Mixing Memory & Desire: An Arundel Tomb

We distort history everyday in our own lives, let alone in our distant comprehension of the lives of others. Memory, imagination, desire, fear and other emotions each taint the reality of the past, reforming it in our image.

Modern grail theory references occult knowledge which is based in hidden lore of mystery schools, passed down over hundreds of years through oral tradition. I am reminded of the children's game where we all stand in a line and repeat a whispered message, finding it drastically altered when it reaches the far end. I am also reminded of this poem by Philip Larkin, An Arundel Tomb:

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

— Philip Larkin (1922 - 85)

It is a marvelous examination of the idea that we often impress our own emotions onto our interpretation of history. When the facts are washed away by the years, we interpret what remains as we would like to see it. The great thing here is that Larkin's poem is itself tainted by the very point he makes. While it is true that the couple may not have been in love and the beauty that remains may be no more than the beauty imbued upon the pair through art, it may also be true that the love portrayed on the tomb was real, and Larkin has projected his own romantic pessimism onto it in his poem.

Perhaps the same may be said for the grail: many wish to claim possession of its mysteries. But whom of us know the truth, beyond the shadow left us by history? And if we convince ourselves that we do know, what have we known besides ourselves and our desires. They are projected out, only to be reflected back to us dimly, shadows rippling in the wine, winking at the brim of the chalice.