Letters to an Unknown Girl

Dear XXXXXX:

I have a story. I came to a bright, bold realization the other day, and I'd like to share it with you.

For most of my life I have felt as though I suffer from an affliction that causes me to be perpetually incompatible with your human representation. With every announcement of my love for a female, they have announced something different: abandonment and flight.

Now, I'm sure this is not altogether unique in the realm of human relationships. I have no doubt that the vast majority of them end with shattered hearts and upended lives. Pain is a trademark of cooperation. In addition, society has changed a great deal over the years, and it continues to change, doing so almost daily, and in ways most of us can't even keep up with. The culture of the Western world is no longer a defined structure - hell, not even gender is definable anymore.

So, while nursing my most recently fragmented heart, I mulled over concepts like amorphous sexuality and tectonic social shifting, and how I might shift my own viewpoints to experience more harmony with the movement of those viewpoints held by the masses. Is it my role now, as an affixed binary heterosexual male in the 21st century, to adopt a position of permanent submissiveness? Or should I do the opposite: drink [even more] while looking for reasons to hate my loving father and buy weight sets and firearms and pit bulls? Or do I become gay just so I can be more accepted? Most important of all, why does each of these ideas instinctively repel me?

Meanwhile, my bookshelves needed to be cleaned. So during the week, as I rested from the exhaustive ponderings, I took time to pull out old books and replace them with others. I dusted off the shelves. I threw away rotting mouse skeletons. And as I began loading up a new batch of books, I came across a series that left a melodic symphony of nostalgia echoing in the damaged cathedral of my heart. Books that I had grown up with and studied and harvested great inspiration from, long ago, and whose words had become a silent part of my cellular growth as I gradually moved into adulthood.

Suddenly they interested me again. I began to do research on them, and on their topics. And the more I researched, the more familiar and fascinating and friendly they felt. It was like a homecoming parade. Great swaths of past heroes rose up and were suddenly marching around me, singing and clapping me on the shoulder and shaking my hand and helping me up and welcoming me back. Figures long forgotten lived once more, giving my spirit the most comfortable of company.

With warmth finally returning to my soul, I knew in those moments that there was nothing wrong with me after all.

Society was subject to a great change, surely, but the reason I had struggled with forcing a parallel internal one was because I didn't share the malleability of society. I don't declare multiple genders because that multiplicity is already flourishing within my spirit. I don't need to abandon my role because the one I'm already committed to is one worth sticking with. And the only thing wrong with me was that I had forgotten where I came from; I had been trying to abandon my own self, in desperation, for the favor of other humans.

So what were these compendia of knowledge that gave me the strength to climb out of the ditch?

Chivalry isn't a historically accurate concept. It was a romantic ideal, mostly perpetuated by songsters and poets, set forth more as entertainment for courts than anything - initially. But over time it grew to represent a lofty, difficult mark that ordinary humans aspired to reach. The quest to adhere to its code became, by itself, a formula for living. Romantic or not, the commitment to it and the effort spent in devotion towards it is what builds the page into a knight.

I have always felt drawn to this code. And, whether or not I realized it at the time, I have always adhered to it.

Even more, fingers flying as I delved deeper into the concepts that had molded me so long ago, I began to realize something further. Most of the chivalric ideals have historically been tied strongly to the Catholic Church. Knights were expected to devote themselves to the church first, and then to their ladies and lords following. Heh. "Well, that's not going to happen," I scoffed into the musty air, from my seat on the filthy floor.

So then, what does that mean for me, and my newly re-discovered source of inspiration, and to my simultaneous dedicated quest to enlighten the souls of others as to the insanity and hideousness and obsolete and dangerous nature of one of the world's largest and most mentally unhealthy cults of mind-controlling lunacy? How does being chivalrous translate to me, here in the digital age, when I have already begun to highlight the existence of "God" as a living entity in the hearts of each one of us, and therefore only blasphemed and corrupted and raped by an empire whose only endgame is dominance over the ignorant? And the fact that the real church is all around us, and in our uniquely amazing minds?

The answer is simple, self-explanatory, and wildly awesome.

Chivalric "codes" were never historically scripted, and they were often modified by artists, giving them license to evolve. We know now that the real divinity is inside us. Well, it is that Holy See to which I am passionately and not-so-privately devoted. My first commitment is to the honor and integrity of the Sacred within my self, with all its many manifestations of "God" and "Goddess"; the second will be to a human Lady with the same Sacred alive within herself. There is literally only one thing that has changed since the days of the troubadours, and it is the location of those spiritual headquarters.

I had found a way. Something to live by, something to write about. Perfectly in line with everything that I feel and everything that I know.

Now, vulgar human culture, in this time at this location, idiotically equates "chivalry" with "damsel in distress", and the current trend is to shame and revile anything that suggests victimization or weakness or inferiority. Therefore it has, as a whole, largely discarded the notion of chivalry, throwing it away and, in extremes, piling hatred upon it. No wonder they don't like me.

But I remind myself, as I would remind any other would-be knights, in this light, to draw a deep, forgiving breath. Because, let's not forget, knighthood is not accessible to just anyone. Literary education and spiritual enlightenment may be available to most people with an internet connection, but it in no way means that everyone is educated or enlightened. Far from it: most peasants prefer to stay peasants, and not make the effort to live up to any standard, let alone a selflessly challenging one. That's what the house of religion is for - convincing capable people that they are helpless victims when they are not. They simply laugh at Shrek, post memes about it, and never take the time to learn what chivalry really is.

This brings me back to my original thought: that I have long suffered an unexplainable disease that makes me feel unlovable by female humans, and that there's something wrong with me. My heroes have, in their scarred but gentlemanly grace, reminded me that I am, and have always been, a member of an extraordinary fraternity, and that just because there are few members today, it doesn't negate its value, nor does it alter its principles. Contrarily, it accentuates its value, for it is now all the more important for me to carry on its principles and live by its code, so that someone may be inspired, through me, by the same way in which I have, through my own champions.

And while not every boy can become a knight, it is also true that not every girl will be a lady. They too have to work and study if they wish to be accepted into a higher echelon of human community. It is just as rare for them as it is for us, especially when each of us already has to work to achieve a higher echelon of spirit by recognizing the magick within and around us as the true and infinite deity, thus removing the primitive tools of the last 2,000 years in favor of large-scale improvements. We cannot blame anyone for not wanting to take the extra time; in fact, it is they whom we as knights are sworn to protect! It will simply be a very small but very special group of people who, at the end of their lives, can say they committed to an ideal and went the distance holding its banner before them. No matter how many others abandoned the journey, or abandoned them.

Chivalry - courtly love - may not be understood or appreciated by many in this time period and in this land, but this is just one flash-photograph in all of history; it is vastly outweighed by a larger portrait whose borders stretch deep into the past and well into the future. Its time will come again (provided humans or other intelligent species survive the civil wars of the peasants). And in the event one of your human representatives happens to hold its values in her heart, and then recognizes me as a devotee, I'm quite certain that heart will not regret its lifetime of romantic curiosity. In truth, everything that had come before will suddenly appear a virtually irrelevant blur, as we exist together in a timeless court of spiritual ecstasy.

Just don't send anybody my way yet, okay? My own court is not clean enough to receive her. I never knew there would be this many rotting mouse skeletons.

Guess even I should read more.