be modest. Do not believe this city was built to elevate your chair. It was built to reach your chair. Were there no city, you and your chair and your vision would still float above the drifting ruin and dust. For this , history records of men reaching out from dust bowls. In fear scrambling out from pits to the beckon of human light.
There is, however, much burden upon the great. First, they must never know peace. For their vision should always keep yearning and distance as their bedfellows. A satisfied king is a very dangerous king. For now he allows himself the luxury of a downward glance. And will surely plummet. In this he hurls to a half grown tree, a city halts in its half works. It becomes the disorder of natural discontent not the clean, purity of fullness.
The great, the king, becomes mired in this half mud, half life which becomes an immense struggle since the arrested king halts the foliage of full stretch. Everything becomes obsess, squat, ugly, thin, unfruitful. There is too much in too little crushed by the heavy weight of oppression from vision shunned or thwarted. For where can a tree grow with a blind crown?
King Hindus: Burden upon a king, your accuse is a heavy stroke upon the bent back of a gardener tending his stalks. For can it be always that the crown slips its grip upon stars and spills to a squash of midway?
Cannot the vision be strong but the green below stunted and diseased? Can it not be that the queen bee beats too large a wing and commands a hive higher than the drone of follow can attend?
This historic strike of the mass to bless the king's perch seems prone of fault. The great gull flies the air, the pressure of water, rock and wind spout to his height. That they do not reach is no fault of the bird but of the bird desires a drink he must swoop to the lower place.
As a king needs men and as men need a king, the place of worship becomes known. Where the king can reach no lower and the men can reach no higher.
Beggar: No, your worship, forgive my mulish ways even to your blows of wise. The great are no gardeners, they are the sun. If they hover over fertile ground, they are compelled to discard that of little change. For did we not argue a river must change course, a lion swerve, the jackal prowl?
Giant men do not squat upon tiny stools, they stride the land in huge boots till a worthy chair is found, even if they must carve it from the raw of mountains.
Great and compromise have no harmony of season. Compromise is the kneading of men's bread. Great is the oven. That together history is fed is true but kneading is not heat; nor can an oven raise flour to food. Without the fire, history feeds a toothless gum. Without the kneading, history gnaws on hardened digest.
King Hindus: Such a wilderness of consume! It is all the same for us. The king of dusty cities oracles of trees while beggars use bread in the altar of their worship. For the sake of a real gnash of jaws, let us give a clear savour of a less king and a greater king. Give the crown an example for today's drool and the morrow's less philosophical stool. (Laughing, King Hindus adjusts his feet once more).
Beggar: As it pleases, your Majesty, I will concoct this stew and we'll see the froth separate from steam with a stirring of wooden prod.
Say a lesser king and a greater king each purchase as palace slaves, a set of twenty slaves each. This twenty are all from the same far-off tribe, almost the same family.
Now the lesser king looks upon the slaves much pleased, for he says 'Great I am as a master for these are fine slaves'Just as a rich man looks to his grand house to pronounce his wealth or a scholar looks to his library to display his intellect.
Now the greater king looks upon his slaves also much pleased for he says 'Great I am and I have great need for these superior slaves to help me accomplish greater things'.
Hence we already see a difference: that the greater sees all about his vision as the best means to his end, the best tools of his craft. All around becomes the bellows, the fuel to raise his destiny to great dance of heat.
The lesser king plots too in raise of his fire but he does not seek a volcano but rather the ordinary forge piled upon all he gathers below him.
Now we the historians can easily witness which becomes the mastery of a man and which only the mastery of mean.
Let us now declare slaves as men and being men they err. And in their err, they stumble and in the stubble, one spills wine upon the king.
First the castle of the lesser; what wrath and rage rings upon its stained walls uttered from the red dripping lips of a king awash in disgust? What whispers in the bile rising his noble thoughts? Even little men have littler men giving oracle behind their kingly lobes. They are known to swing on a gold ring and reduce a king to further folly. What do they rummage amongst the fear and doubt that only tiny needle fingers can probe the whereabout? They whisper "Your greatness tumbles with this breed of buffoon. What is other kings sat quested around this sop? Would they remember the wit, the vision, the opulence to carry its awe in their vision like the whirling paint of eyes in the sun? or will they trade snicker for guffaw while your ears slumber away? Can a king teach great in this lesson of peering drench? or will their point and mock, hidden as it is, shadow the light of your greatness as tree limbs before a moon? Kill him is the hiss of command. For where can be hid that his blunder may not splash and shatter or trip your royal dwell? Kill them all, all of his same. For are they not as property, not men? If a chair of a set is at flaw has not the craft flowed at the set? Kill the, as though would burn the chairs, the table, the crafts men as well for would you sell something lesser than you bought? To let the world know a king will pay much for little and thereby is no great judge of design? Kill them and forbid any more purchase of the race, that all who would be enslaved by plunder or war should be destroyed instead, that their weakness be stamped from your feet. Set those grinds in motion and in time your greatness will exceed new bounds in that all will tremble to a king who decrees vengeance on a race for the rude decent of a wrist! Such is the awe of power in its only useful wage: terror!
But what of the greater king? For a greater thing than littler men lodges high in the noble crown in greater peak. Here to paint a wider 'scape in bold strokes. The colours of its unique framed only to the limits of a king's vision. What is it's bellow for it too has a lion's rage and tiger's glare? But the difference begins here for it has no need to swell its size in the swallowing of toads. As for the lesser king all is the slave to the need but the need is of the vision not the eying; for even the greater king is still slave to the mastery of his vision. We have said that the greatest king acts as random but only as men do not see the vision of the king. What the king decrees is the decree of vision and thus will have no burden within ordinary whim or want. For slavery makes the slave but mastery does not make the master. It is a circle not a line. The master must be a slave to ensure slavery. The greater king is slave to his vision, the lesser king is slave to his slaves. Both find mastery of slaves but one rises as the circle of a sun; the other falls as the ring of dust, trodden in past by the stirring hooves of destiny.
So our greater king heeds nothing but his vision. Vision declares the clumsy best swill the pens of goats; for perhaps a time may come when the spillage of wine in an offensive great may be of a good thing. Wars have had less excuse and who better to train then arms already inclined to such a task? Or perhaps this slave is better a ploy with a hand parted from limb. Then cast to the general slave quarters where his hate will grow and hat seeks like for rebellion and in the seeking brings point o leaders suspected but unfound. His spies need only watch one not a thousand! Or perhaps this slave imprisoned for a month then released to be granted life and the role as a palace guard. What better way to mould loyalty then purchase a man from the dead! Now of the others what's to be done is to be done as men, not bits of collected debris. The greater king sees slaves as property but not as inanimate. If so, who would break a bad broom to teach a good one sweep. Who whips a table to cure its slant? If the pail leaks, are the mops to be hung? If terror and claw are to reap a turning of will, does this not prove that
men are being set upon, not stools? King Hindus: Stall they leap, Beggar! You deny slaves the steadfast of stools and thereby hurl them to the feeble stand of men. Where has gave the pluck of animate dwell, where is the reap of the kingdom of brute? For perhaps the slaves are of the darker tribes, which any of civilized brow knows to be of only brutish thought and is trained to the ways of the noble man as a panther can be trained to curl at my feet. Do not be disguised by their gait or verbal mimics, they are not men but are said to be beasts given to true men as a copy flatters the original. Being half man, half thing they are more useful to the mod of purpose. Just as these two here. One is a stool. One scribes as a man, yet he scribes our thoughts, his own would be gibberish. You perhaps have proofed they are not as thick skinned as wood, yet the proof of blood upon born skin is no proof of a man. All beasts that move, move to the taskmasters will. That the dog is quicker than the toad, does not give it an equal to the man.
Beggar: Right or wrong, the greater king sees all: man, beast, chair is the illumination of his vision. In a glare so bright that only the inner defects of the single cast shadow upon its face.
His is no dim fire
The Seven Days of Wander Page 49
