Wise King Taken by the Foolish One


essay no. 2

Miscreants and Hypothobes: Case studies in real and fictitious - but equally threatening - evils

Dan Plonsey
October, 2001

Keywords: corridor(s), falling, hamburgers

Go to:
Wise King essays, home page, or one of the Wise King essays: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, or Plonsey's "Kingdoms Diptych" home page, or Dan Plonsey home page.

Miscreants and Hypothobes: Case studies in real and fictitious - but equally threatening - evils

Come on in - it's just a teensy bit dishevelly - perhaps a lot - but not to the point where we're miscreants or hypothobes or something, whatever they call people, the technical term, I mean, for those people who are allergic to cleanliness, and who often soil themselves deliberately, in public, just for the warm slimy feel of it. (For such people, incidentally, the accompanying smell is a pleasantly overpowering companion.) You can see that we're not such wise inclined, not at all! In point of fact, we're a sort of hyped and lapsed royalty, just caught in between household staffs, or staves, as musicians say. The butler's been held up on the continent, and the maid has run off with the stable horse man and his boy, but the cook lingers on with us, getting a bit old and crotchety, as likely to miss a meal as cook it, and even more annoyingly, forgetting to tell us which it will be until the very moment when the meal either is or should have been upon the table. We're going out to some cool local cuisine, though: Thai, Salvadoran, Vietnamese... There's even a fine fatty hamburger shack in which every worker and customer is coated thickly in grease about the face, scalp and forearms, but which is in many other respects quietly elegant; frequented by your finer sort of loser, the truly tragic ones. It is there that I imagine I overheard the following conversation:

"What I do is to get into the head of someone, as deep as I can, and from that vantage point I unleash an improvised monologue which reveals something about a fictionally `typical' representative of a profession... For instance, the most horrible of hucksters, who has convinced himself that children can be broken into four categories: `The male-male, female-male, male-female, female-female. These categories can be determined by considering a whole array of immediately apparent surface characteristics, such as: size, aggressiveness, selfishness, appreciation of beauty, etc., though ultimately the child may be assigned to a category much more randomly than you might suppose; people will accept just about any identity assignment. Being right some of the time is better than being close all the time. Now then: you pitch your artistic output to just one of these categories, and people are convinced that it's designed and intended especially for them.'"

"That's because people are stupid."

"Stupid people, in this sense, are made, not born. They start out smart enough, but end up being dumb: get it beaten out of their heads. Only it isn't easy. You gotta get it beaten out a dozen times, at all stages of development, every year, every place, by everybody. Push it, press it, weigh it, reduce it. No secret. `Way to go!' Hallejulah."

"Isn't it worth it to fight back? I mean, we were attacked!"

"No, it isn't. Unless what you like is fighting, and you're discrete enough to wait for an excuse rather than to instigate, for it is universally agreed that the instigator is the diabolical one (the `terrorist'), even though he knows he can count on responders - the 'fighting-back' guys... `And maybe this time I can get them to destroy the world, or maybe my number will come up and they will destroy my world. The "Wise King Taken..."'"

"But destruction could occur at any time, and ultimately will, for each one of us, and the timing is not a measure of guilt or innocence. It's just random."

"But supposing I am granted that agonizing sensation of being dragged back to life from death - unspeakable horror lies ahead! The death of my parents, my spouse, my child! Doors all gradually closing, leaving me alone in a long brightly-lit corridor of closed doors until my body (which must fight to the bitter end) relaxes, and ushers me out the very last door, the one I can't see from here, which I wouldn't choose to see even if I could..."

"Is there a positive spin - or an alternative - to the foregoing scenario?"

"Only that the intense experience of having the Beloved King Taken is to be appreciated for its very intensity. It is a preparation for the supreme pain and loss. Maybe it's like falling - from the warmth of an airplane, carefully parachuted, dropping like a stone until such time as we pull the cord."

Logic flies out the door, and intuition, or chance, takes over, trying to make sense of many clashing images by arbitrarily choosing one - and that would probably be one of those trails which leads into the remotest of uncharted wilderness...

-- Dan Plonsey, October 2001,
El Cerrito, California

Go to:
Wise King essays: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, or Plonsey's "Kingdoms Diptych" home page, or Dan Plonsey home page.