Control Yourself Dear

Control yourself dear.

                 This little bit will be a one off. I’ve mentioned before that one of the themes he is the social disintegration that has resulted from the selective empowerment of a limited number of people. Please note I'm not saying it's good or bad – just that it is – and this can be seen in light of similarities between now and the early middle ages when advancements in armor, weaponry and printing created then as now, a class of nobles who's rights and privileges far outstripped that of the vast majority of the population.

                 Again I do not suggest as to the desirability of this state of affairs only that it exists and we must work with it as it is. One solution is to hire writers to promote “good values”. Augustus Ceaser hired Virgil to convince roman woman not to be promiscous and instead raise families – it was not a success. Marie de Champagne an her mother hired Chretian de Troyes to convince knights that raping and looting was bad for one's reputation – it had mixed results but brought about a social concept called Chivalry which was the beginning of the suggestion that women had rights and brains.

                  My plea, such as it is, is two fold, one that if you rape and murder even if you cannot be prosecuted by the modern legal system it will be bad for your reputations and you won't be invited to the best parties. Secondly if you make a habit of mistreating women you will surely go insane.

                      Even this little missive is not really targeted at the ordinary person, but rather the extraordinary and furthermore it is not so much a plea for mercy, as it is something of a warning.

When Leo Tolstoi quoted the bible saying “Vengeance is mine – thus sayeth the lord,” he was no naive spring chicken. He’d spent much of his adult life in the military and furthermore we are not talking the peaceful military but Sebastopol, home of some of the most deadly card games in history.

I’m no spring chicken either and I can tell you I am not going to set the wrongs of the world aright. That is for bigger punchers then I. If it means I play the coward at times – so be it. It can be looked at another way as well. I’m not going to sully myself with every dirt bag with an extra male hormone and a chip on his shoulder. It’s often difficult to avoid such chaps but it is absolutely critical if you’re going to get anything done.

Besides that the themes here are all interwoven – that’s part of the fun. For instance we speak of technology and it’s nasty habit of empowering bad people, because bad people are the most interested in killing and/or humiliating the rest of us. There’s always been some equivalent of weapons of mass destruction. In Napoleons day it was cannon which ended the several hundred year reign of the castle. Plus as he said, “A little bit of grapeshot takes care of a lot of problems.”

                       Grape shot is small iron balls welded together which are fired from cannons and which when impacting explode, like modern day shrapnel. Napoleon got his start when the French peasants wanted to continue the revolution and the bourgeois of Paris had had enough. As the case of Tienneman Square what you do when you have lost the support of the big cities is you import soldiers from the Provinces, who are invariably more loyal – and in the case of the French it it was a Corsican Artillery Captain, who went on to other things.

                         In the middle ages the effective technology was armor, swords, suits of armor, war horses, and the like – all of which were by law only permitted to those who were in the good graces of the rulers, meaning the nobility. We can draw strong parallels between then an now with the new nobility distinguished by it’s wealth, freedom and immunity to criminal prosecution.

                      The problem of course, which is no problem from the nobilities point of view, is they are free to steal, rape and murder without punishment as long as their victims are peasants. Knights often have a good reputation, now, five hundred years after the fact, but in truth they were not often nice people – it did not make sense to be. Even their own relatives hated them and so invented the crusades and the hundred years war to get them out of town. They were about as welcome as a Walmart in a small town.

                            This also messed up relations between men and women. The rite de seignior said the master of the peasants had the right to screw any bride he wanted prior to her wedding night. Concubines, mistresses, whores, etc were all in abundance but had few rights. More importantly it was the grand dames who were most upset. These are women who married with huge dowries. They nearly always married important men and then as soon as the husband died, often of what we call unnatural causes, pressure would be applied to remove her holdings from her. Often as well it was the heir who was at rish. If the owner of the estate is three years old the king is liable to appoint and overseer to his holdings and then the issue becomes what happens when the lad turns eighteen and his uncle or who ever doesn’t want to turn the lands over?

As stated, one of the turning points of history was when cities and agriculture developed. This went along with the stationary male/female marriage, since the father had more surety of his being the parent of any children, and the shift of the diety from Female Trio, to Male.

                           Capitalism was invented by Italian bankers in the fifteenth century, it was a precursor to todays B borderless society because a piece of paper, a note, replaced physical currency. In Charlemagnes day for instance the king would constantly travel the roads of his domain and take with him the royal treasury, since he could not trust anyone the court. Between these times was a period when estates would be , in effect handed over to families and extended families.

                              This increased peoples concept of what a family was to include the children, something which was of interest especially to mothers since unlike bastards their children were set to inherit not only property but titles as well.

                          So it came to pass that the twelfth century became the era where we first see the notions of romantic love. By this we mean not only lust but a shared commitment to keep the family together. Part of the reason for this development was to impress upon knights the potential value of the women they had possession of. Towards the end of the middle ages, in the troubadour period there came a cult of romantic love where classically the young beauty, forced as a breeder for an grey haired man, engages in illicit love with a man beneath her dignity.

                       As to the troubadours, the master singers, the minnesingers and the like, in the beginning it was a upper class thing to do. It seemed to fill the notion of the complete man to have this warrior step off the battle field and play the lute. These fellows influenced among others the poet Dante. One of the keys to poetry ( listen to me –I feel like I’m talking to a room of children) – but anyway , one of the keys to poetry is the way it can sometimes say something in such a way as a certain person might understand it but others don’t. This is true even to today with hip hop.

                        As the art form spread though and the number of troubadours increased it also became a sort of newspaper, telling of shipwrecks and the fortunes of kings and lords. Again however, especially in areas under the control of hostile forces, which was much of Europe, the songs were coded messages, telling forces where to gather for an insurrection, or where a vulnerable lord might be staying.

                      One of the best of the early poets was Chretian DeTroyes, a semi-ecclesiastical in the pay of Eleanor of Aquitaine. He set the ground work for the Arthur and round Table of legend. He was a superb writer; inventive, funny, moral, and was capable of taking daily problems to their philosophical origins .

Today, perhaps the single greatest problem we face is that what the proverbial ninetynine per cent think is criminal the remaining one percent think is absolutely hunky dory. It was Chretians task to convince the empowered ones not so much to share their wealth – that would be a little too much to ask – but to behave in a way that would not destroy their own families.

                          I’ll just give one example. The wounded king motive is prehistoric, from Dionysius, to Christ and including many others the fellow with the slow killing wound, which is life, and or sexuality, is a standby. Sometimes it’s presented as the Fisher King with the implication that there is a cure, but nevertheless as the king wasteth away so too doth the kingdom.

                          The potential of debilitation in strength however doesn’t cross the minds of the ordinary warlord. That is a truth they don’t want to think about. Mr Scrooge doesn’t seem to mind never getting his rocks off.

                        And Chretian tells a story of Yvain, who was a friend of Gawain, who was King Arthurs right hand man. Yvain was a knight who married young. His friend Gawain says to him “Oh I suppose you’re going to be one of those fat boys that sits around eating and playing with the women until the women can’t stand you?”

Yvain is horrified. He’s in the prime of life. He has monsters to slay, tournaments to win and fame to gain, so to the honor of his beloved bride. So a little while after he’s married he packs up and sets out for adventure, saying he’ll return in a year, but a year goes by and he’s doing so well on the jousting circuit that he forgets his promise.

                     When he does remember he is distraught. Madness overcomes him. This madness was a big them of Chretians. When a knight wishes to apologize for wrongs done his lady he always takes on some form of madness. In”The knight in the Cart” and Yvain there are humorous aspects.

In Yvian, to atone for his misdeed the knight sets out to rescue six separate damsels in situations of distress. By the time we get to the madness of Lancelot however the scene is much darker. Remember Lancelot is the most fearless, and deadliest knight that ever lived ( French of course, even though the Arthur tales are set in Wales.) Lancelot has betrayed his king for a woman and in doing so he has in effect betrayed himself.

We may speak of how in medieval times loyalty to the liege was held as all important but in poetic terms this would be a major crime no matter when it happened. As well the crime was not adultery. That could be forgiven, even praised in the case of a bad husband. The crime was in disloyalty

                         And what is more one must be care when asking “to what is he disloyal?” This was the warriors code we are talking about, where one kills dozens and then brags about it in the pub. So there’s got to be a cosmic dimension to this. Kings, kingdoms, loves – all come and go. I don’t feel all that qualified because the decision to pull a trigger on someone is not one I’d ever want to have to make.

                      The last madness is by Percival, sometimes called Galahad aka “The Welsh Knight”. Pierceval, or pierce the veil, is the only one of the epic to enter the grail castle- he does so naked. In other words without preconditions or expectations.

                           (Added later: We may almost suggest a continuum of madness with the first two minor offenses being punishable by laughable silliness, whereas the madness of Lancelot is a terrible thing to see - ( indeed the fact that Lancelot is the supreme knight is an indictment on the whole order) and the madness of King Arthur cannot be cured except by transmission – to wit, a grail knight has to ask him what ails him- meaning a knight has to have to ability to see through the trappings of majesty to the mortal wound.)

I’ve mentioned how, in the cold war, senior strategists who recognized the two sides were identical in technique and hence indistinguishable from each other used to tell field assets that they fought because they were men and the other side were not. This echo’s Bishop Turpins comments on why Roland was obligated to fight the Saracens. (EG:Because they are pigs and we are not)

                             Actually the origin is all too often like the grain of sand that forms the pearl, some sin that will not let the sinner rest. This seems a little facile, like Orson Wells “Rosebud” in Citizen Cane and one must hasten to warn readers into falling into the trap of thinking the rich somehow must suffer for ill gotten gain.

                          But Percival/Galahad since carries not the stain of the past. He is a male virgin, so to speak and as well “The Matter of Britain” is set in a timeless zone, hence no on succeeds Arthur as king.