As a boy Calculus loved The Jungle Book. So he was delighted to discover that its author had written other books. He read Kim and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and, in so doing, acquired something of a ‘Kipling aficionado’ reputation among family and friends. But he was certainly unaware of the author having addressed the Royal College of Surgeons in 1923. (i don’t suppose that Calculus had any familial connections to those attending or organising this London event.) Apparently the esteemed medics listened intently to what Kipling had to say. The Nobel Prize winner of literature having tailored his speech to his audience.
In the speech he fashioned the following metaphor: ‘Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind…. not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyze, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain’
This metaphor was brought to our attention by a garrulous monk who, en route to Mount Wilder’s Holy Tree, was caught out by a sudden blizzard. Having intended to pass the night in the Buddhist monastery nearby, he instead ended up finding refuge with us at the château. He’d been in no state to turn down Calculus’s kind offer to stay over.
At dinner Calculus – rather stiffly – introduced the tired and bedraggled monk to us, and our greetings had been somewhat muted. Before ‘warm’ conversation could get going, we all needed food inside us. The cold air giving everyone a keen appetite.
The Kommune’s unexpected guest was treated to onion soup for which he was profusely grateful. Between noisy slurps, the monk spoke of many (mostly unrelated) things: Rudyard Kipling, exceedingly good cakes, Hermann Hesse, the dynasties of Buddhist abbots. ‘Vows of silence have gone plain out of fashion,’ Calculus later bemoaned. The monk’s garrulousness had got on his nerves. And it wasn’t difficult to guess what Manu, a sullen presence at the table, was thinking either: What fool hardiness. Wilders in winter is no country for pilgrimages of any sort, let alone for poorly shod, scantily dressed ascetics. Yet Manu, having drummed up all of his reserves of self-control, said nothing. This was unusual.
i and the other Kommunards, however, had listened to the monk with pleasure and no little amusement.
After the meal the monk slept soundly under a round and fluted yurt roof. The storm died down in the night. And when he awoke – in the stove heated yurt – it was to a cold but bright morning. Someone prepared him a tasty breakfast: (brilliant yellow) omelette and cinnamon flavoured goat milk.
The monk’s gift
In exchange for the Kommune’s hospitality the monk reiterated Kipling’s speech. We all thought it fiendishly profound. It was only shortly after he left that we realised we’d been misinterpreting his gift. It had been given as a warning of sorts. Not to let words distract us from the ‘true path.’ While we were thinking, and continue to think, that in Kipling’s metaphor our salvation lies. The metaphor (comparing words to drugs) was emboldening. For it offered hope to us in our fight against Josef A. Martha had been especially affected by it. Upon a strip of rice paper she copied out Kipling words, preceding them with some of her own: ‘Let no one enter be unaware that…’ Then she had Manu pin the modified quotation to above the entrance of her yurt. It wasn’t difficult to understood why. Martha cared little that Kipling’s speech was rehashed Plato. (Rhetoric on rhetoric. Speech is a persuasive tool, says Gorgias.) The quotation was a vindication of her life’s vocation. What’s more, she had long understood that words were a bulwark of sorts against her mysterious malady. They’d become her main line of defense.