king for a day: take a pass on the cake

All the king’s men and women. Indeterminancy and inevitability, fortuity and fate.Sacred geometry and secret recipes. The chance of being king. Or is it chance? The chance of being king is charged with multiple and contradictory associations among of which is the inevitable fall. Chance has the implication of that which we fall into or that which befalls us by surprise- the incident, the accident, the final throws of the dice. There is a dual nature of chance and all is not what it appears to be. Interestingly,  Prince William’s eventual ascendancy to the throne will mark the return of a Stuart monarchy after 400 years since James I….

King James I of England, son of Mary Queen of Scots.The last Stuart king. He won the prize that had eluded his mother: the right to rule over a united kingdom. But in the process he earned himself a very bad press, something the Royals have had trouble eluding since James…..

His absurd generosity and his constant indebtedness forced him to go to parliament again and again, asking for money.His extravagance and that of his hangers-on “passed all measure of taste or sanity.” However, James had come from a primitive and straitened court in Edinburgh and it was natural that he would ape the flamboyance and magnificence of his Tudor predecessors. The beginning of the seventeenth-century was a lavish era throughout Europe of giddy expenditure, splendid building, gigantic feasts, and lavish, evanescent shows.( Trevor-Roper)

The English contribution to these entertainments was the masque, a plotless, poetic opera or pageant, depending on complex scenery and elaborate costumes for its effect, performed only once. Despite the elegant beauty of Inigo Jones’s stage sets, no art form has proved so impermanent. But the masque was sadly typical of the purposeless expenditure so usual in the Jacobean court. Noblemen built enormous houses, “like Nebuchadnezzar’s” and extravagant feasts were the norm, with much of the delicacies simply thrown away as decoration in a prelude to an even more sumptuous feast…

However, even Aristotelian logic and reasoning cannot be applied to the disjointed postmodern life of the royals. Seemingly, their story branches out in all directions, without a beginning, middle or end without unifying structure. It is a mystery of the sacred geometry.  Try as one might to find evidence of shards of an ultimate divine truth,a divine right of rulers, there is always an absence of an organising center or a frame,which  gives way to a vast and complex pagan proliferation of meanings as to what is actually transpiring. The Royals appear as a collection of fragments  which exist alone whose attempts at linear  progression to move their reign along seems to rely  on “chance” events to move their plot forward such as the death of Diana. There is much to learn from the Royal family: a complexity that opposes all  linear ordering of cause and effect.

Chance by itself  is an unpredictable and whimsical goddess;   a way of shattering the power of reason and logic as it occurs in in following the Royal narrative. The unexpected occurs with almost numbing regularity in their lives. As the improbable exists in reality, it is also a source of imagination presented in a manner that is almost fiction. Disneyesque. The incredibly long tradition of royalty plays on the view of Aristotle who advised poets to select events that were impossible but plausible in place of ones that are possible but implausible,since plots should not be made of irrational events. It seems that the history of the British royals is uniquely composed of these irrational events; their inexplicable and bewildering human existence challenges certainties and preconceptions of the world. Perhaps nothing is real except chance.  In an unpredictable universe, causality is no longer the hidden demiurge that ruled the world, where down was up, first was last, the end was the beginning, the change is the only constant.Perhaps these are the secrets of the sacred geometry that Charles is so fascinated by and his conversations with green plants is not just New Age quackery: A glimpsing of the possibility of his own release from determinist metaphysics.

Jean Baudrillard asserted that certain phenomena happen beyond our control and hence chance allowed certain space to escape responsibility for these phenomena.There is always a bewilderment at the sense of contingency, which we are not aware of,and is  present in our lives. Like the universe in Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, Baudrillard’s is a totally absurd universe where objects rule in mysterious ways, and people and events are governed by absurd and ultimately unknowable interconnections and predestination. Like Jarry’s pataphysics, Baudrillard’s universe is ruled by surprise, reversal, hallucination, blasphemy, obscenity, and a desire to shock and outrage: Hitchens: Some British people claim actually to “love” their rather dumpy Hanoverian ruling house. This love takes the macabre form of demanding a regular human sacrifice whereby unexceptional people are condemned to lead wholly artificial and strained existences, and then punished or humiliated when they crack up. The last few weeks brought tidings of the latest grotesqueries involving Prince Andrew, Charles’ brother. If I haven’t forgotten anything, he had just recovered from tidings involving over-warm relations with the Gaddafi clan when his ex-wife was found to have scrounged a loan from a wealthy American friend whose record, alas, was disfigured by a conviction for sexual relations with the underage. The loan would have defrayed part of the unending wasteful expenditure that is required to keep the Ferguson girl staggering between scandals and sponsorships. I mean, the whole thing is just so painfully and absolutely vulgar. And, among the Queen’s many children and grandchildren, not by any means exceptional behavior either. Read More:http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/04/21/christopher-hitchens-middleton-would-do-well-to-escape-the-royal-family-sideshow/

Baudrillard’s “evil genius” is the object itself that is much more malign than the merely epistemological deceptions of the

ject faced by Descartes and which constitutes a “fatal destiny” that demands the end of the philosophy of subjectivity. Henceforth,
for Baudrillard, we live in the era of the reign of the object. Read More:http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/baudrillardshort.pdf

With James I and his excesses, there began a growing feeling that kings should take better care of their immortal souls, devote spare monies to charity, and be a firm example of devotion and clean living. Unfortunately, James was in many respects, the worst example one could find. He was notoriously foul-mouthed, even on solemn public occasions. He drank too much, and although he coud hold his liquor, many who tried to imitate him, including women, could not.

ADDENDUM:
David Lindsay:Monarchy embodies the principle of sheer good fortune, of Divine Providence conferring responsibilities upon the more fortunate towards the less fortunate. It therefore provides an excellent basis for social democracy, as has proved the case in the United Kingdom, in the Old Commonwealth, in Scandinavia and in the Benelux countries. Allegiance to a monarchy is allegiance to an institution embodied by a person, rather than to an ethnicity or an ideology as the basis of the State. As Bernie Grant understood, allegiance to this particular monarchy, with its role in the Commonwealth, is a particular inoculation against racialism….

No wonder that the National Party abolished it in South Africa. No wonder that the Rhodesian regime followed suit, and removed the Union Flag from that of Rhodesia, something that not even the Boers’ revenge republic ever did. And no wonder that the BNP wants to abolish the monarchy here. They are not the only ones. But the others have essentially the same motivation. Read More:http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-anti-monarchists-are-so-angry.html
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Q: Was “River Of Orchids” (the first track on Apple Venus 1-XTC) a bizarre prediction-come-true, given the sea of flowers that accompanied Princess Diana’s funeral procession in London? (Andy: “Ooo, spooky.”) Do middle-aged guys from Swindon give a toss about the Royals?…

Andy Partridge: I think the royal family are a wonderful addition to the tourist industry. And that’s it. I think, unfortunately, they made too much of a hobby of killing things for pleasure and they are the reason there is the class system. It’s the hierarchy of ass-licking all the way up to the royal family. That’s the class system, that’s the pyramid of, “We’re superior” right down to, “You’re inferior”, and that’s the reason we have a class system is the royal family. So keep them on, strip them of all their powers, keep them on as tourist magnets, I say. And I feel very sorry for them as people., their in a zoo. Kurt Vonnegut couldn’t have written it better. They’re trapped in a zoo.Read More:http://chalkhills.org/articles/JAM990305.html
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…This is very interesting, given one of the details of Kate and William’s wedding. In addition to the traditional fruit-based wedding cake that will be served for the rest of the wedding party, Prince William is breaking with tradition and commissioning his own “Groom’s cake” just for himself. It will be made of dark chocolate and tea biscuits, based on a “secret family recipe.”…

I’ll bet. The ancient rituals we are dealing with here have their roots in a tradition by which a reigning monarch sacrifices his son to prevent him from threatening his reign. There were also many traditions throughout the ancient world of temporary kings being wed to their “queen” just before the sacrifice, just as Hitler was married before his suicide. This is part of the alchemical process as well. The king and queen must unite into one hermaphroditic being (the “chemical wedding”) before being killed, burned, and then regenerated into something new: the royal heir….

Given what happened to his mother (coincidentally named after the Queen of May, to whom the Beltane sacrificed were offered), let’s hope that William sleeps with one eye open. Read More:http://www.quintessentialpublications.com/tracyrtwyman/?p=3744

Read More:http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/baudrillardshort.pdf