https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Gd27AO8cnME
And so you live in Quebec? Yeah. And that’s in Canada, isn’t it? Yes, it is in Canada. I’m coming to Canada in April. I’m going to find you. Where are you going? Canada’s a big place, Martin. I’m going to tour it over a few weeks. But if you ever fancy doing something on the on Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, that would be amazing. We could tell it and explore it together. You know, get a few people together. I’d really be up for that. That’d be a marvel. Yeah, definitely keep me posted. I would love to. I would definitely love to do that. Yeah, that story haunts me. The Gawain story haunts me quite a bit. I did a few videos on it, but I when I listen to the videos again, I’m like, yeah, no, like I get some of it. But some of the some of the twists are so strange that that they they kind of haunt me. Well, what are what our viewers probably don’t know, but Mark, of course, knows is that you and I both had COVID when we were first meant to do that. We got sick at the same time and I was six thousand miles away from home and I entered having known the story superficially for years. Every time I closed my eyes for that week of COVID, I was plunged quite almost unpleasantly into the story of Gawain and the Green Knight and have crawled out of the other end of it. And it’s all tied up with being sick personally during the thing into a very different understanding. So I’m looking for opportunities to work with others to explore it, especially figures like the Green Knight himself, who from the moment he and he arrives in Arthur’s court announces effectively he’s a Christian. He says, you know, I come here under the, you know, under the auspices of the bright mind of Christ. But you look at him and he is this primordial, seething weather pattern of a being, absolutely green. It’s not just green armour, it’s green skin, it’s green hair. The only thing in him that isn’t green is his eyes, which are like little lumps of fire or coals or he’s really, he’s holly. He’s the season announcing himself. But then the more you look at the Christian roots of the chivalric code, you begin to understand that the process, the process of Gawain, sorry folks, we’ve gone off piste here. Gawain just getting to Bertilak’s castle, just getting there across the Wirral and the north of England is absolutely an encounter with the underworld itself. He goes to hell to be tested. Then in Bertilak’s castle with the seduction, the attempted seduction of the lady of the place, he’s tested through a kind of heaven. He says it, so anyway, the long shot is this is a magnificent, strange story and I’d love to explore it with you. Yeah, definitely because I have tended to want to see the, I’ve tended to want to see the moment in the castle as really a part of going through the underworld. The reason why is because there’s an inversion of, there’s a weird flip of what is happening where there’s, on the one hand, he is now not being, the proudness is Bertilak’s proudness in terms of hunting the animals and he has to avoid the woman. He’s in his bed, that’s where he is. He’s not out fighting, he’s not doing the things that knights do, he’s in his bed, in his bedroom and he has to avoid the maiden and it’s like, well she’s not a maiden, she has to, he has to avoid the woman and it’s like what, it’s, and then I still like, when I think about the last moment, when I think about the belt or I’m not sure what that is, like I still don’t completely understand what it is that he’s, what it is that he compromises. Why is it that Bertilak doesn’t see it as a compromise and why does he then see it as a compromise despite the fact that everybody else, even the husband himself doesn’t see it as compromise and it’s just, I can’t, I still, like it haunts me, to be honest, like it still haunts me. You know, I’ve spent all week, I’ve written about 2,000 words a day, every day now on this story. That’s amazing. The word that comes up again and again is haunting. Yeah. It’s the genius of the storyteller that he allows this kind of ambiguity at very important moments to allow this kind of discourse, this midrash, to continue, this kind of associative thinking because he doesn’t crowbar the allegory too near the surface of the thing. So one moment you think you’re riding the back of the story, you’re riding the back of Gringolet, the next minute you’ve been whisked off it, but I know, I know for me, of we say, the real failure of Gawain happens in Bertilak’s castle. It doesn’t happen at the Green Chapel. It’s the concealment. It’s the concealment. And then Bertilak, of course, shows angelic level of mercy and says, it’s no shame to value your life. It’s no shame to trying to live. But by then Gawain’s not really having it. And he says, look, I’ve clearly made, I’m going home now, goodbye. And he leaves, you know, he doesn’t want to go back to the castle and clink glasses with Morgana Le Fay or anything like that. But it is beautiful when he tells the story to Arthur, leader of men, that they say, okay, you know, once a year we’ll wear this sash as an example, I suppose, of our own frailty, our own humanity. And you know what I’m left with, when I was, when I had COVID, I kept waking up at night rubbing the back of my neck. And in the dreaming, I was rubbing the mark that the Green Knight had given me to just to show me my humanity, my befuddlements, my sin. But I know for Gawain, for the rest of Gawain’s life, by the way, Gawain’s name means, it’s Gwalkma, it means hawk of May, he’s really a bird. In the early stories, he would have been a hawk. A lot of the Arthurian characters in their early full embryonic forms were animals. But I’m interested, because then we’re into Jacob wrestling with the angel, then we’re into the limp. We’re into these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for sure, like for sure, one of the things that happens when you said, because one of the things that one of the things I notice in a lot of the storytellers, something like changing death into glory, like that seems to be something which is which is a Christian trope, which comes back over and over. But usually, it’s not that it’s not changing death in the sense of a kind of moral compromise. It actually is something like death in a more in the sense of being willing to let go, being willing to die and being willing to be a victim or being willing to submit yourself to others. And that becomes comes your glory. But here in this story, Gawain compromises something compromises by like you said, concealing by not saying but not giving the belt back to Bertilak. But then Arthur kind of raises it up basically, and says, well, we will wear this as a glorious thing every year. And it actually because it it plays on the Order of the Garter, right? And these legendary images of the Order of the Garter, where there’s a shame that happens, you know, the woman loses her garter. And now there’s a moment of shame. And so the king raises it up and says, No, I’m going to wear this as a crown almost like I’m going to put this out as a glorious thing. But it’s like, ah, it’s still like I can’t get to the end of it. It’s just kind of, it’s, it’s genius. It’s a pebble in the shoe. I told the story on Sunday morning to a group. And people were really upset about the ending. They were really upset. And I mean, a lot of them really enjoyed it. But people privately came to me and said, No, he failed, he failed. Right. Wrong. The author made this good. It was wrong. And of course, as you know, it does mean that Gawain is not really going to be the guy that discovers the grail, right? Not going to get into the terrain that a passable or a Galahad, he’s not going to get into that high vibrational frequency. And I suppose, on a on a very mundane level, he does remind me of, you know, myself and other guys that I know who are, you know, we make mistakes to be continued anyway. And yeah, definitely, definitely. That would be wonderful.