Kybernetes

Tigers at play: Stafford Beer's poetry

David Whittaker

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David Whittaker, (2004),"Tigers at play: Stafford Beer's poetry", Kybernetes, Vol. 33 Iss 3/4 pp. 547 - 553
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Tigers at play: Stafford Beers

poetry
David Whittaker
Charlbury, Oxfordshire, UK

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Keywords Cybernetics, Poetry, Literature

Abstract Considers Stafford Beer as a poet. Discusses Beers interest in a wide variety of poetic
forms. Gives some technical examples of how Beer employed Welsh and Sanskrit metre and
rhythm to writing in English. Also includes a translation from the Spanish; a ballade and selections
from his longest poem One Person Metagame.
You liked the formal beat of ancient forms
The discipline they call for in the brain
Ballade for Warren

For all of his adult life, Stafford Beer wrote poetry (Beer, 1983). This was not
some eccentric quirk, a way of passing the time like doing a crossword puzzle.
Poetry was an essential channel for Staffords creativity; a means of expressing
and exploring vital aspects of the human condition (love and death), which was
not always possible in the management texts. Stafford was a latter day
Renaissance man personified; a transdisciplinary thinker who moved with ease
across the sciences, philosophy, religion and aesthetics. The dedication and
epigraphs to each chapter in Decision and Control (Beer, 1966) alone amply
demonstrate the breadth and lively curiosity of his reading. Considering his
many other commitments, the poetry is of outstanding quality.
The French poet Paul Valery made a distinction between prose and poetry
when he said that prose may be characterised as words marching and poetry as
words dancing. Stafford was particularly interested in how to make his words
dance. (Moreover, as a prose writer he had a distinct and enviable eloquence.)
In poetry, he looked beyond the English poetic tradition to find ways of
articulating more ambiguous sentiments. All languages have developed some
kind of metrical rules to provide rhythmical structure and movement akin to
a musical score. The rules involved in the many different forms of poetry
particularly appealed to Stafford as a cybernetician. Confronted with an
enormous variety of words and grammar these rules help to attenuate the
almost infinite permutations of how to say anything. Paradoxically these
constraints actually liberate creativity and prompt a more resourceful search
for an appropriate pattern of words, offering an effective way of organising
how to say something.
Apart from the many classical forms of Western poetry (including a sonnet
and a ballade for Warren McCulloch) Stafford found that Sanskrit and Welsh
offered him a notable challenge in applying their principles to writing in

Kybernetes
Vol. 33 No. 3/4, 2004
pp. 547-553
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0368-492X
DOI 10.1108/03684920410523562

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English. These two languages were important to Stafford. He had done his
National Service, in 1946, in India and it was here that he was introduced to
yoga and Vedantic philosophy; Sanskrit is inextricably yoked to these ideas.
For this example, Stafford chose a classical metre known to Indian scholars by
the evocative name of Tigers at Play (Beer, 1983), this is also the title he gave to
the poem. It consists of four stanzas, each of which scans to one lengthy line of
Sanskrit. The long stressed syllables are in bold.

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TIGERS AT PLAY
Sea birds stand on a rocky wall
evening is here.
Farewell to sunshine today.
Walk please walk with me now and come
into the gloom
where sea and wind counter play.
Talk dies hard in the mouth in that
residents lounge.
They havent that much to say.
Come please come with me now and walk
over the sand
out where the tide turns at bay.

Stafford said this metre demonstrated the startling effect that quantity can
have on quality in poetry.
As for the Welsh, Stafford lived for many years in an area of Wales,
Ceredigion, where there is a good deal of national pride and he duly learned the
language to feel more at home and show some solidarity with the locals.
Like all Celtic peoples the medieval Welsh liked to talk and sing and their
Bards maintain one of the great oral traditions. For this they developed a wide
range of techniques including cynghanedd, which means harmony. This
poetry was meant to be heard; the sounds of the words are crucial (Welsh being
a strongly stressed language) and the pattern of sound can sometimes convey
meaning and mood. Cynghanedd is a system of sound correspondences
involving alliteration, accentuation and internal rhyme. It was a major
influence on the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in the 19th century; he
called them chimes from which his own formal experiments in sprung
rhythm evolved. It is the most sophisticated method of sound patterning
practised in any poetry of the world. Stafford sometimes applied these rules
with rigor and sometimes they are distributed throughout a piece as a kind of
guiding echo. In Behold a Cry (Beer, 1983), written in 1982, he deploys these
rules with great care and skill, though this short paper allows only a cursory
illustration of the elegant pattern involved. The items listed for further reading

(Brough, 1968; Conran, 1992; Preminger and Brogan, 1993) will provide the
interested reader with a more detailed account.
Two types of cynghanedd are on show here: sain (sound) and gytsain
(consonantal). With sain the line falls into three sections: the first two sections
are linked by terminal rhymes, while sections two and three are linked by
alliteration of the rhyme words of two and the final stressed word of three; in
gytsain the line is in two sections where the consonants in the first half must be
repeated in the second half. A sound that follows the stressed vowel that
ends the half-line does not count. The sain is in italics while gytsain is
underlined.
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BEHOLD A CRY
The soul s begging bowl, branded
with its greed or singular need, renounces
alms; rage collapses its ribcage: who can
seek peace, escapes....
Now as the tyrant knows that truant and
has mastery of his mysterious will
to prize the epoch to oppress the picked out
hostage with his two-edged sword,
tremble: stem the stream
of blood, the flood of flowing words.
In the silence is more anguish than for dying: dumb
agony could see that saints
who deflected deaths arrow had afflicted this sorrow.
Curb in still blood your carbon steel blade.

Even this crude and simplified schema on the page (remember it needs to be
heard), and there are further subtleties expounded in the collection Transit
(Beer, 1983), displays the complexity of the structures Stafford was prepared to
pursue in his finely wrought craft as a poet. He often spent months on finding
the right word.
In addition to wrestling with the complexities of some of the forms listed
above, he wrote in free verse. One Person Metagame (Beer, 1983) is a terrific
tour de force and may well come to be seen as his overlooked masterpiece.
It consists of 1,000 lines and took 4 years to write (1971-1974 mainly in Chile).
Ezra Pounds Cantos were an acknowledged influence, but T.S. Eliots Waste
Land is not so far removed either. This is an autobiographical epic and
philosophical work divided into six games: immaturity, maturity, love, politics,
knowledge and death.
Along with his unpublished Chronicles of Wizard Prang and his Requiem
(a large installation of non-figurative paintings), this is perhaps Staffords most
revealing work. Rather than one strict form the poem ranges over various

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techniques in a playful manner. Indeed wordplay was an important ingredient

in Staffords poetry (the first game opens with the pun sun and air) and in
conjunction with the flexible capacity of metaphor (which is a kind of
metalanguage, not so much transcending paradox as revelling in it) enriches
his vocabulary throughout. There are also many allusions from his wide
reading including Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Jung, Hesse, Sartre, Engels, Ashby,
Spencer Brown, The Book of Job and The Bhagavad Gita (as a younger man
Stafford translated part of the latter).
A few quotations (selected with random precision) offered almost as
aphorisms provide something of the unique flavour of the work; ideally it
should be read straight through to fully appreciate the journey across the
varied landscape of an abundant and busy life:
ONE PERSON METAGAME
Stir the cinders of flamboyant fires
that burned life to this charcoal
sun and air
fresh wind on fresh life
strip off the mask
and still the mask is masked
prison is the calculus itself
everywhere
old men rule
it seems that some are almost
thirty
here was the knowledge
lost from gnostics
alchemists
that continent distinction builds
the universe
in a plane space make a mark
the world will follow from this
whose science is a glass bead game
then tumble in the hay with time
enjoy her body years ago
awake a century from now
to kill a clock or two
and ride back on the pendulum
that stopped
you started it the other way
backwards and forwards once it swung
who noticed just be honest now

that for this trip it swung instead

forwards and backwards

Tigers at play

crispin crispian
tock tick

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Stafford translated poetry as well. This fine example is from the Spanish
Cantares of Antonio Machado (1875-1939) and is in the unpublished collection
On the Move. Stafford had a recording of the poem sung by Joan Manuel Serrat.
Being aware that translation is a problem of transduction he said his own
English rendering was transmitted from the Spanish to preserve the rhymes
and rhythm:
ANTONIO MACHADOS CANTARES
Everything passes, everything stays.
Our lot is to pass always to be
making pathways in passing
a road on the sea.
I never chased after glory
nor hoped that mankinds story
would immortalize my song.
I love my worlds subtle:
weightless worlds, gentle. . .
soap-bubbles floating along. . .
I like to see them dispersed
in sun and scarlet: they fly
under an azure sky
suddenly tremble and burst.
I never chased after glory. . .
Walker, your footprints are the road
nothing else.
Walker, there is no road:
the road is made as you walk.
As you walk the way is opened.
Glancing back, youll see the path
youll never tread again.
Walker there is no road
only a wake on the sea.
There was a time, just hereabout
forests now with brambles clothed
the voice of a poet was heard to shout:

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walker there is no road:

the road is made as you walk
knock after knock
verse after verse.
The poet went far from home to die;
foreign dust is his abode.
As he left they heard him cry:

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walker there is no road:

the road is made as you walk
knock after knock
verse after verse.
When the troubadour cant sing
the poet lifts a pilgrims load,
when prayer becomes a useless thing. . .
walker there is no road:
the road is made as you walk
knock after knock
verse after verse
knock after knock
verse after verse
knock after knock
verse after verse

Stafford never lost an opportunity to enthuse about his foremost mentor,

the neurocybernetician, Warren McCulloch. McCulloch, furthermore, was a
blacksmith and a poet. In the role of the latter, he wrote in classical 16th and
17th century forms. Stafford deliberately chose one of these more difficult
modes, the ballade, for his moving elegy to McCulloch. This is a poem he
particularly enjoyed reading aloud; it has something of a prophetic tone and
I personally now read it as a kind of epitaph for Stafford himself.
BALLADE FOR WARREN
You liked the formal beat of ancient forms
The discipline they call for in the brain;
You liked the flash of honesty that warms
The protocol of each austere refrain.
Because we made no parting, you and I,
To all my friends I say this fond goodbye.
Heres one you left religiously performs
The rituals of friendship. Is it vain
To conjure you greathearted through the storms
That lifted you above the common plane
To spar with angels? And is it profane
Because they inconsiderately die

To all my friends I say this fond goodbye?

The lively young define the living norms
By which to soil the earth and light the lane
That leads into the sky. And their reforms
In worlds outside our room may yet explain
The marks we left upon the windowpane.
Because Ill leave them too without a cry
To all my friends I say this fond goodbye.

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So much we know through pleasure, thought and pain

Will perish in the futures hurricane:
Because theres nothing to indemnify
To all my friends I say this fond goodbye.

References
Beer, S. (1966), Decision and Control, Wiley, London.
Beer, S. (1983), Transit, Mitchell Communications, Canada.
Brough, J. (1968), Poems from the Sanskrit, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Conran, T. (1992), Welsh Verse, Seren Books, Glamorgan.
Preminger, A. and Brogan, T. (Eds) (1993), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, Princeton, New Jersey.
Further reading
Beer, S. (1993), Requiem, Kybernetes, Vol. 22 No. 6, pp. 105-8.
Whiltaker, D. (2003), Stafford Beer A Personal Memoir, Wavestone press, Charlbury, Oxon,
U.K., (This publication is available on the authors website: www.wavestonepress.co.uk).

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