The sick bay was in a quiet backwater of the grand old
building, a place well apart from the highly pressured environment in which
officer cadets normally function. The windows looked out not onto the river, or
the parade ground, or the sports fields, or the gymnasium block, nor into the stuffy
ambience of classrooms – the places where learning was learned and purposes filled.
They looked instead into a cloistered world of mellow stone and leafy walls, a
peaceful world in which I never heard a sound or saw a person walk during the
two days of my confinement. And the only person in the room was me.
I filled my time with reading and musing, musing and
reading, and one of the things I read was a magazine article about the search
for the historical Arthur. What impressed me most was the illustration that
accompanied it. It showed a knight and his lady in Dark Age attire riding down
a woodland path away from Camelot or some other towered place. It was done in
the style of a Gustave Doré woodcut, such as he did for Idylls, though whether it was one of his or not I don’t know.
What I do know is that it impressed me more than any other
picture I have ever seen. It swept me almost bodily into a profound
understanding of my personal reality in which the road must be built on duty to
that which is right; in which the watchword must be truthfulness; in which
pledges must always be honoured and ethical values upheld. It’s a difficult
road which promises pitfalls and failures, and even the successes are apt to be
painful. The Grail in the mist ahead is faint and undefined, and often
disappears altogether. You don’t know what you’re searching for; you just hope
you’re going in the right direction.
Failure inevitably evokes guilt, and guilt comes riding with
a message from the sages: ‘You must forgive yourself,’ they declare, delusioned
by certainty. ‘You must see failure as a natural part of being human.’ The
second part I can agree with, but not the first. The very concept of
forgiveness strikes me as insufferably arrogant, for what right do any of us
have to forgive anything? What happens happens. How we feel is how we feel.
There is only observation, perception and emotional response. Somebody once
asked me during the darkest episode of my life: ‘Can you not forgive her?’ I
could only reply: ‘It isn’t a matter of forgiveness. I can only accept or not
accept as the feeling takes me.’ On that occasion the feeling did not permit acceptance,
and so it sometimes is with guilt.
But the road goes on, echoing the words of poets and
balladeers. For where is there a Grail to be found, holy or otherwise, in the
mundane world of politicians, professionals and TV pundits?
On which note, have a small quotation from Tennyson and his Idylls, partly for the prettiness of the
language and partly for the sake of familiarity:
The world of Arthur and the Round Table is crumbling. Many
of his best knights are dead, others dispersed, the Queen is gone to a convent
and the land become unsafe again. He’s just returned from defeating a ruffian
in the north country.
That night came Arthur
home, and while he climb’d,
All in a death-dumb
autumn-dripping gloom,
The stairway to the
hall, and look’d and saw
The great Queen’s
bower was dark. – about his feet
A voice clung sobbing
till he question’d it,
‘What art thou?’ and the
voice about his feet
Sent up an answer,
sobbing, ‘I am thy fool,
And I shall never make
thee smile again.’
As I said recently, this world is no place for an idealist.
* * *
Having got that off my chest, maybe now I can get back to
weightier matters, like whether I remembered to put mayonnaise on my salad
tonight. I did.
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