The Knights Under the Round Tabel, version II
The Knights Under the Round Tabel were on a mission to discover the unknown. Like all members of their generation, they went about it with a curiously apathetic zeal, which meant that any ideas put to them may well get absorbed and acted upon, but self generated ideas were curiously lacking. And all the while they stared into the distance. Roughly about approximately a thousand yards into the distance.
They maintained the illusion that frontier pushing was somehow connected to altering states of consciousness, and they were not totally wrong in this regard. However, consciousness altering can occur in a myriad of ways, one of the least significant of which is imbibing synthetic chemicals. Sadly, this path was the one they travelled the most. They sometimes saw previously unseen colours and visionscapes that may have otherwise been denied, but any earth-shattering insights that may have occurred were kept to themselves, and then forgotten.
It is fairly easy to regard the Knights with derision. I do it regularly. But this self appointed sect were actually more representative of their society than they would be pleased to realise.
They were not averse to token mysticism, without really knowing what it was, and there was a certain amount of conventional cultural experimentation. They would psychically swallow much that would have been otherwise unpalatable had it been presented conventionally, but the result of all these outside influences was something of a homogenised mess which gave no discernible sign of having learned anything significant from the experience. They were a fiercely individual collection of sheep who all thought in remarkable similar ways, whilst revelling in the idea that they were amongst the first of their kind to be really ‘pushing it.’
At the age of 18, I graduated. I thought it was an honour, not realising that the Knights were not always choosy about who they admitted.
Some few nuggets of wisdom came about, some even from me. They were usually derided, sometimes loudly, sometimes by me. Yet future conversations would often find the mocker advancing the same view that once they had scorned, as if it had been their own idea all along.
Ultimately, the Knights Under the Round Tabel foundered, being casualties of their own incoherence and lack of determination. They were victims of their own self-hatred, undone by their disrespect for who they were, where they came from, and why they were here. Hence, their name. They became permanent residents under the table, unable to articulate the few coherent thoughts they were able to have.
Now I find I can reside under several different tables. It seems that membership of one clique makes it easier to become a member of others, as long as the table is a broadly similar shape. When I started residing under different shaped tables, however, then I found myself being sought by fewer and fewer knights.
Soundbergs 