a crying book, the incompletion of Arthur

My niece was recommending a book to me last night. "It's a crying book," she said. Instantly, my own crying books sprang to mind.

To Kill A Mockingbird
A Separate Peace
Sometimes A Great Notion
Flowers For Algernon
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The Once And Future King makes me ache. But only the Arthur movie makes me cry -- that one where his body is sent out to sea on a flaming bier. No matter how the story is told, there is an ache. For Guinevere, the kingship, the quarreling of the knights, the Grail, the incompletion.

Arthur's incompletion.

Maybe it's because I never get that Arthur knew god. Or that Arthur knew himself. I've never seen him take the whole journey from, "I was trained to be this kind of king," to "Here's all the troubles that arose," to "This was my chosen destruction," to "Here's how I was reborn," to "This is who I became," to "This is what I made." It's just the first two steps. He never became whole.

The tragedy of King Arthur to me is all that promise, unfulfilled. His round table was only the promise. Benedict, who founded the Benedictine order of monks; Genghis Khan and his mountain horsemen; Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret actors; the Dalai Lama and his monks; they have gone the whole journey. Are, in some cases, still going. Death holds no terror for them. Fear, yes; they're mortal. But spiritually, they're on solid ground.