Ton van Reen: DE MOORD XXVIII

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Ton van Reen

DE MOORD XXVIII

We gingen in het deurgat op het trapje zitten. De marmot wist niet goed of hij dichterbij mocht komen. We keken naar de morgen en dronken koffie.

‘Ik ben koorddanseres,’ zei Alice.

‘Ik ben degenslikker,’ zei de man, ‘maar er zijn geen degens. De oorlog heeft ze ingeslikt.’

‘Vandaag ga ik oefenen,’ vertelde Alice. Ze liep naar de wagen van Cherubijn. Even later kwam ze terug, gekleed als koorddanseres.

‘Heb je touw?’ vroeg ze aan de degenslikker.

‘Ja,’ zei de degenslikker, ‘maar heb je God al goedemorgen gewenst? We hebben nu een heel dorp en onze eigen God. Daarom mogen wij hem niet vergeten.’

Alice boog heel diep naar het puin van de kerk. Dat was haar ochtendgebed. Daarna spande de degenslikker een dik touw tussen twee bomen. Hij sneed een lange stok uit eikenhout. Even later liep Alice met de stok balancerend over het touw, hoog boven ons hoofd. Ze riep naar me, ze was er erg trots op dat ze over een touw kon lopen.

Ook de melker en Cherubijn waren nu wakker en keken vol verbazing naar Alice die zo maar van boom tot boom liep over een touw, als een engel tegen de hemel afstak en ons het gevoel gaf dat we mensen waren van een ander en blijer soort. Wat toch niet zo was. Dat gevoel noem ik nu ‘trots’.

De kindertjes waren uit bed gekomen. Twee kleine vogeltjes die per ongeluk de vleugels hadden verloren en nu verwonderd naar ons stonden te kijken. Niet lang verwonderd bleven maar naar de marmot liepen en het dier aaiden met hun suikerhandjes. Het bleek dat ze geen echte namen hadden maar luisterden naar klanken die hun vriendelijk toeschenen. Daarom leken ze nog meer op vogeltjes. Het kon zijn dat ze naar een andere taal luisterden. Of dat een mensentaal was? De vogels hadden toch ook een eigen taal!

Ik keek niet meer naar het koorddansen van Alice. Ik was bang dat Alice met de degenslikker mee zou reizen. En in dorpen en steden over touwen ging lopen, voor de ogen van de mensen. Mensen waren belust op sensatie. Ze zouden het spannend vinden om Alice hoog over een touw te zien lopen. Ze zouden toch liever zien dat ze omlaag viel, dat ze dood zou vallen of gewond werd. Niet omdat ze haar de dood toewensten, maar alleen om de sensatie. De prestatie om over een touw te lopen zei hun niet veel. Maar voor wat sensatie betaalden ze graag. Sensatie: dat is het leven en de dood van anderen.

En inderdaad, zoals ik verwacht had, trachtte de degenslikker Alice over te halen met hem mee te reizen. Ook ons wilde hij graag meenemen. Met zijn allen zouden we als circus langs dorpen en steden kunnen reizen. Zelf zou hij degens slikken en een beer kopen die hij zou leren dansen. Ik zou met de marmot rondgaan, Alice zou koorddansen, de twee vogelkinderen zouden zingen of zo, en de melker hoefde alleen zijn onnozele gezicht maar te laten zien om op een clown te lijken. Toch hadden we er geen zin in. We hadden ons nu eenmaal voorgenomen in een huis te gaan wonen in de Lichtstad Kork. En Alice konden we niet missen. Ze was de moeder van het gezin. We vertelden de degenslikker dat ook hij met zijn gezin in ons huis zou mogen wonen als hij dat zou willen. Maar de degenslikker dacht dat een zigeuner niet in een huis kon wonen omdat het zelfs in de lente niet te verplaatsen was.

Alice was een beetje bedroefd. Ze moest haar plannetje om koorddanseres te worden laten varen. Ze begreep niets van de sensatiezucht van mensen, dat was duidelijk.

We bleven nog een hele dag in Wrak. We speelden met de vogelkindjes in het puin. En later was de avond weer zo vriendelijk om een muur rond ons te bouwen. Wrak had geen lichten nodig omdat God vanonder het puin van zijn huis hoog genoeg oplichtte.

(wordt vervolgd)

kempis.nl poetry magazine

Overleden dichter (Theo) T. A. van der Put (Eindhoven 1938- 2013)

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Overleden (Theo) T. A. van der Put

(Eindhoven 1938 – 2013)

Crematie: vrijdag 22 februari om 15.30 uur in de Luxzaal van het crematorium Rijtackers. Anthony Fokkerweg 150, Eindhoven. Samenkomst in de ontvangstkamer van het crematorium waar gelegenheid is tot schriftelijk condoleren.

Mij bereikte het nare bericht dat Theo van der Put is overleden. Theo heeft een ogenschijnlijk beperkte rol gehad in het Eindhovens dichterswereldje. Maar dat is bedrieglijk!

Theo stond altijd klaar om zijn, dikwijls actuele gedichten, voor te dragen. Niet alleen op de diverse podia maar ook als sociaal mens, zoals Theo was, voor incidentele podia rond aandacht behoeftige gebeurtenissen Zoals het voordragen en het toelichten van zijn gedichten voor de verplegingsomroep ERVO ‘Van Poëzie tot poesyalbum’ of voor Sarajevo. Veel dichters kennen hem zittend aan de bar van Café Kraaij en Balder met een pilsje en een sigaar in zijn mond. Altijd goed gestemd, altijd klaar voor een praatje. Bij het tienjarig bestaan van het café schreef hij een ode aan Kees en Hermien. De uitbaters van het voor de Eindhovense dichters indertijd zo belangrijke café. Het werd ‘De Kraaij en Balder blues’ op de muziek van Eric Burdon and the Animals.

Van der Put emigreerde naar Canada op zijn 22^e levensjaar. Lang bleef hij niet daar. Als industrieel ontwerper -vrije vormgeving-, was hij geïnteresseerd in de wereld van de kunsten.

Hij hield zijn ‘Ogen en oren open’, om overal ideeën uit te peuren en om bij gelegenheid iets mee te doen: als kunstschilder, bij het schrijven van verhalen, hoorspelen, toneel en gedichten. Poëthement besteedde nog in 2009 in de Centrale Bibliotheek van Eindhoven een geheel podium aan de altijd bescheiden Van der Put en zijn werk. Daar was ondermeer een film te zien, gemaakt naar aanleiding van zijn gedicht ‘Waar ooit Eufraat en Tigris’. Waarschijnlijk het enige gedicht van een Brabantse dichter die aanleiding gaf tot het produceren van een film!

Maar even terug in de geschiedenis. Velen hebben het over de dichter Frans Babylon in relatie met de Poort van Kleef. Van der Put is echter de enige dichter die over de Chat Rouge, in het genoemde café, schreef en eveneens de eerste over de Kunstmarkt van de sociëteit Cultureel Contact. Met name over het gedrag van het publiek. Waar tot op de dag van heden kennelijk nog steeds geen verandering in is waar te nemen. Van der Put nam actief deel aan het programma ‘Multiplex Dansende woorden, roerende talenten’. Over de geschiedenis en wetenswaardigheden rond de dichters van Eindhoven. Samen met collegadichters de ‘Dichtjesroute 2009’ in verband met 65 jaar Vrijheid. Zijn laatste publieke optreden vond plaats in het 2011 in programma ‘Boekenkast I’ over Frans Babylon. Theo was toen al ziek, maar deze gelegenheid kon hij niet voorbij laten gaan. Tot op het laatste moment wilde hij op de hoogte te worden gebracht over wat er te doen was in de Eindhovense dichterswereld.

Zijn laatste bundel ‘Samenwerking’, samen met Kees Salentijn is een juweeltje. Talenten die samenwerken. Dat deed Theo van der Put, samenwerken als het kan.

Pierre Maréchal 17-02-2013

Publicaties onder meer:

Put, Th. A. van der (1992): Grieks Tafereel, Lijn 24/2. Opwenteling Eindhoven.

Put, Th. A. van der (2001): Laatste Regels. Literair Landschap. Eindhoven.

Sebille, W. van & J. Smeets (2001): Luister en Huiver (Jan van Ant). Opwenteling. Eindhoven.

Put, Th.A. van der ((2004): Een eenzijdige vriendschap in drieëndertig gedichten. Opwenteling. Eindhoven.

Put, Th. A. van der & K. Salentijn (2011): Samenwerking. Eindhoven.

Bijdragen onder meer in:

Eindhoven Ontmoet Zijn Dichters, 2002 Opwenteling en samenwerkende dichtersorganisaties. Eindhoven.

Beslagen Ramen K&B Literair 2002, Eindhoven

Eindhoven Dichtstad I, zj. Stichting Raamwerk Letterexploitatie. Eindhoven.

Eindhoven Dichtstad IV, 20006 Uitgeverij MoNo. Eindhoven.

Literaire Magazine’s Eindhoven Dichtstad en CFK.

Verder in flyers van Plankenkoorts, K & B Literair & Poëthement.

Over Theo van der Put:

Adelaar, W. (1996): Een vraaggesprek met Theo van der Put. CFK 2-5. Eindhoven.

Vertrouw ze niet

‘Voorzichtig kind, vertrouw ze niet.

Wees waakzaam meid, vertrouw ze niet.

Blijf alert vrouw, vertrouw ze niet.

Vertrouw ze niet: de mannen.

Ze stichten domeinen en kloosters, godsdienst en oorlog.

Ze lusten in onbenul naar hun strijd om de macht.

Ze verminken je zoon, verkrachten je dochter,

verloochenen hun moeder, doden de vader die het hen leerde.

Vertrouw ze niet vrouw: de leiders, de generaals en de priesters,

wantrouw de profeten, hun mythen en heilige boeken.

Vertrouw je zoons niet toe aan hun vader als die spreekt over eer,

over mannelijkheid en vaderland en glorie op het slagveld.

Verhef je zonen niet, zij zullen geloven dat het hun recht is.

Plaats hen tussen je dochters, in bescheidenheid.

Leer hen over liefde en over kracht, niet over macht.

Leer hen sterk te zijn, maar geen overwinnaars.

Leer hen vrij te zijn, maar niet overheersend.

Leer hen oprecht te zijn, waarlijk mens te zijn.’

Theo. A. van der Put †

fleursdumal.nl magazine

Bert Bevers: Het lot van de knecht

Het lot van de knecht

Op de Col du Grand Cucheron groeide je
door de angst voor de leegte heen, deed je
steeds beter voort, door hoogte aangejaagd.
Ook die ellendige Col du Granier schroeide.

De schuren die jij passeert zie je niet. Toch
zijn ze vol van voedsel, van te melken geiten.
Je drijfveer? Het vuur van die fijne pijn, daar
gaat het je om. Het volste recht heb je. Maar

mocht het te herdoen zijn, dan zou je liever
beter zijn. Je bent echter wat je bent. Meer
valt er straks niet te doen dan je toekomst aan
het verleden te meten. Dat moest je al weten

voor je hieraan begon, jongen. In je dromen
wegduikende kopmannen, en doortraptheid.
Als je morgen vroeg ontwaakt voel je je weer
een adelaar, maar wel met honger. Wie weet

wat de rit naar de zee brengt. Nu is je palmares
nog leeg, als een volière zonder vogels.

Bert Bevers

uit Geelzucht III, De Letterloods, Puyvelde, 2012

kempis.nl poetry magazine

James Joyce: An Encounter

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James Joyce

(1882-1941)

An Encounter

It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack , Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel . Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother Leo, the idler, held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs. Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling:

“Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!”

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true.

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel.

“This page or this page? This page Now, Dillon, up! ‘Hardly had the day’ . . . Go on! What day? ‘Hardly had the day dawned’ . . . Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?”

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning.

“What is this rubbish?” he said. “The Apache Chief! Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched fellow who writes these things for a drink. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were . . . National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or . . . ”

This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of the weariness of schoollife for one day at least. With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahony I planned a day’s miching. Each of us saved up sixpence. We were to meet at ten in the morning on the Canal Bridge. Mahony’s big sister was to write an excuse for him and Leo Dillon was to tell his brother to say he was sick. We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House. Leo Dillon was afraid we might meet Father Butler or someone out of the college; but Mahony asked, very sensibly, what would Father Butler be doing out at the Pigeon House. We were reassured: and I brought the first stage of the plot to an end by collecting sixpence from the other two, at the same time showing them my own sixpence. When we were making the last arrangements on the eve we were all vaguely excited. We shook hands, laughing, and Mahony said:

“Till tomorrow, mates!”

That night I slept badly. In the morning I was firstcomer to the bridge as I lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank. It was a mild sunny morning in the first week of June. I sat up on the coping of the bridge admiring my frail canvas shoes which I had diligently pipeclayed overnight and watching the docile horses pulling a tramload of business people up the hill. All the branches of the tall trees which lined the mall were gay with little light green leaves and the sunlight slanted through them on to the water. The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.

When I had been sitting there for five or ten minutes I saw Mahony’s grey suit approaching. He came up the hill, smiling, and clambered up beside me on the bridge. While we were waiting he brought out the catapult which bulged from his inner pocket and explained some improvements which he had made in it. I asked him why he had brought it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the birds. Mahony used slang freely, and spoke of Father Butler as Old Bunser. We waited on for a quarter of an hour more but still there was no sign of Leo Dillon. Mahony, at last, jumped down and said:

“Come along. I knew Fatty’d funk it.”

“And his sixpence . . . ?” I said.

“That’s forfeit,” said Mahony. “And so much the better for us, a bob and a tanner instead of a bob.”

We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road. Mahony began to play the Indian as soon as we were out of public sight. He chased a crowd of ragged girls, brandishing his unloaded catapult and, when two ragged boys began, out of chivalry, to fling stones at us, he proposed that we should charge them. I objected that the boys were too small and so we walked on, the ragged troop screaming after us: “Swaddlers! Swaddlers!” thinking that we were Protestants because Mahony, who was dark-complexioned, wore the silver badge of a cricket club in his cap. When we came to the Smoothing Iron we arranged a siege; but it was a failure because you must have at least three. We revenged ourselves on Leo Dillon by saying what a funk he was and guessing how many he would get at three o’clock from Mr. Ryan.

We came then near the river. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts. It was noon when we reached the quays and as all the labourers seemed to be eating their lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping beside the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce, the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay. Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.

We crossed the Liffey in the ferryboat, paying our toll to be transported in the company of two labourers and a little Jew with a bag. We were serious to the point of solemnity, but once during the short voyage our eyes met and we laughed. When we landed we watched the discharging of the graceful three-master which we had observed from the other quay. Some bystander said that she was a Norwegian vessel. I went to the stern and tried to decipher the legend upon it but, failing to do so, I came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some confused notion. . . . The sailors’ eyes were blue and grey and even black. The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out cheerfully every time the planks fell:

“All right! All right!”

When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers’ shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live. We could find no dairy and so we went into a huckster’s shop and bought a bottle of raspberry lemonade each. Refreshed by this, Mahony chased a cat down a lane, but the cat escaped into a wide field. We both felt rather tired and when we reached the field we made at once for a sloping bank over the ridge of which we could see the Dodder.

It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the Pigeon House. We had to be home before four o’clock lest our adventure should be discovered. Mahony looked regretfully at his catapult and I had to suggest going home by train before he regained any cheerfulness. The sun went in behind some clouds and left us to our jaded thoughts and the crumbs of our provisions.

There was nobody but ourselves in the field. When we had lain on the bank for some time without speaking I saw a man approaching from the far end of the field. I watched him lazily as I chewed one of those green stems on which girls tell fortunes. He came along by the bank slowly. He walked with one hand upon his hip and in the other hand he held a stick with which he tapped the turf lightly. He was shabbily dressed in a suit of greenish-black and wore what we used to call a jerry hat with a high crown. He seemed to be fairly old for his moustache was ashen-grey. When he passed at our feet he glanced up at us quickly and then continued his way. We followed him with our eyes and saw that when he had gone on for perhaps fifty paces he turned about and began to retrace his steps. He walked towards us very slowly, always tapping the ground with his stick, so slowly that I thought he was looking for something in the grass.

He stopped when he came level with us and bade us goodday. We answered him and he sat down beside us on the slope slowly and with great care. He began to talk of the weather, saying that it would be a very hot summer and adding that the seasons had changed gready since he was a boy, a long time ago. He said that the happiest time of one’s life was undoubtedly one’s schoolboy days and that he would give anything to be young again. While he expressed these sentiments which bored us a little we kept silent. Then he began to talk of school and of books. He asked us whether we had read the poetry of Thomas Moore or the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton. I pretended that I had read every book he mentioned so that in the end he said:

“Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. Now,” he added, pointing to Mahony who was regarding us with open eyes, “he is different; he goes in for games.”

He said he had all Sir Walter Scott’s works and all Lord Lytton’s works at home and never tired of reading them. “Of course,” he said, “there were some of Lord Lytton’s works which boys couldn’t read.” Mahony asked why couldn’t boys read them, a question which agitated and pained me because I was afraid the man would think I was as stupid as Mahony. The man, however, only smiled. I saw that he had great gaps in his mouth between his yellow teeth. Then he asked us which of us had the most sweethearts. Mahony mentioned lightly that he had three totties. The man asked me how many I had. I answered that I had none. He did not believe me and said he was sure I must have one. I was silent.

“Tell us,” said Mahony pertly to the man, “how many have you yourself?”

The man smiled as before and said that when he was our age he had lots of sweethearts.

“Every boy,” he said, “has a little sweetheart.”

His attitude on this point struck me as strangely liberal in a man of his age. In my heart I thought that what he said about boys and sweethearts was reasonable. But I disliked the words in his mouth and I wondered why he shivered once or twice as if he feared something or felt a sudden chill. As he proceeded I noticed that his accent was good. He began to speak to us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they had and how soft their hands were and how all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one only knew. There was nothing he liked, he said, so much as looking at a nice young girl, at her nice white hands and her beautiful soft hair. He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit. At times he spoke as if he were simply alluding to some fact that everybody knew, and at times he lowered his voice and spoke mysteriously as if he were telling us something secret which he did not wish others to overhear. He repeated his phrases over and over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice. I continued to gaze towards the foot of the slope, listening to him.

After a long while his monologue paused. He stood up slowly, saying that he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

“I say! Look what he’s doing!”

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again:

“I say . . . He’s a queer old josser!”

“In case he asks us for our names,” I said “let you be Murphy and I’ll be Smith.”

We said nothing further to each other. I was still considering whether I would go away or not when the man came back and sat down beside us again. Hardly had he sat down when Mahony, catching sight of the cat which had escaped him, sprang up and pursued her across the field. The man and I watched the chase. The cat escaped once more and Mahony began to throw stones at the wall she had escaladed. Desisting from this, he began to wander about the far end of the field, aimlessly.

After an interval the man spoke to me. He said that my friend was a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at school. I was going to reply indignantly that we were not National School boys to be whipped, as he called it; but I remained silent. He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys. His mind, as if magnetised again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new centre. He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound whipping. A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. I was surprised at this sentiment and involuntarily glanced up at his face. As I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. I turned my eyes away again.

The man continued his monologue. He seemed to have forgotten his recent liberalism. He said that if ever he found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls. And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world. He said that there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that. He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.

I waited till his monologue paused again. Then I stood up abruptly. Lest I should betray my agitation I delayed a few moments pretending to fix my shoe properly and then, saying that I was obliged to go, I bade him good-day. I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles. When I reached the top of the slope I turned round and, without looking at him, called loudly across the field:

“Murphy!”

My voice had an accent of forced bravery in it and I was ashamed of my paltry stratagem. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw me and hallooed in answer. How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.

James Joyce: An Encounter

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: Archive I-J, Joyce, James, Joyce, James

Jack London: Shin-Bones

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Jack London

(1876-1916)

Shin-Bones

They have gone down to the pit with their weapons of war, and they have laid their swords under their heads.

“It was a sad thing to see the old lady revert.”

Prince Akuli shot an apprehensive glance sideward to where, under the shade of a kukui tree, an old wahine (Hawaiian woman) was just settling herself to begin on some work in hand.

“Yes,” he nodded half-sadly to me, “in her last years Hiwilani went back to the old ways, and to the old beliefs–in secret, of course. And, BELIEVE me, she was some collector herself. You should have seen her bones. She had them all about her bedroom, in big jars, and they constituted most all her relatives, except a half-dozen or so that Kanau beat her out of by getting to them first. The way the pair of them used to quarrel about those bones was aweinspiring. And it gave me the creeps, when I was a boy, to go into that big, for-ever-twilight room of hers, and know that in this jar was all that remained of my maternal grand-aunt, and that in that jar was my great-grandfather, and that in all the jars were the preserved bone-remnants of the shadowy dust of the ancestors whose seed had come down and been incorporated in the living, breathing me. Hiwilani had gone quite native at the last, sleeping on mats on the hard floor–she’d fired out of the room the great, royal, canopied four-poster that had been presented to her grandmother by Lord Byron, who was the cousin of the Don Juan Byron and came here in the frigate Blonde in 1825.

“She went back to all native, at the last, and I can see her yet, biting a bite out of the raw fish ere she tossed them to her women to eat. And she made them finish her poi, or whatever else she did not finish of herself. She–“

But he broke off abruptly, and by the sensitive dilation of his nostrils and by the expression of his mobile features I saw that he had read in the air and identified the odour that offended him.

“Deuce take it!” he cried to me. “It stinks to heaven. And I shall be doomed to wear it until we’re rescued.”

There was no mistaking the object of his abhorrence. The ancient crone was making a dearest-loved lei (wreath) of the fruit of the hala which is the screw-pine or pandanus of the South Pacific. She was cutting the many sections or nut-envelopes of the fruit into fluted bell-shapes preparatory to stringing them on the twisted and tough inner bark of the hau tree. It certainly smelled to heaven, but, to me, a malahini (new-comer), the smell was wine-woody and fruit-juicy and not unpleasant.

Prince Akuli’s limousine had broken an axle a quarter of a mile away, and he and I had sought shelter from the sun in this veritable bowery of a mountain home. Humble and grass-thatched was the house, but it stood in a treasure-garden of begonias that sprayed their delicate blooms a score of feet above our heads, that were like trees, with willowy trunks of trees as thick as a man’s arm. Here we refreshed ourselves with drinking-coconuts, while a cowboy rode a dozen miles to the nearest telephone and summoned a machine from town. The town itself we could see, the Lakanaii metropolis of Olokona, a smudge of smoke on the shore-line, as we looked down across the miles of cane-fields, the billow-wreathed reef-lines, and the blue haze of ocean to where the island of Oahu shimmered like a dim opal on the horizon.

Maui is the Valley Isle of Hawaii, and Kauai the Garden Isle; but Lakanaii, lying abreast of Oahu, is recognized in the present, and was known of old and always, as the Jewel Isle of the group. Not the largest, nor merely the smallest, Lakanaii is conceded by all to be the wildest, the most wildly beautiful, and, in its size, the richest of all the islands. Its sugar tonnage per acre is the highest, its mountain beef-cattle the fattest, its rainfall the most generous without ever being disastrous. It resembles Kauai in that it is the first-formed and therefore the oldest island, so that it had had time sufficient to break down its lava rock into the richest soil, and to erode the canyons between the ancient craters until they are like Grand Canyons of the Colorado, with numberless waterfalls plunging thousands of feet in the sheer or dissipating into veils of vapour, and evanescing in mid-air to descend softly and invisibly through a mirage of rainbows, like so much dew or gentle shower, upon the abyss-floors.

Yet Lakanaii is easy to describe. But how can one describe Prince Akuli? To know him is to know all Lakanaii most thoroughly. In addition, one must know thoroughly a great deal of the rest of the world. In the first place, Prince Akuli has no recognized nor legal right to be called “Prince.” Furthermore, “Akuli” means the “squid.” So that Prince Squid could scarcely be the dignified title of the straight descendant of the oldest and highest aliis (high chiefs) of Hawaii–an old and exclusive stock, wherein, in the ancient way of the Egyptian Pharaohs, brothers and sisters had even wed on the throne for the reason that they could not marry beneath rank, that in all their known world there was none of higher rank, and that, at every hazard, the dynasty must be perpetuated.

I have heard Prince Akuli’s singing historians (inherited from his father) chanting their interminable genealogies, by which they demonstrated that he was the highest alii in all Hawaii. Beginning with Wakea, who is their Adam, and with Papa, their Eve, through as many generations as there are letters in our alphabet they trace down to Nanakaoko, the first ancestor born in Hawaii and whose wife was Kahihiokalani. Later, but always highest, their generations split from the generations of Ua, who was the founder of the two distinct lines of the Kauai and Oahu kings.

In the eleventh century A.D., by the Lakanaii historians, at the time brothers and sisters mated because none existed to excel them, their rank received a boost of new blood of rank that was next to heaven’s door. One Hoikemaha, steering by the stars and the ancient traditions, arrived in a great double-canoe from Samoa. He married a lesser alii of Lakanaii, and when his three sons were grown, returned with them to Samoa to bring back his own youngest brother. But with him he brought back Kumi, the son of Tui Manua, which latter’s rank was highest in all Polynesia, and barely second to that of the demigods and gods. So the estimable seed of Kumi, eight centuries before, had entered into the aliis of Lakanaii, and been passed down by them in the undeviating line to reposit in Prince Akuli.

Him I first met, talking with an Oxford accent, in the officers’ mess of the Black Watch in South Africa. This was just before that famous regiment was cut to pieces at Magersfontein. He had as much right to be in that mess as he had to his accent, for he was Oxford-educated and held the Queen’s Commission. With him, as his guest, taking a look at the war, was Prince Cupid, so nicknamed, but the true prince of all Hawaii, including Lakanaii, whose real and legal title was Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, and who might have been the living King of Hawaii Nei had it not been for the haole (white man) Revolution and Annexation–this, despite the fact that Prince Cupid’s alii genealogy was lesser to the heaven-boosted genealogy of Prince Akuli. For Prince Akuli might have been King of Lakanaii, and of all Hawaii, perhaps, had not his grandfather been soundly thrashed by the first and greatest of the Kamehamehas.

This had occurred in the year 1810, in the booming days of the sandalwood trade, and in the same year that the King of Kauai came in, and was good, and ate out of Kamehameha’s hand. Prince Akuli’s grandfather, in that year, had received his trouncing and subjugating because he was “old school.” He had not imaged island empire in terms of gunpowder and haole gunners. Kamehameha, farther-visioned, had annexed the service of haoles, including such men as Isaac Davis, mate and sole survivor of the massacred crew of the schooner Fair American, and John Young, captured boatswain of the snow Eleanor. And Isaac Davis, and John Young, and others of their waywardly adventurous ilk, with six-pounder brass carronades from the captured Iphigenia and Fair American, had destroyed the war canoes and shattered the morale of the King of Lakanaii’s landfighters, receiving duly in return from Kamehameha, according to agreement: Isaac Davis, six hundred mature and fat hogs; John Young, five hundred of the same described pork on the hoof that was split.

And so, out of all incests and lusts of the primitive cultures and beast-man’s gropings toward the stature of manhood, out of all red murders, and brute battlings, and matings with the younger brothersof the demigods, world-polished, Oxford-accented, twentieth century to the tick of the second, comes Prince Akuli, Prince Squid, pure-veined Polynesian, a living bridge across the thousand centuries, comrade, friend, and fellow-traveller out of his wrecked seven-thousand-dollar limousine, marooned with me in a begonia paradise fourteen hundred feet above the sea, and his island metropolis of Olokona, to tell me of his mother, who reverted in her old age to ancientness of religious concept and ancestor worship, and collected and surrounded herself with the charnel bones of those who had been her forerunners back in the darkness of time.

“King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu,” Prince Akuli continued. “And his queen, Kapiolani, caught the fad from him. They collected everything–old makaloa mats, old tapas, old calabashes, old double-canoes, and idols which the priests had saved from the general destruction in 1819. I haven’t seen a pearl-shell fish-hook in years, but I swear that Kalakaua accumulated ten thousand of them, to say nothing of human jaw-bone fish-hooks, and feather cloaks, and capes and helmets, and stone adzes, and poi-pounders of phallic design. When he and Kapiolani made their royal progresses around the islands, their hosts had to hide away their personal relics. For to the king, in theory, belongs all property of his people; and with Kalakaua, when it came to the old things, theory and practice were one.

“From him my father, Kanau, got the collecting bee in his bonnet, and Hiwilani was likewise infected. But father was modern to his finger-tips. He believed neither in the gods of the kahunas” (priests) “nor of the missionaries. He didn’t believe in anything except sugar stocks, horse-breeding, and that his grandfather had been a fool in not collecting a few Isaac Davises and John Youngs and brass carronades before he went to war with Kamehameha. So he collected curios in the pure collector’s spirit; but my mother took it seriously. That was why she went in for bones. I remember, too, she had an ugly old stone-idol she used to yammer to and crawl around on the floor before. It’s in the Deacon Museum now. I sent it there after her death, and her collection of bones to the Royal Mausoleum in Olokona.

“I don’t know whether you remember her father was Kaaukuu. Well, he was, and he was a giant. When they built the Mausoleum, his bones, nicely cleaned and preserved, were dug out of their hidingplace, and placed in the Mausoleum. Hiwilani had an old retainer, Ahuna. She stole the key from Kanau one night, and made Ahuna go and steal her father’s bones out of the Mausoleum. I know. And he must have been a giant. She kept him in one of her big jars. One day, when I was a tidy size of a lad, and curious to know if Kaaukuu was as big as tradition had him, I fished his intact lower jaw out of the jar, and the wrappings, and tried it on. I stuck my head right through it, and it rested around my neck and on my shoulders like a horse collar. And every tooth was in the jaw, whiter than porcelain, without a cavity, the enamel unstained and unchipped. I got the walloping of my life for that offence, although she had to call old Ahuna in to help give it to me. But the incident served me well. It won her confidence in me that I was not afraid of the bones of the dead ones, and it won for me my Oxford education. As you shall see, if that car doesn’t arrive first.

“Old Ahuna was one of the real old ones with the hall-mark on him and branded into him of faithful born-slave service. He knew more about my mother’s family, and my father’s, than did both of them put together. And he knew, what no living other knew, the burial-place of centuries, where were hid the bones of most of her ancestors and of Kanau’s. Kanau couldn’t worm it out of the old fellow, who looked upon Kanau as an apostate.

“Hiwilani struggled with the old codger for years. How she ever succeeded is beyond me. Of course, on the face of it, she was faithful to the old religion. This might have persuaded Ahuna to loosen up a little. Or she may have jolted fear into him; for she knew a lot of the line of chatter of the old Huni sorcerers, and she could make a noise like being on terms of utmost intimacy with Uli, who is the chiefest god of sorcery of all the sorcerers. She could skin the ordinary kahuna lapaau” (medicine man) “when it came to praying to Lonopuha and Koleamoku; read dreams and visions and signs and omens and indigestions to beat the band; make the practitioners under the medicine god, Maiola, look like thirty cents; pull off a pule hee incantation that would make them dizzy; and she claimed to a practice of kahuna hoenoho, which is modern spiritism, second to none. I have myself seen her drink the wind, throw a fit, and prophesy. The aumakuas were brothers to her when she slipped offerings to them across the altars of the ruined heiaus” (temples) “with a line of prayer that was as unintelligible to me as it was hair-raising. And as for old Ahuna, she could make him get down on the floor and yammer and bite himself when she pulled the real mystery dope on him.

“Nevertheless, my private opinion is that it was the anaana stuff that got him. She snipped off a lock of his hair one day with a pair of manicure scissors. This lock of hair was what we call the maunu, meaning the bait. And she took jolly good care to let him know she had that bit of his hair. Then she tipped it off to him that she had buried it, and was deeply engaged each night in her offerings and incantations to Uli.”

“That was the regular praying-to-death?” I queried in the pause of Prince Akuli’s lighting his cigarette.

“Sure thing,” he nodded. “And Ahuna fell for it. First he tried to locate the hiding-place of the bait of his hair. Failing that, he hired a pahiuhiu sorcerer to find it for him. But Hiwilani queered that game by threatening to the sorcerer to practise apo leo on him, which is the art of permanently depriving a person of the power of speech without otherwise injuring him.

“Then it was that Ahuna began to pine away and get more like a corpse every day. In desperation he appealed to Kanau. I happened to be present. You have heard what sort of a man my father was.

“‘Pig!’ he called Ahuna. ‘Swine-brains! Stinking fish! Die and be done with it. You are a fool. It is all nonsense. There is nothing in anything. The drunken haole, Howard, can prove the missionaries wrong. Square-face gin proves Howard wrong. The doctors say he won’t last six months. Even square-face gin lies.

Life is a liar, too. And here are hard times upon us, and a slump in sugar. Glanders has got into my brood mares. I wish I could lie down and sleep for a hundred years, and wake up to find sugar up a hundred points.’

“Father was something of a philosopher himself, with a bitter wit and a trick of spitting out staccato epigrams. He clapped his hands. ‘Bring me a high-ball,’ he commanded; ‘no, bring me two high-balls.’ Then he turned on Ahuna. ‘Go and let yourself die, old heathen, survival of darkness, blight of the Pit that you are. But don’t die on these premises. I desire merriment and laughter, and the sweet tickling of music, and the beauty of youthful motion,

not the croaking of sick toads and googly-eyed corpses about me still afoot on their shaky legs. I’ll be that way soon enough if I live long enough. And it will be my everlasting regret if I don’t live long enough. Why in hell did I sink that last twenty thousand into Curtis’s plantation? Howard warned me the slump was coming, but I thought it was the square-face making him lie. And Curtis has blown his brains out, and his head luna has run away with his daughter, and the sugar chemist has got typhoid, and everything’s going to smash.’

“He clapped his hands for his servants, and commanded: ‘Bring me my singing boys. And the hula dancers–plenty of them. And send for old Howard. Somebody’s got to pay, and I’ll shorten his six months of life by a month. But above all, music. Let there be music. It is stronger than drink, and quicker than opium.’

“He with his music druggery! It was his father, the old savage, who was entertained on board a French frigate, and for the first time heard an orchestra. When the little concert was over, the captain, to find which piece he liked best, asked which piece he’d like repeated. Well, when grandfather got done describing, what piece do you think it was?”

I gave up, while the Prince lighted a fresh cigarette.

“Why, it was the first one, of course. Not the real first one, but the tuning up that preceded it.”

I nodded, with eyes and face mirthful of appreciation, and Prince Akuli, with another apprehensive glance at the old wahine and her half-made hala lei, returned to his tale of the bones of his ancestors.

“It was somewhere around this stage of the game that old Ahuna gave in to Hiwilani. He didn’t exactly give in. He compromised. That’s where I come in. If he would bring her the bones of her mother, and of her grandfather (who was the father of Kaaukuu, and who by tradition was rumoured to have been even bigger than his giant son, she would return to Ahuna the bait of his hair she was praying him to death with. He, on the other hand, stipulated that he was not to reveal to her the secret burial-place of all the alii of Lakanaii all the way back. Nevertheless, he was too old to dare the adventure alone, must be helped by some one who of necessity would come to know the secret, and I was that one. I was the highest alii, beside my father and mother, and they were no higher than I.

“So I came upon the scene, being summoned into the twilight room to confront those two dubious old ones who dealt with the dead. They were a pair–mother fat to despair of helplessness, Ahuna thin as a skeleton and as fragile. Of her one had the impression that if she lay down on her back she could not roll over without the aid of block-and-tackle; of Ahuna one’s impression was that the tooth-pickedness of him would shatter to splinters if one bumped into him.

“And when they had broached the matter, there was more pilikia” (trouble). “My father’s attitude stiffened my resolution. I refused to go on the bone-snatching expedition. I said I didn’t care a whoop for the bones of all the aliis of my family and race. You see, I had just discovered Jules Verne, loaned me by old Howard, and was reading my head off. Bones? When there were North Poles, and Centres of Earths, and hairy comets to ride across space among the stars! Of course I didn’t want to go on any bonesnatching expedition. I said my father was able-bodied, and he could go, splitting equally with her whatever bones he brought back. But she said he was only a blamed collector–or words to that effect, only stronger.

“‘I know him,’ she assured me. ‘He’d bet his mother’s bones on a horse-race or an ace-full.’

“I stood with fat her when it came to modern scepticism, and I told her the whole thing was rubbish. ‘Bones?’ I said. ‘What are bones? Even field mice, and many rats, and cockroaches have bones, though the roaches wear their bones outside their meat instead of inside. The difference between man and other animals,’ I told her, ‘is not bones, but brain. Why, a bullock has bigger bones than a man, and more than one fish I’ve eaten has more bones, while a whale beats creation when it comes to bone.’

“It was frank talk, which is our Hawaiian way, as you have long since learned. In return, equally frank, she regretted she hadn’t given me away as a feeding child when I was born. Next she bewailed that she had ever borne me. From that it was only a step to anaana me. She threatened me with it, and I did the bravest thing I have ever done. Old Howard had given me a knife of many blades, and corkscrews, and screw-drivers, and all sorts of contrivances, including a tiny pair of scissors. I proceeded to pare my finger-nails.

“‘There,’ I said, as I put the parings into her hand. ‘Just to show you what I think of it. There’s bait and to spare. Go on and anaana me if you can.’

“I have said it was brave. It was. I was only fifteen, and I had lived all my days in the thick of the mystery stuff, while my scepticism, very recently acquired, was only skin-deep. I could be a sceptic out in the open in the sunshine. But I was afraid of the dark. And in that twilight room, the bones of the dead all about me in the big jars, why, the old lady had me scared stiff. As we say to-day, she had my goat. Only I was brave and didn’t let on. And I put my bluff across, for my mother flung the parings into my face and burst into tears. Tears in an elderly woman weighing three hundred and twenty pounds are scarcely impressive, and I hardened the brassiness of my bluff.

“She shifted her attack, and proceeded to talk with the dead. Nay, more, she summoned them there, and, though I was all ripe to see but couldn’t, Ahuna saw the father of Kaaukuu in the corner and lay down on the floor and yammered. Just the same, although I almost saw the old giant, I didn’t quite see him.

“‘Let him talk for himself,’ I said. But Hiwilani persisted in doing the talking for him, and in laying upon me his solemn injunction that I must go with Ahuna to the burial-place and bring back the bones desired by my mother. But I argued that if the dead ones could be invoked to kill living men by wasting sicknesses, and that if the dead ones could transport themselves from their burialcrypts into the corner of her room, I couldn’t see why they shouldn’t leave their bones behind them, there in her room and ready to be jarred, when they said good-bye and departed for the middle world, the over world, or the under world, or wherever they abided when they weren’t paying social calls.

“Whereupon mother let loose on poor old Ahuna, or let loose upon him the ghost of Kaaukuu’s father, supposed to be crouching there in the corner, who commanded Ahuna to divulge to her the burialplace. I tried to stiffen him up, telling him to let the old ghost divulge the secret himself, than whom nobody else knew it better, seeing that he had resided there upwards of a century. But Ahuna was old school. He possessed no iota of scepticism. The more Hiwilani frightened him, the more he rolled on the floor and the louder he yammered.

“But when he began to bite himself, I gave in. I felt sorry for him; but, over and beyond that, I began to admire him. He was sterling stuff, even if he was a survival of darkness. Here, with the fear of mystery cruelly upon him, believing Hiwilani’s dope implicitly, he was caught between two fidelities. She was his living alii, his alii kapo” (sacred chiefess). “He must be faithful to her, yet more faithful must he be to all the dead and gone aliis of her line who depended solely on him that their bones should not be disturbed.

“I gave in. But I, too, imposed stipulations. Steadfastly had my father, new school, refused to let me go to England for my education. That sugar was slumping was reason sufficient for him. Steadfastly had my mother, old school, refused, her heathen mind too dark to place any value on education, while it was shrewd enough to discern that education led to unbelief in all that was old. I wanted to study, to study science, the arts, philosophy, to study everything old Howard knew, which enabled him, on the edge of the grave, undauntedly to sneer at superstition, and to give me Jules Verne to read. He was an Oxford man before he went wild and wrong, and it was he who had set the Oxford bee buzzing in my noddle.

“In the end Ahuna and I, old school and new school leagued together, won out. Mother promised that she’d make father send me to England, even if she had to pester him into a prolonged drinking that would make his digestion go back on him. Also, Howard was to accompany me, so that I could decently bury him in England. He was a queer one, old Howard, an individual if there ever was one. Let me tell you a little story about him. It was when Kalakaua was starting on his trip around the world. You remember, when Armstrong, and Judd, and the drunken valet of a German baron accompanied him. Kalakaua made the proposition to Howard . . . “

But here the long-apprehended calamity fell upon Prince Akuli. The old wahine had finished her lei hala. Barefooted, with no adornment of femininity, clad in a shapeless shift of much-washed cotton, with age-withered face and labour-gnarled hands, she cringed before him and crooned a mele in his honour, and, still cringing, put the lei around his neck. It is true the hala smelled most freshly strong, yet was the act beautiful to me, and the old woman herself beautiful to me. My mind leapt into the Prince’s narrative so that to Ahuna I could not help likening her.

Oh, truly, to be an alii in Hawaii, even in this second decade of the twentieth century, is no light thing. The alii, utterly of the new, must be kindly and kingly to those old ones absolutely of the old. Nor did the Prince without a kingdom, his loved island long since annexed by the United States and incorporated into a territory along with the rest of the Hawaiian Islands–nor did the Prince betray his repugnance for the odour of the hala. He bowed his head graciously; and his royal condescending words of pure Hawaiian I knew would make the old woman’s heart warm until she died with remembrance of the wonderful occasion. The wry grimace he stole to me would not have been made had he felt any uncertainty of its escaping her.

“And so,” Prince Akuli resumed, after the wahine had tottered away in an ecstasy, “Ahuna and I departed on our grave-robbing adventure. You know the Iron-bound Coast.”

I nodded, knowing full well the spectacle of those lava leagues of weather coast, truly iron-bound so far as landing-places or anchorages were concerned, great forbidding cliff-walls thousands of feet in height, their summits wreathed in cloud and rain squall, their knees hammered by the trade-wind billows into spouting, spuming white, the air, from sea to rain-cloud, spanned by a myriad leaping waterfalls, provocative, in day or night, of countless sun and lunar rainbows. Valleys, so called, but fissures rather, slit the cyclopean walls here and there, and led away into a lofty and madly vertical back country, most of it inaccessible to the foot of man and trod only by the wild goat.

“Precious little you know of it,” Prince Akuli retorted, in reply to my nod. “You’ve seen it only from the decks of steamers. There are valleys there, inhabited valleys, out of which there is no exit by land, and perilously accessible by canoe only on the selected days of two months in the year. When I was twenty-eight I was over there in one of them on a hunting trip. Bad weather, in the auspicious period, marooned us for three weeks. Then five of my party and myself swam for it out through the surf. Three of us made the canoes waiting for us. The other two were flung back on the sand, each with a broken arm. Save for us, the entire party remained there until the next year, ten months afterward. And one of them was Wilson, of Wilson & Wall, the Honolulu sugar factors. And he was engaged to be married.

“I’ve seen a goat, shot above by a hunter above, land at my feet a thousand yards underneath. BELIEVE me, that landscape seemed to rain goats and rocks for ten minutes. One of my canoemen fell off the trail between the two little valleys of Aipio and Luno. He hit first fifteen hundred feet beneath us, and fetched up in a ledge three hundred feet farther down. We didn’t bury him. We couldn’t get to him, and flying machines had not yet been invented. His bones are there now, and, barring earthquake and volcano, will be there when the Trumps of Judgment sound.

“Goodness me! Only the other day, when our Promotion Committee, trying to compete with Honolulu for the tourist trade, called in the engineers to estimate what it would cost to build a scenic drive around the Iron-bound Coast, the lowest figures were a quarter of a million dollars a mile!

“And Ahuna and I, an old man and a young boy, started for that stern coast in a canoe paddled by old men! The youngest of them, the steersman, was over sixty, while the rest of them averaged seventy at the very least. There were eight of them, and we started in the night-time, so that none should see us go. Even these old ones, trusted all their lives, knew no more than the fringe of the secret. To the fringe, only, could they take us. “And the fringe was–I don’t mind telling that much–the fringe was Ponuloo Valley. We got there the third afternoon following. The old chaps weren’t strong on the paddles. It was a funny expedition, into such wild waters, with now one and now another of our ancient-mariner crew collapsing and even fainting. One of them actually died on the second morning out. We buried him overside. It was positively uncanny, the heathen ceremonies those grey ones pulled off in burying their grey brother. And I was only fifteen, alii kapo over them by blood of heathenness and right of hereditary heathen rule, with a penchant for Jules Verne and shortly to sail for England for my education! So one learns. Small wonder my father was a philosopher, in his own lifetime spanning the history of man from human sacrifice and idol worship, through the religions of man’s upward striving, to the Medusa of rank atheism at the end of it all. Small wonder that, like old Ecclesiastes, he found vanity in all things and surcease in sugar stocks, singing boys, and hula dancers.”

Prince Akuli debated with his soul for an interval. “Oh, well,” he sighed, “I have done some spanning of time myself.” He sniffed disgustedly of the odour of the hala lei that stifled him. “It stinks of the ancient.” he vouchsafed. “I? I stink of the modern. My father was right. The sweetest of all is sugar up a hundred points, or four aces in a poker game. If the Big War lasts another year, I shall clean up three-quarters of a million over a million. If peace breaks to-morrow, with the consequent slump, I could enumerate a hundred who will lose my direct bounty, and go into the old natives’ homes my father and I long since endowed for them.” He clapped his hands, and the old wahine tottered toward him in an excitement of haste to serve. She cringed before him, as he drew pad and pencil from his breast pocket.

“Each month, old woman of our old race,” he addressed her, “will you receive, by rural free delivery, a piece of written paper that you can exchange with any storekeeper anywhere for ten dollars gold. This shall be so for as long as you live. Behold! I write the record and the remembrance of it, here and now, with this pencil on this paper. And this is because you are of my race and service, and because you have honoured me this day with your mats to sit upon and your thrice-blessed and thrice-delicious lei hala.”

He turned to me a weary and sceptical eye, saying: “And if I die to-morrow, not alone will the lawyers contest my disposition of my property, but they will contest my benefactions and my pensions accorded, and the clarity of my mind.

“It was the right weather of the year; but even then, with our old weak ones at the paddles, we did not attempt the landing until we had assembled half the population of Ponuloo Valley down on the steep little beach. Then we counted our waves, selected the best one, and ran in on it. Of course, the canoe was swamped and the outrigger smashed, but the ones on shore dragged us up unharmed beyond the wash.

“Ahuna gave his orders. In the night-time all must remain within their houses, and the dogs be tied up and have their jaws bound so that there should be no barking. And in the night-time Ahuna and I stole out on our journey, no one knowing whether we went to the right or left or up the valley toward its head. We carried jerky, and hard poi and dried aku, and from the quantity of the food I knew we were to be gone several days. Such a trail! A Jacob’s ladder to the sky, truly, for that first pali” (precipice), “almost straight up, was three thousand feet above the sea. And we did it in the dark!

“At the top, beyond the sight of the valley we had left, we slept until daylight on the hard rock in a hollow nook Ahuna knew, and that was so small that we were squeezed. And the old fellow, for fear that I might move in the heavy restlessness of lad’s sleep, lay on the outside with one arm resting across me. At daybreak, I saw why. Between us and the lip of the cliff scarcely a yard intervened. I crawled to the lip and looked, watching the abyss take on immensity in the growing light and trembling from the fear of height that was upon me. At last I made out the sea, over half a mile straight beneath. And we had done this thing in the dark!

“Down in the next valley, which was a very tiny one, we found evidence of the ancient population, but there were no people. The only way was the crazy foot-paths up and down the dizzy valley walls from valley to valley. But lean and aged as Ahuna was, he seemed untirable. In the second valley dwelt an old leper in hiding. He did not know me, and when Ahuna told him who I was, he grovelled at my feet, almost clasping them, and mumbled a mele of all my line out of a lipless mouth.

“The next valley proved to be the valley. It was long and so narrow that its floor had caught not sufficient space of soil to grow taro for a single person. Also, it had no beach, the stream that threaded it leaping a pali of several hundred feet down to the sea. It was a god-forsaken place of naked, eroded lava, to which only rarely could the scant vegetation find root-hold. For miles we followed up that winding fissure through the towering walls, far into the chaos of back country that lies behind the Iron-bound Coast. How far that valley penetrated I do not know, but, from the quantity of water in the stream, I judged it far. We did not go to the valley’s head. I could see Ahuna casting glances to all the peaks, and I knew he was taking bearings, known to him alone, from natural objects. When he halted at the last, it was with abrupt certainty. His bearings had crossed. He threw down the portion of food and outfit he had carried. It was the place. I looked on either hand at the hard, implacable walls, naked of vegetation, and could dream of no burial-place possible in such bare adamant.

“We ate, then stripped for work. Only did Ahuna permit me to retain my shoes. He stood beside me at the edge of a deep pool, likewise apparelled and prodigiously skinny.

“‘You will dive down into the pool at this spot,’ he said. ‘Search the rock with your hands as you descend, and, about a fathom and a half down, you will find a hole. Enter it, head-first, but going slowly, for the lava rock is sharp and may cut your head and body.’

“‘And then?’ I queried. ‘You will find the hole growing larger,’ was his answer. ‘When you have gone all of eight fathoms along the passage, come up slowly, and you will find your head in the air, above water, in the dark. Wait there then for me. The water is very cold.’

“It didn’t sound good to me. I was thinking, not of the cold water and the dark, but of the bones. ‘You go first,’ I said. But he claimed he could not. ‘You are my alii, my prince,’ he said. ‘It is impossible that I should go before you into the sacred burialplace of your kingly ancestors.’

“But the prospect did not please. ‘Just cut out this prince stuff,’ I told him. ‘It isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. You go first, and I’ll never tell on you.’ ‘Not alone the living must we please,’ he admonished, ‘but, more so, the dead must we please. Nor can we lie to the dead.’

“We argued it out, and for half an hour it was stalemate. I

wouldn’t, and he simply couldn’t. He tried to buck me up by appealing to my pride. He chanted the heroic deeds of my ancestors; and, I remember especially, he sang to me of Mokomoku, my great-grandfather and the gigantic father of the gigantic Kaaukuu, telling how thrice in battle Mokomoku leaped among his foes, seizing by the neck a warrior in either hand and knocking their heads together until they were dead. But this was not what decided me. I really felt sorry for old Ahuna, he was so beside himself for fear the expedition would come to naught. And I was coming to a great admiration for the old fellow, not least among the reasons being the fact of his lying down to sleep between me and the cliff-lip.

“So, with true alii-authority of command, saying, ‘You will immediately follow after me,’ I dived in. Everything he had said was correct. I found the entrance to the subterranean passage, swam carefully through it, cutting my shoulder once on the lavasharp roof, and emerged in the darkness and air. But before I could count thirty, he broke water beside me, rested his hand on my arm to make sure of me, and directed me to swim ahead of him for the matter of a hundred feet or so. Then we touched bottom and climbed out on the rocks. And still no light, and I remember I was glad that our altitude was too high for centipedes.

“He had brought with him a coconut calabash, tightly stoppered, of whale-oil that must have been landed on Lahaina beach thirty years before. From his mouth he took a water-tight arrangement of a matchbox composed of two empty rifle-cartridges fitted snugly together. He lighted the wicking that floated on the oil, and I looked about, and knew disappointment. No burial-chamber was it, but merely a lava tube such as occurs on all the islands.

“He put the calabash of light into my hands and started me ahead of him on the way, which he assured me was long, but not too long. It was long, at least a mile in my sober judgment, though at the time it seemed five miles; and it ascended sharply. When Ahuna, at the last, stopped me, I knew we were close to our goal. He knelt on his lean old knees on the sharp lava rock, and clasped my knees with his skinny arms. My hand that was free of the calabash lamp he placed on his head. He chanted to me, with his old cracked, quavering voice, the line of my descent and my essential high aliiness. And then he said: “‘Tell neither Kanau nor Hiwilani aught of what you are about to behold. There is no sacredness in Kanau. His mind is filled with sugar and the breeding of horses. I do know that he sold a feather cloak his grandfather had worn to that English collector for eight thousand dollars, and the money he lost the next day betting on the polo game between Maui and Oahu. Hiwilani, your mother, is filled with sacredness. She is too much filled with sacredness. She grows old, and weak-headed, and she traffics over-much with sorceries.’ “‘No,’ I made answer. ‘I shall tell no one. If I did, then would I have to return to this place again. And I do not want ever to return to this place. I’ll try anything once. This I shall never try twice.’

“‘It is well,’ he said, and arose, falling behind so that I should enter first. Also, he said: ‘Your mother is old. I shall bring her, as promised, the bones of her mother and of her grandfather. These should content her until she dies; and then, if I die before her, it is you who must see to it that all the bones in her family collection are placed in the Royal Mausoleum.’

“I have given all the Islands’ museums the once-over,” Prince Akuli lapsed back into slang, “and I must say that the totality of the collections cannot touch what I saw in our Lakanaii burial-cave. Remember, and with reason and history, we trace back the highest and oldest genealogy in the Islands. Everything that I had ever dreamed or heard of, and much more that I had not, was there. The place was wonderful. Ahuna, sepulchrally muttering prayers and meles, moved about, lighting various whale-oil lamp-calabashes. They were all there, the Hawaiian race from the beginning of Hawaiian time. Bundles of bones and bundles of bones, all wrapped decently in tapa, until for all the world it was like the parcelspost department at a post office.

“And everything! Kahilis, which you may know developed out of the fly-flapper into symbols of royalty until they became larger than hearse-plumes with handles a fathom and a half and over two fathoms in length. And such handles! Of the wood of the kauila, inlaid with shell and ivory and bone with a cleverness that had died out among our artificers a century before. It was a centuries-old family attic. For the first time I saw things I had only heard of, such as the pahoas, fashioned of whale-teeth and suspended by braided human hair, and worn on the breast only by the highest of rank.

“There were tapes and mats of the rarest and oldest; capes and leis and helmets and cloaks, priceless all, except the too-ancient ones, of the feathers of the mamo, and of the iwi and the akakane and the o-o. I saw one of the mamo cloaks that was superior to that finest one in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and that they value at between half a million and a million dollars. Goodness me, I thought at the time, it was lucky Kanau didn’t know about it.

“Such a mess of things! Carved gourds and calabashes, shellscrapers, nets of olona fibre, a junk of ie-ie baskets, and fishhooks of every bone and spoon of shell. Musical instruments of the forgotten days–ukukes and nose flutes, and kiokios which are likewise played with one unstoppered nostril. Taboo poi bowls and finger bowls, left-handed adzes of the canoe gods, lava-cup lamps, stone mortars and pestles and poi-pounders. And adzes again, a myriad of them, beautiful ones, from an ounce in weight for the finer carving of idols to fifteen pounds for the felling of trees, and all with the sweetest handles I have ever beheld.

“There were the kaekeekes–you know, our ancient drums, hollowed sections of the coconut tree, covered one end with shark-skin. The first kaekeeke of all Hawaii Ahuna pointed out to me and told me the tale. It was manifestly most ancient. He was afraid to touch it for fear the age-rotted wood of it would crumble to dust, the ragged tatters of the shark-skin head of it still attached. ‘This is the very oldest and father of all our kaekeekes,’ Ahuna told me. ‘Kila, the son of Moikeha, brought it back from far Raiatea in the South Pacific. And it was Kila’s own son, Kahai, who made that same journey, and was gone ten years, and brought back with him from Tahiti the first breadfruit trees that sprouted and grew on Hawaiian soil.’

“And the bones and bones! The parcel-delivery array of them! Besides the small bundles of the long bones, there were full skeletons, tapa-wrapped, lying in one-man, and two- and three-man canoes of precious koa wood, with curved outriggers of wiliwiliwood, and proper paddles to hand with the io-projection at the point simulating the continuance of the handle, as if, like a skewer, thrust through the flat length of the blade. And their war weapons were laid away by the sides of the lifeless bones that had wielded them–rusty old horse-pistols, derringers, pepper-boxes, five-barrelled fantastiques, Kentucky long riffles, muskets handled in trade by John Company and Hudson’s Bay, shark-tooth swords, wooden stabbing-knives, arrows and spears bone-headed of the fish and the pig and of man, and spears and arrows wooden-headed and fire-hardened.

“Ahuna put a spear in my hand, headed and pointed finely with the long shin-bone of a man, and told me the tale of it. But first he unwrapped the long bones, arms, and legs, of two parcels, the bones, under the wrappings, neatly tied like so many faggots. ‘This,’ said Ahuna, exhibiting the pitiful white contents of one parcel, ‘is Laulani. She was the wife of Akaiko, whose bones, now placed in your hands, much larger and male-like as you observe, held up the flesh of a large man, a three-hundred pounder sevenfooter, three centuries agone. And this spear-head is made of the shin-bone of Keola, a mighty wrestler and runner of their own time and place. And he loved Laulani, and she fled with him. But in a forgotten battle on the sands of Kalini, Akaiko rushed the lines of the enemy, leading the charge that was successful, and seized upon Keola, his wife’s lover, and threw him to the ground, and sawed through his neck to the death with a shark-tooth knife. Thus, in the old days as always, did man combat for woman with man. And Laulani was beautiful; that Keola should be made into a spearhead for her! She was formed like a queen, and her body was a long bowl of sweetness, and her fingers lomi’d’ (massaged) ‘to slimness and smallness at her mother’s breast. For ten generations have we remembered her beauty. Your father’s singing boys to-day sing of her beauty in the hula that is named of her! This is Laulani, whom you hold in your hands.’

“And, Ahuna done, I could but gaze, with imagination at the one time sobered and fired. Old drunken Howard had lent me his Tennyson, and I had mooned long and often over the Idyls of the King. Here were the three, I thought–Arthur, and Launcelot, and Guinevere. This, then, I pondered, was the end of it all, of life and strife and striving and love, the weary spirits of these longgone ones to be invoked by fat old women and mangy sorcerers, the bones of them to be esteemed of collectors and betted on horseraces and ace-fulls or to be sold for cash and invested in sugar stocks. “For me it was illumination. I learned there in the burialcave the great lesson. And to Ahuna I said: ‘The spear headed with the long bone of Keola I shall take for my own. Never shall I sell it. I shall keep it always.’

“‘And for what purpose?’ he demanded. And I replied: ‘That the contemplation of it may keep my hand sober and my feet on earth with the knowledge that few men are fortunate enough to have as much of a remnant of themselves as will compose a spearhead when they are three centuries dead.’

“And Ahuna bowed his head, and praised my wisdom of judgment. But at that moment the long-rotted olona-cord broke and the pitiful woman’s bones of Laulani shed from my clasp and clattered on the rocky floor. One shin-bone, in some way deflected, fell under the dark shadow of a canoe-bow, and I made up my mind that it should be mine. So I hastened to help him in the picking up of the bones and the tying, so that he did not notice its absence.

“‘This,’ said Ahuna, introducing me to another of my ancestors, ‘is your great-grandfather, Mokomoku, the father of Kaaukuu. Behold the size of his bones. He was a giant. I shall carry him, because of the long spear of Keola that will be difficult for you to carry away. And this is Lelemahoa, your grandmother, the mother of your mother, that you shall carry. And day grows short, and we must still swim up through the waters to the sun ere darkness hides the sun from the world.’

“But Ahuna, putting out the various calabashes of light by drowning the wicks in the whale-oil, did not observe me include the shinbone of Laulani with the bones of my grandmother.”

The honk of the automobile, sent up from Olokona to rescue us, broke off the Prince’s narrative. We said good-bye to the ancient and fresh-pensioned wahine, and departed. A half-mile on our way, Prince Akuli resumed.

“So Ahuna and I returned to Hiwilani, and to her happiness, lasting to her death the year following, two more of her ancestors abided about her in the jars of her twilight room. Also, she kept her compact and worried my father into sending me to England. I took old Howard along, and he perked up and confuted the doctors, so that it was three years before I buried him restored to the bosom of my family. Sometimes I think he was the most brilliant man I have ever known. Not until my return from England did Ahuna die, the last custodian of our alii secrets. And at his death-bed he pledged me again never to reveal the location in that nameless valley, and never to go back myself.

“Much else I have forgotten to mention did I see there in the cave that one time. There were the bones of Kumi, the near demigod, son of Tui Manua of Samoa, who, in the long before, married into my line and heaven-boosted my genealogy. And the bones of my greatgrandmother who had slept in the four-poster presented her by Lord Byron. And Ahuna hinted tradition that there was reason for that presentation, as well as for the historically known lingering of the Blonde in Olokona for so long. And I held her poor bones in my hands–bones once fleshed with sensate beauty, informed with sparkle and spirit, instinct with love and love-warmness of arms around and eyes and lips together, that had begat me in the end of the generations unborn. It was a good experience. I am modern, ’tis true. I believe in no mystery stuff of old time nor of the kahunas. And yet, I saw in that cave things which I dare not name to you, and which I, since old Ahuna died, alone of the living know. I have no children. With me my long line ceases. This is the twentieth century, and we stink of gasolene. Nevertheless these other and nameless things shall die with me. I shall never revisit the burial-place. Nor in all time to come will any man gaze upon it through living eyes unless the quakes of earth rend the mountains asunder and spew forth the secrets contained in the hearts of the mountains.”

Prince Akuli ceased from speech. With welcome relief on his face, he removed the lei hala from his neck, and, with a sniff and a sigh, tossed it into concealment in the thick lantana by the side of the road.

“But the shin-bone of Laulani?” I queried softly.

He remained silent while a mile of pasture land fled by us and yielded to caneland.

“I have it now,” he at last said. “And beside it is Keola, slain ere his time and made into a spear-head for love of the woman whose shin-bone abides near to him. To them, those poor pathetic bones, I owe more than to aught else. I became possessed of them in the period of my culminating adolescence. I know they changed the entire course of my life and trend of my mind. They gave to me a modesty and a humility in the world, from which my father’s fortune has ever failed to seduce me.

“And often, when woman was nigh to winning to the empery of my mind over me, I sought Laulani’s shin-bone. And often, when lusty manhood stung me into feeling over-proud and lusty, I consulted the spearhead remnant of Keola, one-time swift runner, and mighty wrestler and lover, and thief of the wife of a king. The contemplation of them has ever been of profound aid to me, and you might well say that I have founded my religion or practice of living upon them.”

WAIKIKI, HONOLULU, HAWAIIAN ISLANDS.

July 16, 1916.

From Jack London: ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES

kempis.nl poetry magazine

Christine de Pisan: BALLAD

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Christine de Pisan

(ca 1364-1430)

BALLAD

In all the world is none so happy here

Nor is there any joy to match with mine,

Since she that hath no rival and no peer

Doth mercifully to my suit incline.

Her slave am I till death, for all my pain

In very truth hath met with guerdon meet:

She was my help on whom I called amain,

For she hath granted me her love so sweet.

Fair queen, in whom all nobleness is clear,

Thou would’st not have me for thy presence pine:

Nay, bid me cry in every lover’s ear,

“Thirsty was I for Love’s immortal wine!”

Not all my weeping might the gift obtain,

Yet she, enthroned on beauty’s mercy-seat,

Hath pardoned all: too soon did I complain

For she hath granted me her love so sweet.

Now to delight returns the torrent drear

That of my mourning was the sorry sign:

Now am I joyous and of merry cheer,

More than aforetime in her grace divine.

Love bade me follow in his chosen train

Where gladness walks beside my lady’s feet,

Nor any loss is mingled with my gain,

For she hath granted me her love so sweet.

Princess of love, my sorrow I disdain

Since out of mourning cometh joy complete

By grace of her who is love’s suzerain,

For she hath granted me her love so sweet.

Christine de Pisan poetry

fleursdumal.nl magazine

More in: Archive O-P, Pisan, Christine de

Gustave Flaubert: DICTIONNAIRE DES IDÉES REÇUES (T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z)

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Gustave Flaubert

(1821-1880)

DICTIONNAIRE DES IDÉES REÇUES (T-U-V-W-Y-Z)

TABAC: Celui de la régie ne vaut pas celui de contrebande. Le priser convient à l’homme de cabinet. Cause de toutes les maladies du cerveau et de la moelle épinière.

TABELLION: Plus flatteur que notaire.

TALLEYRAND (Prince de): S’indigner contre.

TARTANE: Viens dans ma tartane, Belle Grecque à l’oeil noir (Romance).

TAUPE: Aveugle comme une taupe. Et cependant elle a des yeux.

TAUREAU: Le père du veau. Le boeuf n’est que l’oncle.

TÉMOIN: Il faut toujours refuser d’être témoin en justice, on ne sait pas où ça peut mener.

TEMPS: Eternel sujet de conversation. Cause universelle des maladies. Toujours s’en plaindre.

TERRE: Dire les quatre coins de la terre, puisqu’elle est ronde. THÈME: Au collège, prouve l’application, comme la version prouve l’intelligence. Mais dans le monde il faut rire des forts en thème.

TOILETTE (des dames): Trouble l’imagination.

TOLÉRANCE (maison de): N’est pas celle où l’on a des opinions tolérantes.

TOUR: Indispensable à avoir dans son grenier, à la campagne, pour les jours de pluie.

TRANSPIRATION des pieds: Signe de santé.

TREIZE: Eviter d’être treize à table, ça porte malheur. Les esprits forts ne devront jamais manquer de plaisanter: Qu’est-ce que ça fait, je mangerai pour deux. « Ou bien s’il y a des dames, de demander si l’une d’elles n’est pas enceinte.

TROUBADOUR: Beau sujet de pendule.

UKASE: Appeler ukase tout décret autoritaire, ça vexe le gouvernement.

UNIVERSITÉ: Alma mater.

USUM (ad).: Locution latine qui fait bien dans la phrase: Ad usum Delphini. Devra toujours s’employer en parlant d’une femme appelée Delphine.

VACCINE: Ne fréquenter que des personnes vaccinées.

VALSE: S’indigner contre. Danse lascive et impure qui ne devrait être dansée que par les vieilles femmes.

VEILLÉES: Celles de la campagne sont morales.

VELOURS: Sur les habits, distinction et richesse.

VENTE: Vendre et acheter, but de la vie.

VENTRE: Dire abdomen quand il y a des dames.

VERRES: On ne lui a pas encore pardonné.

VIEILLARD: A propos d’une inondation, d’un orage, etc., les vieillard du pays ne se rappellent jamais en avoir vu un de semblable.

VINS: Sujet de conversation entre hommes. Le meilleurs est le bordeaux, puisque les médecins l’ordonnent. Plus il est mauvais, plus il est naturel.

VISAGE: Miroir de l’âme. Alors il y a des gens qui ont l’âme bien laide.

VIZIR: tremble à la vue d’un cordon.

VOISINS: Tâcher de se faire rendre par eux des services sans qu’il en coûte rien.

VOITURES: Plus commode d’en louer une que d’en posséder: de cette manière, on n’a pas le tracas des domestiques, ni des chevaux qui sont toujours malades.

VOLTAIRE: Célèbre par son «rictus» épouvantable. Science superficielle.

VOYAGE: Doit être fait rapidement.

VOYAGEUR: Toujours intrépide.

WAGNER: Ricaner quand on entend son nom, et faire des plaisanteries sur la musique de l’avenir.

YVETOT: Voir Yvetot et mourir! (v. Naples et Séville)

Gustave Flaubert

DICTIONNAIRE DES IDÉES REÇUES (T-U-V-W-Y)

(Oeuvre posthume: publication en 1913)

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: - Dictionnaire des idées reçues, DICTIONARY OF IDEAS

Ton van Reen: DE MOORD XXVII

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Ton van Reen

DE MOORD XXVII

DE DEGENSLIKKER

Aan mij had het niet gelegen dat het oorlog werd. Ik kon best vreemde mensen zien en ik haatte niemand die zwart was of zei nog op de Verlosser te wachten. Wachtten wij ook niet op een Verlosser?

Aan de ouwe vent in de bus had het ook niet gelegen dat er oorlog kwam, niet aan Cherubijn, niet aan Alice, niet aan de melker, niet aan de marmot. Aan wie lag het dan wel?

Het eerste dat ik de volgende dag zag toen ik wakker werd, was het puin van Wrak. Ik kon niet wennen aan puin. Het was niet ordelijk. Het had niets met het leven uit te staan. Wel met de dood.

Ik zag nog méér vanuit de spleet in de dekenzak. Vlak bij onze wagen stond een andere woonwagen. Er kwam rook uit een klein schoorsteentje in het dak. In de open deur van de wagen zat een zigeuner voor zich uit te staren. Hij had een hard gezicht.

Ik wekte Alice. De marmot kroop over mijn lijf naar buiten, deed of hij naar de wagen keek en hupte naar het gras en de klaver. Alice streek haar jurk glad met haar strijkijzerhandjes, ze zag er weer bekoorlijk uit, nam me bij de hand en samen liepen we naar de zigeuner.

De man hoorde ons komen, toch keek hij niet op of om. Hij bleef voor zich uit zitten staren. Of sliep hij met de ogen open?

Alice klopte hem op de schouder. ‘Goedemorgen,’ zei ze.

De man draaide zijn hoofd, leek te lachen, zei ook: ‘Goedemorgen.’

‘We zijn op weg naar de Lichtstad Kork,’ zei Alice, ‘we blijven hier vandaag nog staan.’

‘Wij blijven hier ook een dag,’ zei de zigeuner. ‘Het is hier mooi voor zigeuners. Er is een dorp en er zijn geen mensen. Er is een God en hij zit gevangen in zijn huis. En we zijn niet alleen want jullie zijn er ook. Hebben jullie een gezin?’

‘Ja,’ zei Alice, ‘we hebben een gezin. We zijn met zijn vijven. Cherubijn ligt in de wagen. De melker ligt nog te slapen tegen het paard. En de marmot zit klaver te vreten. Nu hoort het paard er ook nog bij. Over een paar dagen moet het weer weg.’

‘Wij zijn met zijn vieren,’ zei de man. ‘Ik heb een vrouw en twee kindertjes die kunnen dansen. De kindertjes slapen nog. Je mag ze wel zien.’

Hij noodde ons in de wagen. Binnen stond een vrouw aan een klein fornuis en zette koffie. Het was een mooie vrouw van een jaar of dertig. Ze leek uit een kitschschilderij te zijn weggelopen. Ze had lang haar en gouden ringen in de oren. Achter in de wagen lagen de kinderen in bed. Ze hadden de ogen dicht, lagen tegen elkaar aan omdat ze van elkaar hielden. Ze wisten nog niet beter dan dat ze met zijn vieren de hele wereld waren. Ze hadden mooie gezichten.

(wordt vervolgd)

kempis.nl poetry magazine

Henry Bataille: Je t’ai rêvée en la naïveté des choses . . .

Henry Bataille

(1872-1922)

Je t’ai rêvée en la naïveté des choses . . .

Je t’ai rêvée en la naïveté des choses,

Et j’ai parlé de toi aux plus vieilles d’entre elles,

À des champs, à des blés, aux arbres, à des roses. –

Elles n’en seront pas pourtant plus éternelles,

Mais d’elles ou de moi celui qui doit survivre

En gardera quelque douceur pour ses vieux jours…

Je m’en vais les quitter, puisque voici les givres.

Tu ne les connaîtras jamais… les temps sont courts . . .

Mais vous ne pouvez pas vous être indifférentes,

Simplement parce que je vous ai très aimées . . .

Ô les toutes petites et si vieilles plantes !

Moi qui ne me les suis jamais imaginées

Hors de leur sol natal, ce m’est un grand chagrin

De savoir qu’elles mourront sans t’avoir connue . . .

Elles ont des airs si résignés, si sereins,

Et si tristes de ce que tu n’es pas venue !. . .

Que mon coeur soit pour toi le grand champ paternel,

Où si tu n’es pas née au moins tu dois mourir.

Que je te plante en moi, germe de toute rose,

Pour oublier que tu vécus ailleurs qu’en moi. –

Et tu passeras moins qu’ont passé bien des choses. –

Henry Bataille poetry

kempis.nl poetry magazine

16e editie Boeken rond het Paleis op zondag 25 augustus in Tilburg

De 16e editie van Boeken rond het Paleis vindt plaats op zondag 25 augustus 2013. Deze boekenmarkt, de grootste van Zuid-Nederland, wordt -zoals ieder jaar- gehouden in het centrum van Tilburg.

Stichting dr PJ Cools Tilburg – www.stichtingcools.nl

BRHP2002

fleursdumal.nl magazine

Esther Porcelijn: Armoede (Verborgen) armoede

Armoede (Verborgen) armoede

Voor de Tilburgse Voedselbank

en hun vraag naar kerstpakketten.

De armen van nu zijn als… de armen van vroeger.

Bespot, belast, beknibbeld.

Niemand kent ze, niemand is ze

Maar iedereen wil vergelijken.

“Het valt wel mee, met mij valt het mee”,

Als een lopende naast de lamme.

We weten alles beter,

Meer doen, minder klagen,

Koken voor vier euro kan toch best?

De rijkdom toont zich:

Naast de lamgeslagen

Zitten wij gepoft te piepen

Rond de tafel met schimmig licht

Sfeervol en hip knagen we

Aan onze knapperige borden.

Haute Cuisine van vroeger is van nu.

Arm en dus dom, denken we,

Verslagen is nooit echt gestreden

Gevallen heeft nooit goed gestaan

Op eigen benen, de eigen broekriem aan.

Schenken uit de dozen op zolder

Met oude broeken en gatensokken

Verfrommelde jurken en blikjes maïs

We zijn het kwijt, gegeven is gegeven

Dankbaarheid komt met een prijs.

Meer? Willen ze meer?

“Hoe durven ze ’t in de bek te kijken?

Ik werk hard hoor, ik werk hard!”

Voor elke cent zo tien andere.

Het kratje, thuis, zorgvuldig gedekt

Met een theedoek over de koekjes.

“Hier gaat iemand van overleven,

Hiervoor verdien ik respect.”

Wij drogen in gedachte hun tranen

Met kaasstengels en zeven bananen,

En, na gretig te hebben gegeven,

Bedenken wij hoe zij gelukkig zijn

Vier kinderen zonder honger

ook de hond dankt zijn baas.

Onze voldaanheid toont zich

in andermans verdriet.

We stellen ons voor hoe ze lachen

Hoe wij hun lichaam verwarmen,

Maar echt kennen doen we ze niet,

Onze, verborgen, armen.

Esther Porcelijn, 2013

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: Archive O-P, Porcelijn, Esther, Porcelijn, Esther

Gottfried Keller: Poetentod

kellergottfried04

Gottfried Keller

(1819–1890)

Poetentod

Der Herbstwind zieht, der Dichter liegt am Sterben,

Die Wolkenschatten jagen an der Wand;

An seinem Lager knien die zarten Erben,

Des Weibes Stirn ruht heiß auf seiner Hand.

Darin ein flücht’ger Abendstrahl ertrunken,

Mit dunklem Purpurwein netzt er den Mund;

Und wieder rückwärts auf den Pfühl gesunken,

Tut er den letzten Willen also kund:

»Die ich aus Wunderklängen aufgerichtet,

Vorbei ist dieses Hauses Herrlichkeit!

Ich habe ausgelebt und ausgedichtet

Mein blühend Lied, dich, meine Erdenzeit!

Das stolz und mächtig diese Welt regierte,

Es bricht mein Herz, mit ihm das Königshaus!

Der Gastfreund, der die edlen Hallen zierte,

Der Ruhm wallt mit dem Leichenzug hinaus.

Dann löschet meines Herdes helle Flamme

Und zündet wieder stille Kohlen an,

Wie’s Sitte war bei meiner Väter Stamme,

Eh ich den Schritt auf dieses Rund getan.

Und was den Herd in schönen Formen zierte,

Was sich an alter Weisheit um ihn fand,

Die heil’gen Schriften, die ich bei mir führte,

Streut in den Wind, gebt in der Juden Hand:

Daß meines Geistes namenloser Erbe

Mit klarem Aug, im leichten Schülerkleid,

Auf offnem Markt sich ahnungsvoll erwerbe,

Was ich in Sternennächten eingeweiht.

Nur meine Rosengärten lasset stehen,

Bis auch mein herrliches Poetenweib

Im nächsten Lenze wird zur Ruhe gehen,

Den Blumen schenkend ihren schönen Leib.

Dann aber mäht die Rosenbüsche nieder

Und brechet meine grünen Lauben ab!

Der Boden trage Kohl und Rüben wieder –

Nur eine Rose laßt auf meinem Grab!

Mein Lied wird siegreich durch die Lande klingen,

Ein Banner, von den Höhn der Erde wehn;

Doch ungekannt, mit mühsalschwerem Ringen

Wird meine Sippe dran vorübergehn.

Drum sollt ihr meinem Sohn das Leben gründen,

Gebt ihm ein Handwerk oder auch ein Schwert,

Und meine Tochter laßt den Freier finden,

Der sie in Lieb und Treuen redlich nährt.

Gebt jenen Band verblichner Schrift den Flammen,

‘s ist meiner Jugend greller Widerschein;

Die Asche und mein Lorbeerreis zusammen

Legt mir zu Häupten dann im Totenschrein!

Arm, wie ich kam, soll man hinaus mich tragen!

Den Lorbeer nur will ich mit Zaubermacht

Als Wünschelrute an die Sterne schlagen

Nach neuen Klängen aus der Strahlenpracht!« –

Noch überläuft sein Angesicht, das reine,

Mit einem Strahl das sinkende Gestirn –

So glühte eben noch im Rosenscheine,

Nun starret kalt und weiß des Berges Firn.

Und wie das Schneegebirg, erlöscht, verblichen,

Zum Himmel raget zwischen Tag und Nacht,

Der letzte Nachhall übers Tal gestrichen,

Dann tiefe Stille auf den Landen wacht:

Die ganze Größe dieses schönen Spieles

Liegt in der engen Totenkammer nun,

Wo Weib und Kinder, stumm, voll Wehgefühles,

Verlassen um die Dichterleiche ruhn!

Und wie durch Alpendämmerung das Rauschen

Von eines späten Adlers Flügeln weht:

Ist in der Totenstille zu erlauschen,

Wie eine Geisterschar von hinnen geht.

Sie ziehen aus, des Seligen Penaten,

In reiche Prachtgewänder tief verhüllt;

Sie gehn, die an der Wiege schon beraten,

Was er in Liedern dann so schön erfüllt.

Voran, gesenkten Blicks, das Leid der Erde,

Verschlungen mit der Freude Traumgestalt,

Die Phantasie, und endlich ihr Gefährte,

Der Witz, mit leerem Becher, stolz und kalt.

Gottfried Keller poetry

kempis.nl poetry magazine

Fleurs du Mal Magazine

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Categories

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Overleden dichter (Theo) T. A. van der Put (Eindhoven 1938- 2013)

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James Joyce: An Encounter

Jack London: Shin-Bones

Christine de Pisan: BALLAD

Gustave Flaubert: DICTIONNAIRE DES IDÉES REÇUES (T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z)

Ton van Reen: DE MOORD XXVII

Henry Bataille: Je t’ai rêvée en la naïveté des choses . . .

16e editie Boeken rond het Paleis op zondag 25 augustus in Tilburg

Esther Porcelijn: Armoede (Verborgen) armoede

Gottfried Keller: Poetentod