It is winter again. It is time to leave the halls of feasting and revelry and step over the threshold out into the snow. Outside things become clearer. You understand as if for the first time that you cannot live forever in the pleasure of someone else’s court. There is a dark forest ahead and this is the route you will take. Here you could fail, will fail. Perhaps like Perceval you will fail to ask the obvious questions that need asking and the land will remain unhealed. Like Chretien de Troyes, the author writing your story may suddenly die and you will have no way to complete your quest. Try to get it right the first time because there may not be a second chance.
Then again, it’s Christmastime so while your armour rusts in the rain and you cannot ride for shaking with the cold, remember the angels’ words “Goodwill to men’. And to women. And to you.
But let’s consider poor Perceval. Raised by his mother to be a polite young man, when he becomes a knight in Arthur’s court for all his bravery and way with deadly weapons, he lacks simple human curiosity. Taken in by a mysterious Fisher King, he decently fails to comment on the man’s painful wound, he politely fails to enquire about a mysterious ritual involving maidens, a lance and a grail. Don’t be nosy, his mother would have said. Please and thank you will do. Well they won’t. And when Perceval wakes up alone in the Waste Land he still doesn’t understand the test he has just failed. He doesn’t understand its terrible stakes. It takes a woman to point out his failure and he weeps at what he could have achieved.
Later writers working with the Perceval legend put things right, however. He goes back, asks the questions: What happened to you? Is that a…a Grail? And everything is mended. The King is healed, the land is no longer Waste.
What questions are we not asking ourselves? What questions are we not asking others? Will we ignore obvious evidence of suffering in others? The obvious evidence of mystery in our lives? Are we content to live in a Waste Land forever? Are you? Am I?
Fisher Kings
‘Perceval the wretched! Ah, unlucky Perceval, how unfortunate you were when you failed to ask all this, because you would have brought great succour to the good king who is maimed: he would have totally regained the use of his limbs and ruled his lands, and much good would have come of it! But understand this now: how much suffering will befall you and others.’
The Story of the Grail (Perceval) Chrétien de Troyes
What ails you, uncle?
Where do I begin?
The wasted land,
the wasted limb.
The simple knight
home-schooled,
mollycoddled,
naïve and fooled
by codes of good behaviour
and being the perfect guest,
okay in their own way,
but deadly on a quest.
Come out with it, boy,
the man is clearly sick,
wounded and in pain,
and the set-up is a trick
to see what you are made of,
and you will fail
if you imagine mummies’ boys
can use the Grail
to make a dead land prosper,
heal a broken heart,
but basic human decency
is a good place to start.
What happened to you,
begging on the street,
in prison, drunk,
broken, incomplete?
You are the Fisher King,
so many fish uncaught.
Who does the Grail serve?
Who does it not?