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.]