The Beast and the King

I took my son out to a park in a neighbouring suburb yesterday. The park itself is small and tatty, but with a view that stretches out to the city and the harbour bridge. It sits high on the spine of coastal headland, flanked with security-protected houses and luxury condominiums looking out over sheer cliffs to the vast grey ocean. 

It was early sunday morning and no one else was around. The wind made seashell sounds in our ears. There was a pervading sense of emptiness and desolation.

As we were stepping out of the car, there was a roar across the street of a souped-up engine. A car pulled in across from us as if to park, but instead just sat there idling. The driver and passengers were shadows through the glass. They seemed to be waiting for something, or somebody. The moment stretched. Suddenly the engined growled and the car leaped forward and around, completely mounting the pavement just metres from where I was standing. Inside were four young men and an atmosphere of tension and aggression that hissed out onto the street like a choking black cloud. The driver gunned the engine and the car screeched off the pavement and back the way it had come.

In many respects it was nothing. A non-event – over in seconds. But it left me shaken, as though a rip had appeared in my safe sense of a sober and just reality and something frightening and chaotic was spilling in...

Cut back, for a moment, to the Dark Ages. To huge expanses of forest wild with wolves, boar, bears and untamed dogs. To peasants, pestilence and famine. To county kingdoms ruled by strength and greed. To grim battles in heavy armour; knights hacking with swords and axes; muddy ground thick with blood and felled limbs like stunted trees. In this dark world there is no a priori sense of safety – if you move from one isolated pocket of civilisation to another, you do so at your own risk, very much aware of the likelihood of robbery, rape, or murder.

Out of this mire rise the legends of King Arthur which is, externally at least, a myth of civilisation dawning across wild Britain; of a kingdom arising out of unconsciousness, violence and chaos – the belly of the Beast. 

And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,

Wherein the beast was ever more and more...

Arthur's kingdom is founded on the bloody, if temporary victory over the Beast. War is waged on all opposing chieftains. The forests are purged of the wildest of the wild animals. Round Table knights police the highways in the name of adventure and the King. Law and order (that is, the absence of chaos) comes to the land. Peace reigns.

It is during this time of peace that Arthur nurtures his great gift to civilisation and the future. Realising that he has to find some way to direct the urges of his men – who have known only battle for so long – he invents a culture of courtesy and honour that shifts the focus of their energies from the base (the Beast within) to the highest qualities. Battle is figuratively relived in jousts and tournaments, and law is maintained by the knights riding out across the land in search of adventure and wrongs to right. Highest of all however is the insistence on a kind of servitude to Love. Every knight worth his salt had the favour of a lady round his wrist or on his helmet. For her were his brave deeds performed in joust and tourney. The love of a knight for his lady is willfully unrequited – the image of womanhood he upholds becomes a path to inner transcendence of The Beast. 

But always there is the uncertainty... the foundations of this peace and order are insecure, impermanent. The Beast is never vanquished, only subdued. It is one thing to raise the consciousness of a nation above the base, to value lofty ideals and worthy causes that transcend the individual, but to maintain that state takes constant vigilance, strength and effort. In the end, the pull of entropy is just too strong and the vision that Arthur represents is undermined from within by Launcelot and Guinevere, and from without by his nephew Modred.

We have a tendency these days to think of the Beast as something somewhere else, somewhere outside of us. The illusion of progress that dominates the First World his disconnected us from the realities of struggle, violence and, above all, the chaos upon which our civilisation uncomfortably rests. Our culture of distraction and entertainment draws attention away from these grim foundations and we forget that our stability, peace and sense of security have come at a cost and are neither immutable nor inviolable. 

However, it takes only one Katrina to rip down the facade, to see how far we haven't come. One epic and unforeseen natural disaster might be all it takes to reduce a cultural capital to violent anarchy. If the infrastructure that feeds, waters and protects a society is wiped out with one blow, then the structures that elevate that society above the natural condition of unconsciousness and manifest self-interest are wiped out with it. We collapse back into the waiting arms of the Beast; the effort of maintaining the civilisation inside of ourselves gratefully relinquished.

And ever and anon the wolf... lent her fierce teat

To human sucklings; and the children, housed

in her foul den, there at their meat would growl,

And mock their foster-mother on four feet,

Till, straighten'd, they grew up to wolf-like men,

Worse than the wolves...

The structures of civilisation are permeable. We cannot defend ourselves at all times and in all places. The Beast, suppressed, rears its head as violence bursting around us in what seem to be incomprehensible eruptions: a man is beaten to death by strangers with a hammer outside his home; a mother keeps her child in a kennel to punish him for his cries of hunger, then strangles him with his own clothes; a father locks his daughter in the cellar for a decade and rapes grandchildren from her; a truck-driver tailgates a couple for two hours, then hospitalises them with a crowbar when they pull over to let him pass; schoolchildren are beaten to death by their classmates or bullied to suicide. 

These are not problems of civilisation, they are problems of humanity, of individual human beings. In its external manifestation, civilisation is only a structure. It is we, as individuals, who, by consistent effort, maintain that structure. As long as we take no responsibility for ourselves, for our own actions and the actions of those closest to us, then we are without defence against the Beast without and, more importantly, the Beast within. This is the hidden meaning of the Arthurian myths – that, without a King, there is no governing principle that tends towards order and light. A consistent effort of will is required to stabilise our internal chaos, to derive internal laws from our own conscience or a sense of what is right, and to act upon those laws. When the King and the land (that is, the internal landscape) are one, then peace and prosperity reign. When the King is dethroned, weakened by poisonous whispers and betrayal from within, then the land falls to ruin; and, within the impenetrable dark of the forest, the Beast again roams free...

[Extracts taken from The Coming of Arthur, in Alfred Lord Tennyson's, Idylls of the King.]

Progress

My son was given a bag of hand-me-down toys yesterday – a clackety mass of colourful plastic in assorted psychedelic shapes. I am told that this is exactly what a growing baby's brain needs for healthy development – though this concept is in defiance of thousands of years of human evolution.

Catching a glimpse of one of the toys as it fell out of the bag, I was caught by a twinge of excited nostalgia. Amongst the assortment was something I remembered fondly from my own childhood. A simple stacking toy, originally made by Fisher Price: a rocking plastic base with a rainbow of shrinking doughnuts spiked on a pole.

It's amazing that so simple a toy can leave so vivid an impression – and one so pregnant with emotional resonance. I have hazy memories of looking up at this great tower from below, worshiping beneath the spectrum of yonis impaled on the mighty lingham. I remember the taste of the plastic rings, the exact texture as my gums roamed their surface, seeking the invisible edges left by the die. These hours of devotion no doubt sowed the seeds for my fetishistic craving of doughnuts and curious obsession with deck quoits.

A closer inspection, however, revealed that this was not in fact the same toy. The rocking base had been replaced by something more 'interesting' – following the mythic theme, the yoni–lingham duality was now borne on the back of a giant blue and yellow turtle. The doughnuts too had been adapted for easy comprehension by a generation primed for TV – pure RGB offset by a coarse yellow; not the soft hues of my memory. The bulb of the lingham was inset with a glowing orange power jewel. Worse than all of these – the coup de grace detonation after the firecracker-string of disappointments – was the discovery of a compartment for batteries and a switch. Flick it to the left, the lingham throbs and plays jangly greeting card music. Flick it to the right and baby is rewarded for each correctly stacked doughnut by a robotic voice barking out a number. Also the lingham flashes and plays a tune.

This discovery had the effect of a Stalinesque erasure on the mystery of my childhood. It waved a revisionist wand over the memories of my past and redacted all references to magic and wonder. All the spaces forged by my developing consciousness, the bloom of imagination, were subsumed by industrialisation, criss-crossed with superhighways and choked with fumes from the plastics factory.

Worse still was the vision of my son's future, in many respects too terrible to speak (for I fear that it may well be true). A future of flashing lights and barked instructions, where simple tasks performed correctly are rewarded with an insipid tune. A future in which all symbols have lost their potency. A future in which everyone is happy because they are unable to mourn the absence of an imagination they never developed.

Somehow this toy expressed to me everything that is wrong with our contemporary civilisation: the absolutely mindless drive towards the black curtain of the future, fuelled by prosaic economic considerations. This model of progress resists genuine innovation in favour of repackaged improvements of market-proven products. This kind of progress is best represented conceptually by the fractal, Koch's snowflake.

Koch's snowflake begins with an equilateral triangle, the points of which can be constrained within a circle – in this instance representing an initial concept, an idea in its simplest form. Half-size equilateral triangles are then added to the three sides of the original triangle. Then quarter-size triangles are added to the exposed edges of the half-size triangles and so on. The significance of Koch's snowflake in this context is that although it never exceeds its original area (as defined by the circle), its length is infinite. Likewise, the same products can be endlessly repackaged and resold, accreting unnecessary and ultimately detrimental 'improvements', onwards down to infinity.

And what effect does this have on us?

Our greatest single asset is our imagination. It is the source of every genuinely great development, invention, idea or innovation since the dawn of humankind. But it needs space to grow and, like a muscle, it needs to be flexed. It needs to be encouraged in our children and, more importantly, should not expire as we mature. Our society should aim to cultivate imagination, to nurture, respect and reward it - not repress, restrict and restrain it.

Without our imagination we are a civilisation in decline, collapsing into banality and the infinite uncharted minutiae of the consumer Koch fractal.