KIPLING and the Pagan gods

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_dreams.htm#phantom

A vision of natural forces and pagan gods 

"The Bridge-Builders" (1893) takes this a step further. Findlayson, the English engineer, whose fine calculations and dedicated toil have succeeded in throwing a bridge across the mighty Ganges, is exposed under the influence of opium to a completely different vision of the powers that move the universe. The flickering dragons of "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" have given way to something infinitely more challenging. The beasts that Findlayson and his overseer, Peroo, overhear in divine conference as they lie in an opium dream, and the figure of Krishna that comes to stand among those beasts, are deities of the Hindu pantheon. These may be a bolder indication of the scale of the dreams Kipling himself had experienced as a young man in the years before he left India. But by the time he wrote "The Bridge-Builders" he was the father of a young family, living in Brattleboro. Why this vision now, and why one based on the traditions of Hinduism, when he always claimed to get on better with Muslims? It appears that the inner reconfiguration, the expansion which followed on becoming a father, opened a new channel for his imagination, releasing some of his own earliest experience. As a child in Bombay he once lived in a vivid world of ‘threshold magic [and] wayside spells’ where elephants and camels, water buffalo and cows moved along the streets, not to mention the vultures that wheeled above the nearby Towers of Silence: animals lived close alongside humans, as even today, they do to some extent in urban India. Animals also made the heroes and villains in the stories he heard from his ayah and the other servants. Bearing this in mind, it’s no surprise that the creative burst prompted by the birth of his first child Josephine, in 1892, took the form of the animal stories which would make up The Jungle Book. "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" offered no challenge to conventional wisdom, but this later opium dream constitutes both a statement and a challenge, or at the very least a ‘what if?’. What if there are other powers in the universe that may take different forms, which Krishna and his story bring into focus? Kipling was seeking to find a language for his maturing independent vision, one that would frame that vision, and accommodate it within a story concerning human experience and human response to the living world.  The dreams experienced in "The Brushwood Boy", however, present readers with a different kind of juxtaposition, one that challenges them to use their intelligence. In the daytime world, the hero, Georgie Cottar, achieves apparent perfection as a public school boy and later as an officer in the Indian army. He is single and perfect: literally, a virgin. Yet we have been shown him from the age of three subjected to dreams which indicate a buried life of conflict and confusion. As a tiny child he wakes screaming in fear of the figure of a policeman, the symbol, we come to suspect, of the law which rules the daytime life he must take up as a man. Though he appears to have conformed completely to this law, the chaotic adventures of his dreams indicate a life that is bubbling beneath, unexpressed and unresolved in daylight. He confronts extremities of danger in these, indicating a threat to his inner life that has to be confronted over and over, rather like the demands which are shaping his life on the outside. One dream takes him into ‘a sixth quarter of the globe’. For all its dangers, this appears to be the very landscape of desire. Kipling’s only recorded childhood dream seems to refer to a sighting of some such world beyond the map of imposed order, his lost paradise rediscovered, perhaps. His travel letter "The Journey Out" (Brazilian Sketches, 1927) suggests such a link with the past when it remarks: ...Once in a child's dream, I wandered into a Fifth Quarter of the world, and found everything different from all previous knowledge; as only children or old folk desire it to be.’ (italics mine) Yet Georgie Cottar survives amidst these dangers, a survival closely linked to the image of a little girl, a young woman whose presence— or memory—keeps him safe. (Recalling how a young woman spelled the death of insight to Charlie Mears in "The Finest Story in the World", we can see how far Kipling has travelled here.) Kipling revelled in the flexibility of outlook his early identification with India gave him. He called it having ‘two sides to his head’. In ‘The Bridge-Builders’ it is as though he allows himself as a writer to succumb to the power of the pagan, pre-Christian, vision and to present it side by side with the workaday view of the practical white man. The world of the Indian labourers, ‘the humming village of five thousand workmen’, is absolutely present in the tale, along with the anxieties and calculations of the engineers, in the face of an oncoming flood, a pairing that is thrown into relief when Findlayson and Peroo are isolated together under the stress of the storm. Does the writer believe literally in the story of Hindu apparitions that he’s telling? Has he believed in earlier ones? Psychologically, if not rationally, yes. Otherwise none of them could command the power they do. One way of putting it is to say that just as animals and humans remain close in India, the conscious and the unconscious are not so firmly separated there as they are in Europe. For his western-educated readers, then and now, this story offers a charge of something primal that’s been lacking in their diet, alongside the satisfyingly minute description of labour, and the fight to save a bridge in a time of flood.

"The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" offered no challenge to conventional wisdom, but this later opium dream constitutes both a statement and a challenge, or at the very least a ‘what if?’. What if there are other powers in the universe that may take different forms, which Krishna and his story bring into focus? Kipling was seeking to find a language for his maturing independent vision, one that would frame that vision, and accommodate it within a story concerning human experience and human response to the living world. The dreams experienced in "The Brushwood Boy", however, present readers with a different kind of juxtaposition, one that challenges them to use their intelligence. In the daytime world, the hero, Georgie Cottar, achieves apparent perfection as a public school boy and later as an officer in the Indian army. He is single and perfect: literally, a virgin. Yet we have been shown him from the age of three subjected to dreams which indicate a buried life of conflict and confusion. As a tiny child he wakes screaming in fear of the figure of a policeman, the symbol, we come to suspect, of the law which rules the daytime life he must take up as a man. Though he appears to have conformed completely to this law, the chaotic adventures of his dreams indicate a life that is bubbling beneath, unexpressed and unresolved in daylight. He confronts extremities of danger in these, indicating a threat to his inner life that has to be confronted over and over, rather like the demands which are shaping his life on the outside. One dream takes him into ‘a sixth quarter of the globe’. For all its dangers, this appears to be the very landscape of desire. Kipling’s only recorded childhood dream seems to refer to a sighting of some such world beyond the map of imposed order, his lost paradise rediscovered, perhaps. His travel letter "The Journey Out" (Brazilian Sketches, 1927) suggests such a link with the past when it remarks: ...Once in a child's dream, I wandered into a Fifth Quarter of the world, and found everything different from all previous knowledge; as only children or old folk desire it to be.’ (italics mine) Yet Georgie Cottar survives amidst these dangers, a survival closely linked to the image of a little girl, a young woman whose presence— or memory—keeps him safe. (Recalling how a young woman spelled the death of insight to Charlie Mears in "The Finest Story in the World", we can see how far Kipling has travelled here.) Georgie’s family home in England is described in idealising terms, in tune with those used of his career as man and boy. Readers have taken this as evidence of Kipling’s naiveté—as the very notes to the story on this website complain— but I would argue that all this idealisation is a conscious move, made in mockery, meaning to contrast it with the truth to be found in the risk and struggle of the instinctual world of dream. It was only after I came to see this that I could make sense of ‘Ha ha, said the duck laughing’, a dream phrase that is repeated in the story. Like the song Kipling incorporates within the tale, lamenting the return from the City of Sleep under orders from Policeman Day, it snags on the reader’s awareness, and calls out considered response from greater depth. It is when the grown-up Georgie and Miriam, a real-life young woman, meet in the world of daylight and are collecting a real-life duck that his mother has ordered for dinner, that they confront the fact that she is familiar with the landscape of his dreams and has shared in his struggles there, matching detail for detail, impulse for impulse with him. The reader can take it that their lives of instinct and fantasy have all along been intimately shared, for the distasteful presence of a Sick Thing haunts Georgie’s dreams, while Miriam’s waking life has been up till now tied to an invalid mother—by inference one who doesn’t support or enjoy a vitality like her daughter’s. As an artist Kipling has arrived at the point where he can use dream to mount a critique of the secular sacred, the ideal of masculinity and the mothers who perpetuate that tradition. His first readers could scarcely be expected to accept such a move made openly. By taking them into the world of dreams, he quietens everyday patterns of thought, speaking in images whose force is picked up at a deep level. Sixteen years would pass before he wrote another profound dream story. In the interval Kipling suffered an extended dream himself, in 1899 when he was delirious with pneumonia. On his recovery, in line with his interest in the mind and its workings, the play between memory and imagination, instinct and image, he dictated an account of this dream to a stenographer. For today’s reader that document makes painful reading, laying bare his agonised feelings of exposure and of being falsely accused, his fear of separation from his wife, Carrie. Remembering the scandal of May 1896, when Kipling took his brother-in-law Beatty Balestier to court after Beatty threatened to kill him, we can make sense of these anxieties. In spite of all his fame and distinction as a writer, Kipling was publicly humiliated when he broke down under cross-examination, a collapse that was widely reported in the press. At the end of his life what Kipling chose to remark, reviewing the dream in Something of Myself, was the way delirium brought to the surface factual information that he supposed had been long forgotten. In Lahore, as a young reporter on theCivil and Military Gazette, he’d been obliged to translate the war diaries of a Russian general from French. In New York, fifteen years later, the names of every camp noted in those diaries loomed up written just above the horizon of his dream.