle?

• People who are always improving themselves in terms of effectiveness and ability – self-starters


• People who are always improving the organisation in the same way – change managers


• People who are able to improve others likewise – mentors


• People who are able to improve the leader himself, by giving honest feedback – mirrors


• People who are going to develop all the other kinds of people – leaders

It is interesting to use this list as a rating guide for any institution that you might be in. If all five are not present, the inner circle is incomplete.

Too many leaders surround themselves with people they are comfortable with, reasoning that people who are comfortable with each other make a better team, and therefore all are 'team players'. But the 'comfortable' part is probably the least important part of being a team; the most important part is that the team carries out the functions required while ensuring that they can be replaced at short notice. This is one principle of highly effective teams.

A team that cannot be replaced with a functional unit in a short time might be an elite team, but it is certainly not good for the organisation in one specific way: it cannot ensure a smooth transition to an equal or higher level of performance in event of disruption to itself.

A team that is too comfortable internally has probably become a clique. Like any good mechanism, it functions smoothly but will be disrupted when the environment changes. But the environment changes all the time; therefore, such a team needs to be disrupted by honest and uncompromising feedback, perhaps from unlikely sources who come from one of the five 'inner circle' categories listed above.

A team that is comfortable is likely to be incomplete, because a complete inner circle is full of people who cannot accept the existing level of performance. If they did, they would not be improvers; they would be comfortable. "Iron sharpens iron, as one man sharpens another," as the Good Book says. (This is not to say that uncomfortable teams are complete – discomfort can come from dysfunction as well.)

Kipling used to say that part of growing up includes the ability to "meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same." It is particularly instructive to see how leadership copes with triumph, since 'disaster management' is the normal order of the day but 'triumph management' is not. Good triumph management fuels better performance, and not a falling-off into 'same old same old' or other mediocrity. It fuels learning and a renaissance at every corner and every step.

Lastly, leadership communicates in a way that inspires. Without at least the inspiration at human level that leads to better change management and improvement, the organisation starts to stiffen up as the leadership tries to codify previous triumphs and avoid disaster. This is not to say that reckless inspiration wins, but that inspiration should be available which does not draw upon past triumphs or the fear of future failure.

These were some random thoughts as I sat in front of the 50000-word overview of situation that came my way. I wonder if any of them will be of use. And for now, I will append Kipling's admonitory and inspirational words, as my father gave them to me.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master,
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son!

Things To Do

The tumult and the shouting dies,
The captains and the kings depart;
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice:
An humble and a contrite heart.

Kipling wrote these line a very long time ago, it seems, in his masterly poem Recessional. But as I walked out of the venerable hallways (a mere one-sixth the age of the Old Home itself) I realised that this is one of the foundation stones of the whole edifice. We as an institution have done well, but there are still areas for improvement.

Here are a few notes buzzing inside my head.

1. Surely we need not be so wasteful and inefficient in terms of time management. The effectiveness is there, but the pontificating should not take a week. (Etymological note: Latin pontifex, modern 'pontiff', means 'bridge-builder'.) In fact, the more we approach the 'just in time' paradigm, the more we will become like Toyota and other successful and intelligent corporations, where there is little unnecessary make-work.

2. The skills need to be taught more effectively. It cannot be true that extremely close and detailed supervision is something that is a sign of the self-directed learner. And it isn't always successful either. Sometimes, you need to have more experience as a supervisor and the student needs to require less supervision. Idle bums.

3. Knowledge can be over-compartmentalised. And also spammed. It is ridiculous for humans to chew up food, digest it, make it into neat lumps, and then feed it to others to eat. But this is what happens in most academic classes worldwide. Need it be that way here as well? I hope not.

4. Knowledge is a vast net, a great tapestry. But what happens is that people are making snapshots and passing them off as the real thing. The idea of weaving a large tapestry appears too daunting simply because the likely instructors are limited to hand-waving and knitting of small baby items, it can appear. Thank goodness this is not always true.

5. I am very optimistic about the future. I have great respect for the past. What presents itself as the truth tends to require both these perspectives in order for people to understand it and to feel secure about it. Only insecure people seek to control information without spending the necessary time to teach people about information in the first place. If anything, that is the one thing I am not so optimistic about.

Towards the end of Kipling's poem, he writes:

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe –
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law –

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Amen.

Recessional

I remember mentioning Kipling's Recessional once before. My father, a scholar of Anglo-Indian history, first introduced me to Kipling as a child-care agent: he would leave me with a volume of Kipling in his office while he went off to teach on days when nobody was around to look after me.

One day, I encountered the lyrical words of this grand hymn to decolonisation. It is a little dated now, but some of its lines have got that chill of fallen grandeur and fading sunsets. I remembered it today because I was in a fin de siecle sort of mood. And so was Gnomus.

Well, here it is, this relic of a bygone age. Perhaps we look back to a better age, not realising that the best is yet to be.

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Recessional

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine
Lord God of Hosts be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Nevada

Out there in the midwest of the Beautiful Land is a big flat dry space. It has odd cities of the plain in it; some remind you of the long-dead idea of Sodom and Gomorrah, some remind you of home, some remind you of a discomforting dream of the amoral faerie. It is a midsummer night's long slow and sandy nightmare.

Into that ancient desert land came a wanderer from the Tin Isles. He had a sharp eye and a shrewd gaze. He took notes. He had been in many hot lands, but this was one of the driest, one of the dustiest. We don't really know how much time he spent there, in flesh or spirit, in history or out of it, in truth or in fantasy. But if he had not been there, he ought to have been.

He travelled a lot. From the Tin Isles to Saint Andrew's Rift is a great expanse of ocean, followed by a long journeying from the east coast of the Land. And everywhere, the Iron Horse carried him, through the rolling plains and the whistling deserts, the swamps and the glorious hills.

It must have been that journey on that colossus of roads, that sprawling web of steel, that inspired him to think of the Nevada Train and write a poem about its route across the broad expanse. You can find it here.

The most famous line is the first in the poem. Here it is:

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and Nevada Train shall meet..."

Humbled

I think of two sets of lyrics, I suppose, when I see or hear the word 'humbled'.

The way I've been wired over the years (or the way my genes betray me, take your pick), one set is religious in origin, one is familial (pehaps tribal) in nature. And both are very English, I think.

The first one is A E Housman's 1887. It's a moving poem on Queen Victoria's jubilee year. But more than that, it is a celebration of the virtues that Housman looked for and described in the men of his time and his country. Here's the fourth verse.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save.

I don't think I'm as good as any of the ancestors I've known. I think I'm less competent, more wicked, inclined more often to steer away from onerous responsibilities. Which brings me to the 1870 hymn, At The Name Of Jesus. This is the fourth verse.

Humbled for a season, to receive a name
From the lips of sinners unto whom He came,
Faithfully He bore it, spotless to the last,
Brought it back victorious when from death He passed.

The Victorians are often mocked for their social traits. But they were surprisingly full-blooded, and their era was full of literary triumphs and tempered optimism. They could meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat them both just the same, as Kipling wrote in 1895. When Queen Victoria died in 1901, an age preeminent in significance to the 20th and 21st centuries died with her. And that humbles me too.

Pathways

Tonight I watched the second episode of the new TV series, Heroes. It's about ordinary people suddenly manifesting extraordinary talents; hang-ups and problems thereof; the problems of selfhood, personality, awareness, and adaptation.

I also found drawn to two poems. The first is by Robert Frost - it is his famous one about the road not taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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That poem was published in 1916, ninety years and three generations ago. It has somehow become immortal, for we will always have to make decisions about roads and choices between them. And yet, there are older and sadder poems about roads too. Here is one which has proven less immortal, but which has a message just as poignant. It is Kipling's 1910 poem (yes, it is older than Frost's by six years), The Way Through The Woods:

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

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And of course, it is the blind travelling on a road now lost that is the saddest thing here. I haven't yet decided which poem I love more. Perhaps it will be just as difficult for you, my readers.

The Greater Trumps: (29) The Savant

Here is a person hard at work, surrounded by astrolabe and alembic, canopic jar and retort, text and picture; the central figure is surrounded by all manner of instrument, artifact and item. Sometimes, there are peripheral figures, bearing even more things. What is the Savant to do? The world of the Savant is full, busy, and most important of all - occupied by the act of understanding. In the background, the stars shine in a dark sky; in the foreground is a book that might be the Book of Books.

The Savant image is that which evokes Wisdom. It is not merely knowledge that is represented here; it is the attempt to tease out from it that which is useful, that which can be understood and applied. For this image represents Wisdom, that hard-earned coin of enlightenment. It is not mere reflection either, or imagination. The central figure, often shown as old, either female or male, and with shrewd perspicacity shining in the eyes, actually has come to understand the nature of things, and to do the best with that understanding.

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Of course, I understood early that the Savant doesn't know everything. But the Savant is wise, and has learnt how to understand, how to pursue knowledge, how to use that knowledge - and how not to do (or how to not do) any of these. Sometimes, the relative measures of pursuit of knowledge are interesting to contemplate - in the sciences, knowledge doubles every 4-5 years as measured by publications. But is this any measure of wisdom?

Learn from Kipling, and become wiser...

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.

The rest of the poem is even more instructive in its own way. It's also instructive that the second word of this poem is often misquoted as 'have' or 'know'. It isn't what (or who) you have or know, it's what (or which company) you keep that counts.