There was once a great King who had everything he wanted. He bedded every concubine he fancied. He told people what to do. Sometimes he chopped off their heads if he was in a bad mood, or if they looked at him. He rose when he felt like it, went to bed when he wanted and ate whatever he could imagine in between. There was no-one to remind him to wash behind his ears, nor to slurp his pearls dissolved in vinegar, or wipe the blood from his bejewelled dagger.
Now, you’d think the satisfactions of such a great and mighty lord would only be exceeded by the exploits of his loins, the adventures of his voluptuous gut. Yet, it was not so. Having had every pleasure centre in his considerable frame exercised way past satiation the poor King felt bored, bored, bored.
One day, as he sat at yet another groaning table, stuffed beyond use with the toil of his subjects, he simply had enough and swept the delicacies to the floor.
‘Bring me the Cook!’
The man was bought in chains and thrown before his majesty.
” If you don’t bring me something to eat that I haven’t had before, something really satisfyingly, lipsmackingly delicious, I will have your head.’ So the Cook tried everything he could but nothing satisfied the already satiated. Not Goose flambed in peach liquor, nor tomato and basil ice cream, nor nut roast with figs and almonds. Eventually, in despair, Cook tucked a loaf of bread under his arm and fled into the forest.
Before long his escape was reported and the King gave chase with riders and hounds. Furious and famished our mighty lord drove down his exhausted subject. They found the terrified misery hiding in a tree pretending to be dead. This pretense caused him to lose his grip of the bread which fell down and rolled to the King’s feet. What manner of strange object is this? He picked it up carefully in case it was armed or had teeth. ‘It is bread your majesty, poor people’s food’. The King’s rumbling belly tweaked at his curiosity and so he took a bite… to find it was the most delicious thing he’d eaten since he was a babe in arms… which put him in such good humor he neglected to kill the man who made it.
The great debate over whether aggression is learned or innate seems to skip past the possibility that human aggression might have been conditioned by sudden changes in the weave of cultural patterning which happened somewhere in-between the imprinting of ancient instinct and the contemporary lessons of your own lifetime. Something happened within the time span of Homo sapiens which separates us utterly from ancestors which otherwise look just like us.
When social bands presided over by chiefs became cities presided over by kings, becoming ‘civilised’ was a necessary compensation for sudden increases in our collective aggression, fired into life by a new pattern of inequalities and paranoias which simply didn’t exist before. Kingship was to polarise social groups as never before into the twin tragedies of having too much and having too little.
‘There are two great tragedies in life, not getting what you want, and getting it.’ O. Wilde.
To get all you want is to live in fear; that you’ll lose it, that it will be stolen, that the Universe will ask you, ‘now what?’ The King lives in fear in a way the Chief does not. This fear is bound to then course through the people. The divine right of succession is a double edged sword. It makes leadership way more precarious. The rule of succession is also a hit list. You cannot help but become hyper-vigilant, paranoid and super aggressive. Assassins could be anywhere. The smallest deviation of protocol must be punished. All must bow and show show the backs of their necks.
In recent history you could be publicly executed for being in the company of Gypsies for more than a month, impersonating a Chelsea pensioner, or even being ‘a malicious child’. To stay in power others must be cut down for the slightest infringement. The king’s fear then becomes your fear. What we think of as the aggressive patriarchal attitude is rooted in fear. The King does not merely stuff down and distract himself from his fear, he has to forcibly put it into the Cook and then hunt him down.
“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” Machiavelli
Kingship comes with a kitbag of troubles for King and Cook alike. The King gets to be the target of every envious eye whilst feeling empty and curiously unfed despite all the delicacies bought to his table. This dissatisfaction with pleasures previously imagined to be the hieght of aspiration is going to lead quickly to existential crisis and the kind of lashing out that goes with feeling cheated. I have everything, why am I so lonely and unfulfilled?
The King’s subjects then have to reckon with a bad-tempered and sulky leader, prone to temper tantrums and decisions everyone might regret in the morning. People are like bees, placid for as long as the leader is in a good mood and emitting the right pheromones. If we get collectively belligerent its on account of what the leader is putting out or failing to. The assault on the US Capitol and recent events in South Africa show quite clearly how collective aggression is amplified and spun out of control by the mood swings of a single reified person.
Psychologically, the King and the Cook seem to represent that crisis in any journey of self discovery where the habituated and dominant mind set/identity has run its course and yet still needs some kind of elusive transformation. You have attained your goal but somehow can suck no more marrow from it. Life has gotten easy and taken for granted. Success makes you arrogant yet whole other aspects of life are being left untended and unsavored.
Meantime the creative capacity to bring meaning and satisfaction, is relentlessly persecuted and has to play dead to try and save itself. Much of life’s suffering comes from having to suppress oneself, emergent qualities and attributes have to be deadened in order to maintain a stable self-structure.
In our story the situation is redeemed entirely by accident/grace. The bread which the Cook had bought for himself slips between his fingers in the process of playing dead, falling to the ground at the King’s feet, like manna from Heaven, with enlightening consequences. The King rediscovers his ordinariness in the sweat, grime and hunger of his adventure into the Unconscious. The Cook is saved by luck, or is there some divine intervention?
Either way the situation is healed by something other than heroic effort. In fact the poor Cook is just trying to save his skin. Rather, a synchronous event takes place which then constitutes a non-rational solution to the problem of the overweening personality. The moment of transformation, the sense of a spell being lifted, happens by itself, Deo Concedente, once both Cook and King have exhausted their respective prerogatives, one to flee in self preservation, the other to tyrannically persecute. It’s as though things have to come to a head between conflicting instincts to both preserve and create for the ‘accident’ to take place, involving a brush with death of some kind..
A great deal gets written about how we heal and grow. The beauty of our story is that it seems to condense it all down into such wonderfully simple principles. It happens in its own time in its own way, sometimes in the midst of crisis, yet without forcing and seemingly by chance, unexpectedly nourishing in its profound ordinariness.
