revisiting Chinon

Once in a while it is an exercise is self-awareness to go back and read what you've written, removed from the moment...here's the blog entry for May 11, 2004, from my Author's Den blog...entitled "Frankly, Phillip, it's a tangle..."

"The title of this entry is a line from "The Lion in Winter"...where Henry Plantagenet begins his explanation to the boy-king of France about the complexity of sorting out who gets the throne, who gets the girl and who just gets screwed over...

I wish I had the advantage of a few hundred years' perspective to make sense of the mess that exists here. I have never been on the receiving end of so much hatred and bitterness from people who do not even know what they are talking about. Yes, I have made mistakes, and usually taken my lumps for them (how else does one learn?) but to be tarred and feathered, virtually, and unable to defend myself for the damage I would do to those whose asses I have covered, this is frustrating.

To some degree it is an ennobling grace, but it is also wrong, no matter how romantic and noble. I am not a martyr, nor do I want to be, all I want is to find a path in which people will be content and empowered to get on with their lives, including me. It doesn't help that there are gremlins in the goulash, trying to validate or build to their own position, all but unmindful of the damage they do to others. (Of course, when I protest I am told "You promised you'd do whatever was necessary...")

So now I must be the villain. The pervasive aura of hatred and bitterness is so vile, so thick, I am made ill by it. I have been dangerous places, walked on treacherous slopes, but have never felt so physically oppressed by the attitudes of others.

If I told the truth, the whole truth, forthrightly and without regard for others, I would come out a bit better for it, but would have to destroy so many people...to what end? Protecting my reputation? I am not important enough for that to be a sane option.

In my right hand I hold a rope that holds someone I love, safe from the consequences of their own politicking and deceits. In the other I hold the truth. Not for the first time in my life, I have to choose between truth and the safety or sanity of another person. I will be damned for whatever choice I make, and I am neither so arrogant to assume I can save both, nor so clever to see other options. But I do wish I could do this, I would gladly surrender an eye or a limb to make things right, not for me, but for those I love.

Those who wish to hate, an emotion so alien to the Christian principles I struggle to uphold, will always find a cause for it. I am flawed, certainly well in the arc of the blast of my own petard(s), but trying desperately to help everyone out. I'm not looking for validation, just trying to do the right thing.

How subtle be these shades of grey."

It's interesting, almost alien, to be reading those words...nearly two years later I still wrestle with those same issues of homor versus honesty, but perspective has made me more sure-footed in my resolution and resolve.

In honor of this, I compose now a poem, taken from the last line of that entry...I call it

Revisiting Chinon


How subtlle be these shades of grey
where darkness comes and tries to stay
in moments between light of day
and the shading of our sins.

No hero ever plays this game
of purpose, but they lose their name
to memories of a hollow shame -
good heart but rare e'er wins.

Games are but seconds of the sweep
of sundial shadows that will creep
to mark the moments between sleep
and when next test begins.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

Oh, and for the record. In the absence of any indication of purpose to my sacrifice anymore, I release the rope.