Word: carrington
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When John F. Carrington of the Baptist Missionary Society of London reached his new post in the Belgian Congo 14 years ago, one thing struck him especially: though there was neither telephone nor telegraph around, everyone in the village seemed to know exactly when he and his wife would arrive. The experience so impressed him that Carrington embarked on a second career of his own. Today he is the world's top white expert on the language of the Congo drums...
Last week TIME Correspondent Israel Shenker found Carrington at Yalemba, a jungle outpost in the Congo. There Carrington and his wife run a thriving mission school and are the guiding spirits of a community of some 500 natives. But John Carrington, 40, is now a missionary of another sort. Since only one pupil in ten knows how to speak on the drums, he has planned a special course to keep the ancient art alive...
...Moon Looks Down. As Carrington well knows, the art is not easy. Drum talk is not a code like Morse. It is actually an attempt to reproduce language. Every syllable has its own tone, which the drummer must be able to catch by striking the hollow log at exactly the right spot. In some Bantu dialects, a single tone pattern may have different meanings, as in the pattern for moon and jowl. Thus, a drummer must know enough to add a qualifying phrase: moon becomes "the moon looks down on the earth" and fowl turns into "the fowl, the little...
...wind still shakes the old house-but, often enough nowadays, the ghost that comes stalking is fresh from a textbook of modern psychiatry. Such old props as bleeding heads tucked under skeletonic elbows, or crimson stab wounds on vaporous bodies, are out of fashion. "Many modern ghosts," observes Editor Carrington in The Week End Book of Ghost Stories, "have become more human...
Freud and his busy followers have had their effect. As Editor Carrington notes, modern man is far more terrified by a spooky representation of "the state of [his] own mind" than by any problem that may be on the ghost's mind. Moreover, abstract art and surrealism seem to have made an impression on ghost fashions; e.g., some current phantoms do not bother to represent anything at all but simply join the victim in bed on a dark night, remaining strictly intangible and indefinable. The advance-guard ghosts in this collection include one which appears simply as a spot...