Knight Errors

Jung’s Open Model - Three Knights - Knight Errors

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This page follows on the previous two in that I continue to argue that literature in general is very close to the double refuge: both explore — without precondition or fixed theory — the real flow of the human psyche, as well as the relation between the psyche and other people.

I’ll start by suggesting that Jung’s open framework of analysis is close to the approach of open agnostics and open theists. I’ll then suggest the importance of Jung’s dream-analysis in a poem that draws on the Medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Jung’s Open Model

Literature and the double refuge are in many ways like phenomenology, that is, the study of our experience, what we live and not just what we think or believe. In this sense phenomenology is also very close to psychology, which studies how our minds work. My point here is that the same doubts and ambiguities we find in language, literature, philosophy and religion we also find in the structure and content of our minds. Perhaps it works both ways: just as codes of words and paragraphs, doctrines and methodologies create structures in our minds, so our minds change these structures. And these changes go on forever, since our minds are influenced by culture, which changes all the time. 

One can come up with fixed models of the mind, yet given the diversity of human culture it seems more practical to come up with a method that doesn’t impose a particular model or theory. I’m inspired here by Carl Jung’s attitude to analytical psychology. Although he’s well-known for his models of the unconscious mind, the anima, the animus, the shadow, and archetypes, Jung studiously avoids models when it comes to actual practice, that is, when he treats his patients.

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), Jung explains his specific approach, as well as the general framework within which he operates. This framework is largely free of theoretical constraints and rules, which makes it very similar to the framework of open agnostics and open theists. I’ll list here several of his basic points, followed by quotes from Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

🔺 The respected person with a learned explanation doesn’t always know best. The certainty of an analyst, priest, positivist, professor, writer, etc. can destroy an individual’s ability to deal with things for himself:

… nothing is more unbearable for the patient than to be always understood. The latter in any case relies too much upon the mysterious insight of the doctor, and, by appealing to his professional vanity, lays a dangerous trap for him. By taking refuge in the doctor’s self-confidence and “profound” understanding, the patient loses all sense of reality, falls into a stubborn transference, and retards the cure.

🔺 It’s better to align ourselves with listeners, be open to their state of mind and point of view, than try to embed some pre-programmed truth:

We appeal only to the patient’s brain if we try to inculcate a truth; but if we help him to grow up to this truth in the course of his own development, we have reached his heart, and this appeal goes deeper and acts with greater force.

🔺 People who have a theory to explain everything should be open to the experiences of other people, and be ready to alter or discard their theory. We can see the wide application of his framework by replacing doctor with believer, patient with other person, and dream with experience:

The doctor believer should regard every dream experience as a new departure—as a source of information about unknown conditions concerning which he has as much to learn as the patient other person. It goes without saying that he should hold no preconceived opinions based upon a particular theory, but stand ready in every single case to construct a totally new theory of dreams experience.

🔺 Even in the particulars of our understanding — say, the poet or analysist’s understanding of a symbol — we need to avoid dogma:

Instead of taking a dogmatic stand that rests upon the illusion that we know something because we have a familiar word for it, I prefer to regard the symbol as the announcement of something unknown, hard to recognize and not to be fully determined.

Jung doesn’t impose his system on his patients as much as he focuses on what each patient is experiencing, and on using patterns and concepts (the shadow, the anima, the unified self, archetypes, etc) to help the patient bring together the disparate parts of his psyche (which contains mental and emotional activity, both conscious and unconscious). In this way the work of a psychoanalyst is similar to that of a poet, who uses any and all concepts and contexts (images, symbols, metaphors, etc.) to bring diversity together into an artistic unity.

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Three Knights

I’ll use my poem “Knight Errors” (below) to illustrate how poetry can work like a form of psychoanalysis, taking the psyche on a journey from disorder to unity, from nightmare to peace of mind, from the chaos of dreams to the integration of the psyche. Of course novels and short stories work in similar ways, although generally with less density. Poetry is helpful here not only because its compactness brings ideas more closely together (allowing us to see them more distinctly and comparatively), but also because it’s shorter, quicker to read, and easier to deal with on a single web page. 

My poem contains a diversity of things: fairy tales and the real world, 14th century chivalry and contemporary American polics, King Arthur’s Round Table, a meeting of U.S. Army generals, personal opinions, surreal shifts from one scene or ‘mental reality’ to the next, anger, temptation, sex, guilt, trial, retribution, terror, waking, and peace. In this the poem mimics the diverse psychological reality that we experience both in our outer lives and in the confused, enigmatic world of our dreams — especially the way the real world impinges on the surreal world of our dreams. About the content of dreams, Jung says,

Dreams may give expression to ineluctable truths, to philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides.

Like the open agnostic and the open theist, Jung leaves the ontological door wide open. That is, he sees our being, and the flow of our being, within an empirical framework, but also within an uncertain, surreal, and unworldly framework. To boil complex psychological states — especially the dreaming psyche — down to one narrow doctrine is like boiling the metaphysical world of religion and myth down to one narrow dogma.

It is certain that consciousness consists not only of wishes and fears, but of vastly more than these, and it is highly probable that the unconscious psyche contains a wealth of contents and living forms equal to or even greater than does consciousness, which is characterized by concentration, limitation and exclusion. This being the state of affairs, it is imperative that we should not pare down the meaning of a dream to fit some narrow doctrine.

I start my poem with an ambiguous title: “Knight Errors.” This suggests both the errors made by knights and, with a doubly articulated t, night terrors. The notion behind this duality is that errors are made in the world of politics as well as in our personal lives. Both types of errors end up bothering us, sometimes even creating terrors in our dreams.

The first knight in my poem is Pete Hegseth, “Lord Hogsbreath,” a would-be hero who puffed himself up at Quantico in front of the generals on September 30, 2025. He offered to the experienced generals a macho, braggart version of American bravery. Hegseth’s speech was a sad follow-up to the egregious condescending speech J.D. Vance made earlier the same year, on Valentine’s Day at the Munich Security Conference. Knights are meant to have a moral code, a chivalric ideal of service and faithfulness, yet Hegseth and Vance distort these, leaving hundreds of millions of Americans angry or deluded. Trump criticizes the first American Pope in history, yet he ought to listen to him instead.

The second knight in my poem contrasts with Hogsbreath the Valiant because he tries to live with humbler — and one might add more Christian — values. Yet this perplexed knight lives in the present topsy-turvy world of politics initiated by Donald Trump and his rectangular table of bootlickers — chief among them Hegseth, Vance, and Rubio. (The spectacle of their flattery, as seen here around a White House table, is an ugly incarnation of the famous Round Table.) Trump has turned the world upside down. In normal days he could be ignored, yet the way things are, here in June 2026, he can’t be avoided. His gong show, The Chaos of Vanity, invades our psyche, so that a moral compass is even harder to find — and even harder yet amid the surreality of dreams. 

The humble knight has laudatory ideals yet he realizes that he’s also a very imperfect being. He has a chivalric code, yet how well does he live up to it? The model for his predicament is the late Medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In it, King Arthur’s Round Table is tested by the sorceress Morgan le Feye, who creates a bizarre scenario created by her occult magic. In this scenario, Sir Gawain tries to live by ideals but finds himself all too human. Still, he survives the ordeal, just as the protagonist of my poem survives his nightmare, and eventually moves forward with a greater sense of humility. 

The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a surreal one, almost more dream than reality. In it, a Green Knight comes into King Arthur’s hall and challenges one of the knights to chop his head off. He tells the Round table that he’ll later return the favour. Sir Gawain offers to chop his head off, thinking no doubt that it’s unlikely for a headless Green Knight to actually return such a favour.

Sir Gawain chops off the head of the Green Knight, who then walks away with his head in his hands, saying that in a year he’ll return the favour. After a year, Gawain goes in search of the Green Knight (to keep his promise to offer his head!) and ends up in the castle of a lord. While the lord is out hunting, the lord’s wife tries to seduce Gawain, but Gawain refuses. After a great deal of lounging around in his bed and flirting with the lord’s wife, he accepts a good-luck ribbon from the lady. Crucially, this ribbon suggests that he isn’t a brave as King Arthur’s knights are reputed to be. The Green Knight holds this lack of bravery against Gawain. On the last day of Gawain’s stay, the lord is about to chop off Gawain’s head, but then spares his life. 

When Gawain leaves the castle, he thinks he’s escaped unharmed. Yet he didn’t pass the test of bravery. He didn’t even realize that this was the test. In this way Gawain reminds me of K., the protagonist in Kafka’s The Trial: both are convicted of a crime of which they remain clueless. Because of this failure, my version of Gawain (the protagonist dreamer in my poem) doesn’t find himself back on an open road after encountering temptation in the castle. Instead, he finds himself crawling on the floor of a forest (the forest is a Medieval symbol of being lost), where he’s stalked by visions of 1. the beheading of knights and nobles during the French Revolution in 1793, and 2. a mad pirate (the Green Knight) still searching for revenge.

Yet once my knight wakes up (in the 9th stanza), he’s able to shake the confusion and terror of his dream world. In the final stanza he enjoys the simple pleasures of being awake, and being alive to the beauty of the world.

My poem is prefaced by a quote from Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Pound is relevant to “Knight Errors” in two ways: 1. Pound was for a time a propagandist for Mussolini, who I see as a forerunner of Trump and his MAGA movement; 2. Pound was a brilliant poet who in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley complains that we live in a philistine age. Trump incarnates this type of superficial Age, given his love of gold and his ballroom, and given the general level of tackiness he’s brought to the otherwise distinguished office of the President. There is of course a sad irony here: Pound’s type of support for dictators leads to the type of world ushered in by Mussolini and Trump. In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Pound laments that he lives in a half savage country where philistines ignore the sculpture of rhyme, yet in backing a dictator he plays his own small savage part. Like my dreaming knight, he can’t come out of this dirty world squeaky clean.

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Knight Errors, April 2026

The age demanded an image 
Of its accelerated grimace, 
Something for the modern stage, 
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace…
— Ezra Pound

1. The Chopping Block of Dreams

Why, if we stretch our necks onto the world’s stage
to see the best and worst examples of humankind
and all the manic types that tarnish our tinpot Age,
are we surprised to find in our dreams the Fearful Sage
and the Friar Star, and the General Stripe who’s lost his mind? 

2. A Dog Wags His Tail in the Public Nose

Lord Hogsbreath bows to his Lady, the disgruntled Taylor-Green,
and barks a braggart’s prologue, prepared for the doughty crowd,
yelping a tale of shock and splendour, and every fantasy between
so that Heaven and Earth, soon to be folded into the general shroud,
white and glorious, sail over the heads of the old guard. Cowed 
by the incessant barking, they turn their eyes from the Orange Machine.

3. The Barking Never Stops

These aren’t mere fairy stories or looking-glass tales of old
that open the wardrobe of winter and drag us into the cold.
There’s no way, once we’ve known their dogged imbecility
that we can shake their bite, despite our need for tranquility.
For a year now we’ve seen him bark on the national stage,
even lecturing the Pope on the proper values of our Age.

4. The Plays That Dreams Replay

Afterwards, we try to sleep in peace, but the visions of rank stupidity
enter our dreams and turn them upside down
so that the clown’s a king and the king’s a clown
and the archetypes Jung so carefully catalogued
are sold for worthless stock of rank cupidity
and the vestal virgins are stripped and flogged.

5. The Quest

The curtain reopens when we close our eyes
to the betrayal of King Arthur and to all mortal fear.
Drifting off, we find ourselves lying next to Guinevere 
whose dazzling shift reveals a serpentine disguise
though we thought we were swimming through rosy skies.

Lazing in our feather bed for what seems like a year
we tell ourselves that we’re virtuous and have nothing to fear.

6. Mission Accomplished

We see the perilous chapel and go inside
with our reason on the doorstep and our infinite pride
still safe within our hearts. We lance our darts
and slay the dragon, all the while keeping our minds apart
from the terrors of the sorceress, and step back outside.

From the deck of a mighty ship we shout, Mission Accomplished!
And yet somehow it never quite works out like we dearly wished.

7. Old Tales New Tails Expose

For we next find ourselves scrambling on all fours
and climbing an old wooden step, although we don’t recall
the angry king or the powdered queen or her royal ball
or our sacred quest (assuming this dream is also yours)
or what happened in 1793, or any other year at all.

8. Merlin Slinks from the Scene

The only thing we can say for sure is that we’re here
and because of some crazy thing that Kafka couldn’t figure out
we’re the ones to blame, as bold shadows walk the plank
of our world’s murky stage, and Merlin hides his staff in fear
of the verdant knight who stalks us with his Beagle snout
like a pirate bent on taking back his piece of shank.

9. On Waking

The dogs of war have marked their favourite spots
and punctuated our dreams with yelps and bots. 
Opening our BBC app, we see that indeed we’ve been born
In a half savage country where the poet is despised and forlorn,
and where the archetype of the Idiot is much preferred
to the sculpture of rhyme or the falling tree unheard.

10. A Pink Blossom on the River Floats

Disconsolate, and yet strangely still amused,
we wander down to the local cafe.
Looking up, we see that it will soon be May.
April’s cruelty no longer makes us feel puzzled and confused
for we know that the world’s currents have always been rough,
and life, despite its barking and its song, won’t remain anyway:
sooner or later the petal on the wet black bough down the river flows.
And yet, despite all that, the moment is everything, and the moment glows.

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