I dreamt about the prince once.  He doesn’t show himself much, these days.  In the dream, we sat on a bus and discussed our lives.  He had been neglected in recent centuries; his manner, his morals, the entirety of his quest had been pushed backward by a collective repression of a collective consciousness of mankind.  He had been flung, willy-nilly, into a mesh contrived by holy men, a convoluted and whimsical conspiracy of damsels and dragons and courtly love.  And what is he given?  An endless role wherein he gallops towards a deadly Fate, lance couched or sword in hand, to deliver his maiden from her molester, never protesting, never faltering one moment in his sense of duty and gallantry.  Is he ever given a moment’s thought of his own?  Does he ever question the peril that lies ahead of him?  Does he go to his love upon a whim, upon some eternal pursuit for the perfection of mindless heroism?  Is it by chance that he comes upon his Snow White in a glade and kisses her, stranger maiden he has never seen?  Is it with pure luck that he steps out from a milieu of ugly stepsisters and wicked stepmothers, pumpkins and glass slippers and fairy godmothers, simply to have his dance with Cinderella?  In fact, he says, the prince might as well have been born a piece of cardboard, for all civilised people cared.  He certainly seems to act like one, these days.  He enters the stage from a castle and a realm that float in some vague place upon the borders of fairytale.  He meets his true love – a princess or a gentlewoman or a noble lady in the disguise of poverty – they are parted; he disappears only to rematerialize, out of the blue, and rescue her only after some amazing feat of his strength and prowess.  And sometimes, he continues, in ever increasing resentment, the prince is relegated to even further non-entity status, simply arriving to awaken his princess with a kiss.

            So, I ask him, what is the prince for, if not to fight for morality, chivalry and equality?  Is he not like the knights of yore, those faceless nobles who bestowed mercy upon those who craved it, who never failed to aid the damsel in distress, who honoured his lord and king without reserve?  What else was expected of the prince?

            He rolls his eyes, good-natured.  The prince, he says, the prince of the fairytales, has been demoted.  He has been transferred to the part of puppet, of finger-puppet.  His deeds are as indicative of the chivalrous ideals as an accountant plodding through his daily routine.  Later men degraded the original importance of his role.

            And what was his importance, I ask?

            The Grail, he answers.

            The Grail? I repeat incredulously.  But, I remind him pointedly, the Grail was a fairytale as well!

            Only inasmuch as it was given the name ‘Grail’, and was said to have held the blood of Christ, he protests.  Because, of course, it wasn’t really a grail at all.  At least, not in the concrete sense we have come to believe it was.  We know it by many other names as well.

            Such as…

            Such as the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Resurrection, the third thing, the integrated consciousness…

            We’re talking alchemy now? I question dubiously.

            Oh, only one explanation amongst many, he answers off-handly, waving a hand as if to brush away any further questions I might have.  For instance, one might say the Grail is actually the lapis exulis of the Kabbalah, the Divine Manifestation, which inevitably makes itself known through the…

            Tarot? I finish for him.

            Exactly, he nods.

            I shake my head.  I don’t understand, I say.  So what the knights were looking for was the same thing as the alchemists, the mystics and diviners – not to mention our own psychologists – were looking for?

            No.  He looks suddenly frustrated.  It is what all of us were and are looking for.  How do you think I managed to penetrate even your mind, corroded and degraded as I am into this?  A fairytale prince in these ridiculous doublets and britches!  Someone who’s only read about in night time storybooks to little children!  Children know more about the Grail nowadays than anyone else in this so-called ‘civilised’ world.

            He drops his chin into a hand, falling into some sort of bitter reverie.

            I don’t see anything about the ‘Grail’ in children’s stories, I interject, beginning to feel frustrated as well.

            Of course you don’t! – he sits up indignantly, no one does!

            Well then, I say, explain it to me.

            He tells me about Sleeping Beauty, for instance.  I point out acidly that there is no ‘Holy Grail’ in that fairytale.  Yes, there is, he says levelly.  Where? I ask.  Sleeping in her tower.  Sleeping Beauty? I grimace, unbelieving.  A metaphor, he returns slyly.  Surely you should know about such things.  You’re a writer, after all.  You know, this world is all about two parts.  Ever heard of Yin and Yang?

            I reply that I have.

            Well, there’s yang, he says.  Male, hot, dry, creative, logical.  Then there’s yin.  Female, cold, moist, imaginative, intuitive.  Strike a balance between the two and you have a perfect whole being.  You have, in effect, the Holy Grail.

            Now, who do you think Sleeping Beauty is?  She’s the yin to my yang, of course.  Sitting in my castle, feasting, rejoicing, hunting, singing, dancing, meeting pretty women…Do you think I am able to find a balance in all these things?  Of course not!  But upon a certain day, I will hear of the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, passing through this realm, telling stories of their search for the Holy Grail.  In fact, let’s make this easier for your so-called imaginative mind to grasp.  Those knights, they actually turn up at my castle one evening.  There they are – Percival and Galahad and Bors, sitting next to me at the banquet table.  And I ask them, what brings thee to this land, so far away from thine own homes and countrymen?  What treasure is it that thou dost seek?

            And they reply, we seek to go to yonder wood, wherein lies the greatest treasure on this earth, the Lord’s gift from heaven, which is called the Holy Grail.

            Now, I would bid you note, he breaks off to say to me, that the Grail lies within yonder wood.  To you, perhaps, it is a wood of thorny briar roses, hiding away the princess in her sleeping castle.

            I make the link.  Meaning what? I ask.

            Why, what must we all do before we reach what we perceive as a ‘perfect’ state?  We must go through hardship and toil.  Sometimes, we may even have to face our inner demons.  What we call it is ‘going through the forest’.  Going into the darkness.  Getting tangled in and held back by all those annoying, spiky branches that get in the way.  Battling with the monsters that one’s own self has created.  You won’t find yourself any other way.

            Anyway, he carries on impatiently, I ask those knights, and what is it that thou dost seek in this Holy Grail?

            The enlightenment of Christ, they say, and the restoration of the Wasteland.

Anyhow, I am all aflame with curiosity.  Even after the brave knights have gone, I can find no peace with the thoughts of their singular quest.  I come to realise that my present life holds no satisfaction, no harmony or tranquillity for me.  My life has become the Wasteland.  And I think, how may I remedy this?  Of course, by joining in the pursuit for the Holy Grail myself.  So I set out early in the morning, galloping away from the castle upon my steed. 

But I do not come upon a forest of trees.  Instead I come upon a forest of twisted, thorny briar roses.  Daunting, certainly, but fitting.  The thorns, perhaps they symbolise the pinpricks I have been dealt in this life.  And the roses, perhaps they symbolise the blood of those pinpricks.  Or perhaps they represent an unfolded beauty deep inside me, one I have yet to find.  Either way, it is a message to me.  It is a summons to look within, as I was so afraid to do so before.  And looking in upon myself, I see the emptiness of my days, laid out behind me in a meaningless trail, spread out before me in a hopelessly obscure mist.  What have I lived for but the pleasure and the satisfaction of my body, of a life caught up in the here and the now, the tangible and the material?  Was there ever anything deeper?  I am caught up in a terrible guilt, a terrifying despondency, that I should never before have sought, never even have thought to begin the search into my own self.  I do not deny that a wave of self-pity washed over me at that moment. 

But then there is the thicket, standing before me, inviting me in, so to speak.  Can I refuse the invitation?  Most certainly not.  I am stronger than my own indifference, I say to myself.  I am stronger than my decadence, than my hedonism, than my sickening self-pity.  And so I lift my sword, and make ready to battle with the thorns, to tear them down with force, to injure myself in the process if I must.  But the brambles, they part ways for me.  They draw back, as though from a magic spell, opening a path through which I may walk through, right up to the very gates of that sleeping palace.

And why?  Because, I had seen fit to face myself.  I had fought half the battle.  The battle is not with outer monstrosities.  It always has been, and always will be with inner monstrosities.  How can we judge the evil of others, when we cannot even recognise the evil in ourselves?  Accept them and they will leave you.  They may still be yours, but if you admit that they are there, then you have the will to control them. 

But I didn’t realise that then.  Eyes wide, mind all a-wonder, I walked down that path, looking about me, seeing the castle ahead, silent and unmoving as a worn ancient statue.  And as I come up to the gates, I see the first victims of the black shadow fairy’s spell – two guards, dressed in full armour, one leaning upon his spear, the other crumpled up on the ground, snoring blithely, fast sleep.  There would have been something comical about it, had I not been so recently enlightened at my own sorry state of mind.  To me, these sleeping men were as mannequins, dead to the world.

That’s a phrase we use nowadays, I put in wryly.

Well, it’s a good phrase, because it means what it says.  At least, in the context of this fairytale.  The sleeping state, it is an escape from the pressures of our everyday lives.  Now let us say, we dream at night, do we not?  Men have always dreamed.  Why have they always dreamed, when dreams make no utter sense at all?  If we had no need for dreams, surely we would evolved, as your Darwin purports, to sleep without dreaming?

Are you disagreeing with Darwin? I asked, somewhat shocked.

See, you already judge and misjudge me, he notes sourly.  As a matter of fact, I was agreeing with Darwin.  The answer to my question is simple, of course.  We, as a human species, still dream because we need to dream.

But you said it yourself.  Dreams make no sense at all.  At best, they’re jumbled recollections of the events that have occurred during the day.

But then how do you explain what some call ‘lucid dreaming’?  Dreams where one is aware that he is dreaming, when one may control what he dreams?  Or what of dreams that predict things that happen after you dream them.  And what about utterly nonsensical dreams that bear no relevance to one’s life at all?

They’re symbols, I guess, I reply.

Exactly, he rejoins triumphantly, you’ve made my point exactly.

What do you mean?

Well, for instance, if you were to characterise the dark side of your inner self – the side that is composed of all those horrible things that have happened to you and that you turn away from; the side that hates; the side that thinks all kinds of devious hateful, things – how would you represent such a character?

I don’t know…A monster, I suppose.  Well, once I had a dream, and there was a witch in it, and I was afraid of her.  And when I was a kid, there was a phantom, totally black, and I couldn’t see any of its features.

All right, he nods.  A monster, a witch, a phantom.  I think most people would say the same thing.  Who’s the witch in this story then?  The wicked fairy, is it not so?  And she puts everyone to sleep.  Now any normal person, they’d loathe the dark side of themselves, wouldn’t they?  Every time their shadow self would try to make itself known, you’d just slap that beast right back down, wouldn’t you?

It’s what anyone would do, I agree.

Well, there you go, your darker side is casting its sleeping spell on you, isn’t it?  It’s making you pretend it isn’t there, so it’s allowed to grow and to fester, and in some cases, slowly drive you mad.  And if you believe something’s not there, you’re not likely ever to face it, are you?

I guess not, I reply slowly, realising.  There is a pause.  So, I say, the wicked fairy…is a metaphor for the ‘dark side’ of ourselves?

Possibly, maybe, he says airily.  You know, when people wrote down their fairytales, they only wrote down a set of archetypes that had been handed down to them from time immemorial.  They were much worn and degraded, but human archetypes nonetheless.  Throughout the ages, humans have always had the same makeup, always had the same emotions and instincts running through their veins; or their genes, I suppose you could say.  The genes of yesterday are stored in the genes of today.  The archetypes of yesterday are preserved in the archetypes of today.  The stories of yesterday are recycled and reborn in the stories of today.  It’s all one continuous heirloom.  The human heirloom.  Our story.

What happens next? I urge him hungrily.  Now he has caught me, I am all in awe, all in suspense.  Where do you go next?

The only natural thing is to go inside, he replies.  He lingers upon the word ‘inside’ as though relishing it.  There is not a single soul to stop me, he says after a moment’s pause.  And yet, I expect something to be there, hiding behind a pillar or a column, squatting in a niche like a sly-faced gargoyle.  All about is an air of antiquity, of a haunting eeriness.  It is almost like a storehouse.  A storehouse of old memories, flitting through dusty, musty clouds of the cobwebbed past.  Whose past, you might ask?  Mine, yours, oh everyone’s I should imagine.  That dandelion seed, for instance, floating idly across the great barren courtyard, right past the nose of a softly breathing serving maid, what does that signify?  For my part I am taken in by reveries of summer days spent in the meadows of my palace gardens as a boy, catching seeds and butterflies with my poor old nanny desperately trying to keep up with me as I run here and there and everywhere.  And the sleeping scullery maid, whose nose the seed floats under, well, she reminds me of a girl I once loved, yet who I never spoke to.  She used to pass by my window every morning at the same time, to draw water from the well in the square.  The sweetest dreams and reveries I used to attribute to her comings and goings, and over the course of a year, during which I ever used to spy upon her over my studies, I scarcely realised it, but I had grown from a boy into a man.  And when a year had frittered away, she simply disappeared, and never came to the well anymore.  And I wondered, for a while, where she had gone.  But then, upon a certain day, I forgot about her, and I never thought of her again.

Until now, as I stand there in the courtyard, my eyes drawn to the fair-haired maid as they follow the lazy path of a dandelion seed gliding by.  And for a moment, I stand there, entranced, staring at her.  I remember, suddenly, involuntarily, the water-drawing girl of my youth, and how she had witnessed me, unconsciously, grow from a boy and into a man.  How her life had touched mine, unassumingly; yet indisputably, unquestionably, she had done so.  No matter that I had never once spoken to her, that never once had our glances met.  She was a part of me, buried and forgotten, but there nonetheless.  And as I left the maid, and wandered further into the castle, I felt a sense of release, a sense of elation, as if something had unlocked itself inside of me, and had flown free.

And indeed, the further I went, and the more sleeping people I saw, the more I seemed able to connect them in some way, however tenuous, to my own life.  These motionless statues, these oblivious sculptures of human life, human reason, they were mine.  They belonged to me; they always had.  I could not describe it.  It was as though they had been placed there for me.  It was as though I walked through a museum of my own recollections, my own imaginings, my own lifetime of thoughts.

Passing through the courtyard, I mounted the steps into the main hallway.  The depths of my museum had been reached.  I wandered as a man in a dream, held in a trance of bemusement and awe.  In an inner sanctum sat the king at his council, and there his ministers all lay before him, asleep.  The king, the ruler of the Wasteland.  Indeed he was fragile, hunched as he was in unconsciousness, his rich mantle draped over his thin body like over-sized sacking.  His face was lined and wrinkled as a prune, his beard, long and white, thick and tangled in his lap.  Dust gathered over him as it would an ancient skeleton in a crypt.  The Wasteland was his, and he was the Wasteland.  Bound they were, as man is to wife, as mind is to body.  He was broken as a porcelain puppet doll.  Shrivelled as a beggar.  And this poor thing, I found it hard to believe, was the keeper of the Grail itself.  He was the Fisher King.  He was the maimed king.  Such a blow the wicked fairy had dealt him!

            But there was naught I could do for him.  So I left him, in his high place, with his broken body, vulnerable as he was in sleep.  I mounted the stairs up to the highest point of the highest tower in the castle.  Higher and higher I climbed, circling upward further and further into the vaults of enlightened consciousness, the star-pricked canopy, the misty hinterlands, the rarely ascended summit.  This, I tell you, is the land of the Grail.  It is the spiral land of the self.  Whosoever fears to go there shall find naught.  No peace shall be his.  Only madness.

            You mean, I began to say in disbelief, that those who do not search are mad?

            All men are mad, he replies.  At least in part.  Why do you think we are ever sorrowful, ever dissatisfied?

            Because we are human?

            Yes, that is true.  Humans are bent to sadness, to suffering.  It is what makes us the creature we call Homo sapiens sapiens.  But it is not suffering that turns us mad.   It is never accepting, never facing that suffering and madness are an intrinsic part of human life.  One may spend his life running from madness, running into the arms of what he presumes is happiness.  But what he assumes satisfies him is only the momentary relief he finds in hiding from his own madness.  And this redoubles his suffering.  For when the madness returns, he is doubly thwarted.  For one to be truly happy is to embrace his madness, his suffering, to draw strength and inspiration from it.  For what is happiness without sorrow?  If we were eternally happy, how could we learn the worth of that happiness?

            Search, and one shall find himself, or he shall be eternally mired in his madness.

            And so, I climb the spiral staircase.  I make the search.  Now the spiral is really a beautiful thing.  Have you ever considered it for a moment?  It is comprised of two things.  It is half straight and half circle.  Almost like a circle stretched out through a straight line.  As I climb the stairs, I orbit that straight line, all the while ascending ever upwards.  Yet, like the circle, I can never see the next turn of my journey.  Where the circle will lead me is left only to blind intuition.  But circles, strangely, only lead back to the same place from whence one started.  Not the spiral though.  The spiral is a roundabout leap of faith.  But one always knows there will be an exit at the end where one has never been before.

            The straight line is yang.  The circle is yin.  Together they make a spiral called Balance.

            He his rambling, trailing off into metaphysical concepts that I can no longer understand.  Words tumble from his mouth, into my ears, into my head, and there form a whirlpool of letters and forms and ideas that skitter round and round, round and round, until one blurs into another and I can hold onto them no more.

            And what lies at the top of the spiral staircase? I ask him after a moment, after having stared at him dumbly for what seemed like several long minutes.

            Atop the staircase? He smiles briefly.  Atop the staircase is a starlit world of unparalleled beauty.  Nothing can describe it.  There is a dome atop the tower, and the dome is clear and translucent as a diamond, and in its arc has been placed a million stars shining out from a midnight blue sky.  And strange though it may seem to say it, the dome held on either end of its extremities both sun and moon, as if to say that in this place it is ever day and ever night, it is both the lucid and the dreaming.  And in the centre of this chamber, of this fair glade, of this sweet clearing, lies the princess serenely sleeping upon a bed of purest crystal, bathed in the radiance of this starlit daytime night.  Bright she is, fair as Nuith the night sky, dark as Ninki the Lady of Life, for in all things is she dark yet light, the duality of all held within this spinning universe.  Such is her beauty.

            And she is the thing I had sought.  She is the Grail Maiden.

            The Grail is a fairytale princess? I say.  There is something repulsive about the idea – I cannot say why.

            What shall she be called?  He sighs.  She is my one, she is my only, she is my anima.  But think on it for just a moment.  What exactly does the Holy Grail mean?  The French called it the Sangraal.  From which we derive the two words, San Graal, which means, of course, ‘holy grail’.  But what if we were to make a conjecture, and say that Sangraal is not San Graal, but is actually Sang Raal?

            Royal blood…I say.

            The Blood Royal, he corrects me.  Well, is not the princess a physical embodiment of such a thing?  But I only speculate here.  In reality, I suspect there are many threads that tie the Holy Grail to this or that or the other.  One can follow one strand only to find himself helplessly lost and wanting for the trail of another.  It would take a very brave man to bind all those threads together once more.  Some have done it, and have only been ridiculed.  I for one, have not the resolve.  I found my own personal Grail – that is all that matters.

            Again, his words brush past me like some elusive spirit.  What he is trying to say escapes me, like catching a fish that eternally slips from one’s grasp.  The edges of my eyesight begin to fray.  Some awareness then punctures me.  I begin to realise what I realise now – that a part of me is prostrate before him, lying on my back in bed; that another part is confined in my mind and yet somewhere very far away.

            And the princess? I ask him urgently, painfully aware that time is running short.  Do you awaken her?

            An obscure call, an obtuse summons from both within and without…A million neurotransmitters jangling through nerves of wire like complexity…Morse coding the same old signal over and over: - wake up wake up wake up wake up…

            He considers, stuck, frozen in a moment of utter transfixion, paralysed from the neck down, glittering under the starlit canopy of the inner dome.  Prince, hero, knight, philosopher, alchemist, diviner, astrologer, psychologist, scientist, traveller, seeker?  And now I see that he has been trapped in time, forever on the threshold of giving and receiving love’s first kiss.

            Awakening. 

That is all it is.  A skein of ancient wisdom, of ancient philosophy, of the Church and folklore, of the myth and fairytale, of science and technology, a golden line corrupted, now formed of lead…And where does it lead?  From there to now.  From truth to reality.  From spirit to body.  From inside to out.  From them to me.

            Truth finds itself: one only has to seek.

            Wake up.

            I wake up.

            Who is the princess?  She or me?

- END -