The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
or were the eight Carmel fathers consanguine or of
any affinity to those that fathered them, that told what they had heard with their ears of those germana to them, before the palmy arbours began again to pineb —and at which of the boreal oscillations?
And before them?
those who put on their coats to oblatea the things set apart in an older Great Cold.
And who learned them
if not those whose fathers had received or aped the groping disciplina d of their cognates, or lost or found co-laterals, on the proto-routes or at the lithic foci?e
Tundra-wanderers?
or was there no tundra as yet, or not as yet again, to wander —but grew green the rashes over again? Or was all once again informisf, that Cronosg for the third time might see how his lemmings run and hear the cry of his tailless hare from south of the sixties, from into the forties?h
For the phases and phase-groups
sway toward and fro within that belt of latitude.
There’s where the world’s a stage
for transformed scenes
with metamorphosed properties
for each shifted set.
Now naked as an imagined belle sauvage, or as is the actual Mirriam.1
Now shirted, kilted, cloaked, capped and shod, as were the five men of Jutlandi, discovered in their peaty cerements,j or as the bear-coped Gilyakk is, or was, the other day.
David Jones notes
1 The Mirriam are a people of the Shendam Division of the Plateau Province of Nigeria. The men of this tribe are not totally naked, but the women in general are, except for ornaments of bamboo pith. I am indebted for this information to Capt A. L. Milroy, MC, for many years a British official in that area.
additional notes
b A reference to one of Kipling’s finest poems, Recessional : ‘Beneath whose awful Hand we hold/Dominion over palm and pine’.
The poem was composed for the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and takes the form of a prayer. It describes two fates that befall even the most powerful people, armies and nations, and that threatened England at the time: passing out of existence, and lapsing from Christian faith into profanity. The prayer entreats God to spare ‘us’ (England) from these fates ‘lest we forget’ the sacrifice of Christ.
The words used here also refer to the palms dying as the ice spreads in another winter of the Great Cycle (‘boreal’ means ‘pertaining to the north’ but often with the connotation of the Arctic north).
g Cronos was the leader and the youngest of the first generation of Titans in Greek mythology. Cronus is often confused with Chronos, the personification of time, an ambiguity here exploited by DJ.
h The sixtieth parallel runs through St Petersburg and the southern tip of Shetland; the fortieth runs through Madrid and Ankara. They thus enclose most of the land DJ is thinking about here. The lemmings, whose natural home is the Arctic tundra, are forced to move southwards by glaciation and return when warmer conditions permit. They have been chosen by DJ for their self-destructive migrations, and the reference here echoes ‘see how they run’ on page 60.
i See The Bog People by P.V. Glob (1969, original Danish 1965).
kThe Gilyak are an indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the northern half of Sakhalin Island (off the extreme west edge of the Siberian mainland).
see also
semantic structures
glossary
a german: closely related (from Latin ‘germanus’ = brother).
c oblate: to solemly offer something to God or other deity.
d disciplina: Latin for method of learning or instruction.
e lithic foci: stone hearths (Latin).
f informis: formless (Latin).
ji cerements: wrappings for the dead.
comments
This complex paragraph is a series of speculations on possible religious rites observed by primitive man (the belle sauvage), often in association with the burial of the dead.