Le Quatrième Pentamètre

Wisdom

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding

~ Kahlil Gibran

There was a Fine Young King. He was vigorous, strong, and a good man in every respect. He loved to hunt, and one day he was hunting deer on horseback with his courtiers.

In Indian mythology, The Call of The Inner World, The Call of The Unconscious, is often portrayed as a deer that is tantalizingly close but eludes being caught.

The King and his courtiers were galloping along when the King saw a deer just out of bow-and-arrow range. He veered off and began following it, but the miraculous deer kept just outside his range. The King went plunging further and further into the forest, chasing the deer all day, so intent was he, in his masculine vigor, to catch this prized animal. By late afternoon, the King was irretrievably lost, and the deer had vanished.

What a wonderful deer. He gets you where you need to go and then leaves you.

The King was exhausted and rather frightened, as he was now separated from his courtiers. Being a wise young man, he got off his horse and sat down.

If you don't know What to Do, sit quietly, until your wits come back.

Suddenly he heard a beautiful song. A maiden was singing as he had never heard before, and he fell in love with her very voice. He got up, began to walk toward the sound, and soon came upon her. The maiden was as lovely as her voice, and the King, overwhelmed by her beauty, instantly lost his heart to her.

He asked, "Are you married?" and the maiden said, "No." The King said, "Will you be my queen?" and the maiden replied, "You must ask my father." So he asked her to take him to her father, and she did.

The father, himself a wise man, was delighted at the prospect of having a king for a son-in-law, but he didn't let his enthusiasm appear too obvious. So he said, "You may have my daughter as your wife under one condition. She must never see water." 

If you replace the word water with the word reality, you will understand this story easily. 

The King agreed, and the young couple married. But there was one problem—keeping the Queen from seeing water.

Avoiding Reality 

The King did his best to arrange for the Queen to see no water, but the task was more difficult than he anticipated. The palace was located right along the river that ran through the royal city. So the King ordered the royal laborers to build a brick wall alongside the river. Before he would take the Queen outdoors or up to the palace roof, he also had to be careful that there was no rain on the horizon. In fact, the King spent almost all his time arranging things so the Queen would not see water, and he did little else. The kingdom was going to seed, as he wasn't per- forming most of his kingly duties.

Finally, one day, the courtiers cornered him and said, "You never meet with us. You're not managing the kingdom." And the King said, "I have no time. Go away." The head courtier, seeing that the kingdom was in dire straits and that there was no use asking the King again, as he was out of his mind, went to the servants and asked, "How does the palace work? What do you do?" The servants told him, "We spend all our time making sure the Queen does not see water."

What is this myth telling us? The King is in the throes of the forward-looking possibility, but his new found love, who would fill his heart and bring him all the legitimate happiness in the world, has a condition laid upon her—that she must never be subjected to reality. Every love affair, every Stardust romance, carries this prohibition. It will work as long as you don't subject it to reality, as long as it doesn't come down to ordinary everydayness. If ordinary everydayness— water, in the symbolism of the story—ever douses this fallen-in-love quality, the feeling dis- solves instantly. That is the story of romantic love.