What is the deal with knighthood? Where do you start? What in the ten thousand squid hells IS a knight nowadays anyway?
Well, I can't really say what a knight is. I could talk about what I am but aside from making me feel like a teacher feels when he repeats the same damn thing for the umpteenth time, it's also painfully boring. I could also talk about what I think other people are, but raging enemies are bad for digestion. Especially if they want to stick a piece of steel in it.
So instead one should speak of what a knight should be today. Not yesterday, hell a few hundred years ago they were still just metal-clad maniacs with big swords. All that honor-and-duty is simply bribed minstrels mucking about.
So, to start us off, let us first define what we speak of. What does the word "knight" mean? Well, let's see. It's derived from the Saxon word for a "servant". Ah. Tells a lot. A knight is supposed to serve something. And chivalry? Well, it actually means "service on horseback". Bummer, where the hell will we get a horse these days. No, I say, let's change that. Let's change chivalry into chevalry - service in chevrolet. It's a cool line of cars, and you can also "levy in a chevy", which is something every rhyme-loving damsel in distress should swoon at!
So now we know that modern knights are people who serve a higher goal while driving cool and expensive cars, or failing that, people who serve a higher goal while driving a bycicle. Or a Pinto, whichever is worse.
Service
Let us focus on the service part of the knightly business. To be a knight, it is not enough that you simply follow the guidelines of honesty, bravery and compassion. You must also pack that into some higher goal which you can faithfully serve and thus feel vastly superior to the common peasantry of everyday life, and therefore succeed perfectly in being an annoying arse of a man who fails not to wring everyone's brains bone dry with his superfluous oratories and leave them sobbing in the misery of truly anti-orgasmic proportions.
No wait. That's a politician.
A higher goal is a simple thing. It is not necessarily a thing of titanic or even heroic proportions. It is enough that it rests upon the ground higher than that which you are resting your spiritual feet on. For example, constant betterment of the world is a nice, rounded goal which should be appealing to every errant chevy driver. You can even fail miserably at it and feel all penitent for a day or two without killing anyone. And it does not require you to lose your legs, arms and ears in some insane battle with the evildoers of the world - bettering the world goes all the way from stopping a mad scientist from unleashing a nuclear warhead into the core of the world and burning every city on this planet with liquid hot mag-ma, to simply helping a little old lady cross the street and then dodging a vicious blow from her crutch when she figures out you must be trying to ravish her because nobody today can be that nice.
So, what is a knight? Simply a man serving ideals of truth, valor and compassion. You can serve truth by doing your best to become a really good philosopher, so you can skillfully dodge accusations of various people who figured out that truth ain't absolute. But mainly you serve the truth by always being honest with yourself and with people around you. Even if they don't like it. Hell, even if YOU don't like it!
Valor is served by drinking stuff out of umarked bottles in suspicious-looking laboratories. No wait, that's stupidity. You serve valor properly only if you sharpen your mind daily. Only then can you know when to charge and when to sidle-around inconspicuously.
And compassion is the ability to know how much pain you apply by the way of your iron-studded boot. We all got spikes on our feet, no matter how many times we go to the manicurist. Compassion is simply the awareness of another's condition, their problems, worlds and ideas. Compassion is the respect for the common living being. It is the ballast on the hot air baloon of our ego.
Or to put it succintly, the Code of the modern knight could be:
A Knight always serves the Truth through loyalty to Truth, Valor through facing the Truth and Compassion through awareness of the Truth.
And from that you can be... anything...
Simple, ain't it? Try combining the damn things. Cheers!
Post je objavljen 11.12.2004. u 18:51 sati.