every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
tales of the Round Table
try to imagine creating them. there you are a singer, a storyteller, maybe a harpist, full of life and the joy of life, in a world that Christianity has sealed into a thousand years of darkness. you begin to conceive a story of a magnificent king who begins as a bright and curious boy, becomes a knight and a leader of knights, carves out a kingdom, then makes a kingdom of the whole island! and you realize you can't tell this, not without being burned alive just for thinking it up, without burying it in Christian clutter. so you come up with a great wizard, Merlin, who is so necessary to the kingdoms that the church does not bother him, who arranges for one great king to trick another king's wife into letting him bed her, which brings about the prince you want, but of course the king and the queen have to die tragically for they have sinned. you have Merlin secretly arrange for the boy to be brought up by a knight so poor that even his foster children are ignored. and after the king who needed help bedding another man's wife - that happens in the Bible too, so it's okay - dies without apparent issue, Merlin comes up with a sword in a stone that only the scrawny foster son of a poor knight can pull from the stone, so everyone accepts him as the new king. now even your most inveterate believer in fairy tales is probably gonna have trouble with that, so you have that scrawny kid grow up into a magnificent knight and leader of knights who goes out and wins Twelve Great Battles which extend his kingship from not much more than a county to the whole damned island! and then Merlin brings him a magic table so big around, and it is round, that fifty knights can sit around it and still talk to each other and boast about knightly deeds and so forth. you invent a best friend knight, Lancelot, who is in love with the king's queen Guinevere - rounding out the story of infidelity that Arthur began with. oh, oh, oh! and you make up stories for each of those fifty knights, and some of them are so cloying that monks love them, but others are so robust they live for boys for hundreds of years longer than knights charge into battle. you even arrange for One Last Great Battle (making it thirteen, just like Jesus and the disciples) in which Arthur and the fifty knights are destroyed even though they win in some sense. then Arthur is carried from the battlefield by three queens - kinda like the three wise men - to some magical island where he may get to live or maybe not, you don't have to be clear about that. and you get to tell your story and live without getting burned, and your stories outlive you by about fifteen hundred years, and people figure out that even if they can't get rid of the Christian clutter, the stories are not Christian at all, they're just wonderful.
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