THE PUSUIT OF IDEALS
Ideals are not true. That is all you need know about them. They are on the same level as all other untruths one might think up. Where they lead is not where you want to go is lesson enough for any intelligent critter.
None of the so-called lower animals deal in ideals of any type. A male lion wants to be just that and has no interest whatsoever in being “King”. So, who is more intelligent? those who want to become an ideal or all the other animals? It takes a strong intelligence to see through the illusions of the adept tricksters of this world.
As a child I was introduced to an ancient ballad written in my ancestors’ neck of the woods. I do not recall now who read that tale to me but I do remember I knew at the finish I had been given great treasure I must learn to follow...heroes.. When older, I read it myself.
The yarn is of a would-be Knight of the Round Table named Gawain or Galahad in some translations. Gawain was a relative of Arthur the famous English King who ruled from Camelot. Prime stuff that.
What will be shared here is only the meat of the tale and not all its details although it be highly recommended to suffer the reading of the whole of it. It is all idilic. Made of the stuff of promises and oaths and bargains concerning the future. So familiar is it. A child is told of the dream to become an ideal knight of the court. He pursues the dream and it is realized. Almost all who pursue the dream will fail or the ideal would be useless to the realm. And we all know that the future is not ours.
In the Ballad a Green Giant shows up at Christmas to intrude upon the great celebration of King A and his knights, including Gawain, his nephew. The Giant challenges all. “If I bend my head in offering to any brave enough to cut off my head then I expect that one to meet me one year hence at the Green Chapel where I dwell and give me freely the same opportunity at his head. Anyone up to the challenge?
Gawain accepts. Arthur allows it. The Giant’s head is severed…but…the rest of the Giant remains standing alive. The headless man picks up his own head, laughs, mounts his horse and rides away after reminding Gawain and those present of Gawain’s duty to honor his promise to appear one year hence.
Thus begins a year of great agony for Gawain who does eventually survive many ordeals in order to keep his promise. This writing ends the tale here because what was seen on the reading was that Gawain was a young man who wanted badly for an ideal to come true. Ideals are not true. All of them are contrived by a society through its leaders as a scheme to rule over the wealth and resources of a territory claimed on behalf of those who follow some ideal of hoped-for splendor to be realized in the future. Let us not dwell on such nonsense further.
I met a woman once who bedazzled me with her splendor. I told her “You are the goddess all men desire!” She replied, “yes, and I believe all women are”
For quite a while I interpreted her remark to mean…I believe we all have the capacity to become goddesses. Now, I know she meant something quite different…”all women are goddesses”.
It strikes me now the anonymous author of The Green Knight believed that but a few young people have the capacity to become Knights and thus the ending of the Ballad is cloudy and mysterious, or, at least, in the version I was given.
My point is that at the outset Gawain could have saved himself all the agony of that horrible year pending his certain beheading and the trek to the Green Chapel, which was loaded with trials, by keeping his silence, ignoring the Giant’s challenge to accomplish an ideal…which has never, never, never been done by anyone.
Some may point out that Gawain was bound to follow his dreamed of ideal as he spoke up and honor requires it of him. This writer would point to a prior time when Gawain first undertook the ideal to become a Knight of the Round Table which eventually led him to the confrontation with the Green Knight years later and ask, what if Gawain had been more interested in being himself than in undertaking that pretense? The real challenge, absolutely and solidly based in truth, is “Am I not enough as I am?” And not “Am I enough to become an ideal based in complete illusion sponsored by a corrupt society promoting ambition and greed?”
So, some of you may decide I am foolish to fail to realize how strong is the pull on young people to “become” an ideal person in some fashion or another such as, famous as an artist, athlete, warrior, intellectual, peacemaker, etc. All ideals say “I am one out of millions who achieved greatness”; while it has been said in scripture all over the Earth “ each of you are, as you are, one out of millions born to be the unique being you are and contribute a vital role to the whole world”. Such people have nothing to live up to.
People at the end of life are divided into two groups 1) those who pursued an ideal to its logical conclusion to discover they never really lived after it is too late and 2) those who believe they either did not even try to achieve an ideal and, so, are cowards or they tried and are failures. The one job all fear most is to trash ideals to simply live fully as who they are each day. That remains a rarely attempted third option.
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