The Lily Maid of Astolat begged Lancelot to love her, to marry her or -- if he would not -- at least to take her as paramour. He would do neither, the one for the love of Guinevere and the other out of respect for her virtue. She took herself to her bed and died, but revenged herself on him by having her body brought to Camelot with a letter complaining that he had refused her love. It is a bitter story and a sad one, but a better story than today's.
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Elaine understood that her complaint, though the sorrow of it brought her to her death, imposed no duty on Lancelot. He might be ashamed to have caused her such pain, when she had done him only good. But his defense was valid, as Camelot agreed:
And when Sir Launcelot heard it word by word, he said: My lord Arthur, wit ye well I am right heavy of the death of this fair damosel: God knoweth I was never causer of her death by my willing, and that will I report me to her own brother: here he is, Sir Lavaine. I will not say nay, said Sir Launcelot, but that she was both fair and good, and much I was beholden unto her, but she loved me out of measure.
Ye might have shewed her, said the queen, some bounty and gentleness that might have preserved her life.
Madam, said Sir Launcelot, she would none other ways be answered but that she would be my wife, outher else my paramour; and of these two I would not grant her, but I proffered her, for her good love that she shewed me, a thousand pound yearly to her, and to her heirs, and to wed any manner knight that she could find best to love in her heart. For madam, said Sir Launcelot, I love not to be constrained to love; for love must arise of the heart, and not by no constraint.
That is truth, said the king.
37 comments:
Thank God there are still wild places left, where a man can float a river, catch a steelhead, walk across a vastness with nothing more than a pack and a rifle, watch a flock of sandhill cranes or just listen to the wind. Places where sanity can prevail.
Reading horrors like this makes my heart flinch at the emptiness in our culture.
Sanity prevails within the reach of my good right arm. Apparently that's all there is -- mine, and yours, and those like us.
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-source-of-misogyny.html
California knows what to do about guns in the 57 states. Hussein told them so.
It is to laugh at. Let them all burn, what difference would it make at this point.
This stuff isn't a horror. It's daily bread and meat for warriors.
The title Grim, a big laugh there.
What a monster, weakest monster I've ever heard about.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/225960813/Elliot-Rodger-Santa-Barbara-mass-shooting-suspect-My-Twisted-World-manifesto
After reading some of that, mostly at the end, that was some nice entertainment. What a clown and keyboard warrior. A half decent, a half trained warrior, would have wiped him from the face of existence (just don't get honey trapped, stabbed in your sleep, or shot in the back). Good thing Hussein and the Democrats got rid of those on gun free campuses. We might have had a war going on in California then.
100 WACOs and counting. You ain't seen nothing yet.
The LA better come up with better stormtroopers than that in their death squads. It'll be the shortest civil war in history, if not.
VC had a commenter there one time, that talked like the predator in California. I always wondered what would happen to that kid if some people had responded a little differently, by making fun of his problems. I'm sure those too afraid to write their minds out, were making jokes behind the safety of the monitor.
Monsters? Wait until the real ones come out. Oh wait, the Democrats already put one into power, your moral and friendly Hussein.
You make too much light of it, Ymar.
Especially since you have more in common with that guy than you realize.
But its telling that the fellow thought that college was for pleasure and sex. I think he watched too many movies.
Eric is right. This man did something monstrous, but the pain he felt so deeply is understandable. A good friend of mine came very close to suicide not long ago for the same reason -- the despair over the fact that, all his life, no woman has ever loved him. He's a good man, a much better man than this one, but he isn't what women want. Killing yourself is a monstrous act too, a mortal sin, as indeed is despair. But it is easy to understand.
To be rejected by a woman can be difficult, if she was a woman you thought much of. To be rejected by all women is devastating to a man.
Eric is right about one other thing, which is that your manifestos sound increasingly like this guy's. You should consider that.
From your link, Ymar:
The irony is that sexually successful men who generally hold women in contempt and are so often labeled "misogynous" neither hate nor harm women. It is the romantic, but sexually rejected young men who erroneously place women on pedestals they do not deserve that eventually come to hate women, once they finally realize...
There is a conceptual error that some men fall into, which can keep them from relating to women, of thinking that women are 'pure and virtuous beings.' Mostly they aren't, of course, but are human beings who have weaknesses and failings.
However, there is another conceptual error, which is thinking that women deserve contempt for this. You should be able to see the woman in front of you, and not some dream of what you think she ought to be; you should also be able to see yourself, and your own failings and weaknesses.
On this ground, true love is possible between a man and a woman. And true love is -- as we find it in The Franklin's Tale, for example -- by far the best thing in life. That is what people like your Vox are throwing away, the baby with the bathwater.
"Especially since you have more in common with that guy than you realize. "
The only thing I realize is that people like you thought you had gotten rid of me yesterday. Hehehe.
Won't be so easy. As for what you know, it ain't much, as usual. I'm just a chicken keyboard warrior to you, EB. And that's how I like to keep it. Stalking horse.
When have you ever killed a person, EB? Remember that question. You take killing very lightly, EB. Not everyone is like that.
"There is a conceptual error that some men fall into, which can keep them from relating to women, of thinking that women are 'pure and virtuous beings.' Mostly they aren't, of course, but are human beings who have weaknesses and failings."
I don't really care what Vox Day thinks. That's not being hostile, that's just the truth. So his views are his, and people should argue with it at his place. I linked him because he had an interesting and time effective link.
http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/manifesto-of-californian-hollywood-normality/
Here's another view of the manifesto, for the crowd here.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-California/2014/05/24/CA-Gunman-s-Family-Releases-Statement-They-Are-Against-Guns-Support-Gun-Control
If you read the comments, you may see something interesting.
Welcome to my world. The rules are different than usual. The difficulty is equal.
This man did something monstrous, but the pain he felt so deeply is understandable.
The boy did not understand the meaning of Pain.
He was a weakling and humanity is better off without it.
Black monster, a joke in the Democrat tradition I suppose. Deeply understandable? What weak sauce is that.
Such naive concepts, that think that was pain. You need a better education on that concept, before you can start accurately judging it in that manifesto.
"The pain he felt so deeply is understandable."
Did you watch his video? If he as rejected by all women, I'd guess it was because a few seconds of conversation would have been all it took to convince whatever woman to whom he thought he was entitled ("I'm the perfect man") to perceive what a repulsive, dangerous little creep he was. Small wonder none of them agreed that he had a right to enjoy them.
So who was it that turned him into such a creepy little viper? Was it all those heartless women who believed they had some legitimate choice in the matter of who might become intimate with them? We might consider his father, who'd brought a stepmother into the family who was only one year her stepson's senior. It's not hard to see where he learned the confusion about whether women are trophies or people.
I'm not in a mood to contemplate his pain. If there ever were a candidate for the Better Off Dead list, this guy is it.
And if I never again have to hear some guy complain that it's unfair that women can't appreciate his charms and that instead they go for the "brutes," which explains why he hates women so much, it will be too soon. Surely this PUA garbage will go away eventually, if only because its adherents all commit suicide, preferably before they shoot up the street.
If he as rejected by all women, I'd guess it was because a few seconds of conversation would have been all it took to... perceive what a repulsive, dangerous little creep he was.
I think that's right. My reaction to him reminds me, more than anything else, of the way Tolkien describes reacting to Gollum.
He's clearly, and immediately, creepy and unworthy of love. It's clearly his own fault. And he clearly chose to do and to be a monster.
But, as Tolkien repeatedly has characters say when describing the murderous creep Gollum, I can't help but feel a kind of pity for him. The loneliness and pain he suffered were very real. They may also have been deserved, but how horrible an existence.
Ymar:
I mention it out of concern for you, because you have seemed even less coherent lately. As for educating me in pain, thank you for the offer, but inter alia I spent some time in the Triangle of Death. Since then I have focused my education on other things, as perhaps might benefit you also.
Were his loneliness and pain real? I have no way of knowing. What was clear from his video was his frustrated sense of entitlement to other people's bodies, and his vindictive envy. Can you be lonely without understanding that other people are real? Did you get sadness from that video? The creepiest thing about it was how little sadness there was.
Of course one feels pity for anyone who has so degraded his own humanity. But I've seen interviews with imprisoned serial killers-for-hire who awakened more compassion and fellow-feeling in me. There was a sense that there had once been something to them, tragically destroyed; with this guy, not really. Young, pretty-faced, rich, comfortable, and no one home.
Can you be lonely without understanding that other people are real?
I think so, in the sense that you can be hungry without understanding how to obtain food. Human beings by nature long not to be alone, but to join together with beloved others. Only a few people, also monsters, truly do not have this desire for love.
The question, then, is whether he was so broken as not to have the normal drives -- rather than just to have them without the capacity to satisfy them. But he seems to answer that question. He longed, but did not or could not understand what was needed to make it possible to satisfy the longing.
I don't know if it was his upbringing or something missing in his soul; or just a set of bad concepts and bad decisions. But to me he looks like Gollum -- wicked, creeping, at once proud enough to declare himself an avenging god and ashamed enough to believe he has been rendered worthless by others' choices. He is wrong about everything. In the end he murders those who tried to give him a chance to be their friends and housemates, and innocents who did him no wrong at all.
It is a terrible story. His judgment is one I am glad to leave to God, for I want no part of it.
He wasn't a monster because he was lonely. He was lonely because he was a monster.
That may well be. Yet it seems he was both.
It's an important distinction, because of what it says about how he could have changed his life, and how others can avoid his fate. His problem wasn't that mean blonde sluts refused to give him scads of anonymous sex, an entitlement he believed appertained to the college years, which left him "lonely". His problem was that his heart was corrupt enough that he could believe that, which incidentally was why no women in her right mind would get near him. Just think how much worse this story might have turned out if he had somehow conned a young woman into letting him use her like a kleenex.
Just think how much worse this story might have turned out if he had somehow conned a young woman into letting him use her like a kleenex.
We may err in thinking that his difficulty was conceptual -- perhaps it was physical, a defect in the structure of the brain. Yet the opposite point was being made by the blog Ymar cited: wouldn't it have been better, since he wouldn't have then killed a bunch of people?
Of course, Vox seems to think that his failure was in treating women with too much respect -- not, as you do, that he didn't have any respect for them at all. (Indeed, it seems as though he didn't have a proper concept for what it might be to respect someone, i.e., to see them as 'another self,' a being free and independent.)
Vox thinks that, if he had just valued them less, then they wouldn't have been so important to him; and for that reason, he'd have been more successful with them because he could adopt a more distant and manipulative frame. (And it is true that this young man was no PUA, but a member of an 'anti-PUA' community.)
I think that Vox's understanding is as wrong as it is possible to be. Whether there's more or less harm involved in it is difficult to say. I think there's a substantial moral harm, and indeed that it's a clear example of a violation; obviously not everyone agrees. 'Where's the harm, if no one died?'
Thus the citation of Lancelot's principle, which I think is the operative one: true love is the prerogative of the individual soul, which no one ever has a right to demand, but which must rise from that soul's own choice. That seems to me to be the law that governs.
Men or women can transgress it, as we have free will, but there is a punishment that nature itself enforces: you shall never truly love, nor be loved. Because nature itself enforces it, it is a clear example of natural law. There aren't many demonstrable examples of natural moral law, but this is one.
You don't think there's a sharp distinction to be made between respect and vicious hunger? Hateful fixation isn't respect. We might as well say he respected a hamburger. It's not a question of how strong the emotion is, but its essential quality.
No, I can't get enthusiastic about the idea that a self-sacrificing young woman might have averted a tragedy by letting this little monster use her to discharge his purely self-involved sexual tensions. Better that Isla Vista had been well-armed and he'd been killed as soon as it became clear he couldn't distinguish between his appetites and his rights.
I honestly don't see where Lancelot comes in here. Love was not involved. He wasn't seeking love from these women. His video wasn't about the wistful recognition that other people found love while he lacked the knack. His complaint was that college life was supposed to be about non-stop porking, but other guys were snapping up all the goodies he'd been promised. His conclusion was: if I can't own them, they deserve to die, along with the men they prefer. Love? Please.
I honestly don't see where Lancelot comes in here. Love was not involved.
Let's try Tolkien again, then. The difference between Gollum and the hobbits is not that great: Tolkien spells out their similarity at points, and in the end Frodo also chooses to give in to his hunger for the Ring. The power of the longing for it overwhelms him. Tolkien even has him give a short speech emphasizing that his refusal is a matter of choice and volition.
If we ask what he should have done, though, what we talk about is the moral law: what should have governed his actions, without regard to what did? And in a way it may seem surprising, to end up talking about a perfected moral impulse under these conditions of extreme stress and weariness. But it's the distinction between Frodo and Gollum: it's the distinction between the one who only chose wrong in the extreme, and the one who chose it early and made it the core of his being. Both of them failed to choose what was right.
And that leads us to the insight that, for both of them, what was right is the same thing. It was to forgo the Ring: for Gollum, not to commit murder to claim it as his 'birthday present' at all; for Frodo, to keep his earlier oath and cast it into the fire. There is a law that governs the Ring. Gandalf and Galadriel both manage to keep the law, under powerful temptation, forgoing the Ring and instead using their power to help arrange its destruction.
That's why I am looking at the question of Lancelot's principle. That principle strikes me as the guiding law. It is the right thing, the best thing. It serves as a true standard, which nature will enforce, whether you are this monster or Vox, or you, or me.
This is not some guy who knows what's right but crumbles under "stress" or "weariness." Honestly: it's like eliciting sympathy for Dr. Mengele because the Jews wouldn't torture themselves for his amusement. What choice did the poor doctor have? He needed the Jews to immolate themselves for his consumption; they insisted on acting as if they were people; and he just wore out, poor thing.
Certainly we should pity Elliot Rodgers. It's no laughing matter when a soul disintegrates to that degree. But the pitiable part of his life was not that he couldn't contrive to consume enough women, any more than the pitiable part of Mengle's life was that he couldn't consume enough Jews. Disappointed love couldn't be farther from the point.
So, you seem to be saying that you think I'm suggesting by the analogy to hunger that he needed a better ability to "consume" women. That is certainly not what I am saying. It is basic to the nature of analogies that they break down at some point, because if two things are perfectly analogous such that the analogy never breaks down, they are actually the same thing and not two things at all.
The distinction between the natural drive for hunger and the analogous natural drive for love includes this issue of consumption. Hunger does in fact require consumption (and therefore a subject/object relationship of the sort that you tend to object to in human relationships). Love does not require -- indeed, does not reward, actively punishes -- consumption.
The only point to the analogy was to answer your question -- can you be lonely without properly recognizing that other people are real? I think the answer is yes, because the desire to love and be loved is a natural drive. You can feel the drive without understanding it properly. You can feel the drive without having the capacity to satisfy it, or even a basic understanding of what the conditions of satisfaction are.
As to what the proper standard is, I'd be surprised if we disagreed much at all.
I suppose what's hanging me up is that you can confuse what he was hungry for as the natural drive for love. It bore approximately the relation to that, that Mengele's drive bore to the honorable pursuit of scientific knowledge.
Yeah, it sounded like that was where the confusion between us was arising. No, I only mean the analogy to hunger to convey that a drive can exist without the capacity to satisfy it. Since a necessary condition for love is respect, lacking a capacity to respect (or even, perhaps, to believe in) the beloved person means lacking a capacity to satisfy the drive. But that doesn't imply the absence of the drive, no more than the inability to satisfy hunger implies that you won't get hungry.
Sure, but I don't look at Jeffrey Dahlmer and say, "Poor fellow, he was hungry and couldn't satisfy his hunger drive." The thwarted drive isn't the point, and focusing on it seems twisted to me. The important point is that he mistook people for his food. Once that happened, yes, he was isolated in a subhuman and pitiable existence, but hunger wasn't the issue.
I didn't get the impression that Dahlmer had any trouble satisfying his hunger drive. The cases seem distinct to me, though united in the way you describe. To extend the Tolkien metaphor, if this was Gollum, Dahlmer was more like an orc. Tolkien never worried about killing an orc, but the characters agonize about Gollum (and allow him to cause much harm in the process -- although, of course, in the end it is Gollum's part that brings about the destruction of Sauron).
(It's an interesting thing about Tolkien that we get those two kinds of cases, Gollum and orcs. Tolkien can show you the orcs in a way that demonstrates even some virtues -- the attempt to push past the Rohirrim, the brave resistance, the defiant last stand -- but killing them is no issue. Yet we get even from Gandalf a lecture about killing Gollum even though he deserves death, which is based on a queer argument that doesn't really follow logically. Sam and Frodo talk about it at length on the road through Mordor, and somehow just never do bring themselves to kill him. There's something about him being pathetic, though twisted and evil, that seems to set him aside from the orcs.)
Of course, I don't share Tolkien's sense that it would be better not to kill such characters. I have no problem with the idea of killing him, and indeed think he should have been killed much earlier. On the occasion when he tried to push party guests off a balcony, it would have been a public service for one of those fraternity brothers to have thrown him off headfirst.
So Tolkien and I part ways after a fashion. The long survival of Gollum always struck me as difficult to justify.
Well, one point of agreement between us seems to be the "pathetic, twisted, and evil" part.
There are several points of agreement between us. The gulf is limited to the sense of sympathy I have for his suffering. It is probably impossible to convey, but it is similar to the sense that you hear people express of "There, but for the Grace of God." In this case, it is not God's grace alone, but also a woman's grace, which saved me from a madness I expect I would also have known.
I do not think I would, or could, have ever taken it upon myself to lash out at women in the way that he did. This is because I always understood the governing law, which is the law of respect -- Lancelot's law. I always knew grace was their right, and that I had no claim on their love but that they should choose it for reasons of their own.
But the madness of loneliness, that I can imagine all too well. Nor am I alone among men in this. I mentioned my friend who was recently near suicide, but I should also mention many other suicides that actually occurred in Iraq. Almost always, the ones who killed themselves were the ones who found themselves alone because a woman who had loved them, whom they hoped would be waiting at home, withdrew her love or gave it to another.
It's not that they were entitled to her love. It's just that women's love is far more important to men than we often are able to convey. And so they died like Elaine, from loving too much.
This one was not like them, but the madness perhaps was. If so, it makes him pitiable in a way that other wicked, cruel, creeping things are not.
I understand perfectly the pain of unrequited love, as well as the gulf that divides it from the frustration of unindulged appetite for objects. The two have nothing in common except disappointment.
Then it is just a matter of intuition and imagination. My intuition places him in a life of genuine pain and longing, which he can never resolve. Yours makes him merely selfish and small. We are talking about the same person in a way, but in another way we can never agree because the person in your mind isn't like the one in mine.
"I walked into the range, rented a handgun from the ugly old redneck cashier, and started to practice shooting at paper targets. As I fired my first few rounds, I felt so sick to the stomach. I questioned my whole life, and I looked at the gun in front of me and asked myself 'What am I doing here? How could things have led to this?' I couldn't believe my life was actually turning out this way. There I was, practicing shooting with real guns because I had a plan to carry out a massacre."
That, if you like, is a message from someone who can still remember a time when he hadn't entirelysurrendered his humanity. If there'd been any of that left by the time he killed himself, I'd be more likely to share in your "there but for the grace of God" moment. Of course, in a real sense, there but for the grace of God could anyone go: any of us could start viewing the human race as our personal toys, things we can pull to pieces if we like. And if we did, we could all end up just like him.
I only doubt that anyone gets there solely because he's sad he can't find someone who wants to have sex with him. It takes a lot more fundamental wrong steps than that.
"There's something about him being pathetic, though twisted and evil, that seems to set him aside from the orcs.:
Yes- very much this. I might also have some insights to this, as I was painfully shy as a youth- I literally walked around in Jr. High looking at the floor three feet in front of me- though I had friends, it was breaking ice that was problematic. But in thinking about that shyness- which I've mostly overcome long ago- I came to the realization that there was a profound self-centeredness- narcisssism in it. Why should I be dismayed that others wouldn't go out of their way to talk to me, when I wasn't even willing to look them in the eye in passing? I should be so protected from having to take risks that I desire others to take? I also realized and sometimes see it in my son- and actively work against it- that being pitiable is a manipulators scheme- I don't want to do something? Maybe if I'm pitiable enough, someone will do it for me, or at least help me with it, and if I'm pathetic enough, will still do most of it. Again- selfish behavior. Pity is something to be resisted by us in all but the most extreme circumstances- it's a destructive force- 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'- meaning well isn't always the way to good deeds. Some of the worst things anyone did for me in my youth was to tell my parents that I was a good kid, and had 'so much potential', and as a result they all too often cut me slack and let me get away with things that less artful bad children would never have been let to get away with. I think the best teacher I ever had- and I wish I could have told her this before she passed- was the high school English teacher who busted me and held me to account on my misdeeds with all the repercussions it deserved- no breaks. She kicked my butt like it deserved to be kicked, and it was the best thing any teacher had done for me in a long time.
Pity also empowers the pitied- the power to share my unpleasant feelings with the others around me. If one who is unhappy can have nothing else- maybe they can take solace in at least having company. That is the beginnings of a monster. It cultivates a lack of empathy- this attitude of thinking others are there to serve my interests. It's so important not to pity those who would expect it, but to demand more of them.
I suspect too many people never told this boy 'no' and he learned to expect to have his expectations delivered upon, by choice or by manipulation, whatever works. 'No' is perhaps the most loving thing you can ever say to a child, right up there with 'get over yourself'.
He was a whiny disgusting little POS. Comes across clear as day in his writing, of which I have only read a few pasted paragraphs.
short version-
He goes to a party. No one is interested in paying him attention. He hangs outside on a wall with a drop off. Other people come by. Girls hang out with them. He feels left out, and tries to throw them off the drop. He gets thrown instead. Hurts his ankle. Loses his precious Gucci sunglasses. And his precious gold necklace. Whines on about all of this for another paragraph.
No wonder at all that girls would not find his evil repellent self attractive.
That was exactly the point at which I was thinking they should have dropped him on his head. Since he was trying to push people off, it would have been legitimate, and a public service to boot.
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