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A Larger, Rounder Table

For some years, I taught a course on the Arthurian legends, as a way that England came to define itself.
Once, when Winston Churchill was asked if the legends were true--that is to say, historical--he said:
"They are true.  They are all true, or they ought to be, and more and better besides!"

 I wrote a rather long poem about the Knights of the Round Table, and read it as a chapel talk, there where I taught, thinking to explain, without saying it, how it was not only England that created such myths, built on small fragments of historical fact, in order to explain who they were, what their ideals are; something of themselves and what they ought to be.

And in that poem, which I have not seen for years, I recalled that my mother scolded me in the morning, recognizing that I must have been awake, all night again, reading; that there were morning chores to be done, and school to go to.  And I had been awake, reading from a stack of Zane Grey books left behind by a previous owner, I guess.  I read them all; not all of Zane Grey's books--so many of them there are!--but all that we had.

Today I bought tickets to an Arizona Opera Society production of Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey's most famous book, now become an opera.  I can scarcely wait.

We have our own stories and legends and myths that help us understand who we are.  Many of them are religious; stories of the gods and their adventures, giving us a way to understand why we exist, how a potter took clay and . . . , or a rib from Eve . . . , how Arthur gathered the best knights of the realm around a great, round table and. . . .  Other places and cultures have their own stories.  Coyote tales.  Roland.  Odin.  Samurai warriors.  Many-armed gods.

We, here in America, in the somewhat United States, also have our legends, and stories; true, all true, or they ought to be.  They are, sometimes, Old West stories; Zane Gray stories, pioneer stories, frontier stories.  There are good guys, bad guys, pioneers pushing west, uneasy with Old Europe, with too much civilization, with having gotten too far away from the land, and too near to each other, still able to see the smoke from a neighbor's fire.  It is how we understand our need for law and order--the good guy riding into town--and our dislike of too much law and order.  It is, also, how we grew up telling cowboy and Indian stories, and how we never quite get rid of our . . . our awful notions about race, and that we deserved this land, which was not ours until we took it, and of some terrible notion of our superiority.

They are powerful stories, those legends, and myths, in our books and minds and religions and culture.

Maybe they are true to something.  Maybe not.  Maybe we need more.  And better.  Besides.  A larger, rounder table.



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